Blog Entry
The literature on creativity offers some fine insights for instructional design. I don’t want to stretch these ideas too far, but there are some snippets below that may be applied in fresh ways.
The authors Kelly and Littman encourage designers to focus on real people with lived and felt needs. “To make better products and services, you’ve got to care about the person actually using it” (Kelly & Littman, 2001, p. 34). Another way of expressing this is for ...
Blog Entry
A new site that has been in the works for at least half a year will make its soft launch shortly, which means that it’ll go live without much fanfare. It’ll be built up and used over time, and optimally, it’ll start growing and evolving. It’s an interactive site. Now, we’re at the point in the project that it’s important to get some attention on the WWW for this resource.
Blog Entry
One ongoing project has involved the launching of a brand new site with plenty of interactivity, some curious AI security functionalities, and plenty of user-generated contents, along with professionally created contents. The ambition of the site meant that the coding would likely take longer than initially planned. And the many voices at the table would also mean more delays.
To push the site’s development, while the site was still in development, a version was pushed out into ...
Blog Entry
Readers who want a basic primer on how video games may promote learning may wish to give James Paul Gee’s Good Video Games + Good Learning a spin. With his folksy writing style and use of personal anecdotes, Gee’s work is highly accessible and non-threatening, and yet, it does offer some academic perspectives.
This author is a social linguist and professor who came to gaming in his 50s, through his son. It may be safe to assert that his ...
Continue reading Good Video Games + Good Learning (brief resource review)
Blog Entry
One of the librarians at this university showed me a clause linked to a major educational funding organization that required grant recipients to make their written papers from research findings available to other professionals in the field through a related educational repository < http://www.lib.k-state.edu/geninfo/scholcomm/nih.html >. This endeavor is part of a larger effort to capture informational value for the larger public apparently.
This clause is an interesting one to me because of the endeavor ...
Blog Entry
A month or so ago, I went ahead and zipped up course materials on Blackboard and downloaded that onto my desktop. Then I uploaded the zipped contents into a course shell in ANGEL Learning. And that was as far as I got in terms of transferring curricular contents en masse. I will admit to a great deal of skepticism that this particular organization should just ask faculty to move their own work even though I have instance manager privileges on ...
Blog Entry
The concept of “un-design” is an interesting one to consider in an online course. After all, courses are generally about structure. They’re about the delivery of contents in a way that the learning is accessible, offered in developmental stages, supported by the readings and activities, and memorable. When I initially think of un-design, I think of a rummage sale, but there’s something more to this idea that needs exploration. I have a queasy feeling it won’t go ...
Blog Entry
“Teaching with Online Games” Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
I’d never taken part in a truly global webinar. Most of the ones I attend are local…or only have the occasional person tapping in from a few other locales. Then, I attended Dr. Gibson’s “Teaching with Online Games,” and as a warm-up to the actual presentation, the facilitator asked participants to indicate their locations on a virtual map. She turned on that annotation tool in Elluminate, and the ...
Continue reading "Teaching with Online Games" Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
Blog Entry
The new issue of the Journal of Interactive Instruction Development has gone live. Check it out at the following URL:
http://www.salt.org/jiidtoc.asp?top=Yes
Blog Entry
There it was in the press, garnering international headlines, the idea that HIV could be brought under control in a decade in a particular country with the proper combination of testing and interventionist medical treatments. This information came from a simulation. The inputs were not clear, but the outputs clearly garnered all sorts of attention.
There’s a healthy dose of skepticism that usually comes with easy solutions and round numbers and easy predictions. The world itself is quite complex ...
Blog Entry
For many, deadlines just sort of blow right past them, and changes don’t get made. One of the more seductive aspects of digital content is that it feels sort of permanent even though it can so easily be updated. So much digital content in courses need updating because of changes in research, in available digital resources, in pedagogical methods, and in technologies.
Some make changes on the fly. As they realize there are issues to fix, they go ahead ...
Blog Entry
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
The new issue of JOLT (of MERLOT) has gone live for the first issue of 2009. Check it out.
http://jolt.merlot.org/
And
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no4/hai-jew_1208.htm
Blog Entry
So the professional listserv was buzzing about the experiences a local college was having with their trial use of pen-and-tablet setups. Then, I got notice that one of my profs might possibly use a pen-and-tablet setup for his course, which involved writing in a number of different languages, many of them highly graphical. In a couple days, I had tried out the pen and tablet … and had bought a state-of-the-art one for the professor.
An instructional designer is often a ...
Blog Entry
There’s plenty of excitement over open source and Creative Commons-released works. And for a long time now, there have been royalty-free contents from commercial and “amateur” providers. The question then is: What’s actually out there for faculty use? Several recent endeavors brought this challenge to clearer light.
So first, the resources. Wikipedia has plenty of sources released under Creative Commons copyright or fully released into the public domain. I’ve found quite a few cool images on ...
Blog Entry
From the outside, having work embargoed seems like not much fun. It’s work that only goes to a small, limited and elite audience. It’s going to sit on “ice” for any number of years—because of copyright or security or ownership issues (usually). While a person may benefit from the intellectual property of that work, it’s not really there for the public consumption. There may be a release date of sorts, or there may not be any ...
Blog Entry
Back in the day, my students and I studied journalists and how they handled their notes in a way that would protect them. We got two distinct responses.
One school of thought was that it would be good to have all notes and audio and video to show who said what. The idea was that if they had questions in the writing of the article, they could refer to their records. They would have something stronger than pure memory to ...
Blog Entry
It came as a bit of a shock to faculty at my university that there would be a foray into Second Life for educational purposes, social networking, and university service provision. There had been apparently long debates over concerns of what could happen in immersive 3D spaces in terms of griefers or other buses. And after some deep analysis, the advisory committee apparently was putting forward some solid recommendations along with hopes to maximize the use of this social virtual ...
Blog Entry
“I know you from another life!” the professor greets me after reading my name off of an event sign-in.
Oh, no. Say it isn’t so, I’m thinking. What other life? Through what informational channel? And why? In this public venue, I want to be known only by one life, not two. Actually, in this venue, I’m in the audience and don’t care to be known any other way. It helps to have my lives not overlap ...
Blog Entry
Addressing Learners’ Online Test Anxieties
“And one of the things about testing is that it’s harder to do better than you can do, but it’s easy to do worse than you can do.”
– Dr. Ann Johnson, in “A Map of the Stars: Using Test Data to Create Useful Academic Interventions”
Test anxieties have a way of manifesting in various ways. I’ve seen doctoral students, who were college administrators in their “real lives,” fall apart and walk out ...
Blog Entry
There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.
Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little ...
Continue reading A Phone Interview about Culturally Sensitive E-Learning
Blog Entry
There are times when a long memory is downright unnecessary, but in most cases, a long memory can be quite beneficial, particularly in e-learning. Several recent incidences have highlighted this for me.
While the four-walls “digital enclosure” doesn’t truly fully exist yet, for all practical purposes, it does in most learning / course management systems. The simple concept of the digital enclosure is that it is a place where a person’s actions are all recorded ...
Blog Entry
I have colleagues who speak dreamily of teaching online from their sailboats or vacation homes. They talk of never having to attend another faculty meeting. Theirs is a glammed-up idea of connecting to students via virtual means and wifi connectivity (or satellite-based connectivity).
Having spent a couple years now teaching online from a distance, via a campus that I’ve never yet physically set foot on, I can say that there’s something to be missed being at a distance ...
Blog Entry
Two faculty from unrelated fields (audiology and interior design) recently presented on how their respective programs use assessment plans. Both concur that assessment is generally just “good practice.” Within the general push to encourage assessments, programs have flexibility and may focus on different aspects to build in different years.
Both faculty are from fields with external accrediting agencies, which focus on the building of knowledge and skills in learners, and their feedback has enhanced the functioning of both programs. Audiology ...
Continue reading Completing an Assessment Plan: Two Programs (Part II)
Blog Entry
Our campus has an assessment conference earlier this month. The main message to faculty and administrators was the importance of assessing inputs and learning outcomes.
This endeavor is encouraged in part because of the upcoming accreditation visit for the university in a few more years, but program assessment has continuing value—to study and measure academic achievements, student learning, and even coincidental learning. This knowledge is not just for in-house use but for the requirement to publicly account for the ...
Blog Entry
A librarian recently gave a presentation of an online reference tool that outputs in-text citations and bibliographies based on quite a few of the main citation methods. This program allows users to create as many accounts as they desire, such as for different projects, and has plenty of folder-level functionality. Even footnoting is possible.
