on insidious design
An interesting article appeared last week on the First Monday blog. Written by Lisa M Lane and entitled Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching, it examines some of the ways in which the systems (in this case course management systems) educators use influence the way that they teach. Many CMS's, at least those that have been around for a while, it is argued, are based on instructivist principles rather than constructivist ones. Of course these offerings all now come with a plethora of collaborative features enabling, in principle at least, the ability to implement more constructivist design into the way courses are run. Some other factors also seem to come in to play which also ultimately probably lead to sub-optimal use of these systems. For example, many educators, while being expert in their own subject areas, are not so proficient in their use of ICT. An expert 'instructor' may not understand the differences between the Web and say, their previous 'offline' experiences and so not be able to appreciate the different approaches that can be taken 'online'. Novice users are less likely to explore in detail what is available to them and may simply 'transfer' offline processes that they understand into the online environment. In a sense, the technology they are using is now used in a transferable manner rather than a transformative one. Lane also discusses the 'fault of the defaults'. Since novice users are unlikely to experiment and investigate to any great depth, the CMS is likely to be used along the lines of its default configuration, rather than optimised to better support specific requirements. Many implementations will thus inherit this 'default design'. It strikes me that this is not simply a characteristic of course management systems, but of many if not all (potentially) complex systems. There will always be those who push boundaries to their maximum and experiment and innovate but these people are generally speaking, in a relatively small minority. I am trying to relate this problem to the application area of e-portfolios and it occurs to me that the design of this class of application is critical to its effectiveness. Having seen a number of educators struggle with the process of e-portfolio I cannot help but wonder how effectively they will be used in classrooms. Simplicity of use is a key feature but along with it the design really needs to guide users through areas such as collecting, selecting, reflecting and publishing, with minimal assistance. Reflection to me is particularly problematic as it seems to be quite challenging for some. How flexible is the design of your systems or if you are a user of these types of services, have you been unduly influenced by inherent characteristics of them?
