Title: Participatory Instructional Design: A contradiction in terms
1Participatory Instructional DesignA
contradiction in terms?
- Rema Nilakanta
- October 3, 2006
2Agenda
- Research question
- Motivation for my research
- Literature review
- Research design
- Qualitative analysis, context, and participants
- Findings and discussion
- Contribution of dissertation
- Future research
- Limitations
- Acknowledgments and questions
3Research Questions
- What happens when participatory approaches are
integrated in instructional design? - What activities and processes were generated
during the participatory ID process? - How are these activities classified as PD?
- How did user-designers use language to negotiate
their way through a successful participatory ID
project? - What linguistic forms did user-designer
negotiations assume in the participatory ID
project?
4Motivation
- Instructional Design (Merrill, Braden, Dick
Carey, Gustafson Branch, Reiser, Mokenda,
Reigeluth, Jonassen, Wilson) of dominant
discourse in Instructional Design - PD (Schuler Namioka, 1993, Greenbaum, Bodker
Braetteteig,
5Theoretical Frameworks
- Invention Convention (Goodman, 1986)
- From literacy education
- Based on socio-constructivist learning theory
- Participatory Design (Schuler Namioka, 1993)
- Democratic end-user participation in technology
design - Work-oriented design
- Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995)
- Moves beyond description and interpretation of
language use to explaining what language does
and how does it do it (Rogers, 2004, p. 8)
6Research Design Analysis
- Qualitative - case study (Yin, 2003)
- Data
- Weekly meeting transcripts (primary)
- Individual member interviews, documents, email
(secondary) - Glaser Strauss (1967) constant comparative
method for coding - 5 cycles of coding - from 23 to 8 transcripts
7Analysis sample
- Purposeful sampling (Miles Huberman, 1994)
- choices of informants, episodes, and
interactions were driven by a conceptual
question, not by a concern for representativeness
(p. 29) - 8 weekly meetings (September 9, 23, 30 October
7, 21, 28, 2003 January 20, and April 6)
8Coding Process
9Reliability and Validity Check
- Two colleagues unconnected with the project
verified my coding (reliability) - An outside professional from a non-education
background checked my case report (reliability) - Member checking to enhance reliability and
validity of my interpretations
10Context
- CIT Ph.D. program
- Large U.S. university in the Midwest
- In-house funding for one year
- Part of a larger electronic portfolio design and
development project involving different
departments - Limited resources
- one systems analyst and one web design staff for
all the larger project - Volunteer design team with other work commitments
- Partial faculty support
11Participants
- Graduate students (8)
- 5 ISU CIT, 2 international, and 1 from the
English department - Familiar with educational technology
- Relative familiarity with instructional/software
design processes - CIT faculty member (1)
- Systems analyst (1)
12Findings
- 5 major features of the participatory ID process
- Transparency (revoicing, reframing)
- Design Ethos (revoicing, reframing, cohesion, and
modality) - Community
- Contextual Design
- Recursive Design
13Data Snippet
- NICK Rema, I think when Dr. D was discussing
about the grid thing, she was more concerned
about the Prelim portfolio. Because in the final
portfolio, your committee is interested in seeing
how you covered all this criteria and how is your
level of covering? I remember her saying that
this particular student needs to address at least
one of these criteria on an expert level. And
others should be advanced. So, in the annual
portfolio, these novice, advanced, expert won't
be so necessary.REMA so, do you think we won't
need the grid for the annual portfolio?Nick
yeah, we may need the grid to show what criteria
were addressed by what artifact, but not level, I
don't think it will be necessary..Jakob I'm
not an expert at how you do things, not at all.