Works that are drawn from data repositories and libraries have a simple interface that populates the various informational fields in a citation-agnostic way. Manual inputs ...
Blog Entry
IDT Roundtable Nov. 12: Podcasting and Vodcasting
The next roundtable is 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. (CDT) Wednesday, Nov. 12, Union 212. Brent Anders, Bryan Vandiviere, and Ben Ward will present “Podcasting and Vodcasting”. Join us as we see what’s hot and what’s not, the effectiveness of these tools in teaching, how to get started, how to look like a pro, and where to show off your efforts when finished.
http://ome.ksu.edu/webcast/live ...
Continue reading Live Streaming Presentation on Podcasting and Vodcasting
Blog Entry
Dr. Bernard Amadei, founding president of Engineers without Borders-USA (http://www.ewb-usa.org/) exhorted his audience (a full-hourse of students and professors at the Fiedler Hall Auditorium) to consider “service to humanity” as part of their professional work lives.
He joked that his openness to “random processes” led to his founding Engineers without Borders in Fall 2000. By chance, he picked a landscaping company for a project at his home that involved workers from Belize. These people told him about ...
Blog Entry
A Week of Writing Abandon
One comes back refreshed from vacations, typically. I’ve just been back from a “writing vacation,” and it sure is good to be ensconced in my cubicle.
Most people express surprise at the idea of a writing vacation. The idea is this: one takes paid vacation off in order to write professionally. This isn’t the casual blogging sorts of writing. This is about source citations. This is about research. This is about organizing materials into chapters. This is about ...
Blog Entry
Conventional wisdom has it that most of an online course should be complete before it launches.
A more challenging approach for experienced faculty is to use an “emergent” curriculum. That is a course that evolves the curriculum—with or without student input—as the course evolves. This may apply to learning that is also emergent in the world, such as a new course about a cutting-edge technology or policy or phenomena…which is rare but does occur now and again ...
Blog Entry
It usually takes several elements to go wrong in an online situation for things to get really nutty. And reversing this little catastrophe early in an online course is not difficult to see at all. First, I trusted in a pre-made class. While I had gone in and rearranged files, I hadn’t looked to check if the calendar was set up. I didn’t check to make sure that a learner walk-through was working. Mistake 1.
Next, I did ...
Blog Entry
In some fields, the lineage of digital information affects its validity, and therefore its usability in a learning context. This is true for the empirical sciences, for geographic information systems, for legal chain-of-custody, and other fields. And yet, much of this lineage information is never captured, or even if known, is not captured in metadata. Many educators create their own contents, and they just keep the information about the information lineage in their heads…and assume that it’ll always ...
Continue reading The Lineage of Digital Information for Data Quality
Blog Entry
One risk to having taught on a subject for a long time is to disconnect from the experiences of new learners. Long immersion in a topic also leads an instructor to having assumptions about how information may be approached, and hard as a person may try to fight this, it may lead to an intellectual stasis, a comfort.
This seems to be a pretty dangerous place to be as an instructor. And that danger is compounded by teaching online where ...
Blog Entry
Dr. Michael Wesch always offers an engaging presentation, mixed with aptly used high tech, and there are always surprises—of the technological kind and absolutely of the human kind. In a recent standing-room only presentation at K-State, he spoke of the need to use technologies to help college students engage with learning. (“A Portal to New Media Literacy: Engaging New Technologies to Engage Students”)
He showed his digital ethnography dashboard http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography To show his uses ...
Blog Entry
K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group will meet Nov. 20, 2008, from noon to 1 p.m. at the Union Stateroom 1...
Current or potential SL users are welcome to attend.
Contact Larry Jackson at ljackson@ksu.edu for more information.
Continue reading K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group Meeting
Blog Entry
Every quarter or two or three, I get into an online scape. Most scrapes can be seen forming like a storm cloud from a long way away. Usually, a student takes offense at a perceived slight because they’ve received a particular comment about their writing. They’ve conflated their idea of self with their work. Or their grades aren’t what they feel they deserve: they assume that they have earned full points before they’ve done any work ...
Blog Entry
There’s nothing better on a crisp and sunny fall afternoon than to be traipsing across campus with a sheaf of flyers and plenty of tape and pins. That’s at least so for the first hour. The second and the third ones are not as delightful. How I came to be distributing materials around campus is that I offered to publicize a website that is being built to support the protective elements of students’ lives to combat suicide, which ...
Blog Entry
Chasing information has become somewhat more exciting of late because I’m understanding a little more of what is going on when digital repositories are queried for various resources. I’ve been spoiled with my on-campus ILL office, which has been able to electronically track down four out of five requested sources and deliver them to my desktop computer with ease and panache.
Then, I just got a cancellation. The message politely notified me that the request I made for ...
Continue reading Interlibrary Loan Services and the Human Element
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 October 2008
I must be some sort of optimist. The “master” courses that I work on building are set up as perennial files, started one day and projected to go out to the year 2030 or beyond.
There’s no possibility that these courses will be offered in the same form as today some 20+ years from now, but that date is shorthand for “sometime into the future” until this course is sunsetted.
While we instructional designers may not ...
Continue reading For the Next Little While: Digital Preservation and Long-term Storage
Blog Entry
Usually, by the 2nd, 3rd or 4th weeks of a 10-week term, students will start emailing me with a dilemma, which goes something like this: “I ordered my book as soon as I had the money to pay for it, but it hasn’t arrived yet, so may I get a deadline extension to turn in late work?” They then sometimes include the clause that the book may take up to 3-4 weeks to arrive from the day of ordering ...
Blog Entry
Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” shows how the affordances of Web 2.0 changes human potential. As a socio-technical system, Web 2.0 benefits through the power of networks—which grows in complexity “faster than its size.”
Connective technologies enable people to cover much more ground. Photo-sharing sites enable photographers to be virtually anywhere at any time…and to capture digital information that may not have apparent value enough for a company or ...
Continue reading "Here Comes Everybody" (Brief Resource Review)
Blog Entry
From the outside (as a non-lawyer), disclaimers read like legalized clauses that say, “Here are very limited uses of this site, and don’t hold me legally responsible for what others do or say.” A recent project involved plenty of research and pursuit of the legal concepts and practices behind defining a “Terms of Service” for a site that involves both public and private contents for college students, in a site designed to build a protective wall and support around ...
Blog Entry
Human-computer interactions research offers quite a few occasions for laughter. On the one side, you have the machine, with the various affordances and limitations. On the other side, you have the persons, with their affordances and limitations and idiosynracies. The building of socio-technical systems then happens somewhere inbetween and with a complex mix of understandings and inputs / outputs.
It was in this spirit that I ran into a discrete strategy to relax speakers dealing with a speaker-dependent system…in a ...
Continue reading Coded Para-Verbals to Support Live Learner Engagement
Blog Entry
A current federally-funded project involves the building of a site that hopes to improve student mental health, and in so doing, prevent suicides.
The stats say that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Young adults 18 – 24 have the highest incidence of reported suicide ideation. A recent study apparently found that half of students had suicidal thoughts at some point in their history. Mood, interpersonal and academic concerns apparently have driven some students to be ...
Blog Entry
The rationale goes: Today’s generation is a visual one, so to get their ideas, it’s pretty critical to use imagery surveys…or surveys in which an integral component involves a visual or graphic or photo.
An interesting study used just such images to assess perceptions of the computing disciplne. They first vetted the images to see if they were assessed as positive, negative or neutral—as a way to test for content validity. Then the images were integrated ...
Blog Entry
So the water cooler conversations of late have been around the issue of rain-making, drawing in grants and clients that may fund instructional design work. For some, this change is a shock to the system because the prior assumptions were that support positions were somehow folded into the larger budgets…and that’s true. However, the other part of truth is a volatile economy and the need to sort of move some dollars around for equipment and travel needs.
Blog Entry
A fast one-day immersion in the concerns of securing electronic votes occurred back in mid-September, with the visit of a leading figure in evaluating the security of electronic voting machines.
Dr. Douglas W. Jones of the U of Iowa Dept. of Computer Science presented “The Trials and Tribulations of Electronic Voting” in mid-Sept. at K-State. He gave a brief history of ballot voting in the US and showed how the various systems in the US have been hacked and abused ...
Blog Entry
“Encapsulation” makes a lot of sense not only as a design strategy for software design but also for some instructional design. This basic concept is that of hiding elements that may be distracting or irrelevant or extraneous for learners. Apparently, the term comes from object-oriented programming in software design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
I’ve seen this theory in action in the designing of graphical user interfaces on a learning / course management system (L/CMS) and also in ...
