Presentation was by Reuben Tozman President of EdCetra Training. He started with Father Guido Sarducci's 5-Minute University, based on what people remember 5 years after they graduate from college.

Response to this is Personalized, Just-in-Time, Performance Support Training.

Visual Thesaurus as an example of what's possible with semantic web. Build scenarios that are not based on yes/no answers, but bringing answers to people of what they need to have in that moment. Use of tagging allows information that is more and more relevant to the path you're taking. The learning happens at the time you're making the decision. People should be able to pull the information that's relevant for the factors that they're dealing with.

Semantic Web (Web 3.0)--"technologies for enabling machines to make more sense of the Web, with the result of making the Web more useful for humans. (Ed Dumbill, 2000). Right now we're doing this work. It's entirely controlled by us. With the semantic web, you are part of the Web and the Web is an application that brings stuff to you because it's semantically marked up.

Tom Crawford--"If by instructional design we mean somebody designing a classroom or e-learning session, then if it's not dead already it's certainly breathing pretty hard."

Why must ISD evolve?

• Enable the "pull" paradigm
• Go beyond creating one-off instructional materials--look at performance support
• Accommodate new paradigms of learning (ex. user-generated content)
• "Feed the web"--have to find ways to get information out there for free for it to be valuable.

The only way for Web 3.0 to work, you have to be transparent, open to the web. It depends on context. What happens when you make yourself available to the Web?

Refers to Kevin Kelly's TED Talk on Predicting the next 5000 days of the web (go to 12:54 in the video).

"The first thing you have to understand about the future of the web is that nothing's impossible."

How do we evolve ISD to be consistent with this new paradigm? What role will IDs play in semantically defining content for the web? How do you mark up the content in the cloud so that people can continue to learn? 

The value of ISD is the ability to systematically break down content so that it's applicable to learners and their learning styles. This is what's unique about instructional designers.

Will need to develop a system for classifying, organizing, "marking up" learning content.

Evolving ISD

• Define, classify learning types and events
• Create common meta language to provide semantic meaning to various forms of learning
• Able to view content using whatever display device can read the language
• As new tools develop, enable them to read the language.

Example:

• OASIS-DITA for Learning--open source XML standard that allows you to create technical documentation so that it can be re-purposed and re-used. Can be downloaded from SourceForge and can author content, publish to a SCORM format. Then move to mobile application, etc.

Need structure of a language, standards to then create a pathway for creativity to ensure that content is available to people so that it can be seen in a consistent, productive way.

(My thoughts--interesting session, although it seemed like people either weren't totally getting it or they weren't engaged by the idea. An IT person in the group noted that most of the IDs she works with are not into the tech part and that this seems to require a real change in how elearning is designed.

For me, interesting challenge to some of my thinking about us being facilitators of a learning process, rather than designing specific learning experiences. Still felt like there was a lot of ID control and a sense that people need someone to figure things out for them. Is that always true? Seems like we need to be helping people become better learners for themselves. Or maybe they go together? Questions. . . )