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Back in November, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology hosted an “E-Book Expo: LYRASIS Panel Discussion” that examined some challenges with integrating e-books for use in higher education. This event occurred live and face-to-face but also with webcasting to an equal-sized audience. This was one of those events which I’d planned to participate in but which had such a weird scheduled time (probably a mistake) that I wasn’t even in the office by the time this event occurred ...
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New instructors to online teaching may assume that the process is generally tidy. A freshly created online course looks very structured and tidy, but a lived course is something else.
In an ideal world, students submit their work on time. They are attuned with help-seeking behaviors and know when and how to speak up and get help. They learn the online learning technologies well. They get the feedback and support that they need. They communicate openly and freely. They access ...
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MSNBC's Baggage Screening Interactive Experience
This shows some focused design work.
Continue reading MSNBC's Baggage Screening Interactive Experience
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Recently, I ran across an intriguing concept that describes a well known phenomena and actually slaps a name on it. In human-computer interaction, the “gulf of execution” is the gap between what users assume is needed to actualize a certain goal (via a computerized system) and what is actually required. (This phrase dates back to 1986 and Donald Norman’s “User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction”.
This gulf of execution is seen when people go to ...
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LYRASIS hosted a recent eBook Expo that surfaced quite a few intriguing concepts about some of the gaps preventing the smoother integration of electronic books into university libraries and repositories.
The audio could be better, but the web conference may be viewed at the following URL.
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A reviewer wrote to the effect that he / she doubted that there isn’t an ontology for instructional designers for staying legal. This was in the context of a piece of writing that summarizes the applied guidelines for namely that—not “stepping into it” while doing one’s daily job.
I’ve only seen one thing that approached an ontology, and that was from private industry. It was a style guidebook by a major software maker, and it was confidential ...
Continue reading An Ontology for Staying Legal in Instructional Design
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People who don’t deal often with administrators may find the experience a little off-putting. At least I’m finding that among some colleagues. The reason for that is partly cultural…but it’s also a difference of mindset and mental framework.
I can see where administrators can start to see all communications as strategic and all calls on their time situations of trying to get funding or to maintain funding. There are so many competing calls for funds ...
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“Our students are no longer the people that our educational system was designed to teach.”
--P. Sancho, P.P. Gómez-Martin & B. Fernández-Manjón (in “Multiplayer Role Games Applied to Problem Based Learning”, 2008)
Instructors who’ve been teaching for years prior to the online wave…may have a difficult time reaching current learners. This disconnection becomes clear now and again with questions that are asked by students or misunderstood assignments.
Online instructors really do have to go out of their way ...
Continue reading Redesigning to Reach / Teach Today's Students
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All sorts of factors may result in missed deadlines. Other projects take precedence. People burn out on projects. There are funding problems. Scope drift may affect the work. New technologies come with new challenges. People with necessary skill sets don’t show up. Whatever the reasons, it’s rarely a great idea to let deadlines slide. There have to be back-ups and other ways to achieve the same quality of work. On time. Near-time.
I write this as a chagrined ...
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So here, I had nearly 4 gigabytes of contents for a complex course that needed to be uploaded into a new learning / course management system (L/CMS). This L/CMS had been developed by a small company and was bought out by a mainline publisher, and its interface was like nothing I had seen before. As a person who has worked with a dozen or more L/CMSes over the years, that’s saying something. (And yes, this is low-level ...
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There it was again, the reference about the tensions between the privatization of information and the open flow of it. The really tough part is getting the combination right—of quality with free. I have found some helpful mix of quality-and-free, but on the whole, there’s a lot of free without a lot of quality.
In instructional design, a lot of our work involves re-packaging known information. Maybe because the learning relates to undergraduate learning and some ...
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Educause Quarterly has showcased a few endeavors here at K-State... Please check out the following:
And please check out the
the E-Learning and Teaching Exchange wiki / ELATEwiki .
Continue reading University Life Cafe and ELATEwiki in Educause Quarterly
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A recent article described a major mobile phone maker that removed over a thousand device apps created by a particular developer who apparently swiped others’ codes and who tried to manipulate the system by hiring people to give his apps high popularity ratings. A fellow user wised up and notified the company. The company apparently went into the back end and checked out the statistics of the popularity ratings and found anomalies—such as the ranges of evaluations (all 1s ...
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It’s always a privilege to read cutting-edge research and ideas for publications. There’s always learning to be had, and probing others’ methodologies and ideas results in fresh insights. Having gone through a range of works recently, I started thinking about the different paper types that are in circulation…and how labeling a paper accurately really enhances the chances of its being accepted. Different “genres” of writing have different conventions and expectations, and it helps to be able to ...
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A computer science assistant professor at one of my alma maters is working on a subject I’ve long wondered about—how to erase information or destroy data after a certain amount of time. Apparently, there are quite a few ways to achieve this in the digital space, but in peer-to-peer social networks, this researcher has found a way to disappear it.
“The Vanish program encrypts a message, breaks the encryption key into many tiny pieces, and ...
Continue reading Purposively Appearing and Disappearing Information
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Edward Castronova’s “Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality” melds his economics and policy background with his enjoyment of “synthetic worlds” to offer a provocative thesis, namely: people will head to virtual spaces en masse (“hundreds of millions”) within the next generation and bring with it huge impacts on the real world economies, workforces, and policy-making.
In a work that he terms “speculative nonfiction,” he projects into the future and sees virtual reality ...
Continue reading Virtual Worlds: Opportunities and Opportunity Costs
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“Outliers” are those at the two extreme ends of the bell curve, and in the context of the recent book about them, the focus is often on those at the top end of the bell curve—the elite and high achievers, those in the top 1-2%.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success” offers quite a few populist messages. People who achieve big were at the right place at the right time and had the native talent that ...
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I’ll own up to an intellectual crush. I’ve long admired Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas of “flow,” and I only recently was able to read his 1996 text titled “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.” This book is a very solid one for instructional designers because it offers a look at cross-domain creativity and innovation and then brings a psychologist’s insightful eye to how people innovative and what it requires.
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Sometimes, the timing of work has a strong effect on how one responds to it. So last night, when I got a series of emails related to a forthcoming publication—with yet another set of suggested revisions, I glowered at the screen. Fortunately, the editor was a person I had worked with for over a year, and we had a solid and positive working relationship. It’s hard to fault a person who has good intentions—and a high level ...
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A curious phenomenon was observed in a research paper that I read recently. This paper discussed some cultural blind spots in multi (cross)-national teams. One team did not consider a very obvious possible solution to a construction project because of their stereotypes of in-country expertise. This paper described this situation as one of impervious knowledge, information that doesn’t quite make it through the cultural hazes of various individuals who are influenced by their people groups.
One implied question ...
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In today’s tough attentional economy, driving people’s attention even for a short period is a challenging feat. It’s doable. Online audiences are fairly flexible and malleable at least the first time around, but sustained attentional feedback is a lot tougher to achieve.
Of course, the value of the attention also matters. Forced attention is worth a lot less than purposeful self-selected attention. Forced attention may be assignments that drive students to particular sites ...
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A recent and fruitful discussion occurred among a group of reviewers for an international online publication. This dealt with the issue of supporting international writers to ensure that their writing comes up to par, so they can publish and share their expertise and academic experiences. If the publication editor or review board offered support, would there be assumptions of “acceptance” even prior to the rigorous review? (After all, the particular journal sends works out to 8-12 different international stature reviewers ...
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"Digital Imagery and Informational Graphics in E-Learning: Maximizing Visual Technologies" will be released in November 2009.
http://www.igi-global.com/marketingdept/newsletter/novnewsletter/hai-jew.html
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
21 November 2009
“Innovation in Educational Technology: The Virtualization of K-12 and Higher Education”
Dr. Sam S. Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight, presented on “The US Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis” in late Oct. 2009. He made a forecast for the changes that would occur with online learning for Pre-K-12 to Higher Education through 2014, and he focused on the growth of social learning platforms and the internationalization of virtual education.
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A couple weeks ago, I was part of a free webinar that was supposed to be a clinic. People were given simple tasks…sent off to do their work…and were to rejoin the group some 20 minutes later to share their work. The work that emerged was very divergent, and it became clear that these faculty and instructional designers all had different mental models going in. The presenter very graciously made positive comments on their works and quickly moved ...
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Recently, I caught the tail end of a webinar that left a strong, positive impression. The presenter Dr. Patricia Ritschel-Trifilo (of Hardin-Simmons University) was demonstrating how she versioned a course lesson for the various types of learning styles based on a conceptualization by Albert Canfield summarized here http://people.usd.edu/~ssanto/canfield.html .