Blog Entry
So I came to this split in the road, and neither turn would lead me directly to the doorway of my destination building. I was loaded with a digital camera, a tripod, a notepad, a bag of required knick-knacks for life, and a water bottle. I could trek across the nicely manicured lawn, or I could turn one way or the other. Then, I saw one of the professors in the department I was heading to, so I turned towards ...
Blog Entry
The Journal of Interactive Instruction Development has released a new issue
http://www.salt.org/jiidtoc.asp?top=Yes
There's a piece on the application of the Cisco Systems RLO model used on a three-university project (including K-State) a couple years ago.
Blog Entry
Learning about learning seems to be a central part of instructional design. And whenever I have a free moment, I try to finalize a course design that started a while ago but lacked funding for transcription. So while transcription is most certainly not part of the actual assigned work, I try to patch this course’s accessibility gaps whenever possible.
It was in this line of work that I ran across some engaging ideas about learning and the building of ...
Blog Entry
It seems so easy to walk blithely into a massive project and underestimate the work required. I’m so early in the being swamped stage that it’s hard to see how the elements may start coming together. It’s hard getting a handle on complexity. What I’m talking is about a book that I had hoped would be team-written, but after 300+ emails sent out and plenty of online publicity, I’m finding that the work has fallen ...
Blog Entry
Sometimes, engaging in ID work means interacting with a course on-and-off over a year or more. I was revisiting just such a course when I saw it with new eyes. The professor had put in study breaks in the online learning. These study breaks involved deep breathing exercises. They involved humorous out-takes. They involved stretches.
This add-on at the ends of each videotaped lecture segment really added a light touch to the learning. This course deals with learning principles, and ...
Blog Entry
The email is a welcome one even though it seems somewhat formulaic. It’s a call for finalized chapters for a text forthcoming in 2009. The acceptance by the editors has gone through (even though it has seemed touch-and-go over the months).
What follows is what’s disconcerting…a form of final iteration fever.
This particular project has been handled through the mediating technology of a book publishing wiki. The workflow is smooth. It’s very easy ...
Blog Entry
The patterns have become clearer over time. There was the clause for an ID position in Texas listed in the Chronicle of Higher Education that http://chronicle.com/jobs/search.php?today=2 required a full background check. That’s understandable if a person may handle sensitive materials.
And then there’s word that anyone taking on a non-temp position will need to go through a background check at my university. The areas of interest seem to be in police ...
Blog Entry
It seems fitting that the first full-length text that I’ll be tackling on my desktop computer is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2006), which he has made available for free off his own site at http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf .
This work is about ways to strengthen human collaboration on a larger scale with computer-mediated communications and to shape policies that would strengthen virtual communities.
He explains how “non-market and nonproprietary production” of ...
Continue reading The Wealth of Networks (Brief Resource Review)
Blog Entry
“New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential—that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and size.” -- Robert Wright in “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (as cited in Rheingold, 2003, p. 183)
--
Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” offers a generally benign view of the potentially of ...
Blog Entry
Developing a website on a shoestring budget and with many stakeholders is no easy feat. Having multiple institutions working on different parts can also be a challenge, with only partially successful distance mitigations. With the high hopes and high grant-funded ambitions, a site can easily evolve well beyond doability.
One aspect of special risk seems to be “content sustainability.” This means providing sufficient text and images and multimedia over time for the site. From a distance, it would seem that ...
Blog Entry
In Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” (2008), he talks about the competitive advantage that open source environments have as labs for creating and evolving new technologies. He suggests that for-profits run into the challenge of a “fitness landscape” that encourages settling for the first and easiest solution and discourages further exploration for more creative or elegant solutions.
“Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of ...
Blog Entry
It’s a professional boon to be invited to the table to develop a grant project from the talking stages and through to the end when the project actually gets funded.
The more typical route seems to be that one is brought on after an initial grant has been rejected and when the comments by the grant critiquers are that the pedagogical learning piece has not been clearly explained.
The work then involves quick learning about what has transpired, what ...
Blog Entry
It’s in virtually all the business textbooks about entrepreneurship. When a new killer app comes on the horizon, a lot of competitors get into development. They all have a sense of what the public needs. They may have no sponsors per se, or they may have a local sponsor, but they get on the bandwagon and innovate with the rest of them.
The choices they make then in terms of how they’re going to execute their infrastructures and ...
Blog Entry
At a recent conference, the presenters discussed their on-campus policy for using Second Life. A few strategies emerged from the presentation.
First, this campus simulated buildings from the physical campus to the virtual island—as grounds for familiarity. I know of another campus that has used its mascot and logo as a design element for an island on SL as well. The term used to describe this was “mimic proximity.” The spaces mimicked were ...
Blog Entry
During the MERLOT International Conference 2008 http://conference.merlot.org/2008/Program2008.html in the Minneapolis Hilton earlier this month, one of the organizers commented on the intimacy of a first language as an integral part of an engaging learning experience. He mentioned this in the context of looking for translators to help evaluate and analyze the value of learning objects on the MERLOT database. This idea carries over to non-English submittals to the organization’s journal as well.
Continue reading The Intimacy of a First Language for Learning
Blog Entry
A recent presentation at C2C's SIDLIT (Aug. 1, 2008) addressed the physical prototyping of a high-tech classroom in order to make it the most flexible and functional possible. The idea was that once this prototype had been experienced by many different types of users that that feedback would be assiduously collected and then applied to a brand new government building, with standardized classrooms.
Here, the prototype classroom was built to specs in a warehouse…after an initial planning process ...
Continue reading Prototyping a Physical Classroom for Hybrid Learning
Blog Entry
Clients know what they want, but they have a hard time explaining what they want in a way that is specific and usable enough for developers and site designers.
I’ve come to this conclusion after seeing projects languish, without any traction or support (and then the predictable finger-pointing). I’ve seen this with websites where faculty clients may not know what is available or possible technologically, and they have one image or groove in their minds. There’s no ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 August 2008
Dr.Michael Wesch’s "digital anthropology" presentation to the Library of Congress resulted in a thought-provoking video that has garnered a lot of airplay.
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179
Some of his observations about virtual “community” showed people with the art of mimicry and highly suggestible in terms of following others’ actions (something like lemmings).
Seeing Dr. Wesch’s presentation and then reading Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007 ...
Blog Entry
In a continuing endeavor to understand how people use visuals for learning, I came across a curious idea—that of “change blindness”. I know people who say that they can tell if even one item in their work space is moved an iota. Personally, I can relate more to the majority of people who apparently fall under the phenomenon of being blind to small changes.
This phenomena comes from an interesting human feature—that of their small visual working memory ...
Blog Entry
The use of modules to organize a curriculum offers more than learning flexibility. For a recent project, modules now allow for co-building a curriculum for both credit and non-credit deployment.
The credit course is defined by the documents that have gone through Faculty Senate and been approved as a high-quality academic course. Those learning objectives are codified in the syllabus and other course materials, and the course description resides in the academic catalogs. The strategies here then come in sequencing ...
Continue reading Academic Credit and Commercial Non-Credit Co-Building
Blog Entry
So it was with surprise that a faculty member found that she had a Facebook page. There was her official photo taken from her website. There were enough facts about her from various professional bios to make her identity seem accurate. There were postings from students.
The rub: that wasn’t her page. She had nothing to do with the posted information.
Some students (she never actually found out which ones) had stolen her identity in ...
Blog Entry
Usually when an all-day training takes the morning to launch, few will return in the afternoon for the rest of it. So there were about a dozen of us huddled in an upscale hotel conference room with very minimal wireless connectivity and trying to get in on Second Life and to embody our avatars.
Here was yet another foray into Second Life, this time, under the able guidance of Dr. Jonathon Richter (U of Oregon) as part of a day-long ...
Blog Entry
This resource may be helpful for those using images to create learning effects.
http://conference.merlot.org/2008/Sunday/hai-jew_s_track1aug10.ppt
This was presented at the MERLOT International Conference 2008 in Minneapolis, MN, at the Hilton Minneapolis on Marquette.
Continue reading Building Mental Models with Visuals for E-Learning
Blog Entry
Surely, most people have received invitations to join professional social sites. Almost invariably, these come from people that one has met fleetingly at a professional conference. Or a person whom one hasn’t spoken to for years because of differing interests and divergent lives.
