How I learned to stop worrying and love the conifer

As I grew up in Wales I learned a potted (and no doubt unreliable) history of the woods:

• the countryside was covered in deciduous woodland, and populated by poets extemporising in ancient metres to the acompanyment of their harps
• the English came and cut down all the trees to build their navy, and burnt the lot in the cause of Empire
• the Welsh reinvented themselves as upland sheep farmers
• the evil Forestry Commission bought up the hill farms and covered them with monoculture of sitka spruce

Consequently I tend not to be well disposed to conifers, and especially not sitka spruce.

In the hope that I might do some mind broadening during my stay in Canada I have set myself the task of learning to love conifers. I've had to spend time with them, and learn to make new distinctions as I walk through what initially appeared to be endless ranks of undifferentiated trees. I had to stop seeing them as scaly green aliens, and start making new categories for their variety of needles, barks, cones and so forth. And yes, I can report that I am now taking as much pleasure from coming across a sitka spruce half way up a mountain in British Columbia as I do from encountering an oak in a valley in Wales (though now that the sessile oak has been co-opted by the Welsh Tories as some eliptical symbol of their identity I'll no doubt find myself alienated from that blameless species).

Something similar has been happening to me in my work. There is an unreliable history of e-Learning which sees the human touch of face to face education being undermined by a monoculture of inflexible learning activities supported by technologies derived from distance education. The finger of blame is pointed at instructional design as providing the rationale for this. As someone who has worked with IMS LD for many years, I haven't entirely bought into this critique, and I'm not sure on which side of this fence I would be unceremoniously dumped by an enthusiastic (and muscular) constructivist. But something of this attitude persists in the background assumptions of the educational technology world that I move in.
I am currently being generously hosted by the Open Learning group of Thompson Rivers University, and the group I am working most closely with are the Instructional Designers. You will be unsurprised to hear that they do not share this prejudice, and are justifiably enthusiastic about the opportunities for growth which they offer their students. Talking to them all has been the opportunity to develop and appreciate another (and perhaps more useful) set of distinctions.