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In the midst of Instructional Design

Ever since I first qualified as a teacher I have wondered what are the actual tools of my trade and what is the real purpose of teaching (or learning, for that matter).
When (and where) I trained, the immediate future of teaching was not about robots and VR, not even Dead-by-PowerPoint... it was Chalk-and-Talk.
I always thought that my head worked as a little computer. I could relate to those syntactic or paradigmatic relationships (or maybe it was the linguist in me) and from the very beginning I felt I needed a digital representation of my thought process to be able to communicate those key concepts that on delivers when teaching (do not judge me just yet!).
PowerPoint game me a bit of that dynamism that I was looking for, and the introduction of e-learning, blended classroom and rich media further empowered that feeling
...but suddenly I was (like many other teachers) throwing media left, right and centre to my students, not always judging clearly the relevance or rational behind it. In the last 2 years, a plethora of Apps, Ads-on, web-based learning tools and etceteras have wowed me, my students and my colleagues.
And it has made me crave for some order and structure (I am somehow embarrassed to admit).
Then I started hearing about Instructional Design. I wondered what was all of this about. I started seeing jobs advertised for instructional designers and relations between those little two words and e-learning.
So I decided to have a look.



 I firmly believe that teaching must embrace a era of change not because we need embrace technology, but because our student have changed (and so have we, frankly), but then I was looking at this videos (yes, I am a visual/auditory learner) talking about a discipline born in the 1950s, mainly to train American soldiers, which evolved in the world of business and government as a training tool... How could be this related to exciting e-learning?

That was the start of the road. And I got sooooooo lost that I could not but continue reading, and reading, and watching, and asking, and wondering and getting more confused an now ( a bible-and-a-half of reading done) I can start seeing a little -minuscule-light at the end of the tunnel.

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