Help: Toward a New Ethics-Centered Paradigm for Instructional Design and Technology

A first step in defining IDT would be to identify its central concern. Although some see science, design, or technology as central, IDT’s actual center has always been to help learners. Because the aspiration to help people is by definition ethical, it follows that the central concern of IDT is ethical. Thus, science, design, and technology become means to an ethical end. They serve praxis, or practical action, and no longer belong only to the episteme of science, the poiesis of design, or the episteme/poiesis hybrid of modern technology. Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is the chief virtue of praxis, thus making ethical choice, sound judgment, and expert decision-making topics of paramount interest. Help at the center simplifies IDT and dissolves many long-standing anomalies. It suggests the possibility of a new ethics-centered paradigm. Selected implications for IDT, its profession, and its constituent subfields are explored. “If the eye were not attuned to the sun, men could not see it.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Did Ptolemy and Copernicus see the same sun rising above the horizon at dawn? The answers are “Yes” and “No.” Yes, they saw the same shining orb. No, Ptolemy saw a sun that circled the earth; Copernicus saw a sun around which the planets revolved. What differed was not the sun they saw, but its meaning, (Hanson, 1958). The Search for IDT’s Center How should we define Instructional Design and Technology (IDT)? What is the meaning of our discipline? What is the meaning of our profession? A first step toward answering this question would be to determine which of our many goals and purposes is our central, or ultimate, end. What is our central mission and toward what should our efforts be directed? Until we could agree on a central concern, defining our field would be impossible. An inability to define IDT would be unfortunate, indeed, for no other success could compensate for a discipline’s failure to understand its fundamental nature and reason for existing. “If one does not know to which port one is sailing,” said Seneca, “no wind is favorable (1969).” This article invites the discipline and its profession to consider a new alternative for the central concern of IDT. To establish a context, it first reviews three traditional centers of concern. It then proposes a fourth alternative so apt and so obvious that it is almost invisible. The article then uses Aristotle’s categories of the rational intellect to highlight the principled differences among the four centers; and finally, it explores some general and specific implications of the shift in focus for the discipline, the profession, and the constituent subfields of both. Four Paradigmatic Centers Three traditional centers Three traditional centers of IDT have large numbers of advocates. Although seldom acknowledged as such, these traditional centers represent paradigmatic kinds of intellectual activity known from antiquity. These were summarized by Aristotle at least two millennia ago and have recently been reappropriated by postmodern philosophy. (Aristotle, 350 B.C.E./1908; Heidegger, 1996; Arendt, 1955; Taminiaux, 1991.) The scientific paradigm. The first traditional center views IDT as a science, like geometry and physics, where invariant laws, relationships, or principles are sought for, discovered, and applied. IDT embodiments of this central concern are found in instructional research, theory, and measurement.