What's in a name?

I started as a web designer in the 1990s when the internet was taking off, then my research led me into so much more than just web sites so I called myself a multimedia designer, and now it’s interactive media designer as my focus is on learning resources. However, even that doesn’t quite fit …

My research focuses on the design of interactive media to support craft skills learning, but what I do is far more about people than interactive media design. I soon discovered that by far the greatest challenge in my research was the basic eliciting of knowledge needed to perform such complex skills.

It is easy to point a video camera at someone to record their activities, but for the novice this is of limited use. A demonstration by a highly skilled practitioner actually conceals the complexity of their practice because so much of their knowledge is tacit. It is deeply internalised and they respond instinctively to subtle cues that even they are unaware of. It is little wonder that the new learner struggles to imitate what they observe in video.

So, video is fundamental to my practice, but equally so are a set of elicitation techniques aimed at finding what the novice needs to know to get started and make progress. Key to this is the concept of bridges and the use of expert learners, but more about those later …