The idea is to maximize professional relationships as busy professionals by highlighting the relationship and taking advantage of each other’s connections. It’s like how people scaffold relationships through mutual acquaintances… It’s a kind ...
Blog Entry
Effective sound in instructional design refers to the initial sound capture and then the editing that follows. Initial poor sound capture (full of ambient sounds, poor voice quality) cannot really be enhanced much with desktop software. Live events that are not properly mic-ed ends up as a lost event.
With many departments videotaping their own events, there are plenty of digital videos with all-right video but fuzzy audio. Unintended ambient sounds—people walking down a hallway, the closing of a ...
Blog Entry
It would seem that a central piece to designing well for online learning involves deeper understandings of the learner. So it’s not just the curricula, the domain knowledge and the technology that’s critical, but the nature of humans at their core is relevant.
It was in that spirit that I embarked on reading a classic—Colin Ware’s Information Visualization: Perception for Design (2004).
One curious observation was that people have very limited visual working memory. Given that ...
Blog Entry
“Digital media is more fragile than paper. Software bugs, power outages, hackers, and other problems threaten the reliability of digital collections. The risks can be mitigated when multiple copies of the data collection are generated and updated consistently.” -- Dr. Fran Berman in “One Hundred Years of Data”
The nightmare is an old one. A lot of work goes into the development of various digital objects—slidehshows, manuscripts, transcripts, digital flashcards, photos, and images. The memory drive crashes, and that’s ...
Blog Entry
With online synchronicity, most presenters do wrap up the interactions with some flourish. There are some closing comments, a thanks to all who participated, URLs of where the digital resources will be posted, and promises for future events. That sense of wrap-up is fairly critical in giving participants a sense of event completion.
In e-learning, though, I see much less design of closure. Too often, there’s a flurry of activity to hit the deadlines. There are cumulative assignments. There ...
Blog Entry
At a national conference a year ago, in Chicago, one of the presenters spoke about using learning management system (LMS) information about student performance to raise red flags about their learning and to provide the faculty with some sort of early warning. The idea then was to have academic interventions come into play.
At that time, I wondered how oblivious an online faculty member would have to be not to have some red flags raised with certain student behaviors: absenteeism ...
Blog Entry
It’s hard enough to future-proof the present moment. The dynamism of the future involves unpredictability that takes most by surprise at one point or another. Even the past is not closed to revision; it’s not future-proofed. Interpretations change continuously. It is in this reality that people strive to future-proof a curriculum.
What is a future-proofed curriculum? Ideally, it would be curriculum that gets magnified over time and built upon by many and used because of its high learning ...
Blog Entry
In literary critique, there’s the idea that an author does not fully know what his or her writing is about. There’s a subconscious level of production that may reveal hidden psychological insights. That was always a nifty principle to help students feel more comfortable in their interpretations—as long as they could find evidence of their interpretation in the text itself.
This approach has fine value, too, in analyzing nonfiction. Recently, I went through a chapter to identify ...
Blog Entry
So bingo cards can draw numbers from between 1 – 75. There’s often a free spot on the card. And the cards may be 5 x 5 (25 spots – the one freebie)…or 5 x 6 (30 spots – the one freebie). The randomizer could put out as many sets of the numbers as I wanted. I needed 29 numbers chosen from the 1-75 inclusive pool, and I needed them in random order. I needed three bingo cards per sheet, so ...
Blog Entry
For the past half-year, I’ve been privileged to take part in several projects that have used the Open Journal Systems software (distributed by the Public Knowledge Project http://pkp.sfu.ca/).
This publishing system uses a logical workflow from when an author submits a work to the site and ends up in a submission cue. Then, the editors select reviewers and submit the writing to the various reviewers. The submission is then revised and edited, copy-edited, laid out, proof-read ...
Continue reading Two Projects and the Open Journal Systems Software
Blog Entry
During a recent trip to my former haunts, I was chatting with a former colleague and was reminded of a vaporware incident. In this case, a former school president lost my former state some half a million dollars for vaporware—to a special friend of the president’s who had apparently no prior coding experience.
Three college presidents ended up supporting this unfortunate endeavor, and no actual product was produced at the end of the sorry episode. (The state ethics ...
Blog Entry
On Sept. 18 - 19, at K-State, the third annual Axio Learning Community and Conference will be held. This is open to Axio LMS users.
http://www.axioconference.org/
Continue reading The Third Annual Axio Learning Community Meeting and Conference
Blog Entry
This concept sparked with an article of a guitar-playing astrophysicist who writes semi-risque music to make certain elusive astronomy concepts clear.
Part of instructional design work involves getting a sense of an instructor’s workstyle and personality and trying to capture some of that in an online learning experience—so as to engage and motivate learners. For some professors, their public personality is part of their schtick. For others, the personality may be more subtle and nuanced.
A ...
Continue reading Flavor: The Personality Piece in Instructional Design
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
14 July 2008
The idea of reaching out to Millennials or the Gamer generation to enroll as students at a particular university is a common one. Universities work hard to attract and retain students, using a variety of outreaches, activities, supports and academic and non-academic endeavors. Various third-party companies promise delivery of a large percentage of those on the WWW or on networking sites to a university’s portals for a fee. Students may be surprised at the amount of effort used to ...
Continue reading Marketing a Department / Degree Program / University on Second Life
Blog Entry
Instructional designers engage in knowledge work. They collaborate with faculty to collect and transfer information, which must somehow be designed to evolve into knowledge. Our main tools are pedagogical and technological. As service personnel, we support or lead from behind, often based on the instructors’ comfort levels.
The faculty members are the default subject matter experts (SMEs). They have to identify the elements of learning that may be transferable. They must define the degree of abstraction of knowledge needed ...
Blog Entry
Various research writings have originated creative ways to capture information as a byproduct of work. For some, creating help texts and directions can be unwieldy and time-consuming. An article by Paris, Colineau, Lu and Linden summarized an endeavor that captured a procedural help based on how people used a computerized system. This automation was to help replace the “labor-intensive and tedious” writing and maintenance of procedural help texts. Their system apparently captures use information from various data streams: textual, graphical ...
Blog Entry
In recent years, people seem to be working on a faster and faster pace. A student journalist will call on a Tues. for an article that will run on Wed. Faculty will call or email with a request for research or advisement, and they’ll want to meet in a day or two. Or two weeks before a grant application is due, the head of a department will arrange a meeting, and the work involves instructional design, research, writing, a ...
Blog Entry
In student journalism, faculty and advisors work hard to shepherd student work forward towards publication—often locally and then in larger and larger venues. Students had a chance to evolve their work. They made mistakes in small venues before risking mistakes in the larger ones. Some of you already know where I’m going with this.
Students today often publish to the world early on. Various classes may require blogging or wiki postings. While these may ...
Blog Entry
E-learning mitigates time and distance to a degree, but it does not totally collapse time.
At around the 8th week of a 10-week quarter, occasionally, a student will come up with a proposal that goes something like this: How about if I do all the work I missed in the prior 8 weeks and graduate because this is the last course I need? The student promises a Herculean effort to get a course done in a very short time. The ...
Blog Entry
It doesn’t take long for the doctoral students to find their way to those involved in instructional design. There’s research on quality matrices, hybrid learning strategies, interactive television, strategic deployment of e-learning, and any number of other issues and combinations of issues.
The outreaches come through on listservs, broadcast or micro-cast emails, telephone calls, online surveys, shoutouts at conferences, face-to-face queries, and conferences.
Students want advice. They want readers for their draft chapters. They want access and connections ...
Blog Entry
Back in the day, there were some of my freshman classes that had some 700 – 800 or more students per auditorium. Our learning was facilitated by TAs, and there were notes that we could buy in case we missed a lecture date or two. That’s how I recall it. I never actually bought lecture notes as study aids although I probably could have earned some extra points with that. I remember seeing some, and they were full of typos ...
Blog Entry
It was a friendly invitation between two Kansas universities to chat about ITV via Polycom. We were meeting from two universities and one branch campus. The dry run had gone well. The automated dialing system didn’t quite work, but we all did finally get online live to discuss the issues at hand.
One of the universities in the state was seeing ITV (interactive television) as the way to do distance learning. While they ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 June 2008
Game Cultures By Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy New York: Open University Press 2006 171 pp. hardcover
Many have suggested the use of digital games for educational purposes, whether these are games seconded for learning or games designed explicitly for learning.
J. Dovey and H.W. Kennedy’s Game Cultures takes an academically sound approach to analyze the role of games in meeting human needs.
