It is not often that one comes across a faculty or staff member with a very defined thought-out computer management strategy. Many are brilliant in their areas of expertise, but they also often do not see a need to have a computer and data management plan that may make their work more efficient.

A lot of the decisions seem to be made in an ad hoc way. One recent interchange reminded me of this. The occasion was a meeting at ...

Continue reading Multiple Computing Machines

A slideshow is something that is simple enough, yes? That’s what I thought when I headed out to help a staff member with creating a slideshow for an upcoming presentation. He needed a basic refresher. Easy enough, I thought. Three hours later….

Okay, well, I should explain that an early part of the consultation dealt with multiple technologies. I have seen this before with other faculty, staff, and administrators who do not use particular technologies much. They will ask ...

Continue reading Stringing Technologies

There is such a joy to the wrapping up of a project, particularly if it’s been one which has taken a lot of brainspace and effort for years. In longer projects, there have been pieces that have been delivered—for the learning, for publicity—already, but then there are finalized pieces that help culminate the work. More often than not, these culminating pieces are articles that debrief the learning from the project…and that bring the project to the ...

Continue reading Wrapping Up a Project

Functional diagrams convey a specific type of information. These 2D drawings depict systems and processes. These processes may be between humans and machines; machines alone; humans alone; organizational structures or units in a workplace; physical locations, and other entities. The main point is that functional diagrams provide both a sense of overview of the system and the processes within the system (and into and out of the system).

Practically, functional diagrams not only describe systems and processes for workplace trainings ...

Continue reading Functional Diagrams

No one in his / her right mind would update to a live site with a large multimedia-laden file for a small change. One would only consider this when something is not working the way it should. And the thing about pre-publication launches of an article is that many know to look at the site on that date already even if the formal invitation email hasn’t come out. That means that the cost of failure is an unsatisfying reader experience ...

Continue reading Updating to a Live Site

The jury was in. Their verdict: No way.

We had a group of faculty members and administrators crowded into a small room. They had just spent the prior few months using a new third-party software that had been integrated into the university’s learning / course management system. This software was to offer some Web 2.0 functionalities for online learners—in the way of wikis and blogs. Ideally, this would enable students to share information with each other and their ...

Continue reading Selecting by Functions without Considering UI Design

Creating an Online Global Health Course and Game in the new issue of Educause Quarterly...

Continue reading A Global Health Course and Game

An instructional design has to meet a variety of requirements, but one of the most critical ones involve the fit to the faculty member teaching the course. One aspect of this fit involves the faculty work load. Faculty members have responsibilities for conducting research, training up students in their various laboratories and classrooms, pursuing grant funding, engaging with the public, presenting their research at professional conferences, serving on hiring committees, supporting decision-making committees, and a range of other responsibilities. The ...

Continue reading Considering Faculty Work Load in the Course Design

For a long time now, I’ve sort of downplayed the power of human attention and enthusiasms. All of that seemed so faddish. From my naïve point-of-view, I thought that human enthusiasms were fairly easy to spark and manipulate (yes and no)… And it also seemed so superficial. Why would it matter if a particular professor had charisma? And why would it matter if a course project was glamorous or not?

Over time, I have come to see that my ...

Continue reading Glamming up a Project

A development team and I are putting together the final touches on an interactive article that will go live in early 2012. Up top, there is an actual article about a graduate course built for online delivery. Then, this article consists of a rich set of slideshows on a particular global health issue. And then there is an interactive game with a strong narrative structure and supporting video captures. In putting this together for the publisher (now that it has ...

Continue reading All of a Piece, A Little Everywhere, or a Mix of Strategies?

People who have been in the workforce a sufficient amount of time realize the importance of political protection for a project. They know that in a changing political environment, it helps to have leaders and other patrons signal their support for a project with funding, actions, and commentary. Their actions affect the authorizing environment in which one works, and their actions may encourage the long-term survival and viability of a project.

To get that support, it’s important to raise ...

Continue reading Political Protection for a Project

In a class that I’m taking this term, we have a lot of formulas to remember. While I don’t often have to memorize formulas, I am reminded of some things in this learning experience. I am also learning to revise what I know of learning (which is partially the point of taking courses while in the workplace).

Pacing Quickly

One refreshing realization was that our professor would go over a formula only a few times, and she would ...

Continue reading Explaining the Intuition behind a Rule

It is said that too much material wealth spoils people. It makes it harder to get work done efficiently. It is harder to work in a lean and competitive way. If that is all true, and if the opposite is true—that lean times help people run more efficiently—then we’re in the middle of one of the more interesting challenges of our work lives: how to run lean.

That Resilience

When people are under pressure, many shut down ...

Continue reading In a Time of Continuing Austerity

The concept of an “indigenous design” occurs every so often in the popular media. The concept is that a design emerges from the unique conditions of a particular context: the peoples, the design talent, the culture, and the perceived needs. This is contrasted to designs from external sources—without local origination of ideas. This latter one refers to an off-the-shelf solution or maybe a commercial off-the-shelf solution (COTS).

