What’s in a name…
I am sometimes bought to task about using the phrase ‘Learning Design’ to describe some of the research we are doing. Some argue ‘Designing for learning’ is more appropriate, others say its really about ‘teacher design’, others still argue there is no distinction with the well established area of ‘Instructional Design’. So I was interested to see this post reflecting on a paper by David Merrill et al. from 1996 entitled ‘Reclaiming instructional design’. Now you could argue that the distinction between these things is pretty much splitting hairs semantically, however alternatively you could argue that underneath this belies fundamentally different epistemological positions…
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I believe it is actually both.
February 23rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Both ‘designing for learning’ and ‘learning design’ do you mean John? It’s interesting isn’t it - when you get differing views like this, I think it does sometimes mean that there is fundamental disagreement or something more interesting going on under the surface!