learning components

While reading for a course we're building to prepare instructors to teach online, I came across a reference to a four-component instructional design system. While there might be a tad too much theory infused in the system, the component approach to design is intriguing.

I'm particularly interested in the Learning Task and the Supportive Information components. At first blush, it seems that both components would require the instructional designer to have a good understanding of the compositional requirements for writing useful and effective task-oriented information and supportive information. Essentially, it's the procedural/declarative discussion that Tech Com has been involved in for quite some time. The most popular (relevant?) research to consider procedural/declarative information has looked at software user manuals and instructional texts. In some ways, I see this research as a top-level look at the form and purpose of procedural and declarative information.

A second-level look would have us consider the compositional requirements of the procedural information (learning tasks) and declarative information (supportive information). I'm not quite sure what these requirements would expose. I do think that instructional designers would be well served by better understanding how procedural information relates to declarative information. Rather than approaching these information types as discrete chunks of information, the designer could imagine, through a writer's lens, the many interactions and reader/user support processes that reside between the two information types.