Using Research in Design

I was having a conversation recently about designing effective eLearning, and I made a statement that my design is research-based. When pressed for details, I mentioned the name of my ID guru: Dr. Ruth Colvin Clark. Dr. Clark was instrumental in the development of the instructional design model I used at Element K, and her work continues to have a profound effect on me.

But of course, Dr. Clark hasn't been specifically working with D/deaf college students, so of course while I can use her work as a starting place, it doesn't answer all the questions that arise when developing instruction for a totally different culture and language, especially a language that is manual versus spoken.

So for the past three years, I have been working on an instructional design model that starts with my specific audience, D/deaf college students. Many in this group  use ASL as their primary language, and English as a second.However, some use English, and only begin to sign when the come to NTID. And others are scattered along the continuum between ASL and English.

(Side comment: learning a second language while trying to invent an instructional design model for native users of that language isn't so much like building a canoe while rowing it as it is like growing the forest, felling and milling the trees, building the canoe and rowing it! Everyday I learn another little piece that helps me to internalize and know more.)

As I have thought about each section of my design model, I've asked myself: "What does the research say about D/deaf adult learners and this?" I've read mountains of research of various topics, such as:

• How do ASL signers expect/want/need content to be ordered and chunked? How is this different from the way I (as a native English speaker) expect/want/need it done? (Because, let's face it: Our default audience is always "me".)
• What features of ASL can be incorporated in to my instructional design? What features are critical, and what don't matter? For my my non-ASL students in the crowd, this would include things such as presenting material from general to specific, mentioning time first, using a topic-comment pattern, and showing, not telling. There is a lot more to it, but that gives you the gist.
• What kind of illustrations/graphics are most effective? 
• What kind of text is most effective?
• If we incorporate captions, or English, what is the best use of that?
• At what point are what kind of practice activities most effective?
• Are there actually such a thing as visual learners? If so, what does this mean in the development of my content?
• What aspects of Deaf culture are import to incorporate?
• How can non-manual sign components (such as mouth morphemes, gaze, facial expressions, and body shifts be effectively used?

What I have found is that researchers like to research tiny tiny tiny little pieces of things. And I need research on much bigger chunks. So while I continue to read and ask questions, I have also started to establish relationships with researchers so I can hopefully influence the future direction of their research. I firmly believe that it will be through those partnerships that I will finally be able to craft the most effective and engaging instruction. 

We are starting to build the first prototype -- business skills content for D/deaf professionals that desire to move into first-time manager roles. I am confident that this process, with it's millions of design decisions, will lead us to ask more and better questions. And asking the questions, well, that's the first step, isn't it?

Nobody Tells

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

– Ira Glass

True, eh?

Scatter/Gather: Where Have You Been All My Life?

It's so exciting to me to find a site/book/person who says what I have been thinking but so clearly and fluently. 

What if you could text a one-dollar donation for every story you heard on NPR that really fascinated, moved, or taught you something?  It would be extremely easy to do, and probably at least as likely to bring in $50 a year (the threshold for station membership) as the twice-yearly membership drives where NPR implores listeners to remember the importance of those same programs.  Added to the usual membership option, the text-a-dollar possibility would provide an instantaneous reward for them and, however surprisingly, for you.  That’s because the incentive isn’t a random prize; it’s an emotionally affirming action, tied to an experience you’ve already decided is important to you.

From my most favorite site I just discovered: Scatter/Gather. The entire article is here.  

Five Critical Skills for New Employees

I am asked occasionally to act as an interviewer so our students can have some realistic experience to prepare for their job search. Our students are generally very well prepared when it comes to using particular technologies. They are ready to enter today's job market.

But are we doing an equally good job preparing them for tomorrow's? Here are my five top skills students need to possess to be successful in the future:

1.Ability to collaborate and communicate digitally.
2.Solve problems.
3.Both be able to tell a compelling story using multimedia tools, and maybe even more importantly, be able to deconstruct and interpret a compelling story using multimedia tools.
4.Validate a proposed solution.
5.Negotiate.

Ability to collaborate and communicate digitally.

The "cloud" or whatever you want to call the digital realm, is no doubt, the meeting room of the very near future. Our students need to be comfortable both with the technology and the gestalt of these spaces. They also need to be able to collaborate there...to be able to present their own ideas, build on the ideas of others, abandon their own ideas if better ones are presented. Our students will be called upon to create new knowledge and productize it. The most efficient way to do this is through collaboration, and in a global economy, collaboration is digital.

Solve problems.

More than once I have assigned a task with a team member, only to find later that s/he got stuck at some point, and was not able to move ahead. His/her response? To just wait, either for me to come back or for a miracle to occur that would unstick them. The current generation seems to be extremely unprepared to solve problems. I look for individuals who can correctly define the problem, who can break it down into parts. I also want to know how others have solved similar problems. And sometimes similar problems are in a totally different field. Once the problem is defined, solutions must be proposed. Note I said solutions, plural. And a solution must be planned and implemented.

