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Ellen Wagner
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Ellen Wagner’s article entitled “In Search of the Secret Handshakes of Instructional Design,” published in the Journal of Applied Instructional Design. The title for this chapter comes from a portion of Wagner’s essay to better represent the portion of her article that is republished here.
Wagner, E. (2011). Essay: In search of the secret handshakes of ID. The Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 1(1), 33–37.
Practitioners and scholars working in the professions clustered near the intersection of learning and technology have struggled to clearly and precisely define our practice for a long time—almost as long as technologies have been used to facilitate the creation, production, distribution, delivery and management of education and training experiences.
As a professional group, instructional designers—IDs—often bemoan the fact that it is hard to tell “civilians” what it is that we actually do for a living. Ironically this inability to clearly describe our work is one of the “secret handshakes” that unites us in our quest to better define our professional identity.
One of my favorite examples of this definitional challenge was described in a recent blog post by Cammy Bean, vice-president of learning for Kineo, a multinational elearning production company:
You’re at a playground and you start talking to the mom sitting on the bench next to you. Eventually, she asks you what you do for work. What do you say? Are you met with comprehension or blank stares? This was me yesterday:
Playground Mom: So, what do you do?
Me: I’m an instructional designer. I create eLearning.
Playground Mom: [blank stare]
Me: …corporate training…
Playground Mom: [weak smile]
Me: I create training for companies that’s delivered on the computer….
Playground Mom: weak nod…“Oh, I see.”
I see that she really doesn’t see and I just don’t have the energy to go further. I’m sort of distracted by the naked boy who just ran by (not mine). We move on.
Is it me? Is it the rest of the world?
http://cammybean.kineo.com/2009/05/describing-whatyou-do-instructional.html
AECT has actively supported work on the definitions of big overarching constructs that offer people working at the intersections of learning and technology with a sense of identity, purpose and direction. Lowenthal and Wilson (2007) have noted that AECT has offered definitions in 1963, 1972, 1977, 1994, and 2008 to serve as a conceptual foundation for theory and practice guiding “The Field.” But they wryly observe that our definitional boundaries can be a bit fluid. For example, after years of describing what we do as “educational technology,” Seels and Richey (1994) made a case for using the term “instructional technology” as the foundational, definitional descriptor. Januszewski and Molenda (2008) returned us to the term “educational technology” as being broader and more inclusive. All seemed to agree that the terms educational technology and instructional