Learning or “decoding” is a main computer game activity. “Playing requires this decoding of ...
Continue reading Understanding Game Cultures for E-Learning (Brief Resource Review)
Blog Entry
One of the basic assumptions when I judged grants on various committees (civil rights, literature, academic, and in-house ones) was that people are going to do no more than they promise in a grant application. Often, they’ll do quite a bit less.
So the balance was choosing work that would be cutting-edge and prosocial but also that was doable. It was rare to find any grants that were cutting-edge, at least in my experiences ...
Blog Entry
Check this out. This Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (of MERLOT) special issue focuses on next generation learning management systems.
http://jolt.merlot.org/guest_editors0608.htm (Guest Editor Colleen Carmean Intro)
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html (The Current Summer 2008 Issue)
https://wiki.asu.edu/jolt/index.php/Main_Page (The Response Wiki)
Continue reading New Special JOLT Issue with a Wiki Accompaniment
Blog Entry
In a recent professional conference, one of the speakers presented on his use of virtual fairs and expositions. As a computer science professor, he would combine these virtual fairs (which people may attend from their desktop computers) with short research assignments for students.
He demonstrated a few of these for the audience. Essentially, these were websites that put a mental frame around the delivery of pre-packaged or live digital contents. There was a screen for live or canned speeches. There ...
Blog Entry
In my line of work, I occasionally meet people who are quite intriguing. A recent individual was a university professor for many years who now works for a peace organization in the West. She has traveled to numerous global hotspots around the world.
She has a nimble mind that analyzes the world as a power-based place, full of human emotions and angers that needed directing and diplomatic interventions and leadership interventions, or else these situations would hit “trigger point” and ...
Blog Entry
I have always had a kind of reverence for books—not the fabric covers and bound paper—but for the craft of writing that goes into quality works of literature.
It’s as the wise Mortimer J. Adler wrote: “Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that ...
Blog Entry
This clipart shows a gymnast standing on a balance beam in a balanced but difficult pose.
This stock image shows a man wearing a business suit and tie presenting to a group while standing in front of a whiteboard with writing on it.
This clipart image shows a man and a woman holding up an award in the form of a large trophy cup.
This image shows a bright pink "bot" that looks like a head floating in the screen ...
Blog Entry
So here was a pretty in-depth online training on two fairly large technological systems. One was an LMS, and one was an instance manager for that LMS. The learning involved the use of various slideshows, animated tutorials, and practice assessments.
In addition, these technical systems are deployed socially, for use in sometimes high-pressured academic environments.
Once all the mechanical parts of this training were built to spec, and the policy aspects for the role of the trainees upon graduation had ...
Continue reading Adding the Human Piece to an Automated Training
Blog Entry
The warning signs of high maintenance online learners come early. Give me about a half dozen postings in a course…or the first half dozen emails, and a pattern establishes itself fairly quickly. Or maybe one gets a suspicion early…even if it may take a while longer to fully bear out (or not).
They’ll asked an inordinate number of questions that have already been answered in the course announcements and documentation. They will second-guess the teaching ...
Blog Entry
A university-level office had been doing business for years on campus but had no coherent logo. Now that my office has been collaborating with them on a number of projects, they decided to get logo-ed up, which makes a lot of sense. Now that they’re on board with that, we’ve had a flurry of emails to coalesce ideas for the logo and to move ahead with this.
There’s something to be said for the hot graphics talent ...
Blog Entry
IGI Global has a book coming out titled "Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning" this July 2008. This is edited by Drs. Ugur Demiray of Anadolu University and Ramesh C. Sharma of Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Main Book Site http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985
Table of Contents http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985&v=tableOfContents
This book takes more of an international and global perspective.
Continue reading Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning
Blog Entry
A number of times now, various departments have approached this office with a common lament: their grant applications got positive feedback except that they were asked to shore up their pedagogical research, reasoning and execution. An ID then gets called in.
Few professors want to change their teaching approach. And for online learning, what many want to do is the same-old same-old (they’ll videotape everything).
At a meeting last month, the group wanted to learn about ...
Continue reading Supporting the Pedagogical Piece to a Grant Application
Blog Entry
Online learners have become much more diverse now over time, as e-learning has become more mainstreamed and accessible. And in writing classes, people bring much more about the inner texture of their lives. They joyfully share about being rednecks, vegans, Buddhists, and vintners.
In my F2F classes, students would bring in photos of the aftermath of an accident after a jump on the snowboarding slopes with plenty of stained snow. They would bring in slides of their ...
Blog Entry
Knowledge and Knowledge Systems: Learning from the Wonders of the Mind
By Eliezer Geisler
Hershey: IGI Publishing
2008
348 pp. hardcover
In this day of an explosion of information and the building of knowledge management systems, Eliezer Geisler (a professor of business at the Illinois Institute of Technology) has decided to get to the heart of the matter by probing exactly what knowledge is.
In Knowledge and Knowledge Systems: Learning from the Wonders of the Mind, Geisler explores the history ...
Continue reading Knowledge as Oobleck (Brief Resource Review)
Blog Entry
After quite a wait, the triptych teaching case study on Indian Gaming has finally gone live.
Native Gaming Case Studies
http://www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases/caseSubject.asp?c=43 (May 2008)
Online Teaching Case Materials
http://www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases/NativeGamingDocuments.asp (May 2008)
This is a multi-part case which uses slideshows, assignments, research ideas, and documents to create a more full-wrap experience.
A flashcard glossary of terms relates to the three main cases.
Blog Entry
An online course, by the time it’s complete and ready for deployment, often has plenty of moving parts. It involves documents that provide an overview of the learning—through the syllabus, the course policies, and the course calendar. There are the presential materials like videos, slideshows, simulations, texts, and other forms of lectures and demonstrations. There are the assignments. There are the sample student works. There are assessments, with rubrics and gradesheets. There are research project ideas.
And then ...
Blog Entry
It is a simple truism that most people would not want to be replaced out of their jobs. Suggesting that might make a person downright uncomfortable. So it was with amusement that I came across a phrase in my readings on automated learning: “offloading the instructor.”
That very blunt phrase highlights a very real factor in the support for automation of learning. Less offensive phrasing is usually used, more like “cost-savings.”
I recently co-presented on automated learning at this campus ...
Continue reading "Offloading the Instructor" and Automated Learning
Blog Entry
Now that finals are over, you probably don't even want to think of August, but brace yourself!
For the ninth year in a row, the Colleague to Colleague (C2C) organization and Johnson County Community College are hosting the Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology (SIDLIT). The Institute is open to all faculty members, and support staff (librarians, students services, tech support and administrators) who are interested in instructional technology and online learning. The 9th Annual SIDLIT will ...
Blog Entry
One of the first tenets of political storytelling is to embody one’s story. Have a clear alignment between one’s lived life and one’s presentations…the theories-in-action vs. the professed theories-in-use.
At a recent national conference, a large corporation fielded a team of presenters who demonstrated a system that they used for automated training of their staff. However, instead of showing any of their actual trainings, they used fictional training contents—in this case, how to tell why ...
Blog Entry
With work that may be a little boring, it helps to spice it up by thinking of ways to add value. That especially applies to transcripting. Of course, it is a slippery slope to integrate transcription into instructional design, and I most certainly don’t mean to integrate this. That said, I am assuming that most IDs will occasionally get dragged into some transcripting by the needs of a particular project every now and again.
Either that, or I’m ...
Blog Entry
Every new functionality that I learn regarding my university LMS gives me that much more ability. A recent one increased my skills in a pretty major order of magnitude. I say this in part because I spent years working unintelligently in terms of question creation and upload…for a few faculty clients. One involved plenty of chemistry symbols, which meant very slow creation of the formulas and questions. (And yes, this is not typical ID work, but I make it ...
Blog Entry
One requirement of being a geek is to enjoy reading pretty technical articles about what people are doing in their respective fields.
For me, with a background in more of the “soft sciences,” that means forays into IEEE and ACM to see what developers have been working on and how their technologies are being applied in various e-learning endeavors.
By the time I get to reading these articles, I can pretty much assume that the research is ...
Blog Entry
Colin Barras’ “'Matrix'-Style Virtual Worlds 'a Few Years Away'” (Apr. 4, 2008, by ABC Internet News Ventures) suggests that people can immerse in 3D spaces in protracted and possibly even inextricable ways with the new realistic virtual worlds that are being created.
This author paraphrases Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. “He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away,” asserts Barras. He describes ...
