Thanks for stopping by. I am in the process of creating and editing, content will be added as I am able. The answers below (as they are added) are deliberately abbreviated, and are intended only as a cursory overview. -Arlo (February 8, 2012)

(1) What is Instructional Design?

Instructional Design is a process for intervention in formal educational environments, bridging learning theory, activity and pedagogy, with an eye on structuring symbolic and material artifacts to maximize the potential that the goals of learners, teachers and institutions are met. Instructional Design is, at its more macro-levels, an organizing process, that informs curricular decisions, learning-space architecture (real and virtual), and strategies for both organizing content and classroom activity. It is, at more micro-levels, a creational process that builds, implements and studies mediational artifacts and their impact on classroom activity. Most people are familiar with the resultant artifacts of Instructional Design processes, such as textbooks, interactive software programs, exams, videos, training manuals, etc. without being aware of the larger organizing context in which the creational processes occur.

(2) What's foundational learning theory best supports pedagogical initiatives?

Vygotsky's work, and later the work of Luria, Leont'ev and others, has offered a radical reorganization in how formal education and learning should be conceptualized. Their body of work, often called cultural-historical psychology or socio-cultural theory, maintains that development begins in the interpersonal dimension and moves on a trajectory towards an intrapersonal dimension. That is, development is at first social and moves 'internally' as the learner appropriates the skills to operate 'independently'. In between 'inability' and 'ability to perform independently' there exists a spectrum where learners are able to perform with varying degrees of social mediation (Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development).

Often, Vygotsky is misrepresented as suggesting that formal education should seek to duplicate the natural, spontaneous processes of development as it occurs in the everyday world. However, Vygotsky maintained that formal education has a unique cultural role, and has drawn a distinction between scientific (or 'abstract', 'artificial') knowledge and spontaneous (or 'empirical', 'practical') knowledge. To be sure, Vygotsky advocated that both forms of knowledge had strengths and weaknesses, and both mediated valuable activity within the culture. Also, for Vygotsky, scientific knowledge must move to inform and become part of practical, empirical knowledge otherwise it runs the risk of being reduced to "verbalism".

The idea that knowledge is social in origin has several key ramifications for pedagogy. The internalization process is one of active negotiation and participation, where ideas are socially deconstructed and reconstructed as they are 'internalized'. Learners are not seen as passive vessels into which knowledge is poured, but as active and agenic participants of a process of inquiry and knowledge building. Additionally, the social/cultural context(s) into which the learners are embedded must be considered. Also, 'meaning', for Vygotsky, rests of the successful juxtaposition of scientific concepts with the everyday world of the learner's activity, and thus a key component of pedagogy must be to not only present concepts but provide active involvement of those concepts within the relevant practical activity of the learners' everyday lives. Lastly (for this short answer), by examining the Zone of Proximal Development, or what learners have 'near-mastery' over, teachers can get a better sense of the level or nature of instruction individual students may need to move to autonomous performance.

Thus, we see for Vygotsky, formal education begins with the deliberate, cultural-artificial structuring of information, with the goal of its abstract concepts and scientific knowledge being proceduralized into the everyday, practical-empirical activity of the learners. Educational development is, thus, the integration of abstract, scientific knowledge with the empirical-practical activity of the everyday world through the social-cultural processes of appropriation or internalization.

(3) What framework, or descriptive theory, best captures the robust nature of learning communities?

Continuing the work of Vygotsky, Leont'ev and Luria, and later Engestrom (and others), have developed a framework for thinking about learners-in-context known as Activity Theory. While there are variations of the theory, the main structure provides a way of understanding the multiplicity of components that compromise a learning environment, and how those components interact and inter-relate.

Activity Theory begins by conceptualizing that learner activity (indeed, all human activity) occurs not in isolation, but as part of a mediated context, an 'activity system', that must be recognized in any attempt to understand learner performance. Within the activity system is the 'subject' of the analysis, in an educational context this is often a learner or a subgroup of learners. The 'object' is the persistent 'goal' or motivation that provides direction to the activity system, and the transformation of the 'object' is seen as the 'outcome'. For the most part, this is not an unfamiliar analysis, and is probably the foundation for many familiar analytic endeavors.

However, Activity Theory goes on to include within the activity system the artifacts and tools (material and symbolic) that mediate the subject's activity, the division of labor (horizontal and vertical), the community within which the learner's activity takes place (and, importantly, share the same 'object'), and rules (both explicit and implicit) governing the activity system. The well-known model of Activity Theory looks like this:

Thus, learner activity is mediated in complex ways by both other people and artifacts, and this mediation is informed by accepted rules, labor divisions and the shared direction of the community as it moves to transform 'objects' into 'outcomes'. This last part, transformation (often referred to as 'innovation') is critical to Activity Theory that advances a dialectal-transformative relationship between agency and structural and mediating artifacts.

It is also worth emphasizing that activity systems, while persistent by definition, are defined by the analysis itself, they should not be conceptualized as external, objective structures. As the focus of analysis changes, what constitutes the components of the activity system will necessarily change as well. And, importantly, just as learners are themselves not isolated, neither are activity systems. As learners' involvement consists of multiple simultaneous activity systems, activity systems are themselves embedded in larger (and composed of smaller) interrelated activity structures, and that often these activity systems have divergent or conflicting goals.