but I'm thinking perhaps this will be useful
for the annual portfolio because it'll be a way
of discussing what your progress is and what
Nick why don't we let our committee members
decide on that.Jakob yeah, there's another
thing I just want to mention is that by designing
this portfolio we're also shaping somehow the way
things will be done from now on. If there's a
grid like this in the annual portfolio then
Nick it'll provide consistency, yeah I
understand that.Jakob no, but then it would be,
it would probably be a part of practice.RICHARD
so, this is continuous - does the matrix show
your continuous progress like including two years
annual portfolio, or just the current annual
portfolio? If it includes the progress you've
done in two years then it's good. But, if it only
shows each year I think it has no function. (CIT
eDoc weekly meeting, October 7, 2003)
14Transparency Making work processes transparent
- Design meeting conventions such as presenting
reports took on the form of narratives - members experienced events vicariously through
the reporter (experiental learning Dewey) - Enhanced groups transactive memory (Wegner,
1989) - Members knew what each one brought to the table
- Members created a shared history, which helped
establish a sense of group identity
15Data Snippet
- NICK Rema, I think when Dr. D was discussing
about the grid thing, she was more concerned
about the Prelim portfolio. Because in the final
portfolio, your committee is interested in seeing
how you covered all this criteria and how is your
level of covering? I remember her saying that
this particular student needs to address at least
one of these criteria on an expert level. And
others should be advanced. So, in the annual
portfolio, these novice, advanced, expert won't
be so necessary.REMA so, do you think we won't
need the grid for the annual portfolio?Nick
yeah, we may need the grid to show what criteria
were addressed by what artifact, but not level, I
don't think it will be necessary..Jakob I'm
not an expert at how you do things, not at all.
but I'm thinking perhaps this will be useful
for the annual portfolio because it'll be a way
of discussing what your progress is and what
Nick why don't we let our committee members
decide on that.Jakob yeah, there's another
thing I just want to mention is that by designing
this portfolio we're also shaping somehow the way
things will be done from now on. If there's a
grid like this in the annual portfolio then
Nick it'll provide consistency, yeah I
understand that.Jakob no, but then it would be,
it would probably be a part of practice.RICHARD
so, this is continuous - does the matrix show
your continuous progress like including two years
annual portfolio, or just the current annual
portfolio? If it includes the progress you've
done in two years then it's good. But, if it only
shows each year I think it has no function. (CIT
eDoc weekly meeting, October 7, 2003)
16Design Ethos Repeated invoking of groups
desiderata
- Cuts across all activities
- While presenting reports
- Critiquing the evolving design
- Updating newcomers to the group
- Seems to have under gird the design process
- Became the guiding light and kept work on track
- Created a sense of group identity and community
Desiderata is the original expression of what
is desired. The designers role is to midwife
that desiderata, which could not have been
imagined fully from the beginning, by either
client or designer and to provide end results in
the form of an expected unexpected outcome
(Nelson Stolterman, 2003, p. 48)
17Dissertation Organization
- Three articles
- Participatory Instructional Design A new
approach in Instructional Design - Proposed Journal Educational Technology Research
Development (ETRD). Springer. - Participatory Instructional Design Study of an
emerging paradigm - Proposed Journal Journal of Educational
Research. Heldref Publications. Or International
Journal of Educational Research. Elsevier. - Critical discourse analysis of user-designer
negotiation in participatory instructional design - Proposal sent to AERA session on Critical
Discourse Analysis journal to be identified. Or
Linguistics and Education. Elsevier.
18Dissertations Contribution
- Overall Impact
- Introduces and empirically examines a new
approach to designing technology (software) to
support learning - Article 1 (Literature Review)
- Starts a dialogue on integrating PD in ID
- Article 2 (Case Study)
- Studies an authentic case of Participatory ID
empirically - Article 3 (Linguistic analysis)
- Introduces Critical Discourse Analysis, new
research approach, in ID
19Application and Future Research
- How do these findings relate to educative
practice? (classroom practice group work,
curriculum design, research design participatory
research) - How can CDA be systematized?
20Limitations
- Non-generalizable
- Specific to higher education
- Specific to graduate program
- Specific to educational technology design
21Acknowledgments
- My committee
- CIT eDoc design team and my colleagues
- CTLT staff and faculty
- GMAP, ILET, and eDoc