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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 ...
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Back in the day when I worked as an aeronautics company, I would marvel at how the politics of the workplace functioned. People would put their friends and colleagues onto projects as a favor. We would all meet once at the beginning of the project, and then we would not really see anyone again thereafter. We would be back to the lean team that did the actual work, and then maybe we would see the others again when it came ...
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One of the mainstays of basic macroeconomics involves the Pareto efficiency curve, which conceptualizes the total output of a society based on its resources and human capabilities. The idea is that every society makes choices about where to put their resources and how to allocate their human capabilities. This curve is conceptually achieved when no one may be better off without making someone else worse off. This assumes that all resources are used in the maximal ways possible—in a ...
Continue reading Open-Source Pushing out the Pareto Efficiency Curve
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It is hard to define the right level of a resource buffer to create for a secure work situation. By “resource buffer,” what do I mean? A buffer may be a certain number of excess capacity in terms of hours to apply to a project. It may be a set of drafted ideas that may be further developed to completion for uses on projects. Buffers may be technological capacities to create certain learning objects.
At core, it’s helpful to ...
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In doing research for another project, I came across a phenomenon described as “didactic transposition”—which was described as moving (transposing) some of the skills needed in the professional realm into the academic one in a particular domain field. This is a fancy term for a kind of “gaps analysis” between what a professional needs in the workplace and what is actually known by the novice learner. The point is to identify what is necessary for students to learn and ...
Continue reading “Didactic Transposition” for Instructional Design
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For those in academia, the budget tightening has meant that positions have not been filled, and job responsibilities have been consolidated. Conferences are not attended. Professional development tends to be closer-to-home. Technologies are not updated. Some research is not pursued, and papers are not written, published, and presented. I was surprised at one international colleague’s situation. In discussing a possible chapter that she might author for a project, we were emailing back-and-forth.
She asked if she could ...
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The student self-introduction bios that that are posted at the beginning of a course are an early indicator that students are swamped with busy-ness. Students describe their commitments to family, to part- or full-time jobs, to hobbies, and to their education. Sometimes, it seems like a course or two serves as an afterthought. It is certainly not Priority 1, and that is fully understandable.
The challenge comes in when there are scheduling bottlenecks, and one of the first things to ...
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In lots of aspects of life, experience makes a big difference. This came to mind again of late with a colleague who ran into an issue with an open-source wiki (locally hosted). A group of us are using a wiki understructure to create a faculty resource for e-learning. We had stratified the site’s contents in order to enable customizing of contents to particular groups of online faculty based on their amount of experience teaching online. The problem arose when ...
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There is something very satisfying about having a small portion of work life based on freelance work. For me, the freelance work occurs on the side. It has nothing to do with my professional life. It’s just some work that augments a generally feeling of satisfaction.
That said, the freelance work has some benefits to me as an instructional designer. I am learning new ideas and practices that may augment my design work. After all, an ID is a ...