About Acorda Press
The genesis of Acorda Press came in the summer of 2009, when Ray Taylor, an author and training and performance consultant, edited, produced and published a book as a volunteer for a non-profit organization. Ray realized that his own background as an entrepreneur in the print industry, combined with his formal education in both communications and educational technology could be leveraged to create a dynamic new publishing venture. One that would address a problem that he identified in his own M.A. thesis, Learning After the End of Knowledge.
Ray is committed to the idea of the professional practitioner in the field of training and performance, an idea that has not expanded very far outside a very small cadre of academics who are involved in their own evidence-based practices. Ray’s recent experience as an instructional consultant in Europe also underlined the perception of illegitimacy in the training and development profession. In fact, the attitude towards the training and development professional it seems, is much like taking health advice from a doctor who smokes.
After spending over a year researching this phenomena, Ray discovered that the classic dualism of the academic and professional worlds was partially to blame, and this was mirrored in the literature. There was quite simply nothing that could serve as the bridge between the world of research and the everyday application of training and development needs in the real world (and vice-versa). Academic research in education is not only largely inaccessible to the learning professional, but well known to be of questionable value in real world applications. At the same time, practical approaches developed in the workplace, especially with regards to emerging technologies, are inadequately researched, if at all. This is especially true in the field of educational technology, which has not only missed the boat, it seems, but could not even find the ticket agent, especially when it came to researching and developing the social revolution currently taking place on the Internet.
Part of the solution is, of course, the creation of a body of literature that directly implicates the practitioner as both the consumer and the creator of research. This is not unlike how medicine is practiced today, and it should be no surprise that if education is to be taken seriously as a profession, it will be necessary to move beyond the current “folksy” approaches and begin to aggregate real-world implementation data in a more cohesive and scientific way.
As a result, learning professionals will be compelled to be far more scientific, but this does not mean at the expense of the human dimension. Learning is, after all, not a mess of diseases that need to be treated by writing prescriptions. But this should not prevent the creation of more interpretive prognoses that can move us beyond anecdotal evidence and “fad” practices. And at the other end, academics in the educational technology field have been without a decent research roadmap for decades, especially when it appears that other disciplines in the human sciences not only have better maps, but a GPS.
The alternative is of course to do nothing, but the ever-escalating cost of education, including the creation and maintenance of knowledge and the steep social cost of academic failure, is fast becoming unsustainable from both a social and environmental perspective. If we do not move the learning sciences out of the realm of folk theory, it will continue to be a second-class academic discipline, always riding on the coat-tails of psychology and sociology, and one that is rapidly becoming a burden on society.
We wish to develop a bridge that addresses neither the working professional nor the academic but the new breed of practitioner. One that also deals with the inadequacies of both professional practice and the academic world. We hope that our readers and contributors are willing to have a foot in both worlds.
Hence Acorda Press.