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At the elevator, I saw the poster again. It had splotches of simulated blood and an eye-catching course name. It was an intersession course about serial murder. And then, I visited a website spotlighting a different course—this one on leadership with a well known football coach co-teaching. And then at the end of a short news program, there was a news plug about a course offering. A dyadic faculty team does an interview about their course for the local ...
Continue reading The Advertising and PR Pieces to Instructional Design Work
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Some of my work has involved the building of virtual communities—of students, of professionals—and the challenge is to convert site visitors to contributors to the site. The odds are rough: 10,000 visitors = 1 converted contributor, according to one source.
The strategy is to offer so much enthusiasm, so much identity management, so much loyalty building, so much unique informational value, and so much glamor that people want to participate. They want to identify with a certain site ...
Continue reading Hollow Information Channels in Virtual Communities
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I can’t say that I’m totally shocked at this recent turn of events. If the current environment of scarcity hasn’t encouraged people to run scared with resources, nothing else will. After all, institutions of higher education have no interest in sinking time, energy, political capital, and wages into endeavors that do not offer some sort of return.
I am noticing this caution not only in others, but also me. I find that I’m going for more ...
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Every so often, the conversations turn to the new and creative approaches in e-books, and accompanying this conversation, people will lament the passing of paper books. They’ll talk about the relative cost differentiation between one or the other.
As I have mulled this issue, I realize that a lot of work for quality texts happens early on…from the identification of the talent to the support of the individuals to surface their learning ...
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So much writing about social networking has involved an assumption—the assumption of attentional value.
Writing to an audience—even if that audience is unconfirmed and is only conceptual—motivates some writers to really put in the effort needed to write plenty, share images / songs / video, spill secrets, and generally over-share. There’s the popularity quotient of having numerous followers on micro-blogging feeds, podcast feeds, and other types of subscription behavior.
I attended a speaker’s presentation recently ...
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Word on the street is that workplace furloughs are in force to head off financial exigencies at various institutions of higher education. This is one endeavor to both protect the workforce from layoffs but also to recoup some funds to mitigate potential losses. Snippets of information are available online about how these furloughs are conducted, exemptions to furloughs, and the uses of vacation hours for dealing with them.
In anticipation, some faculty talk about making sure to use class days ...
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Uploading new software for the new year is often a joyful experience of discovery of new functionalities and affordances. Yesterday, not so much.
A new software package includes some 9 GB of integrated authoring and editing tools, and it’s a fantastic package from a superb company. However, putting 9 GB of contents a computer means a lot of uninstalling of extant software programs, some of which are used more than others. Many of the programs were used a few ...
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The concept of learners being their own learning tools is a helpful one. Findings about the relevance of meta-cognition show that purposively using the learning built-in capabilities of individuals may be very beneficial for the learning. A recent book titled “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” (by Winifred Gallagher) highlights some fresh insights about human attention.
Anyone who has been on an all-nighter studying for a test knows the limits of human attention. Fatigue may set in ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 January 2010
Learning involves risk-taking. It involves people moving outside their known information into places of discomfort. That is one main rationale for why learning environments need to be as safe as possible. By safety, this refers to emotional safety as well as a kind of consistent professionalism, which would allow students to express themselves and to push the boundaries of their learning.
For those who inherit courses, they have to not only create safety but also adhere ...
Continue reading Encouraging Risk-Taking while Teaching Conventions and Forms
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With a focus on global e-learning, a fair amount of research and work have gone into identifying potential areas of misunderstanding and ways to smooth the various needs of global learners. This challenge of addressing global frictions because of differing attitudes, values, mind-sets, and cultures surfaced again recently in a conversation I had with a faculty member. This one was interesting and related to some students’ length of vacations that fit within the guidelines but which in practice offers challenges ...
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After four years spent formally in the field of instructional design and many more years as a college instructor building curriculum for online learning, I think it might be time to consider what sorts of information conveys value in instructional design. This question is important because what is deemed important affects the practices of the field. It affects future directions of the work. The value of information always has to be justified because the pursuit of it is so expensive ...
Continue reading Defining "Information Value" in Instructional Design
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A work that has “legs” is something that has endurance. This suggests that it has longevity. It has people’s attention, and it endures.
Recently, there have been debates on whether open-source or closed-corpus works have more “legs.” Open-source works are cited more and are more widely accessible, but some closed-corpus works have more prestige. They are more respected in some ways as having “accomplishment” behind the work. In a sense, considering whether a work appears in open-source or closed-corpus ...
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In higher education, the uses of location-based learning seem to be limited to particular projects. One reads of digital installations as parts of student social spaces and libraries. One reads of examples of location-based learning in architectural classes where students may experience what a neighborhood may have looked like decades ago. And there are all sorts of learning games where learners may coordinate activities; these may involve geo-caching and other spatialized fun. Personally, I am hoping that this year will ...
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A highly successful program using online learning to enhance the retention and success of Native American students has been in progress in Washington State for a number of years and is continuing. A well written report describing that follows.
Pathways for Native Students: A Report for Washington State Colleges and Universities
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An engaging article dealt with the phenomenon of failed instructional designs and the importance of learning from them. Taking a page out of that work, I decided to mull some of my failed designs as learning opportunities.
First, what is meant by a “failed” instructional design? For me, failure may be defined in a number of ways.
A non-executable design is the worst kind. Instructional design is an applied science. It’s not a theoretical construct (although it ...
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The reality of “encountered information” is an ever-present one. Instructional design is an information-rich profession. We handle data on a daily basis. At the moment of the encounter, it’s very hard to tell if there will be any relevance later. There are relatively low costs to keeping digital information, but there are high attentional costs to trying to hold them in human memory if there is no direct apparent use for it yet.
It ...
Continue reading Personal / Professional Information Management Tools
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Back in November, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology hosted an “E-Book Expo: LYRASIS Panel Discussion” that examined some challenges with integrating e-books for use in higher education. This event occurred live and face-to-face but also with webcasting to an equal-sized audience. This was one of those events which I’d planned to participate in but which had such a weird scheduled time (probably a mistake) that I wasn’t even in the office by the time this event occurred ...
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New instructors to online teaching may assume that the process is generally tidy. A freshly created online course looks very structured and tidy, but a lived course is something else.
In an ideal world, students submit their work on time. They are attuned with help-seeking behaviors and know when and how to speak up and get help. They learn the online learning technologies well. They get the feedback and support that they need. They communicate openly and freely. They access ...
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MSNBC's Baggage Screening Interactive Experience
This shows some focused design work.
Continue reading MSNBC's Baggage Screening Interactive Experience