Continue reading Photorealistic Virtuality: Light and Animation
Blog Entry
For many quarters and semesters now, I’ve included a learner lounge space where learners can collaborate, share information, and socialize without any instructor presence. The only caveat is that an instructor will enter the space if something goes awry, and that presence is requested.
This space allows learners to have their own privacy, and it stands in the place of four-walls hallway conversations and chitter-chatter that doesn’t include the instructor.
I’ve ...
Blog Entry
A colleague generously set up a campus tour for me, and during this tour, we visited a state-of-the-art e-learning lab.
The lab itself looked like any other set of academic offices, with a mixture of computers, papers and books….and students…and comfortable furniture. We all crowded into a small meeting room to see some of the work of this office (which has a strong track record of federal educational grant funding as well ...
Blog Entry
In the quest for high learner retention and high participation, one strategy in the building of CSCL spaces (computer supported collaborative learning) has been to encourage the building of so-called “back channels.”
In all sorts of communication environments, having such informal back channels is useful. It allows for richer interchanges without people having to necessarily go on the formal record. And if vetted, such information can be highly useful and pro-social and pro-learning.
One example of such ...
Continue reading Developing Back Channels for Online Learners
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
01 May 2008
On Feb. 11, 2008, Dr. Cable Green (Director of eLearning for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges) hosted a virtual session for 42 faculty and administrators from around the US (with a cluster in Washington State) around “Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources.” This used the Elluminate technology for the virtual participants and actually had a physical location, too, at the Bellingham Technical College.
This was billed as a ...
Continue reading Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources
Blog Entry
Some public debate has surrounded the issue of public universities and colleges displaying greater responsibility for their troubled students, in order to head off potential on-campus violence.
There have been government studies on students who engage in violence on campus. There have been various universities that have shared publicly some of their endeavors, usually through their counseling support programs for students.
Recent articles have suggested that such institutions of higher education need to be more interventionist. They need to take ...
Continue reading A Watch List of Troubled Students...and Virtuality
Blog Entry
One central premise of most support offices for online learning is the faculty DIY aspect, that is, the “do-it-yourself” potential of faculty. This idea has been persistent for a very long time even though there have been examples that might lead one to abandon this concept.
The stories abound. One faculty member had wrapped a scarf around her CPU, so it wouldn’t get too cold. Others have somehow lost their courses that they created on the learning ...
Continue reading Expanding the Faculty DIY Sphere in Academia
Blog Entry
While ubiquitous and mobile learning have not made that much headway in higher ed, I am reading more and more about various technologies that would enable some truly rich and engaging learning using such technologies.
I was quite amused to read about the idea of the “web of things,” or various electronic devices that are semi-sentient and wired in wifi space and that can embody virtuality. They would be connected by “hyperpipes”. (The authors explain: “The two endpoints of a ...
Blog Entry
A self-professed “peripatetic” professor, Dr. Chris Sorensen presented on “A University without Walls” at the final Provost Lecture of the year at K-State on Apr. 24.
He pointed out that those in academia tend to specialize in their respective fields. Yet, the creativity happens in the interfaces between domains of knowledge. He used Arthur Koestler’s idea of “bisociation” from “The Act of Creation” to show the interstices where new things may coalesce—in the intersections between disciplines and human ...
Continue reading Expanding the Traditional Lecture in F2F Space
Blog Entry
Every so often, a faculty member will start a query that leads in intriguing directions. And delightfully, this often comes from faculty who are new to online learning.
So this came about when a faculty member asked about letting her distance students learn how to use a digital microscope…and also wanting them to see various slides virtually. She wanted pretty much all live F2F microscope functionalities as well as access to a number of slides that ...
Blog Entry
It seems to be a basic truism that people need to practice shared endeavors. Coordination requires tight communications and cooperation.
At a recent conference, a presenter from the Department of Homeland Security described some desktop “spiral” exercises that brought together various offices to deal with shared potential large-scale disasters.
For example, one involved a pandemic sequence broken down in vignettes for a chronology of interactions and decision-making. Another involved flooding. These virtual simulated experiences involved various ...
Blog Entry
While driving in to work today, I was thinking about a new crop of online students, and it occurred to me that online learners do have a system of self-regulation of learning as a group. What does that mean? Well, online learners create a sense of community online, and they regulate their own community - in a sense.
They pay attention to each other’s asynchronous posts. They read each other’s works with interest and share joys ...
Continue reading The Self Regulation of Virtual Community by Online Learners
Blog Entry
Those of you who may wish to propose a chapter in e-learning in CTE (career and technical education) are welcome to do so. More information follows via the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=401
The title is as follows:
Handbook of Research on E-Learning Applications for Career and Technical Education: Technologies for Vocational Training
This will be edited by Dr. Victor Wang.
Continue reading Handbook on E-Learning for Career and Technical Education
Blog Entry
Now, I truly know what it’s like to be a spammer from firsthand experience. After perusing plenty of literature on digital imagery and e-learning, I culled a list of people who have published in the field. I found several Writer Zeroes who appeared on at least a half-dozen publications that were intriguing, and I just finally sent off the last batch of email queries to see if any may be interested in contributing to the text.
Blog Entry
So our in-house videographer had MacGyver-ed a solution for the sun streaming in through the shades behind the make-shift green screen (a piece of cloth he hung off some lighting poles). He had used clips to hold lights to get proper lighting on the subject. In the cramped office, he had set up the chairs and hidden the peace-inducing rockery left by an employee on leave.
After all that hard work, he had his subject well posed. The subject was ...
Continue reading Handling the Giggles during a Videotaping Session
Blog Entry
A chance comment by a faculty member started me on a brief run of research on “herding” behaviors in automated agents. The idea was initially to have a herd of cows online behavior as their real-life counterparts do when approached from a particular angle. Having only seen one cow up close (at a gas station, no less), I wasn’t sure about the actual behaviors, but I had read a little something about “flocking” behaviors and figured I’d look ...
Blog Entry
Every so often, in a presentation or conversation, a comment has a way of sticking in one’s memory. Here was a presentation by an individual presenting on the importance of leadership training. His presentation was tailored for the audience members in the military in order to sell this training.
He talked about crystallized and fluid intelligence, in terms of knowledge, abilities, skills and attitudes. He offered a global leadership model with meta-competencies. He showed a taxonomy of leadership competencies ...
Blog Entry
There it was in a mainstream article—the concept of being “web dead.” The concept is that some people want to be off-the-grid. They don’t want an online persona. They don’t want to be easily trackable. They don’t want automated digital messages selling them all sorts of unwanted junk and false promises. They don’t want to be known for what they’re doing or where they’re going.
In a sense, what can be made can ...
Blog Entry
MERLOT International Conference August 7-10, 2008, Minneapolis Hilton http://conference.merlot.org/2008/
See you there.
Continue reading MERLOT's International Conference in August
Blog Entry
Several concepts have emerged regarding academic publishing that require some consideration. One is the phenomenon of born-digital texts. These are texts that totally bypass peer-reviewed for-print and go right to digital e-texts. Then, there’s the other phenomenon of academic writers who will only sign over limited rights to a publisher and retain their own rights, so their own universities will not have to pay for the use of their intellectual property in their classes. Some of the larger universities ...
Continue reading Born-Digital Texts and "Mine Forever" Copyright
Blog Entry
There’s something charming about being able to watch a small college come online in creating an online program. What’s even more intriguing is watching from a distance and through the framework of an online course to train the faculty, staff and administrators—using the LMS they’ve selected for their program.
Having never set foot on the campus of this college and only driven by the small town where it’s based once on my way elsewhere, I ...
Blog Entry
As part of a parallel to a recent high tech conference, one of the participants set up a discussion on data portability. While quite a few were invited, there were just three of us in addition to the organizer and his assistant. I’m told that most people headed off to enjoy the sunshine and local shopping, and many certainly did even during the main conference.
Well, I went running in late, which meant I couldn’t make too much ...
Blog Entry
Starting out a new venture in an academic setting involves plenty of collaboration-building and consideration. Universities are complex environments, and decisions can have ripple effects and unintended consequences—even when different constituencies have been fully
So we had our first meeting to consider launching a distance learning faculty wiki out of this university…potentially through the division through which the university’s e-learnings offerings are supported, coordinated and created.
Not surprisingly, the first meeting involved some general ...
Blog Entry
The past several months, the issue of e-learning accessibility has escalated to be one of the central issues of concern on this campus. As such, that has meant that a fair amount of time has been spent on the laws and regulations for accessibility and then on the various technological strategies to ensure the accessibility of images, data tables, films, audio files, and other digital learning objects.
