Rly? Are you that naive? DIR and all it's trappings became infamous through social media. PADI recently changed its standards due to discussions happening here and elsewhere. I think instructional awareness is at an all time high and social media is the reason. The first step in making rabbit stew is to catch the rabbit. There have always been lazy, poor and incompetent instructors teaching both Scuba and cave. Now people are actually talking about them and what makes a poor instructor. We're starting to catch up to that rabbit!
A problem with all performance assessments in all subjects is that the quality of a student performance is in the eye of the assessor. One grader's A is another graders F. That is true almost everywhere.
The exception is in organizations for which assessment consistency is critical. For example, the College Board has hundreds of assessors scoring Advanced Placement essays, and those must be consistent. They use a training system, often referred to as calibration, in which trainees score essays previously scored by the top professionals so that they will develop the same eye for quality as those top professionals. It takes a surprisingly short amount of time to get trainees to a 90% inter-rater reliability score on a 9-point scale. The problem is that as the trained raters then work independently, their previously calibrated standards begin to move. Some start to develop higher standards, and some start to develop lower standards. For that reason, they are checked by the leaders for consistency, and if they are perceived to have strayed too far from the established norm, they are "recalibrated."
That is the role supposedly played by the instructor development system in all levels of scuba instruction. Potential instructors are supposed to see enough examples of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable student performances that they have become calibrated enough to do it on their own. The problem is the lack of a system for recalibration. In a system that is not consistently checked, some degree of straying will ALWAYS occur, and something needs to be done to get people back in line. Regionalism often occurs, with specific regions, schools, or dive operations developing their own local culture and standards that are totally out of whack with what is happening elsewhere. These people usually have no way of knowing that what they see around them every day is not the way things are done by others.
That is where social media can help. Through social media, we can "spread the word" of what is good or bad in instruction. People who are in good faith doing what they think is the best job possible can have that belief shattered if they see enough information to the contrary. I started scuba instruction doing exactly as I had been taught to do and how I had seen 100% of instructors do it: firmly planted on the knees. I had no reason to suspect there was anything wrong with that. Then I read some posts in ScubaBoard that got me to question that. I had no ability to see it done any other way, though. No one in my culture did it differently. I had to experiment on my own. I had to see what worked and what didn't. I sought out others for ideas and for the purpose of trying to make a positive change in the culture, but I couldn't do it through ScubaBoard. Nope. The climate here was too nasty and negative about trying to accomplish positive change. I invited people to a discussion in another forum, where we could talk in peace without all the negativity. The eventual result was a prolonged exchange with PADI, the publication of an article about teaching students while neutrally buoyant, and now a changed PADI policy promoting neutrally buoyant, horizontal trim OW instruction throughout the world.
Ten years ago a discussion about initial OW skill instruction would have been dominated by people saying instruction MUST be done on the knees. Today it would be hard to find someone willing to say that amid the throng of people saying the opposite. Yes, the overwhelming majority of OW instruction is being done overweighted and on the knees, but that is changing, and social media had a big part in making that happen. To make it work in cave diving, you have to be able to have positive comments on how to make it better. That is why I had to move the discussion off of ScubaBoard--to keep a small handful of negative voices out of the mix. If you don't want to be part of the solution, don't get in the way of those who do.
