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"Are you involved in, or do you plan to be involved in any activity where you have agreed, or plan to agree, to any restriction regarding the publication; disclosure; shipment; distribution or release of a particular item or goods, technology, or information? This includes written, electronic, digital, or verbal information."
This above question was part of an automated training that I took part in recently on export controls. The answer in my mind was, "Well, yes, maybe."
Between the Y ...
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After a professional conference, I often end up with a goodie bag full of CDs, DVDs, business cards, and marketing decks of cards. For weeks after, I run across the candies I've squirreled away in my backpack from the varous displays. My email box captures the occasional follow-up emails, and I am popular for a period with sales reps who call, full of cheer and hope. The presenters have had their bit of glory after slogging through the day-to-day ...
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Every so often, the educational literature offers some snippet of intrigue. There I was in a paper about LMSes when the authors - out of Japan - mentioned the use of permanent mixed ability groups in some of their higher education learning. These are groups that are set up to work together through various academic subject matters and courses, and they are of mixed abilities, which means that there are elite high-achieving groups or groups set apart by personalities or same-tier abilities ...
Continue reading The Use of "Permanent Mixed Ability Groups" in Higher Ed
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One of the coolest aspects of working as an instructional designer is the openness to learning new things and working with talented people from a variety of fields.
Just this day (in early Dec.), I had the pleasure of sitting in on cumulating projects for landscape architecture. In a small studio with wooden floors, some dozen fifth-year students had their project plans for various land use spaces - an urban plaza next to a concert hall in Tennessee, a village in ...
Continue reading A Cumulative Project in Landscape Architecture
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It's all becoming do-it-yourself nowadays. One project / conference / publication after another, people are setting up wikis and expecting work and information to be submitted through these.
A conference in the planning stages is using a wiki to store prior digital artifacts and to draw potential attendees. http://arclite.byu.edu/id+scorm/index.php?title=Main_Page
For one publication set to go live early in 2008, the editors set up a wiki page on which contributors may evolve the ...
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We're nearing the end of 2008, and I'm coming up short on ideas. I want to comfortably segue to 2008 with plenty of blogs on tap, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen currently.
And I've started brainstorming a list of topics for something even more challenging - future research. Part of this is inspired by emails I've been getting from a faculty member at another institution of higher education who thinks that ...
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Perusing the academic literature often results in delightful endeavors of others. Even if the work never directly overlaps with mine in instructional design and instruction, I can at least ponder it. It offers a brain tickle. A recent article addressed the issue of how one hardy band of academics would map between printed and digtal document instances.
In various design plans, paper has a role. While much paper has been ...
Continue reading Endeavors to Cross the Paper-Digital Divide
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Some technologies just have an "attraction." They're well designed enough to empower users to look smart and produce well.
While many people seem to like to Microsoft-bash, they keep turning out technologies that are highly usable, fun, and that really help people to think. They make capturing digital contents easy. As a person who works in a tech office, I am beginning to learn how much design and thought and expertise goes into the back-end in terms of the ...
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When the ice storm settled in on Tuesday (Dec. 11), our school was ready with a "Stay home" message. The first day seemed innocuous on the face of it - with occasional sounds of crackling branches dropping into the river in the back yard. The trees were awe-inspiring in their glittering coldness. The electricity sputtered a few times, but it never quite went out. Things were fine enough to get stored up on water and food...and ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 December 2007
Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning By Karl M. Kapp San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons 2007 410 pp. hardcover
Is there a way to make learning fun? Is there a way to motivate people to learn on their own time? Is there a way to make knowledge transfer from the current employees to the up-and-coming generations? Is there a way to tap into the 90-million individuals in the "gamer" generation who will be inheriting the job positions in the present ...
Continue reading Games for Learning Transfer from Boomers to Gamers? (Brief Resource Review)
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Serving on committees may be boring on the face of it, but there's always plenty to learn about others' roles and how their expertise may affect one's own work and learning. That and an online course that I teach on how to teach online...culminated in an eye-opening visit to a music "studio."
A music instructor at a local private school accepted an invitation to visit a state-of-the-art music lab at K-State, and so it was that about ...
Continue reading Studios (Pedagogically Focused High-Tech Spaces)
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Maybe I became somewhat more daring after having taken a course through a full accessibility build. It seemed the right time to also create a course that fully observed every copyright law that we were aware of. It takes some walking the straight line to be able to do it somewhat more easily the next time.
As I come from the academic side of the house (vs. the commercial), the constraints I've worked with have been low funding and ...
Continue reading Scrubbing a Course for Intellectual Property
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The most recent issue of the Journal of Interactive Instruction Development has research articles on instructional system design, interface design, a standardized model of evaluation for e-learning programs and one on live personalization in F2F and e-learning.
http://www.salt.org/jiidtoc.asp?top=Yes
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A recent local conference on informational security in this modern age introduced a new concept. It's that of "media sanitation". I heard about it at a presentation on a different topic and missed the actual presentation on "Cleaning Spells," so I went online and found an informative article by T. Olzak (June 2006). His article "Fundamentals of Storage Media Sanitation" offers a very accessible view of this issue.
Olzak cites Scholl, et al.'s 2006 definition of ...
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For those interested in ID + SCORM, BYU is hosting another conference this year. The venue is lovely, and the participants last year were high achievers in computer science and ID. (If you go, drop me a line and let me know how it goes. I'll be at a different conference at that time.)
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"Facebook is a huge identity risk." -- A security guru at K-State
Universities are reaching out into the "metaverse" to retain and attract the "gamer generation" of students.
One part of this endeavor relates to going out into the social software spaces in order to create identities and digital spaces around which they may interact, bond, and get familiar with the university brand.
In service of this idea, I recently went onto Facebook for some initial research. I ...
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A number of published works have addressed issues of designed interactivity in online courses to create a sense of community and to promote learning. There are discovery spaces where communities just evolve and grow on their own. There are facilitated communities of practice.
It seems like strategies for creating hallway conversations in online learning spaces would be helpful.
When I worked for a major aircraft manufacturer years ago, I remember my supervisor would do a ...
Continue reading Trying to Create Hallway Conversations in an Online Course
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 November 2007
Control and Constraint in e-Learning: Choosing when to Choose By Jon Dron Hershey: IDEA Group Publishing 2007 340 pp. hard cover
Professor Jon Dron's Control and Constraint in e-Learning proposes that existent e-learning technologies and shared online spaces may be built to be even more responsive to participants' insights and ideas. These spaces may empower learners to make informed decisions and choices at various junctures of the learning process, so learners may be more self-efficacious.
Dron builds his idea ...
Continue reading Designed Web 2.0 P2P Social Software Systems (Brief Resource Review)
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On Feb. 19, 2008, there will be a preconference at the Sheraton Orlando Downtown Hotel in Orlando, FL, as part of SALT's 2008 New Learning Technologies conference.
More on this tutorial follows:
Maximizing Affordances: Using an LMS for Education and Training
This tutorial will introduce learning management systems (LMSes) and the affordances they provide for distributed eLearning. This will offer mental models for conceptualizing the functionalities of learning management systems and highlight the commonalities among the main LMSes available ...
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The relationship between learners and an online instructor is defined by the structure of the course but also by their interactions.
I'm not sure what went awry, but I'm starting to feel a bit like a bill collector. I've never actually been one. The only one I ever spoke with was one of my students who moonlighted as a bill collector. She said she used charm to get people to pay their bills. She said - and I ...
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Recently, we moved to a project management software to log our hours. This process, while a little irritating, does have its value.
The way that they categorize the way we spend our time as IDs has shown me that "down time" is helpful now and again for upgrading our technologies and the software programs on our computers.
The way it's done is usually starting some downloading / updating/ patching / changeover process and letting it work itself through on ...
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There are moments when using technologies that one has a sense of bruised trust. More specifically, in this recent case, I lost a whole demo course.
A demo course, in this case, was one created to showcase the work of various faculty using the LMS that the office I work for puts out. This course was organized along both a university track and a K-12 track.
This course had modules from a variety of fields. It had an e-book on ...
