This week has definitely been the hardest week of DigPINS for me to connect to so far because I do not teach in the traditional sense. The only “teaching” I do consists of me trying to reexplain items that friends and classmates don’t understand from their classes.
The core subject I consider myself the best at is math, but ask anyone close to me and they will tell you I am a horrible math tutor or teacher. This is because my brain works and understands a little bit differently than most other people. I understand math easily, meaning I am one of the worst people to try to teach math because I can’t explain how I understand it, I just do.
The other area I “teach” the most would be website design. One of the main reasons I am horrible at teaching is I am horrible at explaining why I just understand how. I also tend to take over and try to do everything myself. I very much like having control, and instead of explaining the problem, I just take over and fix it myself.
I always claim I never want to be a teacher, but learning different ways to teach technology to others was definitely beneficial for me.
By creating websites you are building learning environments. Think about it as creating spaces for others to learn. This is why instructional designers need to know a lot about learning and motivation. If you design an engaging site that “pulls in” users, then you are doing the same thing a teacher does, facilitating learning.
This is an interesting juxtaposition that Reid brings up here. Inside of an educational institution we often call what he is describing “Instructional Design”. But work that is very similar happens outside of educational institutions and goes by the name “UX designer” or the like.