One-Size-Fits-All-ism

Okay – this is just a quick post because I am procrastinating right now, but you know how sometime you read a couple of random things together, and they really resonate off each other for you?

So let me tell you about the things I just read.

First was this slideshare by the marvelous Stephen Anderson:

It’s an interesting presentation on management theory, but the thing that caught my attention was this slide:

He then goes on to discuss how the context (the type of the organization, the structure, the leadership) determines what management strategy is most applicable.

This has long been an issue that I have about Instructional Design – we say we are doing audience analysis (and frequently are), but we still talk about design strategies as if everybody is the same (I am not immune to this, btw).  I think we lack good tools and principles for this.

Then, the saved tweet right after that was this blog post by Nick Shackelton-Jones (via @bfchirpy):

In it he makes several interesting points, but he explains that context is crucial for learning:

What became perfectly clear was that context rather than the content determined learning efficiency: if the organisation to which you belonged could give you a compelling reason to study (such as a life-altering test) then it hardly mattered whether they gave you content at all – let alone what format it was in. People, it turns out, are resourceful learners.

He proceeds to explain about his Affective Context Model.  Go read it – it’s definitely worth the time.  And I think it’s moving in the right direction – we need less recommendations that say “this is how you do Learning” (one-size-fits-all-ism) and more specific tools, ideas and strategies for addressing the specific contexts and abilities of learners.