Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Designing for the World at Large: A Tale of Two Settings

The section heading: “The Challenge of Diversity” would be an appropriate title for this topic while “Designing for the World at Large” is rather grandiose. The point of this topic (from Chapter 23) is that the world at large is a single world with multiple cultures that have various needs that diverge rather dramatically from the United States centered model of education and instructional design.

One extreme would be a country that has little if any centralized infrastructure. Furthermore, such a country may have a variety of needs that simply do not exist in a country such as the United States. Would it make sense to send FOSS (Full Option Science System) curriculum to Papua New Guinea (most of the population lives without electricity)? The challenge of education in locations most unlike the United States is great because there is a need for instructional designers who can work with alternative frameworks for learning, as well as understand the complex and challenging economic and social realities. Although there has been growing attention to the needs of the young, adult learners must be considered since the learning opportunities of their own childhood were very limited by today’s standards.

Until recently, most educational models were borrowed from the models used during colonial times. While this has seemed logical and “understandable”, it has worked for and mostly benefited those living in urban centers, while the masses continue to live in rural conditions. This also explains the slow rate of change in thinking related to these issues – the poor masses have had little voice in politics. This began to change at the World Conference on Education for All in 1990, where it was recognized that developing countries were using obsolete models of educational practice.

The importance of diversity is that the world needs diversity for healthy evolutionary growth, not only biological, but in terms of knowledge, learning and the development of thought and creativity. To acknowledge diversity and serve it accordingly is more productive and a more hopeful course than creating a one-size-fits-all mentality. Rather than transfer technologies, we need to reinvent them according to local needs.

A personal observation I made on a recent trip to Mexico was the contrast between high and low technology. It is possible to see a restaurant that is little more than a concrete shell with a tarp, and in the same city see a restaurant comparable to a modern sit-down restaurant such as Denny’s. In one government center the employees were typing forms on manual typewriters while the workers at the cellular store used networked computer workstations. Such a society has certain educational challenges greater than a highly industrialized society such as the United States because there are less universal standards throughout the infrastructure of the country. Just imagine if schools in the United States still had to teach the use of slide rules because half of the businesses in this country could not afford calculators!

I also feel that the challenges of reaching diverse populations are an excellent challenge for creative instructional designers because of the lack of predefined solutions.

2 comments:

Peiwen said...

""To acknowledge diversity and serve it accordingly is more productive and a more hopeful course than creating a one-size-fits-all mentality. Rather than transfer technologies, we need to reinvent them according to local needs.""
hello,
I am confused in this quotation from you. Once we acknowledge the diversity, then why can't you reinvient/ adjust a little bit to fit the local needs?

Lawrence Pierce said...

Yes, exactly! The quotation is from the text and essentially says that rather than simply apply a technology to a new culture(without changes), we need to reinvent it (make it appropriate) for the that culture. Up until now, the dominant body of instructional technology materials has been developed for the culture of the United States. This cannot serve the varied learning needs around the world.