She applied the Canfield’s Learning Styles Inventory
http://arispa.com/styles/canfield1.html
or
www.tecweb.org/styles/canfield1.html
to her students and compared ...
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Every new technology has to be able to a pool of users who need training, win their loyalty, and continue to deliver quality with each new iteration of their technologies. This is especially true for different types of authoring software with so many “bells and whistles” and different types of terminology and ways of doing things.
The installed base gets used to having certain tools in certain locations. They get familiar with the mental models for the particular technologies. They ...
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Educause 2009 was streamed live to over a thousand participants at 44 colleges and universities in over 8 countries. The online presentations captured via MediaSite are available here.
http://educause.mediasite.com/mediasite/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=ef86ba82-810b-4e15-b223-097b2ea90230
Continue reading Educause 2009 National Conference (Recorded)
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Participatory Sensing
For a kind of “situational awareness,” various fields (law enforcement, environmental science, landscape architecture, biological sciences, architecture, agriculture, and others) are now tapping into “participatory sensing.” This is a kind of information capture based on the widespread distribution of mobile devices that capture imagery and sounds in a location-sensitive way. Many mobile technologies enable live and easy emailing of the information and uploading of the contents to the WWW. Dedicated remote sensors also enable rich information captures.
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Note: Roger McHaney will be co-presenting "Virtual Collaboration: Applied Projects and Tools" 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, at Union 212, as part of the Instructional Design Technology Roundtables. All are welcome to attend.
Those of you who attended preschool years ago probably learned the importance of sharing. Today, in the Web’s early youth, the same lessons are being reinforced as we learn to share without regard to geography or time ...
Continue reading Roger McHaney: Virtual Collaboration in Academic Courses
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Business models around higher education are changing based on the downward pressures of “free” digital contents and bits and bytes in the current economy—as it goes through a massive retrenchment.
Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (2009) suggests that business organizations that want to be competitive will need to reconceptualize prices and how to harness the power of digital contents and free products and services in order to offer value and connect with potential consumers ...
Continue reading Reconceptualizing "Free" and Online Higher Education
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The folks I know in academia have mixed feelings about peer review. “Peer review” simply means that colleagues have a lot of power over one’s teaching, one’s social standing, one’s publications, and one’s contributions to a field.
Peers are the “gatekeepers” in academia. They have a say on tenure. They have a say about whether one presents at conferences. They critique articles and chapters and suggest whether works should appear in public venues or not. They ...
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The building of online learning does not only draw on the writing of textbooks and contents on websites and in digital libraries. Every so often, faculty members include what is known as “gray” or “fugitive” literature. These are informational and unstructured contents that are not part of the official vetted literature in a domain field.
The items of a fugitive literature involve meeting notes, drafts, unpublished photos, unpublished drafts, policy statements, research data sets, research ...
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Hello, all: A number of universities have created strong academic degree programs and courses for online delivery. Their areas of specialty enable many to stand out as global leaders in particular domain-field niches, disciplinary fields, and cross-disciplinary areas of study. How these colleges and universities reach out to a global and local student population is of interest, particularly their global branding strategies.
I am conducting a survey on the global branding of e-learning programs and courses in higher education.
This ...
Continue reading Global Branding of E-Learning in Higher Education (Survey)
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A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.
Subject matter experts ...
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Some online learners give indications of great frustrations with the learning / course management technologies, but they’ll do it without direct communications. They’ll send endless emails and treat those like TMs. They’ll send spam emails to the entire class with personal queries. They’ll post unopenable files, and when the first one doesn’t work, they’ll keep doing the same thing a half dozen times instead of just pasting their text into the HTML window.
They’ll ...
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Dr. Mark David Milliron presented on "A New Generation of Learning: Diverse Students, Emerging Technologies, and a Sustainability Challenge" at the recent Axio Learning Conference in Sept. 2009.
The video capture of this event will be available at the following URLs:
http://www.axioconference.org/followup
http://www.k-state.edu/provost/academic/lecture/2009-2010/milliron.htm
http://www.axioconference.org/schedule/keynote-presentation/
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Years ago, I wrote about the intimidation factor about “data hungry” models for simulations and decision-making cases. Here, we had projects that involved the uses of massive amounts of information and digital imagery. I ripped through a proprietary repository of some 30,000 images and still had troubles finding imagery for particular concepts…and the simulation piece was a small part of the larger automated learning experience.
Well, I’m having a sense of déjà vu again, albeit with Web ...
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For a long time, my mental conceptualization of digital documents was that of finalized ones. I thought of finalized videos…finalized slideshows…finalized imagery…finalized articles.
However, after some consideration, I realize that many of my digital documents are transitory and temporal ones. They are raw images, audio, or video clips that get processed into a finalized work. Or they are annotated research documents that feed the research. Or they are sticky notes for feedback on a finalized project. By ...
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A recent article discussed the phenomena of “psychological ownership” of digital contents. The context of this was about how individual work is marked in a collaborative work environment. The authors discuss various motives for ownership—perceptual (social-cognitive) or part of the human need to categorize the world, instrumental (efficacy and in control) to satisfy (workplace or personal) needs, and symbolic (self-identity) in terms of how people perceive themselves (Wang, Battocchi, Graziola, Pianesi, Tomasini, Zancanaro, & Nass, 2006, p. 226). The researchers ...
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I have heard of some “teaching to the unconscious” in the sense of marketing, advertising, and branding. I have also read that the jury is out in terms of the research on the efficacy / inefficacy of whether such outreaches actually work.
Then recently, after I wheedled a book from a colleague that I’d been wanting to read for a long time, I came across this concept again. The concept here was found in Raph Koster’s much-cited book “A ...
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Most people can tell a 1970s movie by its design, the soundtrack, the generational jokes, the hairstyles, the fashions, and the video technologies. In the same way, dated multimedia and curricular materials may be identifiable by their styling…and their lack of direct and applied relevance.
One method for cost savings in instructional design is to pursue designs for curriculum which are “sustainable.” Another term for this is “future-proofing,” which is a little high-minded and ...
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This last entry of this series focuses on finding the resources which may be good “homes” for a particular author. The following then are some of my favorite tips.
One way in this modern age of publishing is to evolve the informal to the formal. One example of this is the writing of a blog and turning that opportunity to writing articles and then maybe chapters and maybe books.
Another strategy is to see ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 6 of 6)
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People who haven’t published think that their lives change after publication of a work. It really doesn’t in a major way. There may be small changes. That’s been my experience, anyway.
Having published for a number of years, I have found that publishing a work really doesn’t change one’s life. There’s always been a muted response. There may be offers to co-write academic works but usually from people with whom I have ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 5 of 6)
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http://www.k-state.edu/lafene/h1n1_guidelines_for_instructors.pdf
Continue reading Instructional Contingency Planning in Case of H1N1 Outbreak
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This seminar series then addresses the various written artifacts in writing and publishing. Then, this describes a typical publishing cycle. Finally, this also addresses the publishing implications of digital contents—including multimedia.
The common written artifacts are the following related to academic writing.
Query letter: A cover letter offering topic ideas and a professional author introduction
Book prospectus: An overview of the domain area, objectives of the book, possible audiences, suggested titles, academic value, other textbook competitors ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 4 of 6)
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The sticky issue of authorship then arises. Should a writer author a work himself or herself? Should he / she co-write a work?
Most writers write from central areas of expertise. They have primary research and experience in a particular part of a field, a professional interest in that area, access to all the necessary information, and an ability to create all the informational substance and digital contents. In those situations, there are plenty of reasons to go solo ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 3 of 6)
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The actual contents of the slideshow presentation, after several weeks of evolution, comes together in a nifty two-hour session. The slideshow objectives are defined as follows:
Define academic publishing as a field
Review the conventions and ethics of academic writing
Discuss the relevant laws affecting academic publishing
Describe information gathering and research
Describe some written artifacts related to publishing
Review usual academic publisher processes
Explain imagery concerns for publishing
Describe multimedia often created for academic publication
Discuss issues for writers ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 2 of 6)
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A colleague on a branch campus asked if I wanted to collaborate on a piece of writing for publication. Those invitations are fairly common, and they come from people I’ve never even met to those who invite me out for coffee and are those from peripheral fields. The usual answer is “no” not out of any arrogance, but because the logistics of collaboration require that the collaborators have some shared research and experiences. Without that, what’s there to ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 1 of 6)
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“The Network is your computer,” goes one of the slogans.
