Nuts and Bolts: Read Up!

There’s an ongoing debate in theworkplace learning space about whether an instructional designer or othertraining practitioner needs a specialized degree in order to work effectively. Here’smy story.

I had been in the field for adecade as a designer and classroom facilitator before going back to graduateschool for formal instruction about the work I was doing. My goal then wasdriven mainly by the fact that I’d taken a new job, housed in an HR Departmentrather than in the Staff Development unit, and realized I needed help speakinga language my new colleagues (and boss) understood. I needed to be better ableto articulate my work, to justify decisions and proposals, and to be betterversed in things like analytics and statistics.

I thought I knew a lot about myfield—I’d been there a decade, after all, and was a voracious reader of tradejournals and business books (back then it was EQ and the tail end of the TQMmovement) and a member of a very active community of practice (CoP) fortrainers. But grad school, in what I recall as often exhilarating moments, alsointroduced me to a whole world of academic writing I didn’t know existed. Therewere studies that shed light on my unease with popular things like personality type-assessments.There was a whole body of literature that explained my sense of breathingbetter air when at a CoP gathering. There were research-based explanations fromRichard Mayer that helped me articulate—finally—why we didn’t want to narrateevery word in every online learning program. There were entire books onevaluating training programs and initiatives—like those beloved andinstitutionalized by my then-employer without any real rationale—and not justsingle classes. While I’m not interested in arguing about whether people needto get degrees to work effectively, I would argue that a practitioner canbenefit from learning more about the academic work in their chosen field.

To start?

I spend a lot of time in onlineconversations, most often on Twitter, and I love that this puts me in the pathof other, often newer, practitioners. I’m still surprised when they aresurprised to hear that there is, for instance, a pile of empirical studies onthe topic of “learning styles” or extensive academic, research-based discussionof the role and value (or not) of a community “lurker.” So in the spirit of “Nutsand Bolts,” here are some ideas for exploration.

If a topic—like CoPs or personalitytype indicators or learning styles—interests you, start with Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/). The searchthere will turn up mostly articles from academic publishers and universities,student theses, and other peer-reviewed work, along with notations showing instancesof the piece being cited by other authors. Look for dissertations online andcheck their literature review chapters and bibliographies. You’ll quickly see thatmost ideas related to learning and development are not new but have been extensivelydiscussed and vetted and tested, with questions mulled and dissected andreworked and discarded. Very little is really brand new, and in most cases alot has already been said. You may find something that surprises or unsettlesyou. Or you may find something that confirms what you believe with data and notjust some anecdotes or gut feelings. Some time spent here will help you movepast “I think” or “it feels right” to “evidence shows.”

Suggestions?

(Where there aren’t links in theselists, look up the names on Amazon or Google or both):

Communities of Practice? Startwith Wenger; Lave & Wenger; Bozarth; Collins, Brown & Duguid; JohnSeely Brown; Wasko & Faraj. Chapter 2 of my dissertation offers an overviewof this literature as well as some discussion of social and situated learningtheory (https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/4978/1/etd.pdf).Also see Collins, Brown & Duguid, individually and separately, on sociallearning and knowledge management.

Learning Styles? Research showslittle evidence that teaching to learning styles matters. Start with this greatoverview of the literature from Guy Wallace https://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=2070611

Effectiveness of Online vs. TraditionalClassroom instruction? Aggregated sources by year, sorted by finding, areat the No Significant Difference site: https://www.nosignificantdifference.org/

Evaluation andassessment?Look at Stake; Brinkerhoff; and Stufflebeam. There’s a whole world beyond thebetter-known four levels of the Kirkpatrick taxonomy.

Games and Gamification? See Kerfoot; Hamari; Koivisto; Landers; Dixon;McGonigal.

Multimedia Learning? See especially Mayer;Clark and Mayer; and Clark, Nguyen, & Sweller.

Reflective Practice?  “Reflective Practice” was one of my favorite doctoral courses. Here’s the syllabus, withreadings organized into themes like “theory and practice,” “identity,” and“sources of power and knowledge.”

Sometimes articles you find arehidden behind paywalls or in difficult-to-access journals, but it’s often worththe trouble to hunt them down. Sometimes pieces are pulled from longer worksavailable at local libraries or even in bits from Google Books. Some pieceswill require that you become more skilled at reading academic work, andunderstanding how to interpret research.