In many ways, at our university, the instructional design lends itself to ...

Continue reading Indigenous Design

One of the great things of working in ICT is to get wind of various open-source freeware and to get to try them fairly early. There are many who are attuned to beta-versions of software. And especially for resources that are rare-use files or simple pass-through processing software to process digital files, it’s easy to just use them as a matter-of-course and not think again. It’s also easy not to think more if one doesn’t have the ...

Continue reading Being a High-End Open-Source User

I have always thought and do think that it’s important to hear out what a speaker has to say before reacting. I still believe that. I was sitting in on a recent webinar about how to make online classrooms more culturally sensitive to students from abroad. The concept was all fine and good. Culture infuses much of people’s assumptions and behaviors, the presenter said.

I was on board early on…until the presenter started talking in huge over-generalizations ...

Continue reading Equitable Learning Outcomes for the Same Effort?

“To make the copyright turnstile revolve, the author should have to deposit more than a penny in the box.” -- Benjamin Kaplan

I was struck recently by how the concept of “originality” has changed from earlier conceptualizations. In the context of patents, clearly, an idea has to be certifiably fresh and relevant apparently in order to receive a patent. The process is apparently rigorous and requires much evaluation and many years of work to establish that standing. In IP that does ...

Continue reading Originality and IP

“Learning equivalency” is a complex state to actualize for some types of learning. I was thinking this as I sat on a stool and hovered over my iPad taking notes and making observations during a diagnostic medicine / pathobiology graduate course.

I was sitting in on a lab to see how it might be digitized. I was looking at the learners and how they interacted with the materials and each other. I was looking at the equipment and the functions of ...

Continue reading Sitting in on a Lab to Turn it Digital

In my game theory course, we are working through many ways of ascertaining the optimal decision-making given the constraints of game rules on the decision-making context. We are learning the many different types of games and how the games are played. We are engaging sequential and synchronous games. We are looking at various conditional contexts. We are drawing game trees. We are engaging normal and strategic table structures. We are using various algebraic equations to figure out expected utilities of ...

Continue reading Accurate Notations and Decision Supports

Generally, it is not a great idea to ask a principal investigator (PI) if he or she is amenable to open-source release of a shared work when that work is still being considered by peer reviewers. However, given the complexity of open-source and the various considerations for it, one can argue that an earlier broaching of the subject is helpful to allow the PI and other team members to consider how they want to approach the issue.

The Novelty of ...

Continue reading Broaching Open-Source

Lately, I’ve been reading articles on artificial intelligence that refer to the Turing Test (of course). This well publicized technology standard suggests that AI will have arrived (in a manner of speaking) when a machine can emulate human intelligence in a conversation with a human interrogator. AI is used in automated tutoring agents. They are in AI spaces in virtual worlds, with virtual chatbots holding court in their own virtual worlds. They are in service centers meeting the needs ...

Continue reading Reverse Turing

In the popular media, Kevin Mitnick was a daring hacker of the late-1980s and 1990s while in his teens and early 20s. He would “social engineer” people to gain the credentials or information or window-of-opportunity to access the various servers of telephone companies, corporations, and government agencies in order to find information, download source code, read emails, and create all sorts of havocs.

In the 1990s, he and co-author William L. Simon authored “The Art of Deception” about some of ...

Continue reading Ghost in the Wires

I have seen this phenomena multiple times, but it still leaves me with a dazzled impression. The phenomena involves the writing of a script or putting an idea down on paper…but then seeing it truly brought to living life in the hands on a videographer colleague, with his team of actors. Part of this comes from the nature of text on a page which is severely limited. So much of what is on a page has to be augmented ...

Continue reading Adding Texture to a Script

It seems that professors who are just starting out in online learning have a central concern—that their digital materials are not downloaded and passed along for others to use. Their contents are for their students only. This seems like a commonality whether the professor has used open-source contents or not (even if the open-source contents had stipulations that they would have to share-alike any derived contents).

This discussion came up most recently with a project where we were debating ...

Continue reading Locking Down Work

All relationships are transactional. Or at least, that’s what I think in my toughest moments. It’s all about tit-for-tat, quid pro quo; it’s all about what one can offer the other (in trade) in measureable ways. That’s a piece of the truth. The other part of that is that people really do do calculations in a kind of rational choice theory approach to the world.

Why have these thoughts been crossing my mind of late? Well ...

Continue reading Soliciting Work

Having worked in academia for so long, I have become a little calloused to how difficult it is to write and publish. For me, my ego is not directly on the line whenever a work goes out. I understand that editors have different visions and needs, and they have full right to decide for or against accepting a work. I disassociate myself from what I’ve created. I don’t look to editors to give me kudos or encouragements although ...

