Instructional Design: Two questions

This post is written by Sandipan Ray. Sandipan is an e-learning professional with more than 7 years of industry experience, in almost all disciplines from Graphics, Quality, programming to ID. Presently working in a product development company for their internal training needs.

I am little bothered with two common words:

Simplicity:

Instructional Design, as I understand, is make sure that the learner is listening to what I am saying, and the way to that is to keep the course simple. But I am just wondering, with the ever-increasing complexities involved in creating a course, are we really achieving that target of "simplicity"? Is it time for us to become little "lean"?

Plagiarism:

Ever since I joined this field, I had been hearing about the sin called plagiarism. But till date, I haven't come across a clear definition about it. Wiki says: "Plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work." Well- close imitation of the language and thoughts-- isn't that very subjective (how much is close enough)? And in the field of learning, can we be really sure about who the original author is? And if a thing works in a X way, or has X attributes, no matter whatever language and in whatever way we say it, the fact remains the same. So, I wonder, can we really avoid plagiarism?

Waiting for you all to throw some light!