Both be able to tell a compelling story using multimedia tools, and maybe even more importantly, be able to deconstruct and interpret a compelling story using multimedia tools.

Multimedia tools are no longer the property of one group of individuals, namely graphic designers. Everyone must be facile with these tools. But telling the story is perhaps the easy part. Students must also be able to deconstruct and interpret the compelling stories others tell. If students are unable to do this, their perspective and understanding will be dictated wholly by the storytellers.

Validate a proposed solution.

This skill is closely related to both problem solving and interpreting stories. But I call it out because it is so critical. If students are unable to validate solutions, they will choose the easiest, least expensive solution. Or the one fronted by the most compelling storyteller. And frequently, the best solution is neither the cheapest, easiest, or compelling.

Negotiate.

Finally, our students must be adept at finding a reasonable middle ground that preserves the most important attributes, features, or qualities of both sides. Today's world is woefully short on negotiating skills as anyone who reads the daily paper can see. My experience has been that my youngest employees are particularly poor at this. They frequently adopt an all or nothing position that frustrates and puzzles their co-workers.

It is our responsibility to prepare our students to improve the human condition, and giving students vital practice in these five critical skills would be an important first step.

Professional Development for Deaf Professionals

I'm really interested in developing some kind of materials for professional development for NTID grads. I saw some statistics that say our students enter the job market at the same pay rate as their hearing colleagues, but when they have been in the market for a while, they stop making the same sort of gains in position and salary. My thought is that our students aren't being promoted to management positions at the same rate as their hearing colleagues. I think that there may be five reasons for this:

1. Weak written English skills
2. Lack of opportunities to be mentored
3. They don't "overhear", so soft skills information isn't being passed to them in that way
4. Lack of appropriate professional development opportunities. (I don't believe simply providing an interpreter at a workshop is enough. And I am not sure that employers are actually making these programs available due to the additional cost of interpreters.)
5. Unwillingness by Deaf professionals to move around, due to the difficulty of training hearing co-workers how to communicate. Once Deaf professionals get things worked out, they may be reluctant to repeat the process. 

Here are the topics I believe would be useful:

• Personal goal setting
• Time management
• Conducting a meeting
• Project management
• Some kind of negotiation skills training 
• Focused business writing: emails, meeting minutes, meeting agendas, status reports
• Presentation skills
• Self-branding and planning your career

I saw some e-learning that was developed at Cornell. The "class" has some material that the student does on his own, and then some webinar sessions where the students are "together". I want the self-pace material to be developed in a way that takes advantages of ASL features. I am planning to work on a prototype of one of these as a "Major Design Project." 

Translating Ideas to Practice in the Classroom

"Teachers will not take up ideas that sound attractive, no matter how extensive the research base, if the ideas are presented as general principles that leave the task of translating them into everyday practice entirely up to the teachers... What teachers need is a variety of living exapmples of implementation, as practiced by teachers with whom they can identify and from whom the can derive the confidence that they can do better. They need to see examples of what doing better means in practice." (Black and Williams, 2008)

Truer words were never written.

Divergent and Convergent Thinking and Why You Care

 I was trolling the Internet for interesting information and ideas and came across this old school site called Divergent Thinking.

"The goal of divergent thinking is to generate many different ideas about a topic in a short period of time. It involves breaking a topic down into its various component parts in order to gain insight about the various aspects of the topic. Divergent thinking typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing manner, such that the ideas are generated in a random, unorganized fashion. Following divergent thinking, the ideas and information will be organized using convergent thinking; i.e., putting the various ideas back together in some organized, structured way."

 Divergent thinking is probably something we should be teaching our students. It is one of the fundamental building blocks of creativity. Being able to generate a number of ideas and then put them back together in some new and original way is essential. Creation of new knowledge is what our students will be required to do, if they want to be successful.

This divergent thinking - convergent thinking cycle is the part of my job that I enjoy the most. Things I do almost every day (every GOOD day!) are:

• Taking time to think about something -- almost anything will do. But it is important to just stop and think.
• Meditate. Meditation is to thinking as practicing scales is to playing the piano. It will help you to nudge your mind in the right direction.
• Writing. I use my blogs (I write three now!) as the place where I put ideas back together in new and original (at least for me) ways. Sometimes an idea will will present itself and I will use my writing as a way to explore it. Sometimes I will take two subjects and then challenge myself to think of ways that they can go together. 

Putting things together in new and novel ways is not a "nice to have" any more -- it is an essential.  How will/do you practice divergent and convergent thinking?