Continue reading Protecting a Work (and the Authors) through the Revision and Editing Process

Using a game theory overlay to the world is an intriguing one. Even for a total green novice who is just learning about game theory, I am starting to see many applications in terms of assessing situations and forming an empathy for stakeholders in a particular context. I am also seeing how anticipated objectives for individuals may result in strategies to attain those objectives.

In a sense, much of game theory is just helping one to focus on what it ...

Continue reading Using a Game Theory Perspective

In probably most jobs that involve sporadic projects, it makes sense to define “filler work,” or tasks that can be done when there are the occasional quiet moments. What sorts of tasks might work for filler work? From work experiences, I have some ideas.

Contributing to Long-Term Projects

It seems like one part of the work portfolio always includes some long-term projects. These are those that may have evolved over time. They may have quieted down, and then there is ...

Continue reading Defining Filler Work

It is in the best interests of instructional designers to maintain as wide a range of decision-making motions as possible. This is not only for quality of work-life, but it’s also for professional development and the extension of capabilities. One of the critical aspects to this range of motions involves the decision of what to offer faculty, staff, and administrators for free—beyond the limited gratis hours offered to all faculty working on an online course.

Political Necessities

Of ...

Continue reading Doling Out Free

One basic rule in multimedia is that it’s always harder than it looks. It’s also almost always more expensive and more time-consuming. The doing requires a level of sophistication that many people do not realize. For videography alone, the production values are critical.

The Technical Elements of a Production

A “production” makes a situation sound like something complex and highly grand. Any video shoot is part of a video production—because the work has to be produced. The ...

Continue reading Establishing Video Production Values

The C2C Fall Symposium 2011 is focusing on "E-Learning: Mobility, Innovation, & Challenges." The agenda is still being set. The event is set for Oct. 21, 2011 (Friday).

http://c2conline.org/fall/2011

Continue reading Colleague 2 Colleague's Fall Symposium 2011

People who work in instructional design have to like people first. Instructional design is about teaching…and it’s about sharing. It’s about understanding “human factors” in learning—and maximizing what can be done to help people teach and learn. Secondly, instructional designers have to love technologies. And while I’m not the type to go ga-ga over technologies, I do appreciate a designed thing of beauty every now and again. I do very much appreciate how software evolves ...

Continue reading My iPad

The first indicator that there may well be a challenging curricular build is the nature of the question in the initial interactions with a subject matter expert (SME). One recent case involved a professor who came in with a simple question: “How can I actualize the capture of various lecture-captures from around the state?”

Getting Situated

An effective approach with a new instructor is to get them situated, and the easiest approach is to base the situating on legal and ...

Continue reading Knowing Which Way is Up

Slideshows are some of the most common forms of digital information delivery used in online classes. Presenters have added multimedia elements to them. They have added voice-narration, and they have added some annotations. These all add value, but the nature of the digital file type still has its limits. The main constraint has to do with the appropriate length of a slideshow—in terms of the number of slides that may be coherently consumed. Another limit had to do with ...

Continue reading Moving Beyond Slideshow Limits…to Microsites

Theoretically, in a free market environment, innovators have multiple channels that they can pursue to try to find users for their goods. They can calculate their potential costs and benefits by going with a commercial company that will take a cut of any profits in order to bring a good to market, or they can go open-source—and reap a mix of some intrinsic and extrinsic rewards but without the middle-person of the company.

The first system has been famously ...

Continue reading Going Open-Source as an Innovator

At my university, our leadership has been moving to position our school to be one of the top public research universities in the country. That is a lofty goal, and given the competition, it’ll be tough to move up from whatever our current positioning is. (There are different ways to measure school standings.)

The school held a public forum recently about these ambitions, and it was refreshing to hear of this sense of ambition for the school. During the ...

Continue reading Mapping On-Campus Talent

It’s really a bit thankless to just be nice. About a year ago, I took a graduate-level course in which I authored a paper, which got accepted as a chapter in a book. After the class wrapped, the instructor finally got to the paper to give me feedback, and he said, “What was the good news about this paper that you were going to tell me?” I said, “Forget it.” He said, “Has it been accepted for publication?” Uh ...

Continue reading Avoiding the Free Rider; Avoiding being a Free Rider

The beginning of a term is exciting for a lot of reasons—with so many students embarking on the endeavor of shared learning. There is another reason, too, for the excitement, and that involves the launching of new courses that are appearing for the first time. And sometimes, this is the first time out for the faculty member in terms of online teaching and learning.

In this case, all the technologies are new. The interactions are new. The dealing with ...

Continue reading First Time Out

For years now, I’ve read node-link diagrams. These are used to show social relationships. They offer a systems view of different relationships. They are used to define game-theory games and the dynamics of play. They are used in so many ways to show so many dynamics.

That said, I have never actually tried my hand at creating one until recently. The context for this creation was for a course project. Instead of waiting until the end of the term ...

Continue reading My First Node-Link Diagram

With new technologies that help in the authoring of mobile activities, the following is an entry about mobile digital learning objects and approaches.

