Focus on the learning experience

I gave a talk last week to faculty and students at the University of South Alabama - their Design and Development graduate program. I provide a couple of papers in advance: the Transformative Learning paper written with my research lab, presented at AECT last year; and a new paper I'm working on with Pat Parrish and George Veletsianos on instructional outcomes.

The presentation slides are posted on my server. I asked participants to engage in a thought experiment - flipping the usual values in the field, and imagining a practice of ID that emphasized craft over science, practice over theory, and aesthetics over psychology. Reversing those values, we would give much more attention to the crafting of learners' experience and perhaps educating the whole person.

I was excited to meet several folks at AECT who shared my interest in this area. The program at Minnesota has several faculty and students with th is focus, including Simon Hooper who just left for Penn State. Lloyd Rieber at Georgia has sympathetic interests. BYU's program also is a potential center for this kind of work.