Teaching & Design: myths, content, and why we are all Dave

This is post is both going to be tangential & rhizomatic so bare with me. I was away at a conference last week so I couldn't really speak to the content issue and when I did my Tweets were taken the wrong way. Therefore this is me clearing the air so to speak.

I had a nice reflective laugh the other day as I realized I had moved from one hated #HigherEd group, admin, to another, instructional designers. As my admin contract ended at the college I now have the opportunity to be the instructional designer on special online development projects. I am really loving my new role as it allows me to use my many years of experience in ID in a more hands-on capacity and to think digital pedagogy 24/7.

However, I have never had to defend what I do so much as I've had to in the past month. At a one-day conference I attended a few weeks back I was branded "oh no you have become one of those people." Even in #rhizo15, where many of the participants are in fact members of "those people," I've found myself defending instructional design within a course seemingly without design.

  So when @ViplavBaxi suggested that this week we think of how to replace Dave or if we should, it got me thinking of the roles we all play. Rebecca already put it very well in her blog post, which you should all read here.

  I'm going to put this out there and I'm sure some will disagree:

In this space we are all teachers, sure this is Dave's brainchild and he gets all the props for thinking of such a wonderful community building idea, but we are all teaching ourselves here. We are all bringing our own interests to the table and taking other's interests as points of departure. This is the auto-didacticism of Twitter and it is wonderful. But also with this comes the fact that in a course without formal design  (lesson plans, learning outcomes, readings) there is actually innate design to the #rhizo15 experience. Sure the "content" that each of us is exposed to is necessarily different, sure the means of access to this "content" is different (G+, FB, Twitter), sure our means of expressing our "content" is different (tweets, memes, songs, poems, videos)...but it is all contained/designed to be accessible through the #rhizo15 experience.  We use our information literacy, our digital literacy, to access that content in whatever way we are comfortable with and we either actively engage, gracefully lurk, or live somewhere in between.

   What I am suggesting is, at the heart of all of this, if one steps back and looks at it holistically, this is all UDL at its finest (multiple means of representation, expression, engagement).

    We are all Daves here, we are all the Daves we know. To replace Dave would be to replace ourselves and displace the important work we do.

So in the spirit of continuing the dialogue of teaching, learning, and content here are some points I'd like to present as ideas to engage with:

• People tend to hate the designers because there is a feeling we are OCD with learning outcomes. (Which may be true but there is something important to that as well so it shouldn't be dismissed)

• People think  instructional designers want to stranglehold content and chain learners to dull procedural engagement through the almighty LMS. (This is a mega myth where all poor design is brushstroked as all design- thus erasing good design)

• The message that there are some instructional designers (like me) who are interested in design for they have a deep commitment to accessibility issues (in all shapes and forms) needs to be put out there . (Like using bullet points to chunk text)

Optional Assignment for week 4: Hug a designer- and know we are not all evil I promise.