Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
21 November 2009
“Innovation in Educational Technology: The Virtualization of K-12 and Higher Education”
Dr. Sam S. Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight, presented on “The US Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis” in late Oct. 2009. He made a forecast for the changes that would occur with online learning for Pre-K-12 to Higher Education through 2014, and he focused on the growth of social learning platforms and the internationalization of virtual education.
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A couple weeks ago, I was part of a free webinar that was supposed to be a clinic. People were given simple tasks…sent off to do their work…and were to rejoin the group some 20 minutes later to share their work. The work that emerged was very divergent, and it became clear that these faculty and instructional designers all had different mental models going in. The presenter very graciously made positive comments on their works and quickly moved ...
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Recently, I caught the tail end of a webinar that left a strong, positive impression. The presenter Dr. Patricia Ritschel-Trifilo (of Hardin-Simmons University) was demonstrating how she versioned a course lesson for the various types of learning styles based on a conceptualization by Albert Canfield summarized here http://people.usd.edu/~ssanto/canfield.html .
She applied the Canfield’s Learning Styles Inventory
http://arispa.com/styles/canfield1.html
or
www.tecweb.org/styles/canfield1.html
to her students and compared ...
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Every new technology has to be able to a pool of users who need training, win their loyalty, and continue to deliver quality with each new iteration of their technologies. This is especially true for different types of authoring software with so many “bells and whistles” and different types of terminology and ways of doing things.
The installed base gets used to having certain tools in certain locations. They get familiar with the mental models for the particular technologies. They ...
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Educause 2009 was streamed live to over a thousand participants at 44 colleges and universities in over 8 countries. The online presentations captured via MediaSite are available here.
http://educause.mediasite.com/mediasite/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=ef86ba82-810b-4e15-b223-097b2ea90230
Continue reading Educause 2009 National Conference (Recorded)
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Participatory Sensing
For a kind of “situational awareness,” various fields (law enforcement, environmental science, landscape architecture, biological sciences, architecture, agriculture, and others) are now tapping into “participatory sensing.” This is a kind of information capture based on the widespread distribution of mobile devices that capture imagery and sounds in a location-sensitive way. Many mobile technologies enable live and easy emailing of the information and uploading of the contents to the WWW. Dedicated remote sensors also enable rich information captures.
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Note: Roger McHaney will be co-presenting "Virtual Collaboration: Applied Projects and Tools" 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, at Union 212, as part of the Instructional Design Technology Roundtables. All are welcome to attend.
Those of you who attended preschool years ago probably learned the importance of sharing. Today, in the Web’s early youth, the same lessons are being reinforced as we learn to share without regard to geography or time ...
Continue reading Roger McHaney: Virtual Collaboration in Academic Courses
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Business models around higher education are changing based on the downward pressures of “free” digital contents and bits and bytes in the current economy—as it goes through a massive retrenchment.
Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (2009) suggests that business organizations that want to be competitive will need to reconceptualize prices and how to harness the power of digital contents and free products and services in order to offer value and connect with potential consumers ...
Continue reading Reconceptualizing "Free" and Online Higher Education
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The folks I know in academia have mixed feelings about peer review. “Peer review” simply means that colleagues have a lot of power over one’s teaching, one’s social standing, one’s publications, and one’s contributions to a field.
Peers are the “gatekeepers” in academia. They have a say on tenure. They have a say about whether one presents at conferences. They critique articles and chapters and suggest whether works should appear in public venues or not. They ...
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The building of online learning does not only draw on the writing of textbooks and contents on websites and in digital libraries. Every so often, faculty members include what is known as “gray” or “fugitive” literature. These are informational and unstructured contents that are not part of the official vetted literature in a domain field.
The items of a fugitive literature involve meeting notes, drafts, unpublished photos, unpublished drafts, policy statements, research data sets, research ...
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Hello, all: A number of universities have created strong academic degree programs and courses for online delivery. Their areas of specialty enable many to stand out as global leaders in particular domain-field niches, disciplinary fields, and cross-disciplinary areas of study. How these colleges and universities reach out to a global and local student population is of interest, particularly their global branding strategies.
I am conducting a survey on the global branding of e-learning programs and courses in higher education.
This ...
Continue reading Global Branding of E-Learning in Higher Education (Survey)
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A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.
Subject matter experts ...
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Some online learners give indications of great frustrations with the learning / course management technologies, but they’ll do it without direct communications. They’ll send endless emails and treat those like TMs. They’ll send spam emails to the entire class with personal queries. They’ll post unopenable files, and when the first one doesn’t work, they’ll keep doing the same thing a half dozen times instead of just pasting their text into the HTML window.
They’ll ...
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Dr. Mark David Milliron presented on "A New Generation of Learning: Diverse Students, Emerging Technologies, and a Sustainability Challenge" at the recent Axio Learning Conference in Sept. 2009.
The video capture of this event will be available at the following URLs:
http://www.axioconference.org/followup
http://www.k-state.edu/provost/academic/lecture/2009-2010/milliron.htm
http://www.axioconference.org/schedule/keynote-presentation/
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Years ago, I wrote about the intimidation factor about “data hungry” models for simulations and decision-making cases. Here, we had projects that involved the uses of massive amounts of information and digital imagery. I ripped through a proprietary repository of some 30,000 images and still had troubles finding imagery for particular concepts…and the simulation piece was a small part of the larger automated learning experience.
Well, I’m having a sense of déjà vu again, albeit with Web ...
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For a long time, my mental conceptualization of digital documents was that of finalized ones. I thought of finalized videos…finalized slideshows…finalized imagery…finalized articles.
However, after some consideration, I realize that many of my digital documents are transitory and temporal ones. They are raw images, audio, or video clips that get processed into a finalized work. Or they are annotated research documents that feed the research. Or they are sticky notes for feedback on a finalized project. By ...
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A recent article discussed the phenomena of “psychological ownership” of digital contents. The context of this was about how individual work is marked in a collaborative work environment. The authors discuss various motives for ownership—perceptual (social-cognitive) or part of the human need to categorize the world, instrumental (efficacy and in control) to satisfy (workplace or personal) needs, and symbolic (self-identity) in terms of how people perceive themselves (Wang, Battocchi, Graziola, Pianesi, Tomasini, Zancanaro, & Nass, 2006, p. 226). The researchers ...
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I have heard of some “teaching to the unconscious” in the sense of marketing, advertising, and branding. I have also read that the jury is out in terms of the research on the efficacy / inefficacy of whether such outreaches actually work.
Then recently, after I wheedled a book from a colleague that I’d been wanting to read for a long time, I came across this concept again. The concept here was found in Raph Koster’s much-cited book “A ...
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Most people can tell a 1970s movie by its design, the soundtrack, the generational jokes, the hairstyles, the fashions, and the video technologies. In the same way, dated multimedia and curricular materials may be identifiable by their styling…and their lack of direct and applied relevance.
One method for cost savings in instructional design is to pursue designs for curriculum which are “sustainable.” Another term for this is “future-proofing,” which is a little high-minded and ...
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This last entry of this series focuses on finding the resources which may be good “homes” for a particular author. The following then are some of my favorite tips.
One way in this modern age of publishing is to evolve the informal to the formal. One example of this is the writing of a blog and turning that opportunity to writing articles and then maybe chapters and maybe books.
Another strategy is to see ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 6 of 6)