Hiatus

Time warp forward six years. Wow. My shirt is still smokin'. Is my hair frizzled?

I had completely forgotten that I even had a blog. Tell me, are blogs still in vogue these days? Probably not. There are so many. But like they were out of a time capsule, here are my words in 2015. I read them, and they still make sense to me. Since I put these words on line I have added a good others to them and published them in a book. 2014.

This is 2015. So what's new? I think I have some speculative things I want to say. Since no one reads this anyway, what harm can it do? I would like to do some speculating: kind of an intellectual diary.

The first thing I would say is that I think instructional designers have it all wrong. Yes, that's right...wrong. I've been doing it myself for decades. We have intellectualized something that isn't intellectual. It's fundamentally emotional.

There are a lot of indications for this, and it may take me a while to get my thoughts into words. I think that the first things we teach new designers to pay attention to are not the first things a designer ought to pay attention to.

Learning is based first in emotion and tacit processes, but we teach instruction as if it were completely rational. I am convinced that what we refer to as knowledge is really more like a belief. I feel that instructing should be approached as if it was an appeal to the mind and the heart. I do not feel that we can rely on the design principles and processes of the past to lead us to the promised land of learning.

These are things I would like to talk about, and since I am in kind of an echo chamber here, I can write without fear of being discovered.