This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 11:47 am by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk, XML and learning standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
As everything moves online and becomes digitized, our computers and mobile devices take on more of the role of gatekeepers to our relationships with others.
Sometimes, this can make people nervous. Content management and communication technology is an increasing part of our personal conversations, our family lives, socialization with friends, every aspect of our work. It touches how our minds process what they sense. It’s easy to see why technology makes things like travel and construction better, but it isn’t always an unmixed blessing in the personal sphere.
In the learning experience, there can be natural, experience-based skepticism that more technology is the answer.
You’ve probably had an experience similar to what I’ve had a few times; of trying some new gadget or program, looking at the manual, maybe the online help, and still not getting it. Then I ask someone about it, or watch someone else using it. Aha! The light goes on.
Though after that, a funny thing happens. The online help, the reference materials, suddenly look a lot more useful.
If I get it once, I can understand it in other formats, too.
So then when I look at technology in that light, I want to know if it will help or hinder the human interactions that make it meaningful.
I remember, years ago, mostly good-natured arguments between the software engineers I worked with and the marketing staff. The engineers were big Linux fans, who praised its stability as a management system, the flexibility of its command library, its power to do many tasks at once. They couldn’t get why everyone else still wanted to use Windows.
And we’d say something like, ‘But I don’t want to take the time to learn all those command prompts. I want something easy to use, so I can do my other work.’
For the engineers, at the time, technology was an end. It was something they loved and enjoyed. To the rest of us, it was a set of tools.
Of course, that story ultimately has a happy ending. If you boot up a computer running Linux these days, you’ll be greeted with a very intuitive, graphical user interface, open standard spreadsheet and presentation programs, and cross-platform document support. The technology works for you now.
In the learning content world, the SCORM standards are how we make sure the technology works for the people who use it. So that the instructional designers, whose time is more valuable when it’s used to spark aha! moments than reformatting their instructional materials, can get done with their highest value work in time to watch Law & Order.
Also, so they can avoid implosion. Nobody wants that. Very messy.
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