November’s Training+Development (T+D) magazine focuses on instructional design and culture in an article called “Launching a Culture-Based Learning Product”. It highlights the instructional designer’s job to “know the culture of your learner” when building a human-centered learning product. To that end, it prescribes the collection of data, including “ethnicity, race, gender, learning styles, class, demographics, history, experiences, beliefs, values, norms, interests and ideologies.”
The task of knowing a culture takes more than collecting data, although it is a good point of departure. Visceral cross-cultural experience is another ingredient that should be added to this list, but of course it’s not accessible to everyone. CultureWizard is an online intercultural learning platform that addresses the task of building cultural awareness and knowing about the specific preferences and behaviors attributed to cultures around the world. Understanding learning styles can be gleaned from the interactive tools on CultureWizard, directly impacting the designer’s success in blending culture-based content into a learning product. According to the article,
Culture-based content provides for the needs of learners in both anthropological and psychological ways. This means that the learner’s ways of being and seeing the world, as well as psychological ways of being and seeing the world, are addressed in the design of the product.
How have you developed cultural knowledge? What is your favorite way to do this (for example, via books, the internet or travel)?
Joshua
