Yesterday I was discussing the topic of Educational Informatics with someone, and thought I would take some of what I wrote to him, revise it a bit, and post it here for your consideration.
Long before I heard the term "educational informatics" I became aware of the general topic of information presentation at a seminar presented by Edward Tufte. During the course of the seminar we were given all of his books, along with a reproduction of Minard's graphic of Napoleon's march on Moscow. The seminar covered a variety of topics, and referenced the books and poster – in fact, one of the points of the seminar was that the information in the books could not be recreated using the technology in the conference center and so the books were the best way to communicate the information. All the discussions focused on the same basic question – how do we present information in a way that makes it useful? In this context "useful" could mean memorable, clear, or unambiguous among other things, but all these terms could be summarized by the word "true." Although Tufte did not specifically address the problem of learning, the books did allow an extensive exploration of the topic of information presentation after the seminar was over and I took advantage of the books to do just that.
At the time I was producing courseware for Verizon, and attending classes in an IT Master's program at Johns Hopkins. I began to work along two paths. I compared how the ideas that Tufte had presented in the seminar were represented in the course materials I was seeing in my classes. I also began to look at the graphics I (and others developers) were putting into the course materials we were producing. At Hopkins, the focus of my learning began to shift from the IT centered course content to the methods and technology the instructors were using to present course content to their students. At the time the tools were fairly primitive, consisting mostly of PowerPoint slides and an early version of Blackboard.
My explorations uncovered a number of writers on the subject. Tufte wrote a PowerPoint specific monograph, Vincent Flanders had a book and website around the concept of "Web Pages That Suck," or learning good design by looking at lots (and lots) of really bad design. Jakob Nielson was writing extensively on web usability. At Verizon we had a private seminar for the training department by Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland, and I was leading a team concerned with usability and the evaluation of training effectiveness. Simply put, I was immersed in the topic in every aspect of my professional and academic life.
After graduation from Hopkins I found that my interest had continued and intensified. I was inspired to pursue the topic further through formal education and found the Adult Education Doctoral Program at Penn State. I knew before the first class started that my research would involve how people learned on computers, even if I did not know the details or direction that work would take. As I pursued my research, what became apparent was that the existing literature was good at critiquing what was wrong, but it did nothing to suggest what should be done as an alternative. It was also not very specific to learning solutions.
As part of my dissertation process I eventually wrote and published an article on evaluating learning based web pages. It was only after I graduated that I found and read a book by Clark & Lyons entitled Graphics for Learning: Proven Guidelines for Planning, Designing, and Evaluating Visuals in Training Materials. It did quite elegantly in print what I had wanted to do in my web article.
The book covers the topic of information presentation with a specific focus on learning, but with a focus on how learning presentation works and what to do, rather than what was wrong. The book developed an excellent progression from the general to the specific, from how and why graphics are useful for learning to the 5 specific types of instruction that can be facilitated using graphics, and how those graphics differ. I have read some criticism of the book that suggests the examples are not the best that can be had, and I would agree with that criticism, but as someone who has read a great deal of the learning design literature, I think this is one of the best books on the topic I have found.
I think the book fits quite nicely under the umbrella of Educational Informatics – and I use that term because it implies that there is more to this topic than educated observers looking at web pages with an intuitive eye toward what does and does not work. It would be nice to think that there is some blend of science and art that can help us see – and learn – better.
R
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