XplanaZine

Theory and practice, when combined, always seem to provide a healthy dose of entertainment. I think that’s because of the natural gap that exists between logical ideas and the rather illogical group that puts those ideas into practice, namely human beings.

For example, in theory it makes sense for me to have good medical and dental care close to where I live. And, since I live in Boston, you’d think I wouldn’t have any trouble finding a really good healthcare provider. But what you can’t know is that I’ve got a dentist I really trust and like who lives in Oklahoma. He’s a family friend and it makes sense, at least in my strange world., to plan my travel around going to the dentist in another state.

We do things all the time that aren’t necessarily logical and, sometimes, go against what established research says we should do. In other words, we human beings are a hard bunch to corral.

This came to mind again yesterday as I was listening to Susan Smith Nash’s podcast on the Podcast Theory Gap. She made the interesting point that learners don’t always engage with media the way instructional designers intend. She went on to talk about how, with audio in particular, students may prefer to work in a multitasking fashion with the audio serving as a passive layer on top of other work the learner is doing. This brings up lots of interesting questions about content design, and it also points to an interesting reality of teaching and learning.

It seems to me that teaching and learning work best when we focus consistently and constantly on general praxis. In other words, we do best when we think in terms of how people are really going to engage with our information rather than how they should emgage with it.

Now, I know what some best practices are with regards to audio for learning. In my own posts I’ve advocated a specific format for podcasts that includes a movement from Context–>Presentation–>Review with reinforcement via audio cues and visual media. On the other hand, since we’re talking about podcasts — people using this audio on the go in their informal spaces — all of those best practices will likely get tossed out of the window. Instead of sitting in a relaxed setting and accessing the Web in a comfortable learning environment, podcast users are more likely to be walking across campus through traffic, working in their back yard, or writing something at work on their computer while using the audio to block out other sounds.

So the question isn’t whether or not any of this this makes sense, or if the student’s learning habits are sound or not — it’s simply a matter of “that’s how they do it.” And, that being the case, how should I modify my practices, ideal or not, to match the learner’s true environmental behavior?

The other question, the larger one, is about when all of this should be happening to begin with. Should I really be designing audio content according to “best practices” in the first place if those practices and the research surrounding them aren’t based on what users are really doing in the wild?

It’s certainly food for thought.

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