The techno buzz around the office and online has been about “cloud computing.” So when the email appeared in my box about Sun Microsystems offering a webinar called “Introduction to Cloud Computing…for Enterprise Users,” I signed up—only to see that opportunity get overshadowed by other commitments. Then, they sent a follow-up email offering the archived webinar online. Perfect.
Dr. Lew Tucker ...
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Doing instructional design work for speed is an occasional reality for IDs at the university. Speed becomes a critical issue whenever there are deadline-sensitive projects. In these situations, there are deadlines from grant funders, compliance trainings, legal requirements, course-launch deadlines, commercial deadlines, and any number of other reasons.
Speed is seldom the first requirement, but in some cases, it can be. Sometimes, speed is the over-riding factor. Sometimes when a crucial staff member has moved on ...
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The draft article came in a neat little package. Here was a college that had found some open-source freeware that could help its institution deal with student service issues as well as resource management. They are arguing that their going the open-source route was saving them a lot of money and time and resources. However, the argument did not include baseline definitions of the pre- and post- intervention situations. There were no real metrics to speak of, only assertions without ...
Continue reading Making the "Business Case" for a Particular Technology
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For many freshman-level courses, it may be fair to assume that learners will be coming in cold to the learning domain. Coming in “cold” means that they lack basic background in the field. It also means that their skillsets may be scatter-shot in terms of the subject materials, and the learners may well be acquiring their learning skills as they go.
Strategies for supporting novice learners to a learning domain are manifold. First, one strategy involves building ...
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There are a number of strategies to organize course contents in the field of instructional design. One de facto one is to rely on the tables of contents of the selected textbook(s) for a course.
For many faculty, this is almost assumed. They are relying on the subject matter experts of a field who also have the ability to write and express themselves. Or they’re using collections that include many contributions from different authors organized ...
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The opening of the article was riveting. An instructor of an introductory course in computer programming was noticing his student demographics, and the high probability that they…
“Are from some minority group Did some portion of their k-12 in a compromised educational system Are students not just out of high school and may be working Are not born in the United States Speak English as there (sic) second language Have very little (sic) computer skills May be dismayed by the ...
Continue reading The Challenges of the "Highly Anxious" Student Profile
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In light of the H1N1 concerns regarding "high touch" surfaces...
http://itnews.itac.k-state.edu/2009/09/how-to-clean-computer-keyboard-and-mouse-surfaces/
Continue reading How to Clean Computer Keyboard and Mouse Surfaces
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Depending on the domain field and the leaders of an instructional design project, any number of “design principles” may guide a project. Design principles are the main concepts and values underlying a curricular build. These concepts are rarely explicitly spelled out, possibly because the subject matter experts assume these concepts as a matter-of-course. These are not defined in the documentation supporting projects like grant documents or official course descriptions. And yet, these principles are important for a successful e-learning project ...
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Computer science articles do not usually involve freehand pencil drawings, but recently, I ran across some academic research articles on design that had scanned freehand pencil images embedded in the text. There it was—the charm of hand-drawn early concepts of various navigational structures or design templates.
There was the idiosyncratic scratchy handwriting. There were the varying lines drawn with assurance and a rough artistry. That refreshing feel of a raw pencil on paper is such an Important aspect to ...
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Like many people, I care about my work. I want to do a good job on every project that I work on. I’ve also been out in the world enough to know that healthy critique and user feedback are critical to enhance projects, so I’m also not that protective of my work. People have opinions, and they have every right to them.
On the whole, most work developed for a project is used, albeit with some trimming here ...
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MERLOT's JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching) just published a position paper titled "Exploring the Immersive Parasocial: Is it You or the Thought of You?" related to 3D immersive learning.
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no3/hai-jew_0909.htm
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
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Design questions that other people wrangle with regarding socio-technical systems often reveal a lot about people. With the emphasis on self-help and self-management as a money-savings endeavor for education, healthcare, and other aspects of modern life, people have been looking at how to offer sufficient feedback and encouragement to help people self-assess, and further, to help them know when to seek help (and from where).
Help-seeking is not as simple of a phenomena as one might ...
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It may be the tough funding environment, but I have run across a number of grant proposals by various faculty that are somewhat gap-filled. There are proposals for a full program of courses that have no pay for the instructors in other departments (as if they would work for free). Or there are proposals for development grants that suggest a type of learning of creating learning objects but without actual deliverables. Or faculty will suggest the building of learning objects ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 September 2009
A recent foray into the riches of e-learning research has led to a fascinating article. Here, the researcher cleverly examined the popularity of particular researchers based on a number of factors (their links to other professionals, their visibility, and their professional affiliations) to see if that might lead to any distortions in self-estimation—in terms of estimating how many articles they had published in the past three years (measured against the actual objective number of publications).
People experience ...
Continue reading Network Standing, Attributions for Popularity, and Self Delusions
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The decision in publication has not been about going to an academic print one vs. a Web-based one because so many academic journals either have gone wholly online or archive digitally. Rather, the question now seems more to be about going for high-brow or low-brow, to radically over-simplify.
On the one extreme are the journals that require a half-year to a year of peer review before a decision is made and then rigorous publishing processes to shape an article into ...
Continue reading Going for Elite Academic Journals or More Populist Ones?
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A colleague recently emailed me with an interesting concept—the idea that it takes some 18 months for students to decide to take on a particular course of new learning…and the need for at least about a year before a new degree program or course catches on. The concept is something like having to live with an idea for a while before getting used to it sufficiently to accept it.
At this time when so many departments are working ...
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A good friend of mine was befuddled by the manuscript submittal process for an academic paper. This paper was a culmination of a life’s work in reading and dyslexia, and the manuscript had gone through the process of being a dissertation, a co-authored work, and now finally a revised paper that would optimally fit the standards of the international magazine. She kept getting email reminders that her submission was incomplete and that she needed to submit the work. She ...
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There’s a lot to be said for learning from difficulties and challenges, so as to head off future problems or to improve ways of dealing. It’s even better to learn from a near-miss, or it’s at least less costly. Recently, we had a confluence of events that could have been problematic except for some mad scrambling at the last minute. I’ll leave the details alone here. What was learned from this effort was the importance of ...
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Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
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Instructional designers engage in light datamining now and again. There’s going into the back-end of a course to pull records about student interactions for value-added course redesign. There’s tapping into the stats from the survey instruments to evaluate the hardiness of an assessment. There are small overlaps with PI work when they evaluate information from their own research databases.
And then there’s watching others mix and match databases to try to surface hidden information.
Computing ...
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The implications of the future internet are that it will have a kind of machine knowledge of the individual user, so searches for information may be customized, and services (and advertising) may be tailored to the particular users. In a ubiquitous setting (with wifi and mobile devices and ambient intelligence), people could have their needs (digital and beyond) met in a variety of ways.
If that sounds claustrophobic to some (as it does to M. Andrejevic in his insightful book ...
Continue reading The Future Internet and its Implications for E-Learning
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Wired Magazine is hosting a contest to see how easily findable one of their reporters may be if he is active as a virtual citizen but is moving around incognito.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=8412415&page=1
How tight is the "digital enclosure"?
P.S. This is assuming that law enforcement's prodigious resources aren't being employed--so no official systems are involved...but just for regular citizens, how effective can they be in finding someone who ...
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Dr. Sam Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight, presented on “Open Learning: The Convergence of Collaboration-Based Learning and Social Network Learning” (June 24, 2009) via a free webinar.
He explained his role in surveilling various customer segments—consumer; PreK-12; higher education; corporations and businesses; the federal government; state and local government; associations, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and nonprofits; and healthcare—in terms of their use of online learning products.
Their model tracks ...
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A recent project has had me exploring the ethics of the instructional design profession. As far as I can tell, there is not a professional organization that spells out the ethics. The research literature has a fair amount on information technology (IT) ethics, borrowed to a degree from business and engineering ethics. Instructional design (ID), though, still requires collaborative reflection and analysis to surface practical values of right and wrong.
In the absence of a professional society, the ...
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There’s that aphorism that suggests that the moment one stops changing, one starts to diminish. Skills decay sets in, and worse yet, boredom. In that vein, I started thinking of “aspirational” instructional design—the kind of work that one hopes will come about from federal grant funding in the pipeline.
Any sort of complex curricular build is desirable. Complex curricular builds with a challenging learning base means more collaborative techniques and creative deployment of technologies. Working on ...
