Abstract
As instructional designers continue to assess their design process, the need only intensifies for having a deeper understanding of how it connects to the relationships evolving among the instructors, students, peers, content, and the technology they use. The lenses of these relationships are alterable, especially as defined by the latter. We adopt the concept of media ecology as a means to systematically assess the impact on these interrelationships. Teaching and learning, after all, boil down to communicating information among these entities. Media ecology has been found to effectively describe these communications channels. The authors advocate the use of media ecology as a means of introducing design thinking into the enterprise of teaching of instructional technology, as it requires students to ask the right questions and causes them to interpret these relationships through a different and unique perspective. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss this viewpoint and examine how to rethink instructional design methods by focusing on and assessing how individuals transact and communicate information during the learning process.