Michael Allen has a new book out

Michael Allen has a new book out, the first of a planned six-volume E-Learning Library. Volume 1 is Creating Successful E-Learning : A Rapid System For Getting It Right First Time, Every Time.

Several things come to mind when I think of Michael. Of course there’s Authorware (he created the first modern authoring software). There’s recognition that learning does not take place in the absence of emotion (I’ve still got my No Boring eLearning! button.) There’s the waterfall effect: slavish adherence to a design process where one step can’t begin until the one behind it is complete doesn’t let the designer go back to fix earlier mistakes; they’re water over the dam by then. He’s a compelling speaker and a facile writer. And somehow, he always seems to have a smile on his face.

I was writing about design in an online forum about informal learning just last week, and Michael’s waterfall analogy got me started on this rant:

(ADDIE = analyze, design, develop, implement, evaluate). ADDIE’s military heritage is probably responsible for the fiction that design takes place in discrete steps:

Closing a step before going to the next precludes going back to add new insights or fix mistakes. (It does make it easier to administer contracts.)

Real design is more like this, where one step informs another, backward as well as forward:

ISD is akin to economics, where a fellow recently won a Nobel prize for the insight that people are not rational decision-makers, thereby invalidating a wide swath of the discipline. ISD downplays human aspects of real-world learning, things like emotions, preconceptions, the impact of noise in the environment, and the back-channels that transfer ideas sub rosa.

These things draw me to informal learning as a moth to the flame. ADDIE and most ISD is reductionist; informal learning is open-ended. My model for informal learning, which I sometimes call natural learning, looks more like this:

What makes ADDIE so scary is its priesthood. Many are fundamentalists. They pray to one God. She looks something like this:

It’s science fiction.

Let’s see. Have I stomped on anyone’s toes yet?

The subtitle of Michael’s book, “A rapid system for getting it right first time, every time,” is not only grammatically incorrect, it contradicts what’s inside the covers. Michael is a champion of successive approximation. A more apt title would have been “getting it right by getting it wrong and then making it better.”

As much as Michael and I agree, reading Creating Succesful eLearning reminded me of how far I have drifted away from the mainstream.

Michael’s prescriptions are for creating programs. That’s his business.

On the other hand, I am focused on learning environments. What goes on in those environments is loosely coupled; it’s mix and match rather than “follow me.” A learning ecology would benefit from including some of Michael’s programs, but wouldn’t be optimal without tweaking conversations, networks, communities, and culture, too. Maybe that message is in another volume. I don’t recall seeing a description of the remaing five tomes.