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There's something to be said for a quiet work day. It doesn't happen that often, but getting un-immersed from projects can be a very pleasant thing. I went off on a whimsical track here, considering the habits I've now built since becoming an ID about 21 months ago.
By nature, some people hoard things. By nature, I actually tend to slough things off unless they're proved some level of repeated use. However ...
Continue reading What Becomes Second Nature in Digital Space
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IDs are in the business of handling information. They strive to turn information into actionable knowledge by using what they know about human motivation and learning. They do this in a technology-mediated environment. They do it in fields that they are almost invariably outsiders in. They do this in conjunction with various faculty, administrators and graduate students.
This issue of information comes up in intriguing ways - from academic papers to novels. This musing originated with a couple pieces of writing ...
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Those who've worked in education for some time have seen this phenomena of flat-lining - that moment when a learner hits a learning wall and can't get over it. This is no small learning hurdle. Rather, I think of it as something like a learner trying to draw on resources that were never quite built up, and there just aren't the tools to get over that wall.
That is, the learner has to start from the fundamentals...and ...
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There are times that I feel a little guilty for making off like a bandit with the ideas in an academician's article. One of the many perks of work at a university is the freeflow of new information here. Various professors and their graduate students share their ideas. If one could just glean at a library daily, one could be quite happily fed intellectually for a time.
I came across a conceptually intriguing concept in an article recently titled ...
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Last night, after an exhausting and exhilarating time spent editing a chapter and the graphics within it, I thought fleetingly of why people in this digital age would even bother writing or editing print books anymore. Do the editors have any idea how difficult it may be to engage in such work? Do they know how many work and non-work hours they'll put into coordinating with their contributors and the book publishers and all the others involved in this ...
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Some of those who've contributed greatly to different creative fields seem to have idealistic motives. They see room to make a difference, and they contribute where they can. The research literature also has plenty of apparently selfish motives by those who would change an industry. And of course, there's happenstance occurrences that have led to social betterment.
I ran across a recent article and model that examined the motives of those contributing to Wikipedia to see what their ...
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It probably comes as no real "news" that we live in a so-called "permanent upgrade culture." Those of us in IT know that ours is a field of perpetual innovation. There is no end point for "stabilization" or "stasis" per se.
What does that mean for our work as instructional designers?
One analogy for the many incoming changes would be that of incoming waves battering a shore. New technologies. New ways of interacting (Web 2.0 ...
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Christopher Chambers, with the Juxtopia Group, presented on a virtual sim that occurs in real 3D space. Live fire combat involves some muscle memory, similar to marksmanship.
Based on research into sports psychology and with an eye towards fully exploiting cutting-edge technologies, a traning was created to sustain and improve live fire combat skills: the speed of engagement, identification and acquisition of the target, and the accuracy.
Because of the need to engage actual physical muscle memory, this sim occurs ...
Continue reading Improving Live Fire Combat Training with Virtual Targetry
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"I wonder if there's a way to make a PowerPoint that can be shown, but the slideshow images cannot be captured by a digital camera."
The scenario went something like this. A researcher had put plenty of time into a research project. She went overseas to an international conference to present on her research findings. While she'd written a short overview of her presentation, the actual presentation itself included tables of sensitive never-before-published data that ...
Continue reading Private Information and Very Public Presentations
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In some research on gaming, I ran across interactive fiction (IF) games and the related idea of tangibles. Here, game developers would create boxes that would emulate books that had text and manipulables. They would have other objects created to intensify the mainly text-based gameplay. Indeed, tangibles are created for online learners, so I thought I'd add a small entry about that.
Tangibles most commonly involve textbooks, magazines, CDs and DVDs and even videotapes. Some ...
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The Society for Applied Learning Technology's schedule has just been published. This is scheduled Feb. 20 - 22, 2008.
http://www.salt.org/index.htm?fl/orlandoP.asp?pn=orlando
http://www.salt.org/grid.asp
The conference tracks include gaming and simulation, mobile computing, knowledge management systems, training applications, assessment, design and e-learning. See you there.
Continue reading 2008 SALT "New Learning Technologies" Conference in Orlando, FL
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There it was again, another department's story of the search for what my supervisor SF calls the "one-button solution." Various academic departments have educational needs. They want to set up particular functionalities.
They then send a graduate student or a staff member to search out a solution. Or an administrator will go to a conference, hear a rave about a software and then throw cash at that. A one-button solution is one that just requires pushing the play button ...
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Attorney C.L. Lindsay, founder of the non-profit national organization Coalition for Student and Academic Rights (CO-STAR), spoke on the dangers of Facebook and MySpace to an enthusiastic crowd on Oct. 16.
He offered some great common-sense approaches to handling personal information on the WWW.
Some principles:
Think of the off-line equivalent first. In the same way that people wouldn't shoplift CDs, they shouldn't download movies or music that doesn't belong to them. Federal copyright law addresses ...
Continue reading College-Level Cautions re: Net Use and eLearners
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 October 2007
Paul Jones, creator of ibiblio.org and professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, spoke at K-State as part of the fall University Distinguished Lecture series. His presentation centered around the synergies made possible by various global and technological realities and culminate in part in ibiblio (formerly Metalab and then Sunsite) - which is an open and public archive of various types of information.
Jones has overseen ibiblio for the past 15 years,. This project's open source system hosts ...
Continue reading Paul Jones and ibiblio.org, "the public's library and digital archive"
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A couple weeks ago, I had just offered two presentations at a conference and was headed out to another for another two. As I was wrapping up work in anticipation of this next one, I got to thinking about an instructor I'd wanted to meet at the prior conference who was a no-show. Those who knew her already predicted she would not show, but I'd been hopeful that she could somehow make the time and the will to ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
14 October 2007
Chasing rights releases on digital media for faculty has made me a little more nostalgic for dealing with local media markets instead of the national ones.
Years ago, I'd take my mass media students to the local televison station, and we'd tour the premises. We'd see how live weather was captured with the meteorologist speaking to the camera in front of a green screen. We'd see how ...
Continue reading Chasing Rights Releases with National Television Broadcasting Companies
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 October 2007
Virtual Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures
Dr. Dale Olsen (formerly of Johns Hopkins University and now with SiMmersion LLC) presented on "Virtualized Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures" (at the Washington Interactive Technologies conference hosted by SALT).
He opened with a short PBS movie clip about the importance of cultural sensitivities in law enforcement approaching people to get information. So ...
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K-State has released a policy that addresses accessible eLearning.
http://www.k-state.edu/academicservices/fhbook/fhsecf.htm (F125)
This will mean positive changes in instructional design and delivery. More thoughts will be forthcoming.
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Antoinette Bruciati's "Online Social Networking Communities: Issues for Educators" presentation at the SALT conference in Virginia sparked a cultural divide between some instructors and some technologists.
The gist of her presentation was of the number of risks that young people face online in various social venues. She pointed out various types of predatorial behavior of adults (apparently) in online spaces while she went undercover as a young person. She showed various software ...
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One of the benefits of working in an IT office is that I have plenty of access to computer hardware and software to do my work. What's in short supply though...is paper.
So to earn ice cream money, I sometimes read and write book reviews. And the books I receive range from literature to pop fiction. More on the pop fiction continuum was a novel in which there was a passing conceit: the idea ...
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Demographics figures into projections for the economy, the future workforce, and the price of housing, among other things. The retiring out of the baby boomers is anticipated to have wide-ranging effects on job availability, future pay and also the quality of workplace training. With the complicated machinery in the energy industry, and the average industry worker at 48 years old, "human obsolescence" may prove a challenge to this industry, suggests Matthew Sadinsky, president of System Operations Success, International. Sadinsky presented ...
Continue reading Virtual Sims Standing in for a Dwindling Workforce
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So I've been working on an in-house whitepaper on educational games and sims for quite a few months now along with my other projects (with all faculty projects taking priority).
I've immersed in a number of books on gaming.
