The Debate on Instructional Design Models

I know I've mentioned this site in class, and I'm sure Dr. Nicholson has as well, but in case you haven't checked it out already, I thought I'd post a bit on Elliott Masie's LearningTown.

Elliott Masie is an instructional design guru-founder of the MASIE Center, and essentially the go to guy when it comes to cutting edge learning development and best practices.

LearningTown is a huge online forum that brings together people from all walks of the instructional design and technology industry. Members have individual profile pages and use the site to network, participate in threaded discussions, message each other, share resources, and join groups of like minded professionals. As part of a class activity in Dr. N's eLearning Concepts and Techniques course, we all joined the site and did some perusing and investigating.

There are tons of interesting discussions on nearly any topic related to instructional design and technology you can think of, but the one that stuck with me the most was a question posed by Elliott Masie himself: Do We Need A New Instructional Design Model?
Follow the link to follow the discussion.

Various professionals talk here about the "real world" of instructional and course design, what works, what doesn't, and how the industry is changing. It's a great way for students and professionals to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry, pose questions to a large community, or just read a lot of interesting opinions and resources.

Economic impact and anxiety in the workplace

Along with the many learning distractions, I found on Learning Town a survey http://trends.masie.com/archives/2008/9/26/546-urgent-economic-anxiety-in-the-workplace-survey.html to find out the impact on the workplace.
As future (and current) trainers/educators we need to be sensitive to our audience and the many stresses occurring in their lives. Having talked about the many challenges of e-learning, it is really important to realize what the economy is doing to many of our students.
People are distracted by what is happening in congress and with our banking and financial system. Many of our corporate students have potentially lost in the last week (in their 401K and retirement plans) what the make a year.
Think about what this can mean to the attention span and interest of students in what they are learning. These are unprecedented times that we are dealing with and until things become a bit more stable, we need to be more understanding and offer a safe environment for learners.

A-space

When I was reading news online the other day, I came across an article about a way that the government is using a Web 2.0 tool. According to the article on CNN.com, government agencies like the CIA and FBI are going to begin using a social networking tool called A-Space. This is somewhat similar to Web 2.0 tools like Facebook and Myspace, although it's not being used to share party pictures and pointless applications. Instead, employees with several government agencies can share ideas and information with one another. The creators of A-space plan for it to be used among spy agents to share information about terrorists.

I think it's interesting that these government agencies will be using a program like this. It's just another example of the usage of Web 2.0. My only concern would be this being hacked into by an unauthorized user. However, the creators claim that they are building checks into the system to track who is able to access the content. As the article mentions,

"We're building [a] mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they've never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen," Wertheimer said. "Same thing here. We're going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space."

Hopefully, A-space will make it easier for important information to be shared among government agencies.