Course Content

The intent of this lesson is not to lecture you and provide you all the answers. It is expected that this lesson may raise more questions than provide answers.. so the first question to pose is .. is that necessarily a bad idea? Hopefully, we can get you to think about message design in different ways…

Instructional design is a process. it is very prescriptive in nature and helps decide how the end product should look like. There should be no question as to what comes first.. but many look at the media and then try to deign instruction around it.. should be the other way around.. you look at the needed instruction and THEN decide on the best media to use. Take Second Life for example. When you think of it, do you first say to yourself

“boy there’s GOT to be something I can teach with this.”

or do you think

“I need a certain way to get students to create artifacts that demonstrate their understanding of what I am trying to teach them. What is the best digital sandbox^* I can provide for them to do this?”

The Design Process (Shön 1990):

• Design is the process by which things are made.
• In your design thinking perhaps you can create media that does not need a teacher. In others, media’s presence as a guides might make a difference. What about video games? are they best used as standalone or are they better at helping to reinforce what you are teaching? These are important distinctions and must be made before media is selected. And also influences message design.
• history has shown that instructional media has a greater influence on helping teachers teach than on directly teaching students learn on their own. In other words, media designers usually exert more direct influence over materials and tools used by teachers than over interactions between learners and students. Again, take video games as an example…. can you name more than a handful of titles that have actually been shown by the research to be great standalone teaching devices? The more successful ones are those that are implemented by teachers as a part of an overall strategy.
• These decisions have consequences. Anything you do will create a result of some type. It is up to you to decide what kind of result you are looking for and to learn through research, experimentation, or trial and error to find out whether your decisions are affecting the results you anticipate. Feedback is an important concept

The ASSURE Model

Instructional Designers have long been using a model to help select media for lesson development. ASSURE, as you will see, is an acronym. take a look at a couple of introductions to provide you further information:

• The ASSURE Model of Learning
• For you visual learners, this is a posting page with dozens of visuals and chart that outline the concept
• ASSURE Model: Discovering Instructional Design

Marshall McLuhan’s Ideas About Media and Knowing

One of the things that sticks out when reviewing most Instructional Design Models (especially ADDIE) is that you first need to analyze your audience. In doing that, you must pay attention to those things that affect how your students think, learn, and communicate.

One of the most influential thinkers on the subject of how media influences the thinking of the people who most use it was Marshall McLuhan. The interesting thing about his work is that he died a long time prior to the Internet, PCs, iPads, iPhones, and all the pervasive media around us today. Yet, he seems to have sensed where we were going as a mediated culture.

If we are indeed living in a digitally mediated world, then there are things about these kids that we should be learning about in order to reach them and build media products for them. The best place to start is to discover Marshall McLuhan, the father of these ideas.

Key to McLuhan’s argument about technology is the idea that it has no moral bent —rather, it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual’s and, by extension, a society’s self-conception and realization:

Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? […] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. “But”, someone says, “we didn’t know it would happen.” Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.

The moral valence of technology’s effects on cognition is, for McLuhan, a matter of perspective. For instance, McLuhan contrasts the considerable alarm and revulsion that the growing quantity of books aroused in the latter seventeenth century with the modern concern for the “end of the book.” If there can be no universal moral sentence passed on technology, McLuhan believes that “there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies.”

Though the World Wide Web was invented thirty years after his Gutenberg Galaxy was published, McLuhan may have coined and certainly popularized the usage of the term “surfing” to refer to rapid, irregular and multidirectional movement through a heterogeneous body of documents or knowledge, e.g., statements like “Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.” Paul Levinson’s 1999 book Digital McLuhan explores the ways that McLuhan’s work can be better understood through the lens of the digital revolution. Later, Bill Stewart’s 2007 “Living Internet” website describes how McLuhan’s “insights made the concept of a global village, interconnected by an electronic nervous system, part of our popular culture well before it actually happened.”

Understanding Media (1964)

McLuhan’s most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a pioneering study in media theory. In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as “the medium is the message”. McLuhan’s insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.” More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children’s shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.

Tetrad of Media Effects

THIS is the work we must look into here and utilize as a part of our instructional design efforts….come back to this tetrad and think about it for a while. After all, how do we measure the importance of media/technology? How d we analyze it for use in our instruction? How do we know when to move forward? to adopt newer technologies?

In Laws of Media (1988), published posthumously by his son Eric, McLuhan summarized his ideas about how to evaluate the effects of media in a concise tetrad (i.e., list containing four “laws” ) of media effects. The tetrad is a means to examine the effects on society of any technology (i.e., any medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

To put it another way:

1. What does the medium bring to the table?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium bring back?
4. What happens when we over-depend on it?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the “grammar and syntax” of the “language” of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium “overheats”, or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme. Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are the Obsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.

Using the example of radio:

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. Radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.

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