Reading a breadth of work, and listening to conversations about instructional design you start to see that there are (at least) two very different things both being referred to as instructional design

on the one hand, you see lots of scholarship and research in the area. It's an entire discipline, with journals, books, blogs and other kinds of scholarship. Degree programs. Tenured faculty. Research in the training and development areas.

on the other hand you have this sort of, maybe more ephemeral ID. This is the stuff that gets baked into short hand that is readily accessible that isn't based on the research, scholarship, or discipline directly, but calls itself ID (or referred to that way)

so, what you end up seeing is a whole bunch of conversations that talk past eachother, because they're both talking about ID, but referring to fundamentally different things.

Yes, ID has roots that run back into the military (news flash, so does design thinking in case you cast aside ID models for that). But the scholarship and work in the area didn't stop there.

Casting a net over all of ID doesn't help clarify the conversation.

As a field, we probably haven't done ourselves any favours by not professionalizing either. That creates a tapestry of roles and people that engage with it (which I actually think can be a strength)

The caveat is that it makes it a garbled mess of a field to try to say definitively one thing is ID. Or all IDs are the same. Heck in most of the contexts I've been, the IDs are all very different. Different skills, approaches, etc. It's what makes us a great team.

But (after seeing postings over the past year, the most for IDs I've seen in the last decade), if the titles were stripped away, you likely wouldn't call all of those positions instructional designers.

So you see everything from tech support, to technical writers, to faculty development type roles, to LMS page builders, to designers, to graphic designers, all being called an ID (of some flavour or another).

What is an instructional designer happens to be the topics of a whole bunch of articles in the field. But again, today I'm thinking about the conversations. So you ask 10 IDs you may get similar answers, you might not.

Anyhoo, I don't do threads very often and feel like it's been a long day. So I'll stop here.

actually, I'm going to share one story. One day, an educational media developer I knew said to me, "JR, I was an instructional designer today."
Neat, I like talking about that sort of stuff over cocktails.
"What were you doing today?"

"I wrote learning objectives." Reader. They proceeded to motion with their hands as they said, "by the end of this module, students should be able to" dragged their finger down through the air, "describe..."
That was it. An entire field reduced to that.

of course it's a jovial conversation over drinks, but I cannot get that moment of horror I experienced from my memory. It's about so much more than that, and yet, the messaging often gets reduced to "tips and tricks". That's one of these things on what I called ephemeral

Is that all there is to it? Of course not. Would I call that developer and ID, heck no. Yet, in some contexts others might do so or draw very wrong conclusions from it. Anyhoo, now I'm done.