One practice in academic research is to come clean on one's background and initial thoughts, in order to approach the materials without any of that important information un-surfaced. The idea is also to get this on the table ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 September 2007
As part of a blog tour, Dr. Karl M. Kapp agreed to a Q&A. A future "brief resource review" will follow later this year.
Q: What are some strategies that you find are effective in reaching the so-called gamer generation?
A: Well, first I want to say that what we already know about good instructional design works with the software, gadgets and games of the gamer generation. You still teach facts with chunking, association and organization. You still teach ...
Continue reading Q & A with Dr. Karl M Kapp, "Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning"
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Here is the scenario. A successful chain of hotels opens up a new chain of exclusive hotels (approximately 200), with its own unique brand and niche market. They would like to employ some computerized method of training for the service staff, particularly those who would maintain the hotel rooms. Their average stay is 2- 3 years only, which is fairly high turnover. Many are English-as-a-second-language speakers. An organization is brought in to distribute the training. There ...
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The presentations at the ID + SCORM 2007 conference at BYU have gone live. They are available here.
http://arclite.byu.edu/id+scorm/index.php?title=Presentations
Word is that the academic papers linked to these will follow shortly.
Continue reading Presentations from ID + SCORM 2007 Conference Live
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Genevieve Wood (Concurrent Technologies Corporation), a speaker at the Washingotn Interactive Technologies conference in late August, introduced a tool that may help instructional designers collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs), through the use of a shared building site. Her presentation was titled "Collaborative Design of Immersive Simulations." One front-line challenge for instructional designers may be that they receive contradictory feedback from subject matter experts and may have difficulties resolving these, particularly when there is no overriding power of a lead ...
Continue reading Collaborative Design of Immersive Simulations
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 September 2007
"The immersive nature of computer games, and the invisibility or transparency of the medium that Moulthrop suggests this produces, works both to empower the user and to simultaneously serve the interests of the oligopolies that produce them. The nature of immersion is seen not only as a desired quality for the production of active, engaging and meaningful experiences, but also simultaneously as the means through which the gameplayer is most likely to be exploited in the interests of monster conglomerates ...
Continue reading Creating "Controlled" Cyber Addiction for Training Purposes
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It's always good to know that umm the IRS is reaching out to its constituency with trainings. Chris Ammon and Amy Gareis presented on "Adapting IRS Classroom Training Content for Web-based Training" at the recent Interactive Technologies Conference in Virginia. Originally, this training was delivered in a F2F way by the customer education wing of the IRS at various locations around the country and reached several thousand participants. The objective of this was to train those who worked in ...
Continue reading Adapting Classroom Training for the Web...at the IRS
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Lou Iorizzo, the head of the Army Training Staff Center in Training and Doctrine Command, gave the Interactive Technologies keynote for SALT in Crystal City, Virginia, on Aug. 22. He spoke on "Enabling Authentic Environments." One of the main challenges is to help their learners acclimate and function well in changing and adaptive situations. While people tend to be comfortable with a known through-put, those who would design learning need to focus, too on unintended consequences and flux in situations ...
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Those who would immerse in persistent virtual worlds may well enjoy getting a glimpse of Neo's post-death view of The Matrix. Here, instead of the illusions of the space, he sees the substructure and the streams, and he sees the reality.
In the same way, economist Dr. Edward Castronova offers a synthetic world-building / image-breaking view in his text that may shake loose some of those images of digital gold pieces and wizards and virtual furniture.
With Synthetic Worlds , he ...
Continue reading Castronova's "Synthetic Worlds" (Brief Resource Review)
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Sims have been a part of higher education for many years. A simple one may be a kind of role play held in a classroom where students take on different roles. It may be a mock court.
My first design of an online sim occurred about a year ago, and it involved designing a digital replacement for a real nation-wide sim that stretched over several weeks. The sim design was coming near the end of a three-university grant (and I ...
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During the August 22 - 24, 2007, Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Crystal City, Virginia, an international consulting organization offered a powerful presentation on their use of mobile technologies to train their international workforce, with a particular focus on their executives.
I think it may be wiser not to mention their names because I'm going to bring in something that they may not want to be connected with - which is the effective use of low technologies cobbled with high technologies ...
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The 2007 Interactive Technologies Conference (sponsored by SALT) included a presentation by two Apple staff--LeRoy Dennison and Russ White. The presentation (full of multimedia and levity) was titled: "Rapid Development at Apple (Quickly and Effectively Delivering Training to a Worldwide Sales Force)."
The training work in this organization manifests in a variety of ways. The training work involves training both the direct and indirect channel sales force. They also offer fee-based customer training (which from the design angle involves the ...
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A recent crash of the blog brought to mind that this blog has passed its year-long anniversary, about half a year ago. Since this blog started, several colleagues have flown ideas of starting theirs.
There are discussions about shifting this to a techno that will support images, diagrams, voice files, movie files, and other types of multimedia. I am very hopeful about that as I've been wanting to bring these elements into play.
When I was a runner in ...
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So over break, as part of a family road trip, I got to visit some condo models in Chicago. One in particular was a luxury building that involved the use of a sophisticated DVD with virtual depictions of the various units and the new building itself just a few blocks off the Magnificant Mile. The quality of this simulated experience was something only an established builder with many years of marketing could really build or commission. And this experience, while ...
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For many of us who work in the online realm, a lot of what we create is digital representing the real. I attended a session recently at the Washington Interactive Technologies conference that dealt firmly with real-space. Dr. Maria Lizano-DiMare discussed "Rugged Mobile Computer Technology."
The concept here is that ubiquitous research and learning require bringing potentially sensitive computer equipment into the field - whether that be a live volcano or crop field or an ocean habitat. While I've seen ...
Continue reading Stepping out of Virtuality into Real-Space Ruggedness
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"There's no reason to have walls in a classroom."
In any number of conferences - whether about journalism or advertising / branding or filmmaking or eLearning - the phenom of Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) keeps resurfacing. It's 3D; it's immersive; it's creative, and it's the in-thing right now.
At the recent SIDLIT (Summer Institute on Distance Learning, of C2C or Colleague-to-Colleague), Stacey Fox of the University of Kansas offered "Synthetic Worlds: Second Life in Education ...
Continue reading Classrooms without Walls and Thousands of Feet Above Ground
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Libraries often seem to get short shrift when it comes to eLearning. This point was illuminated in a presentation by Kristin Whitehair, a biomedical librarian, of the University of Kansas Medical Center at SIDLIT. Her presentation - "A Survey of Library Instruction for Distance Education Students" - showed numerous outreach efforts made by librarians to connect with their constituencies.
She showed how static websites, dynamic sites, tutorials, video tours, and course management systems are used by librarians to introduce their services and ...
Continue reading Libraries at the Point of Need for eLearning
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Those who head online learning programs have the unenviable task of deciding when it's time to change to a different LMS. As an online instructor, I get to watch this from a comfortable distance.
The scenario looks quite daunting. First, there's the political management piece. Instructors need to understand why changes are necessary, in order to move beyond the built-up inertia of system familiarity and pre-built course materials posted online. Often, people face new learning with an inordinate ...
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I must have been protected somehow my first ramp-up to the fall semester as an instructional designer back in 2006. For some reason, I remember that time as pretty calm and focused. There were a number of projects in play, but it all seemed somewhat manageable and "easy" then.
Well, here it is a year later. And I am totally swamped. There are numerous calls on the phone, many for troubleshooting. There are dozens of emails a day. An instructor ...
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Of late, I've spent a fair amount of time doing somewhat mind-numbing work. I ended up with a time-heavy transcription project and then another uploading massive amounts of chemistry formulas and questions for another course. I have the steps down almost in a kind of pure physical memory - scripted behavior. The truth is that I brought both on myself. For the first, I was trying to live up to my accessibility goals and thought it would be worth it ...
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One job descriptor that wasn't on the job description I saw about a year and a half ago for my position was that of serving as a technical support technician. However, a couple encounters of late have brought this whole issue home.
Visiting clients in their respective offices, I've found that serving as tech support is often necessary. Oftentimes, the computers and setups I have tend to outpace those of any faculty members I've dealt with, except ...