Mobile Learning

Continue reading Mobile Learning

Having been at multiple airports of late for personal travel, I've noticed that airports usually have a feature or two to make online work efficient--but these are piecemeal at best. For example, some airports have efficient wireless connectivity (even if the security may be a little elusive). But then, that airport would not have electrical plugs for juicing up devices or topping off batteries. Or an airport might have one or two cubicles for people to connect and word-process ...

Continue reading Work Efficiencies at Airports

Dr. Heidi Upton presented on a multimedia project that she used to engage learners titled “Discover New York,” at a recent conference I attended in San Jose. She explained that she had to change this course to a degree because of the competition for contact hours with students, which limited her face-to-face time to only two days a week. This could have threatened the student engagement in her class.

Her Pedagogical Understandings

It was useful to have her describe her ...

Continue reading Reaching Out, Reaching In: Embedding Student Engagement

One of the more creative uses of Twitter for blended education was described in a conference that I attended recently. The European professor taught a graduate-level business course wholly through Twitter. No course site. No L/CMS.

He had his students use their Twitter accounts and follow him and follow each other—to create a real-time and asynchronous circle of communications. People would also post Tweets with hash tags that would identify the nature of the messages being posted. What ...

Continue reading A Twitter-Based Graduate Business Course

People go to conferences to find out “how the other half lives,” to use a quaint phrase. In other words, we want to scope out the competition and find out how to improve our own work. I used to go to conferences on the East Coast to see what money and smarts (including educational psychologists) and feedback data (of the players) can buy the military in terms of immersive games. I went to those conferences expecting some glitzy designs, and ...

Continue reading Software More Alike than Not?

A fairly recent phenomena in instructional design work involves the capturing of open-source contents for integral use an a course design. It used to be that one would create all the contents in a course. Or if there was a little more funding, the development team would capture the work.

Now, there is a lot more delving into free sources—in part because of the popularization of Creative Commons releases and various online repositories with sharable contents.

What’s Usable ...

Continue reading Mapping Out Open-Source Contents

My most recent pre-module for a course was well designed and executed, but it was so well designed that its contents actually got absorbed into the mainline modules, and the pre-module idea itself was stowed. That experience aside, I started thinking about the whole challenge of creating a pre-module because this concept has arisen again, and we have a defined content curriculum for a pre-module.

What is a Pre-Module?

A pre-module is an optional module that defines foundational understandings and ...

Continue reading The Uses of a Pre-Module

After doing a lot of repetitive work for a certain period of time, one sort of starts acclimating and also maybe getting a little numb from the work. Recently, one of the projects has involved writing one quiz after another. These quizzes involve true-false and multiple-choice options. Having taken a graduate course recently that used multiple-choice exams, I found out how confounding some questions may be –even if they’re not written to be devious per se.

From this experience ...

Continue reading Writing Detractors for Multiple-Choice Exams

Let’s start with a fundamental reality in instructional design. It is the following: The vision for the course has to come from the instructor who will use the course to teach online. An online course has to be something that the instructor can live with and evolve over time. It has to use technologies that he / she can manage. It has to include assessments that they can actually follow through on—so if a course is designed to consist ...

Continue reading Establishing Comfort Levels: Instructional Design from a Distance

Whatever instructional design project I am part of, I always go in with the assumption that I have “skin in the game.” In other words, I have some investment in the outcomes of the project. I am serious about pulling for a project to succeed.

That responsibility carries over even after a project has officially wrapped—or rather—when my part has officially wrapped. After all, projects do often move through phases—and there are different needs at different times ...

Continue reading Pulling for a Project

I had never heard of Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) until a recent conference that I attended. The concept behind these come from both chaos theory and the idea of self-organizing human groups. Now enabled by Web 2.0 technologies, there are now large-scale endeavors of groups learning together, with nominal leaders who guide and facilitate. The technologies are manifold, and they are cobbled together through various linkages. This learning occurs in dispersed environments. The learning may be in multiple ...

Continue reading Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC)

I was listening to a podcast interview by security experts, and they were talking about the importance of educating legislative decision-makers about technologies to better inform their decision-making. That all sounded very reasonable to me, but it seemed also somewhat distant from my own experiences. In higher education, most decisions get made in a consensus-setting way. Every so often, though, a rare administrator will get caught up in a decision-making path that leads them to something highly inadvisable. One can ...

Continue reading Policymaking and Technological Knowledge

Whenever a PI asks for an estimation of hours and costs, it always feels like a bit of a catch. After all, an ID does not have any power in deciding a budget. They don’t have a deep say in terms of the bottom line. And yet, it’s important to have a voice even if one does not have an ability to direct affect the bottom line. At least one can sort of set a baseline of expectations ...

