Instructional Design and Religion

Instructional design means the science and art of preparing learning materials. These materials can include lesson plans for use by teachers, self study books for learners, videos, and so on. Given that the basic economic fact of this day and age is that labor is expensive, materials for self study are usually considered a lot better than materials that require instructors.

The are several domains of learning that instructional designer may seek to teach. A psychologist called Gagne identified five of them, of which four are actually useful.

1. Verbal information. Basically, knowledge. "Stoves can be hot", for example.
2. Intellectual skills. For example, the planning it takes a toddler to realize s/he can move the chair next to the stove to be able to reach it.
3. Psychomotor skills. Physical skills. For example, the being able to push the chair next to the stove and then climb the chair.
4. Attitudes. A tendency to select certain behaviors instead of others. For example, "I don't want an owie, so I won't touch the stove even though it looks inviting".

Out of these four, attitudes are the hardest to teach, especially to adults. Religion is, to a large extent, about teaching attitudes. Most religions teach that if you stole yesterday, worship God today, and rob somebody tomorrow you're a bad person and your worship is useless. The worship of God today is supposed to make you a better person so you won't rob anybody tomorrow.

My point yesterday was that teaching attitudes requires repetition. Road to Damascus conversions occur, but they are extremely rare. The common pattern is closer to the Israelites in the desert. You follow God, and then you panic when you get to the Red Sea. You get back to following God, and throw a temper tantrum at Marah. You repent again, and follow God, then you panic when Moses is missing and make a golden calf.

However, we are all masters at filtering information. We have to be, living in an age of over stimulation. And the easiest information to filter is information that is repeated. Nagging rarely works. If we try to repeat the same thing over and over again, we're likely to develop a mental immunity to it.

This means that we need to hear the same message repeatedly. But we need to hear it in different ways, or we will not listen. Silly ways, such as the Porpoise Driven Life, make sense if they make people listen and remember the real things to which they point.

I hope this is clearer.

The Porpoise Driven Life - Silly, but not Stupid

This appears as a parody of The Purpose Driven Life. However, there is a deeper lesson to be drawn from it. Religion (at least the Judaism I practice and the Christianity I see around me) is primarily a matter of attitudes, preferences for one course of action rather than another. Knowledge (or belief) and skills play a part, but ultimately it's about what you choose to do.

Changing attitudes is hard. New year's resolutions seldom last until February 1st. To change an attitude, you often need to repeat the lesson over and over. Orthodox Jews do it by praying three times a day, and each of those prayers includes asking God for certain attitudes. Other religions also use repetition in other variations.

But our generation is chronically overstimulated. We are so used to tuning out things, it's all too easy to tune out messages that literally repeat themselves. One solution is to present the message in different fashion each time. Use jokes (such as "Porpoise Driven Life") to get people to listen, and embed the attitude changing lesson in those jokes.

Violence makes things memorable

According to this research, ads in video games are more memorable when the game includes a violent component. This makes evolutionary sense, there are good reasons to pay attention during violent incidents. If you survive violence, you should remember what happened so you'll be able to survive next time.

This ability to learn quickly in relationship with violence might be useful in Instructional Design, especially when teaching facts that are inherently boring. For example, imagine a version of Quake which requires you to shoot one specific molecule type while avoiding shooting any of the others to teach organic chemistry. While you're looking for that one molecule type, you have billboards in the game world that teach you the others, which you'll need at higher levels.