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Some mainline media organizations offer some fine quality slideshows and digital movies. I'm thinking of the tightly edited food and restaurant reviews of Phil Vettel The Chicago News Tribune with their condensed mix of food appreciation, chef interviews, atmospheric digital captures, music, and scrumptious food views. I'm also thinking of The New York Times in its real estate section with its slideshows and voiceover narratives related to real estate.
One of these was by an architect, and he ...
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Shortly, I'll be taking a fairly long road trip as part of a family household move. It will be during an intense part of the summer quarter when several weeks' work will be due in condensed weeks. And this quarter, like all others before it, has involved students straggling in late with a variety of reasons for their lateness. To use a running analogy, they will be coming in to the final stretch and will have to sprint the ...
Continue reading To Share or Not: Teaching Online from the Road
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So the other day, I was working with a chemistry professor to help her upload her exams and finals with all the various annotations and symbols, the superscript and subscript. The equation editor was acting funky. In her office, she said expansively, just delete all these prior questions in the Question Bank. As a bit of a neatnik, I was all ready to comply when a little something made me hesitate, and I said to wait until we'd uploaded ...
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At several institutions of higher education that I've worked in, I've seen some tentative moves towards engaging the world for global eLearning. The steps seem to be wobbly and tentative, more hopeful than effective. These endeavors often involve third-party vendors who may represent different entities or populations in other countries. These efforts involve small groups that are budgeted to go overseas to try to attract learners. And often, these endeavors are not supported by overseas offices or anything ...
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A couple years ago when I was teaching full-time at a community college in Washington State, my supervisor let me know that there was a student who wanted to work on an independent study project. This was a software engineer who had created a product that could create automatic writing. He and I met, and it turned out that he wanted help writing a book about his product and also some publicity materials. I went online and read some of ...
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This year when the Axio LMS rolls out on August 6, I will not be in the office sweating any help documentation. That job is in the very capable hands of our content specialist, and I am more than full-time on curricular builds, research, grant proposals, and other work. Still, while I'll actually not even be in with the roll-out, that's a very special time.
The instructional design function is part of an IT office. While this office ...
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Observers have long commented on the dwindling power of the written word. One article I read recently talked about the usefulness of having books as objects of decor and not really for reading. Many students rely on book jacket blurbs and formalized summaries of literary works to understand them. What is occurring seems to be a slippage in the power of written language to serve as a shared code of understanding. Written words, by their ...
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"The Trust Factor in Online Instructor-Led College Courses" will appear in the upcoming Journal of Interactive Instruction Development (JIID), Volume 19, No. 3 on July 24 at the Society for Applied Learning Technology site at the following URL: (www.salt.org). This article covers research of over 630 learners at WashingtonOnline (WAOL) out of Washington state and interviews of online learners, faculty and administrators.
Continue reading The Trust Factor in Online Instructor-Led Courses
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Part of elearning course design involves thinking about the learners and their needs. This is not only a matter of pedagogical necessity but also financial and bureaucratic protectionism. I've been on projects where this wasn't explicitly considered until the modules for the course were fully built. In that case, the assessments had to be redesigned to fit the needs of the accrediting agency. Now that another project with accreditation needs has just started, it seems like a good ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 July 2007
As sometimes can happen with a project, I was bulding one thing under false assumptions and my supervisors were thinking I was making something else. The divergence wasn't serious, but it meant an extra layer of work later on. My small piece in a project was to teach college composition and research writing courses to Native American students, in a cohort model. One aspect of this project was to create Native case studies as part of a curriculum. My ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 July 2007
When Dr. Michele Lansdowne of the Salish Kootenai College (SKC of Pablo, Montana) went looking for a curriculum for Native American students of business, she found very little that resonated. She found even less in terms of business endeavors on an American Indian reservation. That dearth of academic materials in this field led her to start a project of interviewing American Indian entrepreneurs on reservations, in a grant-funded project that resulted in a widely used text and multimedia CD set ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 July 2007
To get ready for the Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop, I read through various cases from the site. There was an interesting "choose your own adventure" type of quality to these cases.
Various author voices came through clearly, and a range of sourcing strategies were used to capture the information.
"Sovereign Still from the Forest to the Plains" (Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff), "Indian Identity in the Arts" (Tina Kuckkahn, J.D.), "Evil Water" (Dr. Subodh K ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- Current Cases (Part IV)
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An eLearning Course Curriculum Wizard Building an Instructor-Led "High-Tech / High-Touch" LMS-delivered Course
Preconference Tutorial Washington Interactive Technologies Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) Arlington, Virginia August 2007
This goes through the steps for creating an instructor-led eLearning course for higher ed. Combining educational theory and modern technologies, this session will address efforts in the following areas: project scope, learner analysis, course contents, learning outcomes, applied pedagogical theory for eLearning, technology selection (especially for multimedia builds), project checkpoint definition, course structuring ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
08 July 2007
Speaking credibly on the issues of Indian Country requires standing and knowledge. Our conference speaker had both and a highly revered name in Indian Country. Sam Deloria, J.D., has been an engaged and important American Indian leader for many decades. His topic was a challenging one: identifying the most important Indian Country topics today - in front of a group of college instructors.
Deloria spoke casually and without notes. He compared the Pacific Northwest ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2007
Getting hands-on is a fine way of learning how case studies may be experienced.
It was a couple of years in the making - this case. Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff started out with the relationship building that is so critical to doing research in Indian Country. Without trust, without a clear showing of personality / motive / "heart," there would not be sufficient synergies or motivations to "do business" there. In her ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- A Forestry Management Case (Part II)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 July 2007
The invitation to present came just about half a week before the conference itself was to be held. I was not brought in to be a space filler but rather to contribute a small bit of knowledge - about half an hour's worth. The knowledge base for my presentation had been in the works for at least two years, but even prior to that, I'd been learning a lot about interactivity, learning communities, DLOs and such. I was looking ...
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At the beginning of summer term, learners tentatively begin preweek with some tentative emails. There are the queries about books, where digital resources may be, and some other probes about the class. There are the few brave souls who'll crack a joke or two. There are some who'll come rambling in with a raft of personal questions. There's the perennial sharing of nicknames and preferred choices of how the students want to be addressed ...
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IDs have to draw on the expertise and resources of a number of others to bring the design of an online course together. The clients / SMEs are an assumed group. What's often not seen may be the work of graphic designers. The work of IDs often is that of a cross-functional team.
Graphic designers create covers for e-books. They create logos for course series. They create posters to advertise events on campus ...
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Overnight, people disappear from the streets of Manhattan, KS. The talk in the coffee shops seem more muted. There are shorter wait times for books and resource materials in the libraries. The fellow at the local shoe store can spend time showing his plastic models of foot bones and crack jokes about toes. The local Chinese buffet is full of construction workers, vacationers and the occasional family - but the students are really hard to find. The local businesses ...
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One of the coolest things about reading other people's research is how immersed people may be in their respective fields and how maybe even a part of their learning may have impact on what I do (or even think).
Most of us have likely engaged with informal learning. Learning...to rollerblade...about the real estate market...how to cook a particular type of food...and how to use a new software program...often is ...
Continue reading Informal or Untaught Learning ... and eSpaces
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A couple weeks ago, I zipped up a fat file of digital materials that I'd been developing for well over half a year...used Yousendit (that godsend) to send the file...and almost danced a jig. If it weren't for the dancing cadet, I might have.
Anyway, in packaging this work, I found the need to review naming protocols on the digital files. I used folders to organize the contents...for slideshows....for graphics...and other elements. Flash ...
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The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) has a great issue just released on mobile learning.
http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl
Here is also a (Canadian) journal that has managed to strive for true internationality... and a rich diversity of approaches to their topics.
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Fall 07 EDCI 786
COURSE DESCRIPTION: PRINCIPLES OF INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN:
Principles of Instructional Design Fall 2007 Online 8/23-12/14 Course Description:
This course addresses the fundamentals of the instructional design process. Learners will study a systematic approach to the design, development, and evaluation of instruction, focusing on pragmatic aspects of major theories and practices of design models.The course is project-based, with special attention to learning how to use Web 2.0 technologies to engage with each other and ...