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After years of working with faculty on various curriculum projects, I’ve long known that it helps to have a loose hand on certain aspects of a project but to run with responsibilities seriously in all cases, too. A recent project involved brainstorming a series of scripts for a new website, and the webisode preview of one of those scripts recently was launched to some very positive feedback. I was running through a “lessons learned” from that work.
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The work of a reviewer is wonderful in a lot of ways—with plenty of access to fresh ideas and opportunities to shape journals in terms of contents, voices, and directions. These works help one see what colleagues are doing around the country and world. The reviewer work also encourages one to stay on top of the field and to make efforts to enhance it.
While journals get what is cutting-edge (sometimes), it’s rare to get anything bleeding-edge. For ...
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In pretty much every conference that I have attended, there have been some presentations or workshops on the legal and policy environment in which instructional designers and IT folks work. The affordances and constraints of a litigious environment mean that we have to proceed defensively.
Word is that “anonymity” (which has never truly existed online, no?) also is no defense against libel. People are realizing that there are limits to free speech, just as there are with every legal right ...
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In the span of a few days, I had gone online to download open-source free imagery for use in a newspaper article for a for-profit newspaper. I have contacted professionals using free email systems for freelance work. I have visited commercial news with stock images that are alt-texted in a way that shows that they’re stock images—either as freeware or as sold objects.
It used to be that placeholder images would be selected lightly for representations, but I ...
Continue reading For-Profit Reliance on Open-Source Contents and Freebies
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At the recent SIDLIT conference, I attended Tracy Newman’s “Digital Storytelling: How to Bring your Stories to Life,” and the presenter offered a helpful concept in the assigning of video storytelling and creation to students.
Newman cited research that showed that student creations of digital stories may address a range of skills: research, writing, organization, technology, presentation, interview, interpersonal, problem-solving, and assessment skills. The secret, though, is to incrementalize the work ...
Continue reading A "Seemingly Simple" Assignment (in Digital Storytelling)
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http://scholarspace.jccc.edu/sidlit/15
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 August 2009
In a recent project, an online course was co-developed by multiple institutions, and the digital contents (learning modules with video, flashcards, slideshows, and additional simulations) had to be ported onto several different learning / course management systems (LCMSs).
The numbers and types of features on L/CMSes have stabilized among the surviving online learning systems. Over the years as this field as evolved, many commercial players jumped in; a few open-source ones have been popularized ...
Continue reading Transferring Digital Contents between Learning Management Systems
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Check out the trailer for an educational webisode series ("Suzy's Strategies") on doing well in college.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UobRqWGZNK8
for a college student well-being site located at
www.universitylifecafe.org
This webisode series will launch this Fall 2009.
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A recent webinar brought to mind again the importance of measuring learning. That’s a given in most professional workplaces, where the return on investment (ROI) has to be measured and justified to support the funding. Dr. Patti Phillips’ “Show me the Money: How to Determine the ROI in People, Projects and Programs” (part of the Provocative Ideas Free Webinars) discussed some of the ROI methodology (as developed by Jack Phillips developed in the early 1970s).
To ...
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At the recent SIDLIT conference in Overland Park, KS, Tim Murphy presented on “Meeting the Challenges of International Online Teaching.” His task was to take part in online course redesigns for better acceptance by international audiences. He began with a Venn diagram of overlapping circles representing place, language and culture, for a global classroom.
At one point in the presentation, he asked rhetorically whether synchronous communications were ever advisable for international online classrooms. One ...
Continue reading Adjustments for International Online Teaching
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Accidental learning happens as a byproduct of formal or informal learning. It is unintentional and sometimes not even noticed by the learner. It is informed by serendipity, and it can take a person in powerful directions if they are open-minded, curious, and attuned to the potential for learning at every moment.
For instructional designers, considering ways to enhance the possibilities of learners bumping up against ideas and discovering new information should be part of the design. There can be rich ...
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Check out various presentations and resources from the C2C SIDLIT conferences beginning in 2008, in this newly launched site out of JCCC in Overland Park, KS.
http://scholarspace.jccc.edu/topdownloads.html
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http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/07/0707_ceo_guide_security/21.htm
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Collaborations across institutions involve rotating access points to various technological systems—learning / course management systems, digital repositories, and databases—and that means slivers of time when one has differing identities and codes. These are necessary to access information, collaborate with others, troubleshoot technologies, and learn new systems.
These “access windows” are often instructive. They show ways that different institutions deploy their technologies. One learns how systems work or don’t work with various digital artifacts ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 July 2009
A recent article referred to how some companies design technological tools for amateurs vs. novices. In a sense, instructional design may also differentiate between learners based on amateurs vs. novices—as a construct.
Okay, so definitions, first. A “novice” is a person who eventually aims to be an expert. This person is at the beginning stages of learning about a particular area of expertise. This person will be initiated into a field from elementary understandings to ...
Continue reading Designing Technological Tools (and Instruction) for Amateurs vs. Novices
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A regular part of email life involves vetting the spam. Many of these are very easy to detect—based on the misspellings, the uses of the Cyrillic Russian alphabet, the come-ins for password or account information, the calls for secrecy, the offers of low-cost pharmaceuticals, body enhancements, and other predictable information.
Recently, I got one that was a personalized spear-phishing venture that broke the mold. It was from Nigeria (red flag) and asked for my editing services for a publication ...
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A recent article I perused discussed how the researchers differentiated their research and development (R&D) projects from other companies by a variety of strategies. They discussed how they selected particular research fields where they could excel, and the subtext seemed to be that that particular field was unclaimed. Their predominance in it was unchallenged, with “no or few competition.” They purposefully worked with target customers on strategic collaborations to meet specific market needs. They used external technologies and open ...
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One of the journals that I work with on occasion has a stated policy goal of going global linguistically. They already are on four continents and a half-dozen countries, in terms of their editorial pool. Their readers are from all over. Now, some six and a half years into publishing, they want to move their abstracts into a range of different languages.
The question then is how and what sort of human talent is there to do the translating and ...
Continue reading An E-Journal: Multiple Languages and Going Global
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Dr. Ray E. Jimenez, Managing Director and Chief Learning Architect of Vignettes for Training, presented on “Do It Yourself E-Learning” through SimplifyeLearning.com and Elluminate™. This presenter highlighted three features that are necessary for DIY builds within organizations with training needs. These include simplicity, succinctness, and reusability.
Building efficient DIY e-learning should be strategized instead of having individuals “wing it,” he said. He cited John Maeda (of MIT)’s book “The New Simplicity” as an informative ...
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After a complex course build, there may be all sorts of digital detritus. These are raw files, some of them with different names but with similar contents as another file. There may be reference articles. There may be snippets of video that didn’t make it off the cutting-room floor.
In every complex course build, messiness occurs. Messiness would involve a variety of raw files.
For collaborative projects where there is no chokepoint for information and where creativity is the ...
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A recent wrap-up to a project ended with my comment to my direct lead that we were very fortunate that everything went well with this half-year collaborative course build. I quipped, “You have no idea how many things could have gone wrong.”
That same lesson came back to haunt me on a different project, which involved a fair amount of videography. Let me preface this with the reality that I’ve had very good videography support on all my projects ...
Continue reading All the Stuff that can Scotch a Video Project
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 July 2009
The simulation creator and author Clark Aldrich held a webinar recently titled “The Unifying View of Highly Interactive Virtual Environment (HIVE) Learning.” While I’d long looked forward to this presentation, I ended up with one of those mash-up days that allowed me to log on for the last 10 minutes of the presentation, and so I ended up experiencing this presentation as a re-run. Still, I found much that was thoughtful about his ideas.
(Truth to tell, I have ...
Continue reading Employing Highly Interactive Virtual Environments for "Learning to Do"
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When faculty clients or groups contract with web designers for a product, they often use a memorandum of agreement (or understanding) to define the work that will be done. The MOA or MOU should often specify a site tune-up within a particular time frame after a site launches.
The rationale is that no matter how prescient a development team is, it takes testing a site in the real world with real users to know how well the design ideas play ...
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Remote learners have many of the same needs as face-to-face students. These needs go beyond the learning to such things as getting letters-of-recommendation. For many such letters—such as verifying writing skills and academic work—I have no problems writing emails or letters or filling out forms.
What things get tougher is when students ask for letters recommending them for certain jobs that mention skill sets that I have no knowledge about. These may involve customer service, private information handling ...
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Every so often, the proverbial curtain is pulled back, and one gets a sense of the inner workings of a company. This happened recently with an anomaly with a grading system in a learning / course management system. The downloaded grades did not fully download, and a number of columns of student work did not show any points.