An interesting twist on this relates to The Layered Model of Computer Supported ...
Blog Entry
Dr. Alma Clayton-Pederson, Vice President of the American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) presented at the March 26 Provost Lecture Mar. 26, at K-State. I hadn’t realized that I’d actually already seen her speak in a 2006 AAC&U conference as one of the keynotes…until she was introduced. (Back in 2006, I was presenting at the AAC&U conference in Seattle and may have had the mind engaged in meeting up with former colleagues and ...
Continue reading Diversity and the Appreciation of the Other
Blog Entry
I have never been very sympathetic with those who go to conferences with a product to sell. That might be a new book or a company name or a new product or themselves, for a career change. Now, I’ll have to sheepishly re-evaluate and come up with a strategy for attracting talent for a book that I’ll be editing on digital imagery in e-learning.
While the concept itself is solid, and there’s plenty of strong academic writing ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
22 March 2008
Unfunded mandates are as popular in higher education as they are pretty much anywhere: not.
However, recently, our campus faculty and administration passed a policy that requires that e-learning meet accessibility guidelines. That aligns with national and state laws, but as an unfunded mandate, that requires plenty of creative hard work.
All the intentions here are good and positive, but there may be a lag between the desire and the actual doing. This campus has signed on for a big ...
Continue reading A Tip Sheet and an E-Learning Module to Promote E-Learning Accessibility
Blog Entry
Professor John Scigliano’s initiation into online space was not very salutary the way he tells it. He had logged on to Second Life when he was approached by a “furry” in lizard form, who promptly assaulted his avatar. This professor at the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences of Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, was somewhat traumatized, the way he tells it.
In “Payoffs, Spin-offs, and Ripoffs in Virtual Worlds: What Gain? What Pain?” at the ...
Continue reading IRBs, Video Releases and 3D Virtual Avatars
Blog Entry
The KU Libraries hosted a "Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities" conference back on March 7. They have published the resources of the presenters, and those may be found at the following site.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/CopyrightSymposium/CopyrightSymposiumhandouts.shtml
Blog Entry
Student retention has always been a bit of a challenge in many academic programs. Doctoral programs seem to feature about a 50% dropout rate. High schools have a 30% dropout rate. For e-learning ones, there are additional challenges, many of which have been mitigated with more student screening, student support, learner outreach, and faculty and staff training. That said, the challenge of retention does crop up in different ways.
Recently, a program that has high student entry traffic but low ...
Blog Entry
At a recent e-learning conference, a presenter on informal learning demonstrated his instrument that involved basic trivia questions and also involved an assessment of how much confidence each respondent had to the certainty of correctness for each answer.
He showed that people had quite a few incidences of high confidence linked with incorrect answers.
At another event, the speaker asked the audience how many of them made decisions in their lives knowing they were wrong. No ...
Blog Entry
The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching just released its Mar. 2008 issue (Vol. 4, No. 1). Please find the current issue at the link below.
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
Check it out.
Blog Entry
Every time we come up to spring break, I’m feeling more of that sense of anticipation. I truly adore my job, and the busier it gets, usually the happier and more productive I am. But the really cool thing about spring break is that there’s often a week to de-compress and focus on the less harried projects. The town empties out. The faculty all disappear to their respective homes. The campus has an abandoned feeling. The IT folks ...
Blog Entry
Dale A. Morris, an instructional development meteorologist of NOAA, in the presentation titled "National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario," presented a powerful live tabletop exercise designed to raise the situational awareness of the various entities that may be involved in a severe weather incident - the meteorologists, TV newscasters, and an emergency operations center.
A National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office piped in simulated weather information (based on past weather events). To create this, they built a weather event simulator ...
Continue reading The National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario
Blog Entry
Visualize a doctor who needs to trim a bone in order to fit a new hip. Or imagine some other surgical procedure which requires a steady hand and practical finesse.
A manufacturer of a haptic device showed what such a learning experience might be like by combining 3D computerized visuals with sound along with a haptic device (linked to the haptic virtual objects on-screen). Haptics, of course, relates to “touch” or “contact.”
The tabletop device was a white pen device ...
Blog Entry
Rich media refers to Web artifacts and sites that provide audio, video and interactivity. This includes downloadable or streaming videos that may be played on different media players like Adobe's Flash Player, Apple's QuickTime, Real Networks' RealPlayer, and Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Rich multimedia can add more full-sensory learning such as sound and dynamic motion video to an online or hybrid learning experience. The digital interactive media may offer a more active learner experience than passive viewing ...
Blog Entry
E-learning has evolved with numerous IT-enabled affordances, including many that involve digital imagery and informational graphics. Not only are traditional images like drawings, blueprints and photos widely used in e-learning, but, in today's e-learning enviornment,many new graphics have become useful learning aids.
These including screenshots, interactive maps, screencasts, photo montages, fractals, genetic artworks, video stills, animated agents, rich skin designs, satellite imagery, live data feed imagery, holography, 3D imaging, live webcam imagery, digital clay sculpting, acoustical imaging, and ...
Continue reading Call for Chapter Proposals: Digital Imagery in E-Learning
Blog Entry
Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities
The University of Kansas (KU) is hosting a day-long symposium on copyright issues in academia, with two powerhouse speakers: Tracy Mitrano and Wesley D. Blakeslee. This is a free conference for locals.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/copyrightsymposium/
Blog Entry
The Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI) group is now the center for the public SCORM development, outside the auspices of the US Department of Defense.
http://www.letsi.org/letsi/display/welcome/Home
It looks like they're still looking for more founding sponsors at a cost of $10K..to have a seat at the table in defining this organization. The deadline to join will be March 13.
Meanwhile, it's wait and "let's see" for the time being.
Blog Entry
The offer was just too good to resist: teaching a four-week course to faculty members in Washington state's community college system through WashingtonOnline. A last-minute change with a faculty member and overwhelming faculty interest in online teaching culminated in an available section of their "Teaching Online: Planning for Success." I was being a sentimentalist - as the course was one I'd taken a decade ago when I started teaching online regularly.
I decided to cut out any other extras ...
Continue reading Elegance: The "Learner Frustration" Assignment
Blog Entry
One of my prime faculty members with whom I'd worked intensively building an online course for three months suddenly told me that she was planning on resigning. When? I asked. In two weeks, she said. She basically meant, "Right away" because she was using her leftover leave time for the following days. It was between semesters, and she was using this short lull to make a run for it.
This was a sudden declaration - even for her - in a ...
Blog Entry
Invariably, part-way through the interaction in the faculty member's office, a look of caution, skepticism and cunning will cross that individual's face. Sometimes, it'll occur after weeks of support work. For others, it'll occur at the first meeting.
"Is this going to cost me?"
The "this" is the service of instructional design, the advisement, the work, the multimedia, and the digital artifacts. The "me" actually refers to the department or bureaucratic entity ...
Blog Entry
An essential assumption of education is that it can change people's mindsets and their abilities and behaviors. On the face of it, this is a fair enough assumption. People seem to have all acquired different skills and learning.
However, if one were to look at statistics about high-risk human behaviors - regarding smoking, drinking, HIV/AIDS prevention - it doesn't seem like education or knowledge has that great of an effect on human behavior. It seems that people may regurgitate ...
Blog Entry
A provocative new book by Dr. Mark Andrejevic called iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era offers a dark vision of a digital enclosure in which everything an individual does leaves an electronic trail that can be read and tracked and cross-referenced by others.
He offers dystopian visions of politicians tailoring different messages for different observers to garner votes. He sees intrusive uses of private information by marketers. And he sees a populace lured into believing an illusion of ...
Blog Entry
So what does it take to be able to show a full-length video (that is copyrighted) in a password protected online class? In other words, what does it take to host the media on university servers and to have the materials streamed (semi-protectively) for educational purposes?
Faculty will use rich media for F2F uses. They'll verify display rights with the library and then use the video materials, for purely educational non-commercial purposes. Trying to translate this freedom to an ...
Continue reading The New Territories of Digital Rights Management
Blog Entry
A situation that occasionally arises is that of course sabotage. This refers to the purposeful cause of destruction or defacement of an online class through particular behaviors. Just this last quarter, I had a student who actively engaged in several weeks of this. It's to the credit of the learning management system (LMS) that he couldn't get very far with his misdirected anger and behaviors. I'd like to address this because it would be hugely naive to ...