Continue reading Instructional Design Courses Offered at K-State
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After years in the faculty ranks, I got used to having a rich variety of professional development opportunities. There would be seminars and workshops. There would be guest speakers. There would be conferences and symposia. There would be publication opportunities. And then I switched to instructional design with teaching online on the side. I'm noticing now that there's no real program for instructional designers here to develop their talents and skills. On the DEOS listserv, I read about ...
Continue reading Grab Bag of Professional Development Opportunities for IDs
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SoftChalk Lesson Builder's most recent Webinar involved a presentation by Lisa Young, a hydrology professor at Gateway Community College (part of the 10 Maricopa Community Colleges of Phoenix, AZ). Young also is a part-time elearning coordinator and co-chair of the RLO Action Group. Some 100 individuals had gathered online to listen in on "Re-usable Learning Objects - The Maricopa College System" (June 13).
Young used a purchased template from SoftChalk that was made for the particular college ...
Continue reading An Aligned RLO Effort in a Community College System
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Those who nose around graduate school and academia will run up against a computerized locked-down lab for true assessments / testing.
A locked down computer lab is one that does not allow for Web surfing. It is password protected in terms of entry. It captures learner inputs and makes them available to the instructors. It disallows the saving of information on the desktop. It's used for doctoral comprehensives, masters comps, and any range of strict tests.
Those who have the ...
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Of late, I've been thinking a lot about a software program that I've been using for the past year and a half. It is flexible. It has a kind of elegance after one gets used to it. It facilitates learning for tens of thousands of students. I know from firsthand observation that a lot of work has gone into the architecture of this product. Tens of thousands of people hours have gone into the writing of the code ...
Continue reading Not Giving up on "Four Million Lines of Code"
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H. Wayne Hodgins, in the context of digital learning objects, offers the concept of a periodic table of information. This idea has been around for many years, and it has resided there in the back of my mind for quite a while. This is the concept that if digital learning objects are well-designed at the right level of atomistic granularity that all known information may be categrorized into different types ...
Continue reading Mulling over the Periodic Table of ... Information
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Accessibility is one of those critical issues that affect pretty much all ID work. Various authoring software programs have made our jobs a lot easier in terms of templating with the right color contrasts, the ability to add alt texts, the various ways digital files may be output, and so on. My own commitment to accessibility has been put to the test with a 9-module course build that involves plenty of video: lectures, labs ...
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Truth is that it's hard getting scooped. A couple months ago, while at a conference, I met up with a fellow attendee, and we shared some fun hallway chatter. He attended my sessions. We all took away a lot of learning, and then a day or two later, I got a notice that my name had been noticed on a new posting on the WWW. One always assumes that anything presented at a conference will take on ...
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Now is that time of the term when students start to slump.
While online courses may seem to be ones where it's harder to keep a hand on the pulse of the learning, as a long-term virtual instructor (and a F2F one, too), I can sense when learners have hit their limits and are running on caffeine fumes, blocks of fudge, high energy drinks, and sheer will. (There are those running on the energy from putting in the exercise ...
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"Learning outlasts all other pleasures." Isaac Asimov (1980)
Dr. Michael Bush in his "SCORM-enabled Knowledge Economy: Willit be Hollywood or YouTube?" suggested that the ID + SCORM conference offered an opportunity for scholarly endeavors...and made suggestions to reach an academic audience. He said that human conservatism and slowness to change may not be negative per se. This reluctance may protect some valuable instructional approaches, for example. He seconded M. David Merrill's ideas that learning communities are tantamount to "pooled ...
Continue reading Gauging Speeds for the Status Quo and Innovations
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So a couple weeks ago, some snafu with my email resulted in the creation of a second spam folder. And in the work of fixing my spam, the technologist found that numerous emails had been rejected and sort of left to disappear into the digital morass.
I then found out a week or two later that two editors had been trying to reach me for maybe 3-4-5-6 months now...and I'd been missing their digital cues. It wasn't ...
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One carry-over between projects have been vocabulary lists. For one project, the vocabulary list was uploaded into a database and connected to various modules of learning. For a current project, the vocabulary list will be deployed as both a Web-table and Flash object flashcards. In another project, pop-ups with word definitions may be created as a rollover effect. Words matter a whole lot in online learning. Every academic field has its own verbiage and meanings tied to those words. Add ...
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Copyright seems to be one of those perennial issues, especially as multimedia builds get more complex and involve more diverse sources of materials.
What do you do if you're brought onto a project, and your predecessor downright took a load of writing from another site / from professional colleagues / from published sources? What do you do if a client would like to use copyrighted materials in a course curriculum (and ultimately a book) that was developed in-house, and she ...
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by IDOS Newswire
17 May 2007
Greetings all,
I'd like to make you aware of a project I'm starting that I'd love your participation in. Please feel free to forward/post this invitation in other forums that you feel are applicable after reading the rest of this message.
Summary: I would like to invite you to participate in a small research project I'm embarking on: Accessibility in eLearning: an In/Outsider's Perspective. In brief, I will be sitting in on two ...
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Dr. Xiangen Hu (University of Tennessee) presented at a recent conference on intelligent tutoring systems. He suggests that computer tutors may solve learner problems by tracking the history of learners' academic performances and their interactions with the computer and curriculum. However, to build such systems, a numerical value must be given to a stimulus-response pair (with behaviorist underpinnings) in the interactions. The computer tutors use natural language interactions, and he later said that for any ...
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by IDOS Newswire
14 May 2007
The Colleague-to-Colleague (C2C) conference SIDLIT (pronounced "sidelight") addressing various issues in distance learning and instructional technology will be held Aug. 2 - 3, 2007, at the Edwards Campus of the University of Kansas.
http://web.jccc.net/c2c/sidlit/
This collegial and low-key conference adds value to the work and refreshes the participants for a full year of instructional design and IT work.
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The management literature talks a lot about facing change and assuming change. Effective leaders anticipate changes. They don't get blind-sided by the changes in the environment. Change is repeated like a mantra.
Recent articles in various national publications talked about a "clean slate" effort for the redesign of the Internet. The way it was conceptualized years ago did not take into account the widespread commercialization of this tool or of the need for massive security and identity authentication. There ...
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The Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) will be hosting the next Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Virginia from Aug. 22 - 24. Preconference tutorials are available Aug. 21.
This conference offers a range of tracks such as Assessment, Design, eLearning, Gaming and Simulations, Knowledge Management, Mobile Computing and Training.
http://www.salt.org/dc/washingtonP.asp
Continue reading SALT's Washington Interactive Technologies Conference
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Many years ago when I was a program assistant at a social services agency, I did a lot of work on a grant that was submitted under the auspices of our office. It was a grant to provide service for those with HIV infections, and it actually did get funded. However, what I remember from that process was an issue with bylines. As a published writer, I assumed that bylines should go with all work in a workplace. I hadn ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
10 May 2007
Software makers that reach out to instructional designers with trainings and engaging events improve my ability to do my job. One of the coordinators in our building sent me an email about a series of Webinars ("Innovators in Online Learning") hosted by SoftChalk Lesson Builder, LLC. Their software is used extensively in our office and puts out some very usable and engaging interactive elements in Flash and Javascript and HTML. The other day, I participated in a seminar presented by ...
Continue reading Webinar: Language Instruction and eLearning (Brief Resource Review)
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Our small team had driven two hours to take part in an educational Web conference, which drew people from neighboring states. The publicity for this event had been pretty unrelenting and positive. The conference was featuring two nationally known authors in the elearning field. They were the authors of numerous accessible and reader-friendly texts. They somehow managed to capture meta-analysis data about various aspects of elearning and then to simplify the concepts into texts that people from various backgrounds could ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
08 May 2007
Michael Allen's Guide to e-Learning: Building Interactive, Fun, and Effective Learning Programs for Any Company by Michael W. Allen Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons 2003 $34.95 USsoft cover 328 pp.