Continue reading Costing Out Work

As a veteran game master, Dr. Jane McGonigal makes a compelling case for using alternate reality games (ARGs) to tap crowd-sourcing and crowd-intelligence, and to coordinate mass problem-solving. In her ebullient book, “Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world” (2011), McGonigal conceptualizes a variety of ways that games can help motivate people to work toward goals, to find work that is personally fulfilling, and to coordinate shared actions.

In a sense, many ...

Continue reading Enhancing Reality through Alternate Reality Games

The next new hot thing is the uses of mobile devices for online learning. Or so that’s been said for many years now. But only recently have there been authoring tools that allow us to build to the small screen—and now—even in HTML 5 and without the requirement for a Flash player for much of the interactive contents. Instructional designers do work as the technologies enable them—although some do have the skill sets of coding the ...

Continue reading Building to Small Screens

We all have positions that enable us to see something of others’ silos (and sometimes, even our own). This realization was emphasized to me when I was in a discussion with an administrator who wanted to lock down an open-source wiki which she wanted to use for a particular administrative purpose. She made the passing comment that she didn’t want the university’s professors to be contacted by anyone abroad. I am aware of some private universities that charge ...

Continue reading No Connectivity with Colleagues Abroad?

“People tend to see in the open source software movement the politics that they would like to see—a libertarian reverie, a perfect meritocracy, a utopian gift culture that celebrates an economics of abundance instead of scarcity, a virtual or electronic existence proof of communitarian ideals, a political movement aimed at replacing obsolete nineteenth-century capitalist structures with new ‘relations of production more suited to the Information Age.” -- Steven Weber in “The Success of Open Source”

David Rice’s “Geekonomics: The ...

Continue reading From a Security Perspective…Open-Source = Risks

In several different domain fields, anything excess to the actions needed to achieve a certain aim is considered a part of a “signature.” I’m thinking of this concept in terms of law enforcement investigators of various crimes to understand and profile certain individuals who commit criminal acts. Another concept of “signature” is the concept of method, something typical in terms of how a person goes about problem-solving. People have preferred methods of working and proceeding with work. It is ...

Continue reading Instructional Design “Signatures”

“What is instructional design?”

“Finally, I know that you really exist! So what is it that you do anyway?”

“Do you upload contents for us?”

A lot of the early questions I get when meeting with a new faculty client shows just how common the lack of knowledge is about what instructional designers do. Of course, what they do is defined by the particular work place and the policies that are in place.

In some ways, instructional designers also self-define ...

Continue reading Justifying Instructional Design

In higher education, there is a limited amount of money to create digital learning objects (DLOs) and online learning experiences. Because of this state-of-affairs, there is a kind of market demand-pull for free learning objects. Part of the popularity of image-sharing sites and video sharing sites comes from this need for resources.

On a more complex level, there is even greater demand for learning objects created for learning, which explains the popularity of MERLOT and BIGTHINK and other sites that ...

Continue reading Encouraging Open Sharing

There aren’t that many of us that are very good at waiting for a long time for particular decisions to be made. A fact of life in instructional design involves waiting, though, and some of the worst waiting is waiting on grant funding for a project that one really wants to work on. It’s a lot less anxiety-inducing to have grants done and out-the-door for projects that would be interesting to pursue but which do not offer anything ...

Continue reading Waiting on Grant Funding

One of the on-ground realities for instructional design is that one doesn’t get any sort of final word on a project. I’ve often thought it would be good to have a small party to celebrate the completions of long or complex course developments, but that has never happened yet. People do their quick private celebrations probably, if even that, and it’s on to the next project. What this means is that one never gets a full or ...

Continue reading Dangling Ends

With the popularization of desktop screen capture software and flip cams and web cams (and faster Internet connectivity for many learners), very simple lecture captures have become more popular with faculty members. While many struggle at first with just learning the technologies, and with adjusting to how they look and sound on camera, many others already have a long history with quality teaching and learning and build for quality early on.

Baseline Quality

One of the first realities of lecture ...

Continue reading Adding Sparkle to Lecture Captures

In instructional design work, one will occasionally get invited to serve on hiring committees. And when one has the opportunity to hire in one’s own field, one has the additional benefits of revisiting the state of the field, the skill sets desirable for the position, and the larger ambitions of the university. Serving on cross-campus committees also allows for more opportunities to connect with colleagues and to align each other.

Going Ambitious

With the job market coming back online ...

Continue reading Going for Broke in Hiring

“If I knew then what I know now…” I think that old cliché now that I’m well into my career. What I know now is that there is a basic work guarantee. That guarantee is that if one works long and hard enough in an area of passion, that all works for publication will eventually land in a peer-edited published format, that all works will find an audience (even if small), and one will be in a place where ...

Continue reading A Work “Guarantee”

A strategy used by some designers of digital labs involves highlighting the parts in a curriculum that have proved especially difficult for beginning students—in order to better retain learners in the field. While many fields are highly competitive, with early courses used to sift out those with the mettle to continue, many others are struggling continually to attract and maintain learners.