Blog Entry
Several years ago, as part of an educational program that I taught for, a special cohort of students were integrated with my online classes. With them came an administrative lurker. This person is a very ethical and professional individual who has held many positions of responsibility in various universities around the US. She has lurked with a great sense of finesse, and I thought that I should probably write a little something about the proper protocols for live class lurking ...
Continue reading The Proper Protocols for Live Class Lurking
Blog Entry
With all the attention being paid to MIT Open Courseware and other universities (reportedly over a 100) joining the bandwagon of offering their online course materials online, I thought it would be worth a visit to the site "More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware," writes CBS News in "Mega-Universities for the New Millennium: Internet Makes Top Colleges Accessible to All" (Dec ...
Blog Entry
Now is one of those moments that I've given myself some 15 minutes to writea blog. I just finished a slideshow on "e-learning course branding - simplified" and figured I'd write on something fresh on my mind.
Branding a course is often a hard sell for faculty. Only those who've had some prior exposure to branding take to it, and then, those are happy to work with the graphic artist, multimedia specialist, and others to create a course ...
Blog Entry
That my supervisors elfed themselves for the holidays has given me a little hope. That hope is that I can convince two of my supervisors to be a "Max Headroom" figure in an automated course I created for an elite few who may manage instances of our Axio LMS.
The automated learning is important for functionality but a little thick. Learners will be dealing with complex socio-technical systems within their own respective bureaucracies. This training will initiate them into a ...
Blog Entry
After a year immersing in studying sims, I only recently (a month ago) came across a concept that helps tie the elements together in a basic way. For me, that concept is one of "mental models." This frame has given me some new understandings that have grounded some learning about sims for me.
A mental model is a person's internal conceptualization of a certain paradigm or situation or phenomena, built around pre-existing knowledge. It's that person's sense-making ...
Blog Entry
Whitepapers are not usually much in the purview of instructional design, except maybe as a way to understand a new pedagogical method originated from private industry or a commercial whitepaper to understand a new software product.
That said, whitepapers can be so helpful in in-house learning and decision-making. For the office where I work, whitepapers are authoritative reports used to educate not customers per se but all of us in-house staff.
Instead of the very brief whitepapers that ...
Continue reading Using Whitepapers to Change (My) Mindset(s)
Blog Entry
by IDOS Newswire
01 February 2008
BTC eLearning is delighted to host Dr. Cable Green presenting on Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources. This presentation will be publicized throughout the system and externally, so please reserve your seat early.
When: February 11, 2008 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM Where: Online via Elluminate /Broadcast at BTC Building G, Conference Room A How to Attend: Email jjones@btc.ctc.edu with the email addresses of those you would like to add to ...
Continue reading "Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources"
Blog Entry
Back in my former college teaching days, a debate arose in Faculty Senate about how much to limit student credit hours by policy. As a student who totally slammed in huge numbers of credits in my undergraduate days, I argued for learner freedom. Others felt that the in loco parentis role meant that a little more oversight would be important to ensure student graduation rates.
In the context of this debate, our college VP of Academic Affairs raised the concept ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 January 2008
Games and Simulations in Online Learning Edited by David Gibson, Clark Aldrich and Marc Prensky Hershey: Information Science Publishing 2007 402 pp. hardcover
The three powerhouse editors of Games and Simulations in Online Learning -- David Gibson, Clark Aldrich and Marc Prensky - each have contributed to the field in their own ways.
Their editorial hands are clear in this text that addresses what's done effectively now, given pedagogical, cost and technology constraints.
The learning created through digital gaming and sims ...
Blog Entry
I first read about task decomposition in the context of business processes some years ago. And then, I've come across it in the prototyping of a simulation for a project a couple years ago. Here, I got to break down a number of complex decisions and paths into discrete snippets of information and decisions and potential repercussions of the decisions.
Then, in reading about simulations, I came across the idea of "critical incidences" or relevant events or situations (that ...
Blog Entry
So on a Friday just before a long-awaited holiday, I discovered that I had committed a "rookie" mistake. I'd been building contents for a CD and had saved the master file to one area, forgot where I'd saved it, and had been covering over the updates with an older file in another area.
It was totally a situation of misreading my own strategies, forgetting, not double checking, and then taking an action that affected a number of folders ...
Blog Entry
So one of my unofficial goals for this past year was to collaborate with a colleague on a piece of published writing.
I tried to do that with an article for an online newsletter on retrofitting a course for accessibility. That fell through when one of the advisory board members nixed my choice of a colleague. I tried again recently with a colleague at a different university who suggested that maybe we could find areas of shared interest for writing ...
Blog Entry
Every so often, there's a moment for a breather to look around at how the digital landscape has changed for e-learning. I marvel at the quality of various authoring tools for building digital learning objects. These tools now have features for accessibility. They have cooler design elements. They have high usability for even novice users. The designers have taken an anticipatory approach in building well designed tools.
The types of outputs are rich and varied. It used to be ...
Blog Entry
So why is ---'s name on the publication? I asked a former colleague. It's political, so I can get my doctorate, he said.
When I worked in private industry, the team lead on a project packed it with his friends not because they would contribute anything but because he wanted to give them political cover - to use their time as they saw fit. We met the team members early on, and we simply never saw them again throughout the ...
Blog Entry
Back in the day, the InDesign and Quark files were for print. Photos were .eps and ramped up dpi and CMYK for the inks.
The day the paper was digitally put to bed, I'd be off to the printers...often small business operations in the industrial parts of town. The layouts would be for tabloid-size papers (vs. broadsheet). The small front offices would be mere fronts for the really fun web presses in the back, which would smell of ...
Blog Entry
One of the benefits of having some slow days now and again is that one has some time to think about improving what is already extant. One of my favorite things is teaching a course called "Online Teaching, Design and Development" on the AxioTM Learning Management System.
This is a 5-week course (with a pre-week and a post-week for stragglers) that covers a range of topics:
Pre-week Learning and Review Week 1: Making the Change Week 2: Learning Curricular Issues ...
Continue reading Retrofitting a Course for Branding and Accessibility
Blog Entry
The editors of an on-campus newsletter have been running a series on accessibility in e-learning design.
They've touched on a variety of software. They've addressed various principles. They've looked at strategies for retrofitting a course for accessibility.
One of the articles I ran across noted that "enhanced communications interfaces" are generally used to enhance accessibility.
Then, I ran across an essential concept that is not often addressed in the accessibility context ...
Blog Entry
Wrapping up different projects often means dealing with all sorts of ephemera. That may mean a thin folder of paper (meeting notes, rubrics, annotated research) and brochures and posters, and fat digital folders of draft logos, images, digital video, sound files, text files, and other elements. There are the added resources from each project - whether it be new software or free graphics downloads or online research resources or connections with other individuals. There are the DVDs or CDs. There are ...
Continue reading Protecting Course Build and Project "Ephemera"
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 January 2008
The Tools for Successful Online Teaching By Lisa Dawley Hershey: Information Science Publishing 2007 244 pp. hardcover
With every resource, it seems somewhat inevitable that the authors will draw on their own experiences. For some, they hide the personal tie-ins through objective research. For others, the firsthand experiences are drawn upon heavily. This latter approach in Dr. Lisa Dawley's The Tools for Successful Online Teaching is its main strength and weakness.
Faculty who like to learn from their own ...
Continue reading The Tools for Successful Online Teaching (Brief Resource Review)
Blog Entry
"It's a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why?" -- Janet Rae-Dupree, Dec. 30, 2007, "Innovative minds don't think alike," The New York Times
In 1990, as a doctoral student, Elizabeth Newton apparently conducted research while at Stanford on "the curse of knowledge." Her research was intriguing. Rae-Dupree describes it as follows: "She gave one set of people, called 'tappers,' a list of commonly known ...
Blog Entry
The new year starts off with plenty of resolutions. And this also seems so for community organizations. Years ago, when I was in my teens, I started volunteering for a local community newspaper, and amazingly now, many years later, I'm still friends with many who are related to that paper. And somewhat less surprisingly, I've been called on to work on building a blog site for one aspect of that newspaper.
2008 is opening with the financial pressures ...
Blog Entry
There are various ways to test the efficacy of a computerized system. I've read about how theoretical systems are tested with known inputs and known outputs, and the real-world results are often used to test the theoretical programming that happens in the "black box" in between the inputs and the outputs.
A couple weekends ago, I came across the notion of self-playing games. This, too, is another method to test software games through trial and error. The game developers ...