Sometimes, a new approach takes plenty of sell before people buy into new practices. That's the sense a reader may get in reading Dr. Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning.
The author's enthusiastic and intrusive voice gives a sense of a textual chatbot, but that conversational tone ...
Continue reading Edutainment: Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning (Brief Resource Review)
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In reconsidering the "Educating the Client" entry, I realized that that could sound like it was full of hubris. A more balanced approach would involve this other half: educating the self. How does one listen as an instructional designer to the needs of a client? After all, our job is to support projects to a successful completion. It's to ultimately make our clients themselves successful. It's to make them look good. The optimal way for a ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
07 May 2007
The recent spate of tornadoes that touched down in Kansas highlighted the importance of real-time accurate online information. Just a day before, Greensburg, KS, took a terrible beating in a "wedge" tornado that took out 90% of the town and resulted in 9-10 deaths (with that information changing). Now, on May 5, the whole area where we were in Manhattan, KS, was under a tornado watch. A short moment after I got a warning call, the tornado sirens went off ...
Continue reading EF-5 Tornadoes, Tornado Watches and Enhanced Real-time Decision-making
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The customer is always right. So goes this old saw.
For instructional designers (IDs), that concept requires a kind of eloquence in describing multimedia and LMS technologies in a way that non-experts may understand. They must be able to explicate various back-end processes when relevant. They must explain the rationales for why particular outcomes may be achieved particular ways.
"Magical thinking" exists in a number of realms. One of them clearly involves technologies. I think back to ...
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One higher education takeaway from the flooding of New Orleans relates to disaster recovery / business continuance (DR/BC). Many of the universities in New Orleans survived because of the good will and contributions of other universities - that took the stranded students and offered them a comparable education but which deflected the tuition back to the universities in that city.
This realization that the brick-and-mortar of a campus could be hit by an unforeseen disaster led various ...
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Before I starting learning about IT, I'd always seen the word "legacy" as a generally positive one. It's something that politicians try to shape; it's something that a person leaves behind, in terms of something useful to future generations. It's a clean name that future generations may laud.
However, in IT, which is constantly updating and changing, "legacy" implies something like leftovers in the fridge, ruts worn into the road, or ...
Continue reading Legacies, Cosmologies and Unfunded Mandate Technologies
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One of the more engaging aspects of ID work here involves being able to sit in on development meetings where individuals brainstorm various features to add to a new tool, the developers argue over specs, and final decisions get made about the functions. At a recent meeting, one of the developers said something about "this spaghetti of a mess," which I thought was very apt. The various constituencies represented by the members at the table all need their parts heard ...
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A meditation is supposed to be something reflective and calming. These are often accompanied by soothing intonations, bells and backstories stemming out of the Himalayas and clouds. Maybe I can just say that an ID may not always have time to meditate. Or maybe the rush is part of the techno age.
I was digitally scrolling through a series of video captures of a course that involved stress management. Part of the curricular build involved the live course sequencing to ...
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In an academic office with plenty of technology-minded people around, it's not often that one sees a lot of obvious primping. As I consider this further, I am awestruck by the rarity of this event that occurred.
So there we were at the end of a virtual simulated tour conducted by a representative of an East Coast company. A group of us were beings in Second Life. One kept walking around with a virtual torch for quite a while ...
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Models have a way of helping people conceptualize processes, among other things. Bates and Poole offer the "SECTIONS" model for instructional design that is helpful in the sense that it offers an instructional view as well as an administrator view (along with some technological savvy). The cost, novelty and speed concerns are more administrative ones, and technology undergirds this. Also, the consideration for swapping in materials is highly helpful.
S "Students: what is known about the students - or potential students ...
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Late last year, I engaged in a research project that involved the use of online surveys. Ostensibly, the contents could apply to any number of instructors who teach f2f and those who teach online. I was going to use a non-reward strategy for the simple reason that I didn't want to pay out hundreds in gift cards for research that itself was not directly funded and would only get small play at a small C2C Fall Forum in Hutchinson ...
Continue reading "Nah": Rallying Interest in "Mirror" Online Surveys
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 April 2007
Jeff Merriman of the OKI / MIT highlighted some interoperability trends. [A quick Wikipedia search defining the Open Knowledge Initiative suggests that this organization works on the specification of software interfaces comprising a "service oriented architecture" (SOA). This endeavor was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIT, and IMS Global Learning Consortium.]
"The goal of an SOA is to provide a separation between the interface of a service and its underlying implementation such that consumers (applications) can interoperate across the ...
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Caveat: Whenever I write on technology issues that are beyond my purview, I should use a double or triple cover, so I may disavow that I wrote this. I think that what's going on on the back end is important enough to discuss, but I also know that I'm going to embarrass myself by writing about something in a way that a software engineer never would. I've faced the disdainful glare (once was enough) of a software ...
Continue reading CORDRA and ADL-R (Registry) for Shared Data Environments
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Years ago, I presented a small session on another campus about how to build unique aspects to an online course. The context was that the faculty were inheriting pre-built courses used at the state level in a college consortium. These pre-built courses were well conceptualized, professionally built and porous and flexible enough for instructors to add their own designs and personal touches. Effective teaching and learning often involve a degree of personalization, the application of the ...
Continue reading Inheriting Online Courses...and Owning Them
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Brent Anders (of the Office of Mediated Education) and M.E. Yeager (a doctoral candidate in the College of Ed at KSU) created the following video to publicize a forthcoming course offered by Dr. Fred Newton and Professor Art Rathbun. Andrea Mendoza (graphic artist with OME) created the snazzy logo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tucjbL1GdU
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 April 2007
Really in a time of need, no one really wants to depend on trickle down effects alone. These take time. These take goodwill. These take the structural levers in a society to make them work well.
I was watching a video off of a news site about how old PCs were being sold in large cheap lots and refurbished and sold into a West African nation. In their second incarnations, these computers were enabling small businesses ...
Continue reading Social Justice: The "Trickle Down" Effect and Educational Techno
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It's often refreshing to hear more traditionalist voices in education - those that will laud lectures, text (as a "reusable technology"), and that will decry some of the strategies used in eLearning. M. David Merrill, a visiting professor from the U of Florida, was one of the presenters who joined us by a live Net-mediated videostream. He described learning as continual and goal-based. Good learning is purposeful, not incidental.
He does ...
Continue reading A Skeptical Voice re: Online Exploratory Environments
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The most current issue of the Journal of Interactive Instructional Development out of the Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) includes an article by one of the instructional designers of OME. The site, which is password protected, may be accessed at the following URL. Getting access may require a micro-payment and /or membership.
http://www.salt.org/jiidtoc.asp?top=Yes
Continue reading Journal of Interactive Instructional Development
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Dr. Bill Blackmon (Chief Technical Officer at ADL), in his presentation "ADL and SCORM," took a lowkey approach but dropped a surprising bit of news. Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) is looking for some other organization to steward "SCORM" and to develop the public global version of SCORM. The Department of Defense's needs for SCORM have long diverged from that of global users' needs, and it's time for new direction, development, and a diverging of paths. The new public ...
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The technology learning curve for instructional designers seems as steep as the cutting edge roller coasters that plaster your cheeks against your ears as you pull out of the starting platform and do the first loop-de-loop. There's no real keeping up. If it's any comfort, technologists will tell you that they know their areas very well, but it's near impossible to extend their expertise beyond a region of specialty. Their learning curve gets too high, too, and ...
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"Use cases could be a cultural tool (Lave & Wnger, 1991; Candlin et al., 1999) that (is) used for mediation between the various 'cultures' that take part in learning technology specification." (Hoel, n.d., pp. 2 - 22)
As an outsider to software development, I would never have assumed the importance of a so-called "use case." Now, as a person with a small toe in the door, I at least have a better sense of why "use cases" are ...
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My skeptical supervisor looked askance at the invitation. Indeed, I was not looking to head off to another conference. I had my hopes on a few that I'd submitted proposals to and was waiting to hear back from.
The email invitation was like any number of other electronic come-ons. Upon opening the email, I saw that it was a mass emailing invite to a conference. The email had names and led to a ...