It makes sense to build to particular learning and skills that would enable students to better position themselves ...

Continue reading Teaching to Difficulties and Errors

Paul Allen’s memoir “Idea Man” has sparked some buzz on the Internet for its portrayal of his sometimes-tense relationship with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. This book has been heralded as an unusual sharing by a deeply private man. Those facts may be true. However, this work has plenty of other revelations which were more telling.

The Lure of Creativity and Discovery

The way the book is set up is that it begins with the impassioned youthful years, when Allen ...

Continue reading Paul Allen’s “Idea Man” and Being

Research in instructional design almost always has to align with other partners. It is not a stand-alone sort of field that can offer up deeply fresh insights as a stand-alone situation because instructional design is a field that aligns with certain domain fields, learners, instructors, and technologies. It is not stand-alone in any sense.

Strategic Partnering

Willing partners to conduct research and writing may include faculty members, funding organizations, e-learning consortiums, software technology companies, and students. Out of this lot ...

Continue reading The Research Piece in Instructional Design

At a university, rarely does instructional design involve designing for children. However, every so often, a grant-funded project will surface that offers interesting and unusual work. One recent one has involved the potential of designing learning for Pre-K and K-3 learners.

One of the truisms in instructional design is that the designs are unique to each learning situation. The designs have to be tailored to particular learners. That’s not to say that people cannot generalize about learning. One can ...

Continue reading Designing and Building Learning for Children

“No way?! I did that!”

Ideally, designed curriculums will be put into service, adapted and evolved over time, and used consistently and continuously over time. That way, it evolves with the learners and the various instructors who use the curriculum. It doesn’t go out-of-date. It stays relevant, and it’s in use.

However, based on circumstances, free courses may or may not be offered, and if a busy schedule takes over, then a curriculum can be left to lapse ...

Continue reading Revisiting an Old Curricular Design

It’s always a risk taking something public. The risk can be in the timing—such as getting attention on a project too soon. Then there are the challenges that the topic may not be particularly relevant to anyone else, or maybe one miscalibrated, and the work is actually not that cutting-edge or that particularly interesting.

What was Designed vs. What was Built

This system magnifies when the object that got built falls quite a bit shorter than what was ...

Continue reading Too Wobbly for Public Risk

A sequence of webinars on sustainable e-learning at colleges and universities highlighted a reality for many institutions of higher education today. The generous programs of reimbursement for faculty to build online courses by incentivizing their work is not currently supportable given the economic downturn. While many faculty may not necessarily think that the incentives were particularly generous in prior years, the truth is that the scales are now being weighted differently, and the financial burdens are being felt at virtually ...

Continue reading Long-term Supportable Structures for Quality E-Learning

While I often have felt that faculty members have been too restrained in their ambitions and dreams for various online learning endeavors, I have learned that they can go too far the other way, too. Faculty members who dream too big can render a project unwieldy and impossible to execute. How willing they are to actually listen to what is / is not possible will determine whether a project actually stays on course or runs off the tracks.

Having the Conversations ...

Continue reading Setting Reasonable Expectations

In a recent project, we did a lot of raw captures of images for processing for a digital lab. The point of the lab (the subject matter of which will go currently unnamed, so we can save the surprise for actual roll-out) was to offer a chance for student identification of particular biological life forms.

The camera setup required plenty of professional insights. A special photobox had to be set up for the image captures. The camera and lens were ...

Continue reading Creating a Workable System

The IT security presenter made the rueful observation: there is “no security patch for humans.” His point was that people who should know better often don’t and often take unnecessary risks in online spaces. While there are numerous technologies and various vigilances to protect computers, if people do not follow through on a basic safety regimen and maintain a certain level of awareness, they will get taken. They’ll compromise their private information; they’ll let their computer be ...

Continue reading A Recent IT Security Conference

Images are a critical part of numerous instructional design projects. At the lowest level, free clip art and imagery may be used to illustrate some basic concepts. Middle-range projects may involve the collection of some original imagery to illustrate concepts and resources. In some image-intensive projects, the team originates all of the images for the project. The images are all original. And oftentimes, the equipment used for the image capture may be fairly high-end.

Every project has its own unique ...

Continue reading Building a Workflow for Image Handling

One of the basic understandings of “going public” is that one will always have multiple audiences—in particular one who is the target and then others who may be more peripheral to the main message. For every public message, there are unintended audiences as well. When a work recently went live, one of my supervisors mused out loud whether we were possibly short-changing ourselves by potentially sharing privy information or offering insights that might be better used in an academic ...

Continue reading Elbow Grease and the Easy Theoreticals

Interesting ethical moments arise now and again. Just the other day, I was working with a faculty client who wanted to revamp a graduate certificate curriculum that was over a decade old. He had the substantive updates, and certain department issues and alignments made it feasible for him to pursue changes. He also wrangled quite a sizeable (relatively speaking) budget and was ready to proceed. He had taken some online courses, and he knew the look-and-feel that he wanted to ...