I replicated this on my multiple computers and then called the 24/7 helpdesk. The person there asked me to delete my current ...
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There are plenty of educators who can speak coherently and amusingly off-the-cuff. They jot a few notes down about the main points they want to it, and you turn on the camera or the digital audio recorder, and they’re off. One or two takes, and you’re done.
This approach seems quite popular—with greater speeds of creation, more of a sense of speaker personality, more impulsivity, and more casual informality. There are also more chances for instructor gaffes ...
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When I make rookie mistakes, I truly have no one to blame but myself. One recent one left me on the computers for five straight hours downloading video from two mini-DV cassettes because I had failed to save the media files with the project. I was trying to get done quickly, and had not noticed that the “include media” button had been un-clicked / untoggled by whoever used the software before I did. Not only that, but I usually edit the ...
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In every academic field, virtually, there is a push for discovering new information and new ways to doing things. This is also true for instructional design, which is a cross-disciplinary area.
There are also innovations from mulling over the extant research, which involve mostly qualitative and case-based works. There are the occasional quantitative types of research, but those are more about doctoral dissertations and system-wide research and the occasional business-funded research study. Truth to tell, it may be that the ...
Continue reading Accelerants for Innovations in Instructional Design Research
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The World Digital Library offers various resources from different times and locales around the globe. The contents may well be copyrighted because this resources is contributed to from a variety of copyright holders. The items are well labeled with metadata and tagging.
http://www.wdl.org/en/
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In a time of economic strain, it seems that maintaining goodwill is more important than ever. So many of the projects that I deal with (both in public and private spheres) depend on benevolence and generosity and patience.
One example of this concept not working was with a publisher that solicited chapters for a book. The editor mentioned that all contributors would get a free contributor copy. Then, when the book was about to be published, they sent ...
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This seems like an interesting resource for some specific purposes.
http://www.voki.com/
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A recent course build by a faculty member built the course foundation on resources found on the Web. Here, the instructor used links to downloadable files, simulations, and videos. She eschewed any textbooks. To create an overlay, she did add a syllabus and supplementary videos to explain the contents. She also invited professional colleagues to take part in videotaped interviews that illuminated the issues further.
It struck me that she was truly relying on the Web for her curriculum—by ...
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Faculty members do accrue a collection of student excuses for late or poor work. Many of the excuses are dire in terms of health or housing or relationship issues. Students often know the policy parameters sufficiently to where they offer insights that are excusable. And I’ve been around long enough to know that life doesn’t necessarily fit set parameters. There are valid reasons for late work.
I will request evidentiary proof at times. At times, I will even ...
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Subject matter experts from a variety of fields are turning towards online learning as a way to serve a wider constituency of learners. Some get on online learning projects because of grant funding and the originality of their expertise. Not all who get on projects particularly believe in online learning. As a matter of fact, some approach online learning with mixed emotions and attitudes. In a team that works well, these concerns are surfaced and addressed incrementally.
Continue reading Learning about E-Learning as a Team Collaboration Byproduct
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One of my recent projects has involved the use of peer education, or the use of students to serve as supporters and peer advisors for fellow students on issues of acclimating to campus and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. These programs involve some vetting and training of students to support these services. This endeavor is a way to save on funds, but it’s also about packaging important information in a way that may be more effectively delivered to people—through ...
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A recent project highlighted the phenomena of designing websites to deliver information for synchronous wide-scale interactions. This refers to the delivery of information (via text and multimedia) to a broad-spectrum audience in real-time, often in a crisis or emergency situation. One aspect of this is that the information is not only for situational awareness but for decision supports—making choices in real time and with real implications.
Some basic tenets of crisis communications involve the need for having ...
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The research literature on innovations as they proliferate into a community is engaging. One central concept is the idea that innovations are risky for a world that may not be ready for it. Being first involves changing human attitudes and behaviors, structures, technologies, and the larger economies—for an innovation to actually “take.”
These entrepreneurial risks are important to take to move technologies forward to improve human lives. The challenge though is building to an environment that may not fully ...
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Here is an article about a course designed to address academic dishonesty.
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no2/roberts_0609.pdf
Continue reading An Online Course for Students Addressing Academic Dishonesty
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A generic syllabus is one that captures the main contents of an online course: the course description, the defined learning objectives, the catalog information, related texts and resources, a course schedule (to show the overall e-learning trajectory and course structure), the grading structure, and course policies (civility clauses, accessibility issues, and others). I had assumed that it always comes with every online course build, but one of the faculty on the build team asked several times about what this syllabus ...
Continue reading The Uses of Generic Syllabi in Collaborative Course Builds
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For the faculty and staff who will be hitting the road this summer, many will be taking their various digital devices and laptop computers. In that spirit, our campus IT security folks offered a training to support us in keeping both equipment and data safe.
The actual physical protections of equipment are pretty straightforward, with many locking devices that may be used to secure laptops to more fixed surfaces. The presenter suggested bags that do not look like laptop ones ...
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The use of e-learning to back up universities during times of crisis or emergencies has long been in discussions on various campuses. With the WHO declaration of H1N1 at the pandemic flu level on June 11, some are re-looking at virtual learning as a way to support social distancing—or strategies for self-isolating as a protective measure to keep the flu from being passed from person-to-person and possibly recombining in other more dangerous ways.
It’s interesting, but faculty uses ...
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Elluminate™ hosted “Informal Learning or Non-Formal Learning: What Makes More Sense In Your Organization” presented by Lance Dublin of Dublin Group (dublinconsulting.net)and a worldwide consultant on learning (on June 10). Between formal and informal learning, is there another way—with “non-formal learning” as a semi-structured, semi-purposeful / semi-random way of learning in Web 2.0 spaces. (This suggests that formal learning tends to be structured and purposive, and informal learning tends to be unstructured and random.)
Dublin seemed to ...
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With the growing popularity of various repositories of information, many amateurs have joined in the work of informal archival and preservation of contents. And recently, I have heard about a project at a university (not in the US) that encouraged the digital sharing of privately-owned artifacts related to WWII via digital photo captures.
There was no apparent training of those who posted the contents, and there was not apparent vetting. People basically identified artifacts from WWII based on family lore ...
Continue reading Protecting Solicited Amateur Digital Work...into the Future
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Like most work, projects tend to have stages, and these include a “sunset” stage. This is where the instructional designer takes a quick bow and splits. This is usually defined by the MOU (memorandum of agreement), or more specifically, when the funds run out. Optimally, this coincides with the work’s final wrap-up and acceptance of the curriculum by all parties involved.
Tapering off on a project involves letting the principals and the team members know that the tapering phase ...
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Getting information out to people can be a messy business. It gets worse when the information is coming from individuals working in a variety of disciplines in a time-constricted crisis mode. It just so happened that when the H1N1 (Round 1) broke earlier this spring, that I was working on a multi-institutional public health project. I had met a range of experts and was learning of the hard work of capturing raw research and reaching out to the public in ...
Continue reading Rumors, Street Cred, Science, and Misinformation
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On a recent and rare afternoon when I had a chance to attend a presentation on tips for writing up NSF grants, I came away with an intriguing angle. (And do instructional designers support the conceptualizing, writing and fulfillment of federal grants—you bet!)
Dr. Parag R. Chitnis described the general guidelines for NSFs…which focus on science and engineering (but not the study of diseases). He suggested that this organization has the defined strategies of funding “discovery, infrastructure, learning ...
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For about half a year now, I’ve been reviewing contents for two electronic publications for e-learning, and while both have been on my reading list, I’ve had a comfy insider’s view of some of their policies and editorial practices.
The truth is that for most publications, they would not be able to survive financially if they had to commission the works that they run. An article can take many many many dozens of hours of research, writing ...
Continue reading DIfferent Mindsets and Cultures for Different E-Publications
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onguardonline.gov/wireless.html
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A recent article about game design for a particular application raised the question of the ethical debates the authors went through to decide whether or not to take on the particular project. It strikes me that going through the considerations of whether or not to take on a particular project—based on ethical grounds and personal and professional values—is critical.
Let me clarify. My work has always been public-side and open. As a long-time college instructor and writer, I ...
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by IDOS Newswire
28 May 2009
Dr. Carla R. Payne of Union Institute and the University of Vermont College has recently edited an edition of a reference text titled "Information Technolgy and Constructivism in Higher Education: Progressive Learning Frameworks."
http://www.igi-global.com/downloads/pdf/33447.pdf
Continue reading IT and Constructivism in Higher Education: Progressive Learning Frameworks
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Smarter instructional designers would not get themselves into the quandaries that I sometimes do. There I was with my backpack and bicycle helmet. I was ready to head back to my office when the faculty member said: “Go watch TV and eat a doughnut!”