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Digital simulations may be used in situations where live simulations may be expensive, time-consuming, impractical and / or fast-changing.
At a recent conference, a representative of Chi Systems introduced the use of synthetic teammates for undergraduate pilot training. Here, pilots-in-training may practice the various voice communications with the tower (controller) and others in a runway take-off situation. Their voice inputs would be captured by voice recognition software (and VOIP for Net-mediated learning), and their responses and the timing of ...
Continue reading Fielding Synthetic Teammates for a Flying Simulation
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Several presenters at the SALT Orlando Jan. - Feb. 2007 conference echoed a similar point. One was a simulation virtuoso who'd adored this method of learning for 20 years but had yet to see this approach adopted. She said wearily, such technologies - no matter how fantastical and effective - will not sell themselves. Innovations need commercial level promotion. Another presenter, who'd been around from the time of the Plato System, described the slowness with which some technologies "take." He gave ...
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The snippet of information was included deep in the presentation. A fascinating curricular build has been achieved for miners to improve safety. The learning was delivered off of a website as well as through mobile devices. The learning met SCORM 2004 compliance and Section 508 standards. It useful integrated prior existing digital contents. It met the standards of the oversight agency, and it did so under budget and within deadline. They had built in an "accident reporting coach" to help ...
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I'm doing a mental inventory of the various software programs I've decided to purchase from the professional conferences I've attended. Truth is that there have been very few such products. Yet, a staple of various conferences has been that of vendors and salespeople-as-presenters who have a new product or functionality that they'd like to sell. One "inoculation" for me has been that of working in an office full of technoids, who would generally not let me ...
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The Alice-in-Wonderland moment happened a couple days ago. There I was in the middle of an online course. I was making a change to an announcement when I accidentally hit some weird combination of keys and ended up in another person's account. I had access to that person's courses and all her "powers." I had attained "super powers" even without using my actual "instance manager" powers.
That got me musing about Alice-in-Wonderland moments. In these past 10 ...
Continue reading The Insidiousness (and Necessity) of Plug-and-Play
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Too often, various educators take a very defensive stance when it comes to using copyrighted works. They'd rather borrow the concept and a snippet or two of a copyrighted work and not risk any infringement. Yet, learning about fair use may help instructors better use the plentiful informational resources out there and keep them safe from intellectual property violations. A lack of understanding of one's rights will mean that fair use is not put to good use.
Faculty ...
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As a seasoned college instructor, I've had a fair amount of experience dealing with "grade hounds." Grade hounds are those learners who focus a lot on their formal grade. That's not a negative in and of itself. That gives an instructor some leverage in the teaching and learning / learner motivation department. Where grade hounds get a little exasperating is when they do some of the following things.
They'll wait until their peers have ...
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Elearning's rich functionalities may play a large role in the support and promotion of accelerated learning. A recent conference I attended defined this term as the following type of learning situation. Accelerated learning
This is not to be confused ...
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"A risk is a potential event that, should it occur, would have an impact on the project." -- Mike Wright ("Project Management: From Managing Cost to Managing Risk," Educause Seminar 4, Mar. 12, 2007, Chicago, IL)
Our seminar presenter said, "I like to walk around dumb and happy." His expression made it clear that much as he might like to walk around that way, his better sense was that it was not advisable to do so, particularly ...
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Sometimes, I indulge myself and apply to a conference without any idea whether I'll get accepted. I do this in order to give me the space to consider a particular research question or concept or practice. Recently, I proposed a topic (haven't heard back yet about its status) in order to consider a project postmortem.
A project postmortem is an analysis of the work - from proposal to finish - in harsh light. Some use analytical rubrics or ...
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It doesn't take long working as an instructional designer to realize that some curricular builds will be "data hungry" ones. Data hungry curricular builds require massive amounts of digital learning objects and information. They require huge amounts of research. They require complex data tracking. They require lots of legal copyright releases and permission seeking. They demand fact cross-checking and accuracy. They demand attention to details because every change has a price in terms of investment of ...
Continue reading The "Black Hole": Data Hungry Curricular Models
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"Good ideas can lead to good practices..."
Sometimes, in work places, colleagues and supervisors think of theory as something snobby, excessive, unnecessary and maybe wrong. Several times in a recent week, I was given a carefully worded piece of advice - from the same person. His advice went: Avoid theory. He had been on the receiving end of a whitepaper on digital learning objects and SCORM, a work that I am currently revising and updating based on ...
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Imagine a tool that could help manage the world...
That was the proposition made by Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI, the forefront company that designs and develops GIS technology. Dangermond visited K-state to present "GIS Vision and Enabling Technology" on Mar. 8. He visited as a speaker for the Provost's Lecture Series.
(A blurb introducing him reads: "Dangermond fostered the growth of the company from a small research group to an organization with more than 3,100 ...
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A recent project involved the writing of instructor notes to go along with a three-part online-delivered case study. While the instructional design involved conducing interviews, researching and writing the cases, the ideas for the assignments, and the creation of digital learning objects, the tough part came when I started to draft some commentary to instructors. More specifically, I was drafting the "instructor notes." In thinking about this issue, I refer back to various instructor's manuals that accompanied academic textbooks ...
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Course management for an intimate online course of 20 differs greatly when there's a course of 200 - 1000 students. When I worked in colleges for many years, I saw the occasional "larger" course, and these were for topics that students really enjoyed, and maybe the higher end number of learners was about 60 or 70. Having taught at universities for over five years, I have had some experiences of teaching a face-to-face course with several hundred learners. Some of ...
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Getting smart machines to collaborate with humans may require some cajoling. One of my colleagues has a way with both people and with machines. He very masterfully originates workarounds that solve a variety of live issues for faculty as they use the campus-originated LMS. Being able to deliver such support requires a mental agility and a deep knowledge of the various technological systems. The very human demands on the technologies originate in the intersection of the teaching, communications, learners and ...
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I had ensconced myself in a 24-hour student cafe in the basement under the main library. The only "cafe" food was from vending machines, but at least I was out of the office enough to read a stack of articles on SCORM and digital learning objects. It had been a year since my last whitepaper on this subject, and I'd been snowed with numerous projects and clients. I was behind ...
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For many years, I earned my keep by giving lectures and speaking in public. I know what I sound like in various spaces - from a room with hundreds to more intimate 20-30 student spaces. I know what I sound like in various moods and circumstances. I know what I sound like in several languages. I know what I sound like in full strength as well as with laryngitis coming on. Indeed, this voice has been on radio. It's been ...
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A training by our resident security expert touched on various ways digital information may be grabbed and exploited. He addressed issues of open wifi networks. He talked about the risks of portable memory devices. He discussed regular patching. He talked about encryption. He gave vivid examples of data compromises along with some humorous Rumsfeldian quotes.
He didn't go into the weakest link, which would be the human factor. He maybe was being too polite.
A while ago, I'd ...
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Back in the day, when I was a full-time faculty member, I could do my job without wondering what my colleagues thought about my email life. Sure, there were emails from students and colleagues daily. And the assumption was that one would answer in a day or so. However, in this shift to an ID environment (and in an IT position of sorts - yes, my friends are laughing about this), I'm seeing that my email life really makes a ...
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"Program" might be too large of a word for this experience, but I'll use it in the heading as a kind of shorthand. At a prior college where I worked, the school made small grants available for individuals with experience in eLearning who wanted to work with colleagues (in cross-functional dyads) to set up online courses. Professionals often like to learn from one another, and this built on that concept. This would be an extension of faculty sharing.
I ...
Continue reading A Low-Cost Faculty Mentoring Program for Online Learning
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So Dr. Michael Wesch (assistant anthro prof at K-state) has caused a YouTube splash with his witty video. Worth a look. Even more electrifying live.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/feb/13/professors_video_creates_sensation_youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
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Cubicles are too Dilbert-ish. They're not cool. Any person who appreciates them must be a little "off."
Well, I have to admit that I finally have my very own state-of-the-art cubicle. It has high gray walls. It's modular. I have mod shelves, mod lights, a massive electrical hookup, and neutral gray shelves. It's tall enough for privacy, but if I had to get over the walls, I could, possibly scraping a bit of asbestos off ...
