Four Fried Chickens and a Coke - and some Dry White Toast.

You're heard the saying "from the sublime to the ridiculous." It's the latest revelation that I've had regarding Instructional Technology - and it's only a revelation insofar as it's something that I sort of understood but not not seeing the "why" up until now.

The best metaphor that came to me was the scene from the film The Blues Brothers where Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) enter the Soul Food Cafe and place their standard order: Jake orders four fried chickens and a coke; Elwood orders dry white toast. When the waitress/manager (Aretha Franklin) takes the order back to the kitchen, the cook (Matt "Guitar" Murphy) knows exactly who's out there just from hearing the order.

It seems improbable that two people - brothers, in this case - would have two drastically different preferences in the same environment. We face this everyday as teachers - more so when we factor in technology. We don't just deal with Jake and Elwood - we deal with Matt "Guitar" Murphy, "Blue Lou" Marini, Tom "Bones" Malone and everyone else in the band. They all want the same outcome through different means. Some students will gorge on the new and exciting technologies introduced to the class while some will stick with the hum-drum safety of what they know.

It's tempting to point to the student who overindulges in the material and say "wow, now there's someone who is a hungry learner" while snickering at the others that play it safe. Let us not forget that there is a price for overindulgence. Somewhere there needs to be Prevacid or Nexium, or even Lipitor if it gets that far. That's where I see us as teachers. We can't always stop the heartburn or heart attack, but we play a crucial role in designing effective lessons that use technology in a positive way to prevent the overload or misdirection. 

The same is true for the dry white toast folks. They stay in their safe harbor because they know it works. Getting them to try new things is not at all unlike trying new foods. Set down a bowl of Panang Curry before the toast eaters and they won't budge. Put a little jam on the toast, and they might go for it. Getting them to try the technology must be done the same way - going from MS Word to SecondLife will be too much; Google Docs will seem very familiar to then, so they'll go for that. Along they way, they'll see the online collaboration and sharing features, and become used to those. Baby steps, but all going forward.

Before enrolling in the Instructional Technology cohort, I thought I was the four fried chicken guy. I thought I was an innovator in technology - even heard that from my colleagues. Now I realize that I was munching on the toast - maybe with a little jam, but that was it. I know I have a long way to go, but with the idea of Instructional Design guiding my choices in the classroom, I feel like I'm going to like the chicken.

Along the way, i found the following from TomBrienProfessional. It's the soundtrack from the Blues Brothers scene along with 3-D animation that does a great job of mimicking the actors in the scene. I only wish he would have done the next segment in the kitchen.

BTW, thanks to anyone from ISTI who is reading this via Dr. Leigh Zeitz's recommendation.  If he made all of us from his EIT Summer 2010 course sound wonderful, well ... who am I to call him a liar?



Still Image: The Blues Brothers, John Landis (Dir.) John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd (Perf.) Universal, 1980
Video: TomBrienProfessional, May 31, 2009