What would lead a health-minded kinesiology professor say that to me, while we were both within earshot of a friendly pickup basketball game in the Gymnasium?
Okay, I’ll admit that the particular ...
Continue reading Conveying Digital Swiping and ID Policies in the Same Breath
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Professional writers often forget what it’s like to be a starting writer. They forget how sensitive writers may be about their work and how hard it is to share. They forget how stinging simple critiques may be. They forget that writers often conflate themselves with their work.
As an instructor who regularly “workshops” student writing online, I am continually re-learning how to adjust to the changing young writers who take the courses.
In a workshop ...
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In this economic downturn, various articles have cropped up of people who change their high-powered careers to something more relaxing. There was one about an ophthalmologist who became a baker. There are lawyers who step off the corporate ladder to work as chefs. There’s something very culturally based about this sense of the world—getting off the fast track in order to achieve self-fulfillment, a (hopefully) longer and less stressful life, and more satisfaction—at the cost of lower ...
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I’d always thought that it was a pretty big disadvantage to come into a field with only very generalized knowledge (or occasionally, no knowledge). That’s just part of the work life of an instructional designer, I thought.
A recent project has helped me revise my opinion. There’s something to be said for empathizing with the total outsider student. Knowing where questions may arise may help in the curricular design. It may help in identifying what learning experiences ...
Continue reading Student Buy-in of the Instructor Framework for a Course
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In some ways, the understandings of what instructional design is hasn’t penetrated to many parts of a campus. This is not for lack of effort in terms of presenting at on-campus and regional conferences, socializing with faculty, working with administrators, and using various communications technologies to conduct outreach to the faculty audience.
There are hurdles, too, such as the lack of clear ratecards and costs, and perceptions and bureaucratic barriers.
It’s in that context that ...
Continue reading Explaining Instructional Design in a Traveling Show
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Making the world's knowledge computable...and visualizable...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
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http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/News/win-10000-dollars-by-helping-others-beat-the-recession.aspx
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A recent project has involved the use of the Quality Matters Rubric to ensure the quality of the e-learning through the curricular design. A trained QM-certified faculty member is spear-heading the critique. That said, the others of us without that training are still finding this rubric very helpful for aligning the elements of the course and ensuring that the basic elements are in place.
This rubric was funded through a FIPSE grant (from the US Department ...
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Bureaucratic reshufflings will affect access to various resources—of money and staffing. In the instructional design move coming on half a year ago now, it resulted in the loss of an “art shop.” By this, I mean access to a graphic designer who could brand websites, create posters, lay out e-newsletters, create logos, and provide creative design ideas.
For instructional design purposes, this was a tough loss. Designing for a visual generation, instructional designers need access to graphic arts talent ...
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http://angeliclearning.blogspot.com/2009/05/flight-from-blackboard-to-angel-and.html (or http://tinyurl.com/BB-Angel
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In a number of recent projects, there have been more focuses on geospatial information use. This comes in part from the popularization and free costs of a variety of geospatial and mapping tools. These are wide use by the public in practical ways. Tools like Mapquest, Google Maps, various real estate pricing sites, and various satellite image capture sites offer an easy low-cost way to access some of these functionalities.
It’s breathtaking to take a virtual ride from a ...
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When a bicycle gets off-true, the tires begin to rub against some other part of the bike. And it’s then just a short time before a trip to the bike shop is in order.
That same sort of challenge occurs when scripting problems occur in a basic simulation. The various elements act wonky, and it becomes a challenge to get the elements to work. The fun then really begins—to get the object back to “true.”
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The idea of digital “seeding” is to put in some basic ideas to a site in order to get participants started. One puts up “stubs” to a wiki, and the idea is that people will run with the maintenance of the site. At some point. one is supposed to let go, and others are supposed to take over and power the communications vehicle on their own. The problem is when to actually do the hand-off.
In theory, information is attractive ...
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Understanding the context of an instructional build is helpful for the instructional design. A recent project involves the professionalization of a field—or the formalizing of the training and education for individuals who work in a high-demand workforce that has not traditionally had high standards for entry.
The interesting part of this instructional design work was that the curriculum would be designed for online delivery. The curriculum would eventually have to fit a state-level assessment ...
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Webisodes are brief video episodes in continuing series that are played out and delivered on the Web. I saw a few through news sites, with stories of characters striving for the usual things—love, self-respect, self-actualization. These shorts were amusing and were sponsored by various advertisers: a car company, food manufacturers, and the like.
A recent project involving an anti-suicide website (universitylifecafe.org) resulted in the creation of a number of different short scripts. One was for a ...
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At some point in every project, there comes a surprise or a twist. These are usually positive. They involve some new learning. Or there may be some travel or a jaunt to a local restaurant. Or there may be an opportunity to reach a unique group of learners. Or most recently, there was an inspired suggestion to build a web-based mystery around a set of public health issues. The concept was dazzling—a character-filled interactive scenario-driven mystery that makes the ...
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by IDOS Newswire
27 April 2009
Consider creating an account and submitting some ideas for a presentation to Colleague-to-Colleague's SIDLIT!
http://www.sidlit.org/
This is a very collegial and professional conference.
Continue reading Submittal for Colleague-to-Colleague's SIDLIT Annual Conference July 30 - 31, 2009
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Some visuals help create changes to people’s perceptions of the world…and this might be one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAlqUkl9_p0
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In a short time, the college system that I teach (out-of-state) for will no longer be subscribers to a particular learning / course management system. This shift will mark an end of an era, with their long-term commitment to the use of this system and several generations of students acclimated to the resources in that system.
This changeover will also render all archived courses on that system unopenable, without additional cost and without the cooperation of the company that ...
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Faculty members work with a number of audiences. They connect with their colleagues. They work with grant funders. They rub elbows with people from the business world, political environment, and military circles, and others. They work with students. They work with staff. And they also communicate with the general public.
Sometimes, their many constituencies are forgotten by those outside the professoriate or academia.
Faculty often do a great job of presenting concepts and contents to a class; they facilitate learning ...
Continue reading Sophisticates in Communicating by Digital Video
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Instructional designers work with a range of folks to have a secure technological working environment. Part of safety means being aware of where information goes and the devices it resides on…especially when data goes portable on small devices like thumb drives.
We recently had a computer security conference, and one of the sessions addressed how to avoid malware infections. The lead presenter highlighted campus statistics of those who had their information compromised or who responded to phishing schemes and ...
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Check out these engaging topics related to e-learning.
https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/event/schedule?etn=training;demo&eef=0
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 April 2009
The idea of transferability, portability and digital learning object sharing has always been appealing and practical. It’s been years of seeing the back-end technologies to enable course cartridge uploads and templates to add metadata to learning objects….and finally, I can say that I have had a course build that has allowed me to tap into others’ direct contents.
On the surface, this would seem fairly straightforward. There are certain federal government sites that have the incentive of publicizing ...
Continue reading Not Reinventing Wheels...but Chasing Digital Contents through Bureaucracies
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One constant aspect of being an instructional designer is expectations management. Faculty clients (and some admin) often have little sense of what would be required to actualize the work that they imagine--because of the technologies, the content capture, and the processing. Most express surprise that work will cost anything. Or the technologies are so mysterious that they don’t know what their actual options may be. This client expectations management aspect of instructional design work often exists under the radar ...
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http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html
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The work of an instructor is to make information understandable and easy-to-acquire. This means identifying critical main principles (How much learning is needed before certain concepts are attainable?). This means identifying threshold concepts—those ideas that if grasped will open up whole new vistas in a particular topic. This means identifying the critical decision points in a process that are crucial to the new learner. This is about identifying the learning moment when the “Aha!” occurs.
In mainstream films, these ...
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The chatter about Google Analytics had been positive for a while. Talk was that Google could collect all sorts of information about visitors to a site in order to help site designers better tailor the contents to meet user needs. The data would be aggregate and anonymous, but all one needed was a gmail account and a little tech savvy and one could get a treasure trove of visitor information.
A tour of the Google Analytics site brings out the ...
Continue reading Google Analytics for Site Evolution Strategies
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by IDOS Newswire
06 April 2009
Call for Chapter Proposals
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 2009
Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends
A book edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=626
Introduction and Objectives: Immersive learning has come to the fore with the popularization of Second Life and the development of open-source immersive 3D learning spaces. Those in e-learning have been working to find ways ...