Continue reading Shifting to In-Field Students

One goes along creating a variety of storage folders and naming protocols to handle various contents on a desktop computer. And then one rotates contents off into deep storage to have sufficient protective redundancy but not too much. When projects go live, and the PIs have the final version, and that is protected sufficiently, one goes on a spree and cleans off all of that. (There is a point at which information starts losing its value—at least for one ...

Continue reading Decluttering a Work Computer

In my half-dozen years as an instructional designer, I usually work with faculty who are local. In other words, they live in our small town, and I’ll occasionally see many of them at the local shops or watering holes. For several years now, though, I’ve worked with a globe-trotting faculty member whose home base is actually overseas. Interestingly, the instructional design has been progressing fairly effectively.

Connecting as Individuals

Every time she is in town, we make it ...

Continue reading Socializing around Instructional Design Artifacts

After years working with faculty members on building many many dozens of courses, I have realized a very simple but critical observation. It is that the subject matter experts (SMEs) that create the most effective digital learning objects are those who know something about information coalescence and coherence—in order to create learning value. Those who have internalized this can create contents almost effortlessly. They understand how to cluster information. They can empathize with novice learners. They know how to ...

Continue reading Information Coalescence, Coherence, and Learning Value

Several initial projects have something in common—the concept of the digital simulation of real-world diagnoses. While some dealt with health issues, and others dealt with plant pathogen diagnosis, these projects offered some broad insights about the design of a simulated diagnostic situation.

A Scenario or Case

First, there is a kind of simulated context in which the learner is placed in a situation to receive or collect (or both) relevant information. This scenario or case may be explicitly stated ...

Continue reading Simulating Real-World Diagnosis

Workplaces need to get past human frictions in order to get work done in the most efficient way possible. Any number of issues may lead to frictions—differences in personalities, turfiness, perceived differences in values, gossip, ego, mis-communications, and a lack of respect. There are many workplace practices that try to mitigate these issues. Meetings encourage all voices at the table. Leadership is a critical one—the setting of values and the modeling of appropriate behaviors and the enforcement of ...

Continue reading Social Negotiation in ID Work

Most instructional design projects are simple enough that one doesn’t run into actual dilemmas. The work is executed, and hopefully, everyone is satisfied. However, on some, things can get, well, complicated.

A Tough Budget Climate

A tough budget climate makes projects even more difficult. Any gaps in funding for necessary work will result in some tensions. Some people are totally unwilling to support work that is not fully funded, and many are unwilling to move outside their comfort zone ...

Continue reading Phasing a Complex Project

When subject matter experts capture video, they often do not think about transcribing the audio files until after the video has been edited down into more of a final form. They see this as a feature of finalizing and polishing a work. In some cases, though, transcribing a video early on is helpful in the design decision-making. In interviews where the dynamism is in the ideas and maybe less so what’s directly on-screen, a transcript may help focus on ...

Continue reading Transcribing to Know Where to Edit

Once a project starts rolling, a certain dynamism sets in. Different people with different skill sets are brought on board to execute certain parts of the project. People come in from out-of-town. A few technology experts are brought in from around the campus, and there are longer-term alliances to tap particular skill sets. I was thinking about this in relation to a particular project in which I set up a meeting for the team precipitously—in response to a meeting ...

Continue reading Getting the Tech Systems Right Early On

This blog entry is going to make me sound very greedy, but I think there might be something valid here, so I’ll take a risk. So first, the context: in instructional design, we will often use open-source contents simply because the cost of actually creating the contents ourselves would be prohibitive. We often tap into what others have already made based on others’ expertise and interests.

Riding on Open-Source

In my five years working in instructional design, several projects ...

Continue reading A Site for Commissioning Open-Source Works?

It’s easy enough to fall into commitments while emailing back-and-forth with fellow colleagues at other universities abroad. So it was that I said I would help with supporting a conference on upcoming technologies. After I clarified the work (just a little advisement), I was then asked to do a live web presentation to a live audience halfway around the world. We settled on a topic, exchanged some drafts of the slideshow, and we were set.

Accessing the World Clock ...

Continue reading Assuming a Global Audience

Call for Chapters: Proposals Submission Deadline: March 30, 2011 Full Chapters Due: July 30, 2011

http://www.igi-global.com/authorseditors/authoreditorresources/callforbookchapters/callforchapterdetails.aspx?callforcontentid=49406cf9-f565-4649-a5c5-3c863bf5629c

Introduction

Open-source development of tools and contents have existed for a long time as a complement to for-profit approaches. This concept and practice describe R&D and production that includes savvy users of a particular software or information product and enables the widespread sharing and distribution of created resources among users. In information and ...

