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Every so often, I run across a person who is an actual innovator in their particular fields. Most often, these are professors who have new ideas who actually work towards actualizing their ideas. In other situations, though, these are young students who have spent their growing up years developing various skill sets and evolving their learning in order to contribute to the world. I had the pleasure of such a conversation recently, and I realized some intriguing aspects to the ...
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The editor emailed to ask for new contracts for the two chapters that had been accepted to a forthcoming text. New contracts? I doubled-back to check the text, and it all looked kosher. The proper titles had been used. I wasn’t sure what the concerns were. So I went and worked on the formatting and left the contract issue for later. Well, a short while later, another email came. It turns out that the title change was on their ...
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It’s almost always a bad idea when people want to share privy information—mostly because it’s usually a ploy to get me more deeply involved in a political escapade or an unfunded project. Just recently, a faculty member offered to tell me of some privy research that was in the works, and I declined knowing. If I cannot for the life of me see a benefit to knowing, I am not going to pursue that information. I’ve ...
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I’ve always thought it was a risk to get too defensive about one’s stances and one’s work. After all, those who sort of hoard their digital work and try to make outsized claims about their achievements often remain static. They live off the past to their own detriment. In the same way, people who define their roles in very fixed ways and will not accept any other task outside their own sense of themselves (often self-importance) will ...
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The first message started innocently enough. It was a welcome back to the new year and a projection to forthcoming work that a dispersed group of peer reviewers would be engaging in the coming year. The publication was shifting to a rolling publication deadline. Some of the group members would be continuing from prior years, and others were brand new invitees to the endeavor.
The members were using a basic collaboration software, but most of the work would be done ...
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It doesn’t take more than a few experiences with a computing machine that balks at simple tasks to really just want to trade it in. In a work day, there is only so much time one can spend coaxing basic performance out of a machine. There are the typical underlying reasons for under-performance, the huge amounts of content that may be clogging a machine…some malware possibly…or the behavior of the software…or user error (usually in some ...
Continue reading The Limits of the Machine…and the Software…and the User
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The prior week, I had two experiences that were somewhat scary in terms of technological behavior. First, this blog lost several of its most recent entries—which just disappeared—without any logical reason. There was not any known update to the server or compromise in terms of the accounts. Rather, some of the entries and replies to those entries just vanished. And then, I was working with a faculty member to get onto a wiki. Once she created an account ...
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For a recent project, I have been tracking ownership of various images that we would like to use in a video. The topic is quite elusive and possibly incendiary. People who have imagery tend to have these buried deep within a site or within a .pdf document that is delivered online. Some companies have images of manufactured products that they make and advertise.
Clearly, those who share information on the Web and Internet do so for a purpose. This is ...
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As an instructional designer, I am on the constant lookout to find ways of visualizing information in 2D, 3D, 4D, etc. The value in visualization is that one may surface new ideas. Further, one may convey ideas in somewhat fresh ways. A new visual conceptualization method enables doodling around with ideas that may surface new insights.
Recently, I came across a graduate thesis by a student writer who clearly had fallen for fishbone diagrams. She used these visuals excessively, even ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
25 January 2012
I can’t say that I’ve ever dealt with anything with a million data points and still found them useless informationally—as Nassim Nicholas Taleb has asserted in “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” (2007 / 2010). This book has garnered plenty of attention of late, and his ideas have found their way into broad debates about disaster preparedness and predictive analytics.
A so-called “black swan” event has three main attributes, according to Taleb: “First, it is ...
Continue reading Why Averages and the Bell Curve Matter at the Micro Lived Levels
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Some half-dozen years ago, I took part in building a “demo” course to showcase a learning / course management system (L/CMS) that was merely to be an exploratory space. This was mostly to show the various and full functions of the system for delivering various digital contents, supporting intercommunications, building learning communities, and maintaining student records. This demo course involved curriculum from K-12 and university because this was designed for a wide level of public usage.
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In putting together a book manuscript, one always hopes for a wide range of writers who can address a broad collection of issues from unique points-of-view. As an editor, one generally does not want to have to jump in and write chapters—because, frankly, it shows that there were gaps in information that the editor had to jump in to address.
To draw out writing from subject matter experts around the world, one does try to ...
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One of the program coordinators that I spoke with recently expressed her concerns that a funded degree program was moving forward with multiple course developments and new hires, but the program itself was not bringing in sufficient learners. She was using all the data channels to market the courses. The professors were using their connections to try to bring in learners. However, the enrollments for the existing courses were low, and it was unclear whether even those students might commit ...
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In the past several years, I’ve noticed that our university has been bringing more and more instructors on board from out-of-state. They request instructional design support for the few times that these individuals come to campus to collaborate with colleagues. They also tend to request support from a distance—by phone and email and web conferencing, in order to make sure that their course materials are developed in an effective way.
There is also something about human connections over ...
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Many instructional designers never have to worry about monetizing a project. They don’t have to worry about fund-raising. They don’t have to necessarily bill hours. And maybe some even consider thinking about this a little vulgar. I don’t simply because it has almost always been part of my workplace landscape. I had to bill hours from my first month on-the-job as an instructional designer, and I have always had some role in budgeting projects over the years ...
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At some basic level, I differentiate projects that are for-pay ones and those that are internal to the institution. Part of the reason for this is that I have to track hours very carefully for the first set, and while I log hours on the latter, there is a lot more flexibility there. Also, the rules of the game seem somewhat different for the different project types.
What are “good will” projects then? These are ones that ...
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As a new year commences, I spend some time thinking about what commitments to carry forward and which ones to leave by the wayside. I think about whether to continue blogging, with such a massive onslaught of people who post messages to this only to promote certain SEO (search engine optimization) links—and who never actually check back to realize that their postings have long vanished and seldom last more than a day or two. The emails I get are ...
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A recent day-long workshop on copyright was insightful and salutary in a number of ways (even though I had to put in extra make-up time for the time spent at the conference to keep up on projects). The presenter treated the participants like her law students (she was a former law professor). She was helping the group abstract out principles to be used in understanding particular situations; she was showing them “how” to think about certain legal issues. She set ...
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Recently, I’ve had the privilege of writing a recommendation of a colleague for a new position. This situation led me to think about what I actually know about my colleagues. I learned a new term from Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) which is WYSIATI, or “what you see is all there is.” Given that reality, people have to work hard to exercise due diligence to learn everything that they do not know to understand what ...