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces (A Call for Chapter Proposals)
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The launch issue of EQ online is now live.
http://www.educause.edu/eq
This publication strives to use the multimedia Web space creatively. Check it out!
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In most academic fields, editors and publishers play a gatekeeper function by vetting the articles that make it into their vaunted pages (whether paper or digital). These roles involve a lot of power and a lot of responsibility and discretion. New faculty’s careers may be made or broken based on their publishing records. Even those who have published widely and are long-term tenured faculty have a stake in their reputations with the public and their peers when they publish ...
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Those who work as professional videographers may be puzzled at the approach in this particular entry. This may be a concept that is such a central part of their skill set that this all goes without saying. The concept I’m referring to is that of “videographic continuity”. It’s the simple idea that videos should convey a flowing narrative in a way without interruptions or confusions.
As an educator who has come to instructional design, I am learning about ...
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Dr. Marilla D. Svinicki, a professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, spoke Mar. 30 at K-State in a presentation titled “Changing student (and faculty) attitudes about who’s responsible for learning”. This was presented as part of the provost’s lecture series.
She described a mis-match between learner and instructor expectations of each other, particularly over issues of who is responsible for what in a course. She led the audience through activities in which the ...
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I am thinking of breaking a personal policy. That policy is to set up a project, ensure it works, and then move on. That policy is in place to protect against time “sinks,” particularly those that involve no compensation. This is a practical policy. It’s based on the business structure of this university. It makes sense in every logical way.
An “endless project” is one that has no defined conclusion, could conceivably continue on for many ...
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Most major universities have branch campuses, many in-state and some abroad. Instructional design skills may not be a priority in some of the branch campuses, but the needs for that skill set exist in those branches as well.
There have been endeavors to reach out to our local branch campus by live webcasting of presentations. There are invitations to main campus events. And we will sometimes travel out to the branch to do face-to-face and interactive presentations. We work to ...
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Initial meetings on a project are always interesting. A team of colleagues has gathered around a particular curricular build. There’s an overwhelming amount of expertise at the table. There’s often some technological sophistication. There are rich ideas about what is desirable for the learning experience that they’re creating.
And then there’s a switchover to instructional design. This piece then brings together the pedagogical and technological pieces. How would these be deployed to reach a particular learning ...
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ELATEwiki is the Electronic Learning And Teaching Exchange created and edited by those interested in advancing the use of technology in teaching. This site is intended to host a wealth of freely available information categorized and organized into E-Learning and Teaching topics useful to teachers, scholars, students, and administrators seeking to understand the dynamic and changing higher education landscape during this critical time of transformation.
The concept for ELATEwiki emerged during a series of conversations among members of K-State’s ...
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If there are recent trends in questions for instructional designers, one would be how to hold and create live conferences in virtual ways that are still beneficial and lively. How may informal, “hallway conversations” be facilitated and captured in terms of informational value? How can the casual hanging out after a live meeting be emulated in virtual spaces? These seem like anachronistic concerns in a time when there are so many technologies that have been created to promote computer mediated ...
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In an information technology office, I often hear snippets of telephone conversations. That comes with cubicle-land living. That sort of hearing (vs. listening) is unavoidable. I hear now and again the term “known problems.” In IT-speak, that’s a kind of comfort. It’s the idea that the problem has been noticed and replicated and likely has an IT professional looking into solving it.
In a larger context, the world is full of “known problems” that are unwieldy and challenging ...
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The concept of cultural sensitivity in designing curricula is an important aspect of instructional design. Some domain-field assumptions are elusive and not well articulated. Or particular fields have a range of opinions that affect the dissonant voices in a field. Because of the need to understand what is going on in different domains, it helps immensely to attend different face-to-face conferences on campus.
These conferences not only result in helpful contacts, but they also enhance one’s sense of paradigms ...
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As the economy goes deeper into the tank, the nature of instructional design in the workplace has been changing. Now, it’s not only a matter of taking on all comers but ensuring that there are funds that come with the constant work.
Instructional designers (IDs) now have to work hard to earn a place in the line-up for every single project that comes forward. There has to be value-added. This has always been so for those in industry, and ...
Continue reading Earning a Place in the Line-up...Every Time
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This issue surfaces in the popular media every so often, when a celebrity’s medical records, police file, mug shot, or some other official information gets compromised and released to the press. The idea of “data voyeurism” is that of people who don’t have a “need-to-know” accessing information that they shouldn’t.
I ran across this term again in an article, in the context of Information Technology (IT). It seems to me that instructional designers also handle plenty of ...
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The “observer effect” described in quantum physics applies to online human communications. The effect of being “seen” by others on a list or in virtual spaces may have an outsized effect on what people post. That awareness of being watched changes people’s behaviors. This is where it’s helpful to have one-way mirrors or unobtrusive ways of observer, without the fronting or need to impress.
In one case, a group of us were critiquing a website. An editor emailed ...
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Hello, all: I am soliciting responses to a brief survey on the experiences instructors and facilitators have had regarding security in 3D immersive, interactive and persistent spaces (like Second Life) in higher education. This information will be used for a forthcoming article or chapter.
Survey Title: Security in 3D Immersive and Interactive Spaces in Higher Education
This survey will be offered Mar 9, 2009 through Mar 31, 2009.
To participate in the survey, please go to the following link:
https ...
Continue reading Survey on Security in 3D Immersive Spaces in Higher Education
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One of the PIs on a recent grant project made the point that she preferred to spend grant moneys locally to support other on-campus offices. Given that our office here was the recipient of her largesse, I’ve been thinking more deeply about the purchase of skills and talent to actualize different projects.
A few large grants in motion have brought up this issue of hiring talent. The challenges there seem to involve the discrete skill sets that are involved ...
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David Shieh’s “These Lectures are Gone in 60 Seconds: Minute-long talks find success at a community college” got forwarded to us instructional designers by our supervisor recently. (http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i26/26a00102.htm) This issue had come up because of a request by some departments for a presentation that would cover some topics that are critical for e-learning: new technologies, e-learning quality, accessibility, intellectual property, and some design principles. They wanted this all in a short time ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
06 March 2009
Professional development keeps work life fresh, and it helps keep the skill sets (semi)viable. In a time of scarcity, it takes a bit more initiative to find professional development opportunities. Oftentimes, such opportunities are piecemeal and catch-as-catch-can.
Many workplaces have a serious shut-down of travel out-of-state. We are getting emails about on-campus conferences that have been cancelled. Many conferences are listing the option of tele-porting in to a conference from desktops to save on travel costs. Interestingly, I am ...
Continue reading Maintaining Professional Development in a Scarcity-Based Environment
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
04 March 2009
My student probably had no idea how happy she made me with her simple question. She had read one of our course readings and wondered how a circuit court case got resolved. I suggested she find the official site for the court and look up the case by name. She chased the issue and found out how the case resolved. It did cost her some money for copies under e-FOIA (http://epic.org/open_gov/efoia.html) , and it did cost ...
Continue reading Getting Online Students Immersed in the Informational Universe
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I see students in various stages of distress as they wrangle with their academic papers. They’re lying across their desks staring into the computer screens as they search for the words or ideas that they need to build the contents. They send emails about their concerns as their papers are in various stages of development, particularly when they’re stuck on a thesis or on the possible use of a particular source.
Recently, I had a déjà vu moment ...
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One current project involves launching a wiki focused around e-learning that will be going global once we have legal cover and a few more understandings and skills in the MediaWiki technology. This endeavor will involve something that involves a pretty massive leap of trust: the building of shared knowledge with quality maintained by community standards.
What makes this harder to anticipate is that the definition of “community” is not clear. As with most wikis, the wikimaster is ...
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I was revisiting one of the projects that I served as instructional designer on and noticed in a very tiny font that the site now identifies the sponsoring university. This project had been brainstormed and evolved with the help of several dozen students, and the consensus then (and now) has been to soft-pedal the university tie. The rationale was to let the interactive site stand on its own merits and contents, and the greater access and support for our university ...
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Bringing a curriculum to life requires an understanding of various dependencies. There are chains of pre-requisites that must be met for an online curriculum to actually launch well and effectively. These include human, technological, and resource dependencies. This includes intellectual property ones.
Why these dependencies matter is because these are required to reach deadline-driven goals. And it’s critical not to build loose ends into the system. While parts of an online course or training may be decoupled from the ...
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Here's an interesting column about Facebook, which has been integrated with some e-learning endeavors.
