Curated Knowledge

Untechnical Writing has several metaphors for the technical writer:

• Writer as translator - translating Technese into normal language.
  
• Writer as host - welcoming guests to a new, scary complicated place.
  
• Writer as friend - making friends feel comfortable while helping them master a new experience.
  
• Writer as nerd next door - knowing the inner workings of technology, and telling people what to do and where to get more information.
  
• Writer as teacher - lighting the spark of knowledge in your students.
  
• Writer as intrepid explorer - documenting a discovery process so others can see the sights while avoiding the pitfalls.
  
• Writer as tour guide - guiding tourists through a dangerous foreign land. Protecting them while showing them a good time.

I think these are equally true of instructional designers, though I could imagine Thiagi arguing that instructional designers are not any of these things. Writing is content development, not instructional design. Designers DESIGN: they determine what people need to be able to do in order to solve significant performance gaps. Then they figure out participants can receive feedback indicating whether or not the gap has been closed. The in-between stuff should be engaging, but it's more-or-less the responsibility of the participants.

I'd like to argue with my imaginary Thiagi by adding another metaphor to the list: instructional designer as curator. There is a lot of information out there. A whole, awful, lot if you include the internet. Even if you're given specific pieces of information, it takes a lot of knowledge to be able to know what to do with them. For example, after an undergraduate degree and a year as a PhD student, I finally learned how to take apart a psychology article in less than an hour. I can describe the point of the article and any elegancies or flaws.

Imagine what it would have been like to attend my very first psychology class and, instead of having a structured syllabus, to be given the tests, the books, all of the handouts and the instructor's contact information. "Call me day or night." the instructor says, "See you in 16 weeks."

Yeah, I'd have all of the information and would know exactly what I was expected to know and do. I'm also pretty sure that, as a complete novice, it would take me much longer than 16 weeks to figure out how everything fit together - if I ever did.

By providing structure, by telling me what specific piece of information I needed at a specific time, I was able to easily and enjoyably master the subject. The professor acted as a curator, not only assembling all of the information, but also arranging it so it told a coherent story. Even better was my instructional design professor, who fed me the information in such perfect chunks that it felt like the theory and skill blossomed within me. I still don't feel like I "learned" anything in her class, though my abilities after her class were of a different magnitude than those I had going in.

Shouldn't one of a designer's goals be providing Flow? Flow is a state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced CHICK-sent-me-high), where challenge and ability are perfectly balanced. When you're in Flow, you are completely engaged - unaware of time or other distractions. As designers, if we can accurately gauge the abilities of our students, we should be able to bring them to this state, feeding them new information while increasing the challenge of an exercise. They would feel exhilarated instead of exhausted, and be excited by the prospect of practicing the new skill in the real world.

Here's a couple of Mihaly articles in Fast Company, for the interested:

The Art of Work
There's No Business Like FLOW Business