Continue reading Call for Chapter Proposals--Open-Source Technologies for Maximizing the Creation, Deployment and Use of Digital Resources and Information

One of the key affordances of an online e-learning environment involves the tenacity of an electronic memory. By this, I mean that all student and instructor actions in an online space are recorded and are searchable and archivable. This is all fine and good unless one begins with magical thinking or adopts magical thinking at any time during or later. In other words, this level of electronic memory becomes problematic if you want to change your narrative purposefully.

Instructors who ...

Continue reading The Electronic Trail in Online Learning

For many online writing courses, novice and amateur writers are taken through various stages of writing—to brainstorm topics to fit particular directions and rhetorical modes (forms of writing), draft outlines, create various parts of an essay (intros, conclusions, bodies, and titles), analyze their own and others’ writings, and revise and finish a work. They have to take on a lot of responsibility in selecting topics that they know well particularly before research may be integrated into writings. In other ...

Continue reading Breaking up Early Commitment to One’s Work

The wide sampling of the curricular offerings on a campus is usually the privilege of freshman and sophomore students just starting out. Students are learning about both themselves and what’s available in the world of learning at a particular time (and at a particular institution). In sampling courses again, now, after my graduate studies, I am able to sample with a broader sense of self-knowledge and also awarenesses that I didn’t have back in the day.

I am ...

Continue reading Setting Standards for Research and Learning in a Fairly New Field

At the end of the term, like a seasonal migration, masses of doctoral students wrap up their dissertations, and they finalize their digital files for archival and findability / searchability on a national repository and also possibly at the university’s repository. It is a time of great excitement. For many, their studies are a culmination of many years of hard academic labor and likely many sacrifices to reach this moment.

The next step afterwards seems to be to get the ...

Continue reading Transitioning a Dissertation into Publication(s)

On many campuses of higher education, one measure of education quality now involves undergraduate research. This means exposing young learners to a wide range of phases to understand the research method. This also means going over a range of legal and professional and ethical requirements and standards for research—particularly those involving people, animals, and potentially harmful substances.

This undergraduate research endeavor also means creating opportunities for various graduate students, staff, and faculty to mentor others in research. For many ...

Continue reading Undergraduate Research

In instructional design, part of our work is to tell stories or create contexts. And the materials we use range from the non-photo-realistic to the photo-realistic. The non-photo-realistic may be drawings and diagrams; they may be image captures from virtual worlds. The photo-realistic images are actual photos.

Recently, a PI working on a storytelling slideshow sent us a variety of screen captures overlaid with different image filters—to emulate oil painting effects, water color effects, and so on. Her question ...

Continue reading The Strategic Use of Artifice

For a long time now, I’ve been following what is considered to be quality learning in online courses. There is a lot that has been learned about quality in general for mainline students, but there has also been a bit of research in terms of case studies based on certain domain fields. I have wondered what some unique aspects of quality may be…and thought I would review what I’ve heard about domain-specific quality issues. It may well ...

Continue reading Domain-Specific Requirements for Quality E-Learning

Just a year or two ago, the world was aflutter with the possibilities of virtual world learning. There was talk of engaging simulations. There were dazzling examples of eye candy. A local project involved the uses of a virtual island for multicultural studies. Another project involved a simulated geological time space. People offered very nuanced versions of their digital doppelgangers. And then, almost overnight, it seemed, people were saying, That’s so passé!

This phenomenon of using virtual worlds seemed ...

Continue reading Using Immersive Virtual Worlds for Online Learning: Missing a Window of Opportunity?

So-called e-books (or flex-books) are popular among some faculty members. These are digital books that the instructor creates for his or her own use. These are often archived and delivered on various websites. I know of one delivered off of Google Docs. There are actually open-source websites and platforms that house these contents as well.

In theory, these are positive because they can save students on costs. They can be instantaneously modifiable by the instructor if he or she finds ...

Continue reading Professional Editing and Production of Open-Source Academic Book Publishing Endeavors?

Working with talented individuals via computer-mediated communications and at a distance is challenging—not because the technologies don’t offer a variety of ways to interact and to share ideas and mutual support—but more because people are people. They are busy; they have many draws to their time and energy resources; they take on more than they can follow through on.

Connecting at a Human Level

One important aspect seems to be to have a positive start in a ...

Continue reading The Ability to Facilitate Follow-Through from a Distance

A recent research article I read dealt with the phenomena of “herding online traffic”. In the same way that people “herd” food animals using chutes and other structures, and in the same way that people themselves are herded (as crowd control), there are ways to build sites that drive traffic to certain locales.

A very general top-level version of this may be seen at http://www.internettrafficreport.com/. This highlights the amount of Internet traffic at any given time. More ...

Continue reading Herding Traffic Online

In reading through the IT literature, I run across new concepts every so often. Some feel forced, like an effort to coin a new term to get one’s name into the history of a field. Others are interesting mixes of pre-existing terms and concepts. And then sometimes, it feels like a fresh idea…but that turns out to be somewhat less fresh than one might have thought originally. That’s what happened when I ran across the term “cognitive ...

Continue reading “Cognitive Hacking”