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/02/didnt-you-know.html
And the latest
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-fi-facebook19-2009feb19,0,4088613.story
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The research literature on global virtual teams is intriguing. Most come from multinational companies that work with global laboratories or global work groups. They talk about multiple languages, time zones, different bridging endeavors, and management techniques. They talk about shared camaraderie mixed with never meeting face-to-face.
It all sounds somewhat exotic, something like an artifact of the business world…when I realize that some recent projects of late have been executed as global virtual teams (GVTs), namely, book endeavors. (I ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 February 2009
A recent book I’ve been reading talks about a nation’s power in part as ideational. Besides its economy and its military clout, a nation has “soft power,” the ability to influence other nations and peoples through the power of its ideas. This is about using charisma and the strength of ideas. Some of the more engaging ideas of late have involved Web 2.0 or the collaboration around shared ideas.
In that light, I’ve been thinking about ...
Continue reading The Ideational Power of Open Source and Creative Commons Releases
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I got to thinking of the uses of e-learning for the development of muscle memory in a beginner’s ski class while I was crossing my skis and doing the duck walk up a hill and sliding back a step for every two I went up. My trainer had a couple graduate degrees…had survived five avalanches…and had plenty of experience training speed skiers. Our group, by contrast, were all beginners, with both children and adults. Our ski instructor ...
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For years now, I’ve been watching freshman and sophomore students interact with each other in a variety of online courses. Even though most of the learning in my courses are asynchronous, the general co-learning in time among college students really enhances the learning experience.
For one, online learners seem very supportive of each other. They pass along kudos and encouragements. They share personal life stories. They share photos—of desserts, of artwork, of ducks from a duck hunt, of ...
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There’s little doubt that these are stressful times for many. Posted student messages show a heightened concern for their studies. And behind that concern seems to be a range of personal challenges that only occasionally make it to the surface of the conversation.
Maybe the higher levels of student stress come from a new L/CMS and the higher learning curve in knowing how to use that. Maybe the higher stress comes from pretty ...
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Several of the conferences that have been staples for e-learning practitioners are offering ways to participate in the conference from a distance—by offering mediated presentations opportunities. One suggested that potential presenters should not hold back from submitting based on travel constraints.
In a time of thinning budgets, a lot of projects get put on ice. Anything can be pulled off the table. And truth is that people seem to start pulling back all around anyway. There are fears of ...
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After coming off a spate of case studies and qualitative research, I came across a lecture in my work that suddenly put that work in a different light. The basic assertion of the lecturer was the need for quantitative metrics to inform decision-making. That’s a simple enough point. Quantitative measures are used often for decision-making. There’s a kind unknowability for various types of information using qualitative methods or mixed methods. (That’s also true in the reverse, in ...
Continue reading The "Sugar" of Case Studies and Qualitative Work
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Design of socio-technical systems is an interesting thing. For all the anticipation and thought that has gone into each one, there are still sometimes surprises when a system goes live. This phenomena has been addressed in many different ways. The “lab” of theoretical use can only anticipate so much. Here, developers work with others to make systems as self-explanatory as possible. They build for the widest common use. They use features that are both explicit and implicit. They build in ...
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So a book editor and I were chatting by email one day, and I suggested that the group of practitioners in this field of instructional design was small enough that one could guess at who authored a particular work. I didn’t fully believe that, but I was trying to make the point that it was hard to “scrub” a piece of writing sufficiently to erase all fingerprints. For that particular project, that editor was right. I couldn’t for ...
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Discussions have been rampant that e-learning may happen more and more outside the structures of a learning / course management system. The concept is that a cobbling of tools may offer learners a loosely coupled online learning experience at a lower cost than the proprietary or open-source L/CMSes may offer. The idea is that people may tap various user sources that are Web 2.0 and improve functionalities from there by adding contents and using the technologies in ways that ...
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A recent project is bringing together a cross-functional development team that is distributed, multi-institutional and virtual. The work that people are creating needs to coalesce and work in an interoperable way on multiple learning management systems. The work, of course, also has to be accessible and fully legal in terms of intellectual property. What this meant on the front end is that we would start with a stylebook.
The rationale for a stylebook is to surface ...
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Adapting to a new learning management system involves a fair amount of learning. Going live with it also means dealing with some surprises—in this case, the disappearance of student work. Usually, the default settings I have in Message Boards is to disallow student deletion of their own posts.
There are a number of reasons for that. Foremost is the need to have data integrity, so if students posted a particular message or assignment, and I responded to that work ...
Continue reading Plugging the "Student Editing" Gaps in a New LMS
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Check this out.
Dasher Project, Cambridge University http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/uai2005/
Google Tech Talks http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078334075080674416
Continue reading Writing as Navigating in "The Library of All Possible Books"
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Dr. Allen G. Johnson presented as part of the Provost’s Lecture Series and participated in MLK Day events at K-State. He gave a presentation based on “Power, Privilege and Difference,” which is based on his most recent book. As a full-time author and speaker with a long history in academia, Johnson came highly recommended to the campus.
He suggested that the debates around the recent presidential campaigning avoiding hot-button issues of ...
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Transitioning into an instructional design position, one just focuses on learning the ropes and making sure projects come in pedagogically sound, on deadline and at budget, and ultimately, to the professor’s satisfaction.
Then, three years later, I look up and consider what it is to have an actual instructional design portfolio of courses, designs, and web-based products. Early on, one takes all comers and ends up with some gofer-ish types of jobs mixed in with the more challenging projects ...
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After finalizing work on a project, a colleague and I were commiserating about how it’s always good to have a project finish smoothly and on deadline. He wrote of how various projects have a way of bogging down and not resulting in a usable final product in any timely fashion. I recalled my former supervisor advising—half-jokingly--“If the project collapses, don’t be under it.” That project didn’t collapse. I haven’t had one fail yet, but ...
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A small team has been researching and mulling the idea of launching an e-learning faculty wiki for “the good of the order” and as a university contribution to the Web-enabled information spaces. The idea would be to use the wiki to surface implicit knowledge and also to create a professional community mediated through technologies.
The team diligently scoped out the competition through direct research and queries posted to professional listservs. They found quality wikis like Edutech ...
Continue reading Early Proposal of a New E-Learning Faculty Wiki
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Dr. Michael Wesch has offered a view of disruptive informational technos and their impacts on learning...
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able
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A colleague of mine suggests that there’s a “new normal” for the economy. And current signs and projections seem to suggest that to a degree. Watching the aggregate behaviors and thinking of a population has been very informative about massive pendulum swings. No matter where this all goes, the new frugality in my field may be here to stay, an indelible part of doing business.
One part of a job is to create and demonstrate ...
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One strategy for enhancing learner understanding of course expectations is to offer a student work sampler.
These achieve several possible objectives. One is to de-mythify the work and make the idea of essays or research papers less intimidating. Another is to showcase former students’ works. And yet another is to offer a kind of attentional kudos for students who do exemplary work.
Over the years, I’ve found that I’ve chosen works ...
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K-State’s Counseling Services has launched a new interactive website for K-State’s students to promote mental wellness, particularly in relation to preventing suicide. The site offers information for various protective factors to promote student mental health and resiliency.
The site is based on a metaphor of a café, with the idea that students, faculty and staff, will create a sense of warm virtual community that will help make K-State a better place for all. At the site’s center ...
Continue reading The University Life Cafe Promoting Mental Wellness
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 January 2009
Why do computer games need to evolve to keep people’s interests? How may AI enhance game playability?
For Darryl Charles, Colin Fyfe, Daniel Livingstone, and Stephen McGlinchey, who have teamed up for a new text that highlights biologically inspired AI for computer games, the answer is to create worthy game opponents. Games that adapt and learn are more challenging and therefore offer more learning and play value.
In Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games, these authors offer case ...
Continue reading Biologically Inspired AI for Computer Games (brief resource review)
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Handing over a project is a necessity, or else one could be a stringer for a project into eternity, which would mean lost project opportunities into the future. The handover moment is a fragile one because it involves conveying the rich understandings of a project over the many months of the design and build work. It’s also about letting go in a way so that the work is successful into the future.
One critical piece is to ...
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Getting candid critique on a manuscript can be a tough challenge—not in terms of receiving honest feedback but in terms of readers being willing to really go full bore into ways to improve a piece of writing. Editors are to writers as choreographers to dancers, directors to actors, and masters to apprentices. They offer critical constructive directions to improve a work.
Let me clarify. It does take years to be able to take critique well and to use it ...