Good Bacterium

Join us for our next SCoPE seminar, The Dance of the Instructional Designer, facilitated by Vivian Neal, Program Director, Learning and Instructional Development Centre, Simon Fraser University. October 31st - November 13th, 2005.

Description:
Instructional design can variously be described as a process, a science, an art, or as a relationship. Instructional designers approach their work in many different ways, and we modify these approaches to suit each particular project and team.

This seminar is an opportunity to share and learn about what dances we use to balance the art and science of instructional design and build great relationships with subject matter experts and other team members, while at the same time ensuring that our work is aligned with our pedagogical values.

Join us if you are an instructional designer, or just curious how instructional designers go about their work.

Access the seminar directly: <http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/view.php?id=146>

If you have questions about accessing the seminar or managing your email subscription, please send me email.

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Sylvia Currie
SCoPE Community Coordinator
<http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/>
scurrie@sfu.ca  (250) 318-2907

...an open, online community for people like you

"Control - you must learn control!" These wise words were uttered by no less a sage than Yoda, and while he was talking about telekinetically hoisting spacecraft, having control has another important benefit. It protects a person from spotting false patterns that aren't there, from believing in conspiracies and from developing superstitions.

Control and security are vital parts of our psychological well-being and it goes without saying that losing them can feel depressing or scary. As such, people have strategies for trying to regain a sense control even if it's a tenuous one. Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky from the University of Texas have found that one such strategy is to identify coherent and meaningful relationships between things we observe.

These patterns can help us to make sense of past events and predict future ones, affording us a degree of control over our fates, albeit an indirect one. We can't change the weather, for example, but if we can tell when it's going to rain, we can be prepared. At the more extreme end, conspiracy theories can help the bewildered to make sense of otherwise unconnected events. And explaining random events by invoking superstitions or higher beings can help to bring reality's many possibilities within one's understanding, if not under one's heel.

Whitson and Galinsky demonstrated the link between desiring control and seeing patterns through a set of experiments that used a variety of psychological tricks to induce feelings of insecurity among groups of volunteers. With these tricks, they managed to induce a number of different illusions - increasing the risk of seeing false images, making links between unrelated events, creating conspiracy theories and even accepting superstitious rituals. Superficially, all of these behaviours seem quite different but they all involve seeing patterns where none exist. They have a common theme and now, this study suggests that they have a common motive too.