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The elements that would allow the integration of mobile learning with an LMS have been seriously evolving. Dr. Heather Katz and Bob Sanregret presented on "How to link mobile content results into your LMS system" at the recent SALT conference in Orlando, FL. Using the Hot Lava Mobile Learning Author (open source?), mobile devices may be set up do up to 5 API calls for SCORM-compliant data: the start and end times, the test results, and other data. Using SOAP ...
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So it looks like BYU is planning an "ID + SCORM" conference that is supported by Advanced Distributed Learning. This may be of interest for those of you supporting ID for projects linked to private industry and / or "defense" sorts of work.
http://www.adlnet.gov/news/articles/387.cfm
http://arclite.byu.edu/id+scorm/index.php?title=Call_for_Papers BYU ID + SCORM: Connecting Instructional Design to Online Learning Standards April 5 - 6, 2007
Drop a line here if you plan ...
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One of the more creative forms of teaching online at the university level involves the use of custom-originated case studies. In the Native American learner context, these teaching cases are used to surface new research and to provide learners with more open-ended and analytical learning online.
www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases
The following public site (out of The Evergreen State College) recently debuted and may be helpful.
Continue reading Native American Teaching Case Studies Online
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Christopher Stapleton, one of the staff members of Simiosys at the University of Central Florida, calls himself a "faculty entrepreneur." With decades of experience working in the entertainment industry "creating memories of a lifetime," he left managing a megabudget (over a hundred million) and a fat salary...in order to apply himself to meaningful work. That said, he still describes some of his works that he's helped create with an earned sense of pride. He describes the ...
Continue reading Virtual Puppetry and a Simulated Urban Classroom
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Scott Edwards (of Outstart) presented on "Why your LCMS should be PENS Enabled" at the Jan. - Feb. 2007 SALT conference in Orlando. -His presentation addressed why the standard "package exchange notification services" (PENS) standard should be integrated into an LCMS or LMS. PENS is an AICC and SCORM-supported specification. PENS allows for the automating of the process of content publication, transportation, and messaging between servers hosting LCMSes, LMSes, and data repositories. PENS allows not only for the transfer but the ...
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Thomas Held (of MetaMedia Training International) came right out with his view in his keynote: Instructional designers coming out of the various higher education institutions need more scripting and video capture experiences. I'd have to agree with this assessment.
From the outside, multimedia looks quite simple to create. Neophyte consumers of multimedia consume the end product in very short time and often do not have any idea of how much work goes into the back end to create the ...
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Dr. James E. Guilkey gave the keynote at the recent Orlando New Technologies conference hosted by SALT. His address - "Generation Why? Designing, Training & Learning to Engage the New Workforce" - offered some intriguing examples of digital builds for modern learners.
One interesting angle was the use of blended learning. His company's clients deal with training. To reach employees for whom the WWW and various communications technologies are "part of their fiber," they use a strategic integration of online ...
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So Tom Held of MetaMedia Training International, in his address at a prior SALT conference, talked about the concept of the "installed base" while considering which of the various DVD types (blue ray, high def, holographic) may be around for the (relatively) long haul. (This is only one small aspect of his content rich talk, but this is the only aspect I want to talk about here.) The concept here is that a critical mass of people will own a ...
Continue reading Building Digital Content to the "Installed Base"
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There's something disconcerting about the term "denaturing." To denature something is to remove the natural character or properties of something. It's to undercut something natural. These would be fighting words for an environmentalist. So when I ran across this word in the context of the design of learning objects (DLOs), I had to take a second look. The concept goes like this: all building of digital learning objects is necessarily unreal, fake, simulated, and not ...
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One of the basic tenets of instructional design for online learning is to build for the learner. Without direct insights or access to the learner base, an ID ends up having to speculate based on the demographics of a particular audience. The build then becomes based on speculation, hearsay and guesswork. After all, how does one build for an audience that one has never met? The point of entry then seems to focus on the curriculum. The "what" of what ...
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At the same time that the mass media carry stories of students using text-messaging lingo in their college homework and examinations, the great push for eLearning has hit its stride. Much of this learning is still text-based because of the extra load that multimedia and audio-visual digital resources may place on a system and on learners in terms of the download. Is there a certain baseline literacy needed to take advantage of eLearning - not technologically ...
Continue reading Defining Minimal Literacy Requirements for eLearning?
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All sorts of talent move through a healthy office. Hardened administrators know this to be true. They know that every individual serves for a time and in a role. When a person leaves, he / she leaves a vacuum, usually fillable. The so-called "keyman" insurance assumes the symbolic and strategic value of an individual and the cost that the loss of that individual to a company that might have (not via leaving per se but more from unforeseen accidents). Well our ...
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"Humanists look at these games as a new expressive genre like drama, opera, or movies; social scientists view them as anew form of collective behavior; computer scientists, engineers, and industrial designers find them a new focus of invention." -- Murray, Bogost, Mateas and Nitsche
So digital gaming has been around for 35 years now. So the talk in the academic literature on educational gaming is that games can be much more than that. They serve a learning purpose. They ...
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"Aaaaahhhh." On hot summer days in the Pacific Northwest, at my former college, I would have the office door to the student newspaper open. Every so often, the calm afternoon would be broken by the bloodcurdling screams of the drama students in the nearby theatre or out on the sidewalks, with their digital cameras running. Every quarter, the drama students would engage in a kind of "generative learning." Generative learning tends to be collaborative, creative, dynamic and synergistic. As the ...
Continue reading Generative Learning Materials and Technologies
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Some years ago, H. Wayne Hodgins proposed the creation of a periodic table of information in the context of the development of atomistic reusable learning objects. As I understand it, there would be some structure (akin to Roget's thesaurus?) that would help in the categorization of information. Digital learning objects could be co-created and vetted, and these would be launched and categorized in massive databases. These would be sharable and accessible to all. Knowledge ...
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Like the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz, I have been thinking of heart and the lack of it. What sparked this was a face-to-face meeting with some of my online students. Usually, it takes a while to build relationships to the point where candor is assumed. In this case, the candor came right out early on. Students "check heart" before they can take risks with an instructor. The question was, did I have a "heart" for them?
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One of the professional listservs that I belong to involved a comment by an individual who asserted that his skills as a multimedia designer have become worse since he went into teaching. So much of his time now is spent on committees, student support, teaching, and publishing - I'm guessing. That comment struck me as astute.
Time, energy and resources are often zero-sum. Once used, it's gone. There are developmental windows of time to be ...
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Back in November (a full year ago...or rather a couple months), one of my blogs dealt with the issue of using free e-texts in lieu of textbooks (in a unique course design situation) and the internal debate about the pros and cons of that.
I thought of a colleague who told me once that she earned some $70 from selling the free book samples she got from book reps of various book companies that ...
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Former Microsoft "chief architect" Charles Simonyi's has said that he wants to be the first geek in outer space. He has bought a round-trip ticket for just such a trip and will make history as the fifth tourist cosmonaut ever. In a recent interview (in this case, with The Seattle Times), he has described his engineering approach to studying for this out-of-this-world fieldtrip. The interviewer asks him: "Is it circa 1990 technology on the spacecraft you'll ride?" He ...
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So Jan. 3 marks the anniversary of my first day at OME. In a recent grocery run, I saw a can of Turkey Spam on the shelves and couldn't resist buying it. Okay, so it's really not for the flavor or the texture or the can shape. That Spam was something bought on a lark in our first days holed up in a cheap motel in Manhattan, KS. One doesn't come to a small college town expecting ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
03 January 2007
Years ago, I was visiting a library in the PRChina. There, I got to look at and briefly touch a 600-year-old book. I didn't know what the contents were, and the librarian didn't tell me. The value was in the book's age and its frailty. It was kept under glass in a semi-controlled environment. One didn't quite dare to breathe around it lest it turn to dust.
For those of us ...
Continue reading "Slow Fires" and the Preservation of (Print and Digital) Information