Challenges posed by my forecast

The most memorable aspects of 2006 for me involves blogging. On two previous occasions I had started blogs that never got beyond five postings. Reading Naked Conversations last summer gave me the needed insights to dive into daily posting. In August I launched Clues to the College Blues . I was not finding blogs to comment on until November when I suddenly appeared on the Learning Circuits Blog. As I wrote previously, I began learning so much from the exchanges among us that this second blog came into being easily. I had 253 unique visitors on the first week. The "power of community" had shifted from an abstraction to a vivid experience. That reinforced what I had written about on amazon.com this year about The Starfish and the Spider, The Long Tail and Blue Ocean Strategy . 2006 has been a year of enlivening convergence for me.

My forecast for 2007 suggests that those of us in instructional design, delivery and software development have some "discontinuous changes" to assimilate:

1. I expect we will jump from refining instructional designs to following the learner's lead in how to approach what is next to be learned.


2. I anticipate we will transform the value of what we offer from "better than rote learning" to "cooked up on the spot from an infinite arsenal of resources".


3. I foresee a shift from experiential learning modules to the delivery of performance support snippets, just-in-time, through mobile computing devices.

This forecast poses challenges to our comfort zones, self confidence and familiar outlooks. Discontinuous changes (paradigm shifts, playing with the rules instead of by the rules, going outside the box) have that effect. We cannot go on thinking the way we have, relying on our past experience to cope or imagining the future as comprehensible. This challenge presents itself as four choices:

1. Are you going to connect to activities you have never done before -- or disconnect by continuing what you're already good at doing?


2. Are you going to open your mind to receive inspirations and intuitions that guide you through these unknowns -- or close your mind with opinionated thought processes, compartmentalized reasoning and "hardening of the categories"?


3. Are you going to imagine scenarios where these changes could become a "dream come true" for you -- or imagine a nightmare where your situation goes from bad to worse and paranoia is justified?


4. Are you going to proceed as a visionary leader that takes us where we have never been before -- or as an erudite historian that lives in the past and tells the same old story?

Technorati tags: Web 3.0, instructional design, forecasting, December question