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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The items of a fugitive literature involve meeting notes, drafts, unpublished photos, unpublished drafts, policy statements, research data sets, research ...
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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)
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People who haven’t published think that their lives change after publication of a work. It really doesn’t in a major way. There may be small changes. That’s been my experience, anyway.
Having published for a number of years, I have found that publishing a work really doesn’t change one’s life. There’s always been a muted response. There may be offers to co-write academic works but usually from people with whom I have ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 5 of 6)
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http://www.k-state.edu/lafene/h1n1_guidelines_for_instructors.pdf
Continue reading Instructional Contingency Planning in Case of H1N1 Outbreak
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This seminar series then addresses the various written artifacts in writing and publishing. Then, this describes a typical publishing cycle. Finally, this also addresses the publishing implications of digital contents—including multimedia.
The common written artifacts are the following related to academic writing.
Query letter: A cover letter offering topic ideas and a professional author introduction
Book prospectus: An overview of the domain area, objectives of the book, possible audiences, suggested titles, academic value, other textbook competitors ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 4 of 6)
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The sticky issue of authorship then arises. Should a writer author a work himself or herself? Should he / she co-write a work?
Most writers write from central areas of expertise. They have primary research and experience in a particular part of a field, a professional interest in that area, access to all the necessary information, and an ability to create all the informational substance and digital contents. In those situations, there are plenty of reasons to go solo ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 3 of 6)
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The actual contents of the slideshow presentation, after several weeks of evolution, comes together in a nifty two-hour session. The slideshow objectives are defined as follows:
Define academic publishing as a field
Review the conventions and ethics of academic writing
Discuss the relevant laws affecting academic publishing
Describe information gathering and research
Describe some written artifacts related to publishing
Review usual academic publisher processes
Explain imagery concerns for publishing
Describe multimedia often created for academic publication
Discuss issues for writers ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 2 of 6)
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A colleague on a branch campus asked if I wanted to collaborate on a piece of writing for publication. Those invitations are fairly common, and they come from people I’ve never even met to those who invite me out for coffee and are those from peripheral fields. The usual answer is “no” not out of any arrogance, but because the logistics of collaboration require that the collaborators have some shared research and experiences. Without that, what’s there to ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 1 of 6)
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“The Network is your computer,” goes one of the slogans.
The techno buzz around the office and online has been about “cloud computing.” So when the email appeared in my box about Sun Microsystems offering a webinar called “Introduction to Cloud Computing…for Enterprise Users,” I signed up—only to see that opportunity get overshadowed by other commitments. Then, they sent a follow-up email offering the archived webinar online. Perfect.
Dr. Lew Tucker ...
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Doing instructional design work for speed is an occasional reality for IDs at the university. Speed becomes a critical issue whenever there are deadline-sensitive projects. In these situations, there are deadlines from grant funders, compliance trainings, legal requirements, course-launch deadlines, commercial deadlines, and any number of other reasons.
Speed is seldom the first requirement, but in some cases, it can be. Sometimes, speed is the over-riding factor. Sometimes when a crucial staff member has moved on ...
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The draft article came in a neat little package. Here was a college that had found some open-source freeware that could help its institution deal with student service issues as well as resource management. They are arguing that their going the open-source route was saving them a lot of money and time and resources. However, the argument did not include baseline definitions of the pre- and post- intervention situations. There were no real metrics to speak of, only assertions without ...
Continue reading Making the "Business Case" for a Particular Technology
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For many freshman-level courses, it may be fair to assume that learners will be coming in cold to the learning domain. Coming in “cold” means that they lack basic background in the field. It also means that their skillsets may be scatter-shot in terms of the subject materials, and the learners may well be acquiring their learning skills as they go.
Strategies for supporting novice learners to a learning domain are manifold. First, one strategy involves building ...