Learning Instructional Design from the Gurus – The Fiction
Writers!
You know something? If you are looking for an Instructional Design
Guru, look at the master storytellers – look at Arthur Hailey,
Sidney Sheldon, Ken Follett, John Grisham, JK Rowling, Agatha Christie,
Wilbur Smith...and all others who’ve transcended the boundaries
of their countries to write stories that have a universal appeal.
If you want to choose a learning ground, choose a book written by
them, and see how they apply instructional design principles intuitively
and create experiences that are so vivid that you land into the
book, right by the side of the hero or heroine!
If you want to find an Instructional Design Guru in India, you
won’t find anyone better than Chetan
Bhagat, who excels in audience analysis and content design.
What in his books makes him the first Indian author to have caught
the fancy of the masses? His audience is everyone who can read English
minus those who we call the intelligentsia.
If I’ve spent about two decades of my life, reading; I’ve
spent about eighteen of those years reading fiction. My true ID
gurus are the novelists of this century. So next time, when you
go to your favorite bookstore, walk past the non-fiction, and spend
some time in the fiction section.
Here’s what you should do.
Find an Evergreen Author:
Find an author who’s been there for what seems to be forever.
I recommend evergreen authors, because the chances that you’d
stumble upon a completely no-go book in their collection are slim.
Here are my recommendations:
If you like:
Find a Story that Appeals to you:
In the collection of your selected author, find a book with a back-flap
brief that interests you the most. The back-flap tells you something
about the story and its settings. Usually, we prefer the books that
our prior schema engages with. So if you’ve worked in a Steel
Plant, you’d prefer Wheels
by Arthur
Hailey than Hotel
or Airport
by him. Choosing a book that connects with your existing schema
will also help you analyze the book from the SME’s angle.
Buy the Book:
I think we are experts at the skill of buying...so I’d not
waste your time telling you about how you should go about doing
it. (Aha...and I achieved it without the pre-test!)
Read the Book...and Stop!
The bad news is that the moment you’d begin reading, you’ll
find yourself drowning into the storyline. As a learner, you should
try to analyze your behavior and figure out its root cause. If a
smart, mature, and intelligent person such as you could lose your
real-world bearings and enter the fictional world created by a fiction-writer...there
must be something to learn.
So force yourself to stop at the end of each chapter.
Review the Chapter you’ve just read:
Check out the chapter for:
- Who was the intended audience for the book and how the content
of the chapter addressed the audience?
- What dragged you into the story?
- How the writer introduced the characters?
- How was humor used?
- Where the characters black, white, or gray?
- How were the characters named?
- What kind of language was used for the dialogs?
- Were you learning expect a particular behavior from each the
characters? Why?
- Where were the hooks placed?
- What made you check your watch at the end of a chapter to find
out whether there was time for reading the next chapter?
I am not a critique, nor do I ever want to be one – but I
do reflect over what I read. I like to put myself in the position
of the author and try to see why he did certain things with the
content.
Not many authors would allow anyone to peep into their lives, nor
would they assume the position of an enabler for other fiction-writers,
but Ken
Follett , who I admire for his storytelling genius, is different.
At his website, you’ll find some advice for the new authors,
who’d like to make a career in fiction writing. I recommend
that you go through it. From the viewpoint on an ID, there’s
a lot to learn there.
Now Apply:
If you are wondering how you could apply your learning
from fiction to content, think again. You too write for an audience.
You too use characters in your content, create scenarios, try to
hold the learner’s attention, and attempt to create a suspension-of-disbelief
for them. You need to make your content as sticky as they do. I
agree that you won’t be able to apply it all the time, and
in the same measure. Apply it wherever you can...even in technical
content! Yes. Nobody stops you from leaving a hook at the end of
a topic/module/any cohesive bit of information! You can connect
with your audience through language, through examples, and even
through the tone used for addressing the learner.
Speak of all other kinds of content, the applicability of this
knowledge increases manifold. Remember that it takes the same amount
of time to lay a brick askew, that it takes to lay it right. It’s
the skill of the bricklayer that would decide whether the building
would be a scar or a spot of beauty.
So, next time when someone tells you that:
- Text is boring!
- Text leads to least retention!
- Text needs to be jazzed up!
Tell them that text is beautiful. It’s the most potent format
for knowledge transfer. It has its limitations, but those limitations
have nothing to do with the interest levels it can generate, nor
with the possibility of retention.
Ask not what text can do for you; ask
what you can do with text!
Author: Shafali R. Anand
(Read other articles by the author in Wavelength's
Articles Section)
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
|