As a descriptive theory, or research-analytic framework, Activity Theory captures the dynamic inter-relationships between socially-engaged learners, artifacts, goals, community members, organizational structures and the outcomes of their educational endeavors. In this way, Activity Theory is a holistic, rather than reductionist, view of educational contexts.

(4) What is the core crisis confronting education today?

[In answering this, I've bypassed several immediate concerns of Instructional Design (such as Transmissive models of 'knowledge', lack of authenticity and agency, obsession with 'assessment' and teaching test-taking skills) to zoom out to what I think is a fundamental problem at the conceptual level over why we have public education, because I firmly believe that is a dialogue in desperate need of resolution.]

In many ways, confusion over the question "Why do we educate?". There are many possible answers to this, from the notion of informed citizenship required to sustain a democracy, to vocation preparedness or career training, to broad exposure to ideas, art, etc. in the liberal arts tradition. Do we have public schools to produce knowledgeable voters? Skilled workers? "Renaissance" men and women? Cultural literacy? Certainly these answers need not be mutually exclusive, we can prepare students for the workplace while exposing them to art and music, and teaching them the information necessary for an informed citizenry. The problem is that each of these answers as articulated demands different considerations that a singular, or monolithic, educational structure will not address.

Another answer to this question we must address is "to sort students into social categories". Is it a valid role for education to 'sort' students into various social roles and then structure their paths towards that end? In democratic views of education, sorting out those who will be pushed into factory jobs from those who will be pushed into white-collar employment is not a legitimate role of education. And yet this is one of the strongest 'roles' played by public education today, even if it is not directly overt. Many schools, as early as the fifth-grade, begin making determinations about the (economic) value of the learner and begin to offer- and withhold- instruction accordingly.

All too often, as districts try to build one structure to do everything, unintended consequences derail several legitimate functions. Many times this is based on illegitimate assumptions. With an eye towards 'cultural literacy', a strong argument can be made that familiarity with Mark Twain is an important aspect of understanding, and identifying with, American culture. Why is it then that when it does appear on the curriculum as a requirement, it is often only for those in 'college-prep' trajectories. Is there an implicit assumption that while vocational students are smart enough to be plumbers, they are too 'dumb' to be expected to read Twain? Or, in their effort to strengthen vocational needs, are those of cultural literacy de-emphasized, or even de-legitimized? Or are there even larger forces that demand an uninformed lower socio-economic population?

It should also be readily visible that when we begin to evaluate the successes and failures of public education with reference to a specific goal, we get quite different results as well as possible solutions. How well are we preparing students to be informed citizens in a participatory democracy? How well are we fostering a strong level of cultural literacy for everyone who completes public education? Is everyone being prepared adequately for a career? Is everyone being exposed to the broadest range of art, poetry, music, philosophy, literature possible? Knowing which of these questions we are asking is critical in assessing education, and not knowing is a core crisis facing education.

(5) What is my design philosophy?

(5) If you had to name one 'skill' that is crucial regardless of domain or vocation, what would it be?

I'd name two, with the understanding that they are symbiotic; critical thinking and information literacy.

We live in a world in which we are bombarded with information, and parsing that information, understanding its inherent assumptions and deconstructing and/or problematizing that information is a crucial skill that underscores cultural activity across the spectrum. Cultural-historical approaches to knowledge have made it clear that 'information' is never objective or neutral, but is laden with cultural assumptions, values, biases and prejudices. Additionally, the movement away from what Pirsig called "subject-object metaphysics" has changed the focus of information from external, fixed 'Truths' that are determined once and then merely reproduced, to contextual, value-based 'truths' that are in a constant flux of negotiation and evaluation. While the sheer amount of information confronting people precludes a deep personal critical re-examination of everything we hear, critical thinking argues that filters, while necessary, also are a deployment of critical thinking skills. That is, we need to know not only how to deconstruct and evaluate information, but we need conscious and purposeful selection and control of the filters we use, and the ability to abandon or reappraise those filters as needed.

We also live in a world where it is increasingly necessary for people to make evaluations and critical assessments of the information flow. In order to do this, a knowledge of where information of certain types resides, how it can be accessed, and how to determine the 'meta-information' corresponding to that information. In other words, we need to know not only what information we need, but how to find it. 'Digital literacy' is another term that is often used in conjunction with 'information literacy', and in many areas (perhaps mostly of socio-economic privilege) one can not be information literate without also being digitally literate, but I think information literacy is a more inclusive term that includes, but is not restricted to, information held in digital realms. Again, understanding that information is neither neutral nor objective, 'information literacy' is as much finding out about information as it is finding information in the first place.

Critical thinking and information literacy are key elements of human agency, perhaps more so as we transition towards 'knowledge economies'. In addition to the aforementioned cultural biases and values, information can also been seen as a tool of symbolic violence by power-holders seeking to reaffirm and/or reify their power. Individuals unable to deconstruct and evaluate information, and its tethered meta-information, are perhaps less agenic to act in response to these efforts. Thus, regardless or irrespective of domain and/or vocation, critical thinking and information literacy elevate agency, promote cultural competence, and provide resistance to implicit or hidden information structures that may serve to reify a dominant power-base.

(6) "If 'technology' is the answer, what is the question?"