VIRTUALIZATION SECURITY: PROTECTING VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS. Dave Shackleford. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons Publisher. 2013. $49.99. 334 pp. softcover.

“Cloud computing” is considered a tactic to enable more efficient uses of hardware and to more easily roll out various computing services. While virtualization has been used for many years (the partitioning of mainframes, the centralized imaging of virtualized desktops and labs), the speedy rollout of various virtualization systems and the inherent nature of virtualized systems have raised concerns about security.

Dave ...

Continue reading REVIEW: Establishing security basics for virtualized network environments (Part 1 of 2)

IGNORANCE: HOW IT DRIVES SCIENCE. Stuart Firestein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. $21.95. 195 pp. hardcover.

“If ignorance, even more than data, is what propels science, then it requires the same degree of care and thought that one accords data. Whatever it may look like from outside the science establishment, the incorrect management of ignorance has far more serious consequences than screwing up with the data. There are correction procedures for mishandled data—they must be replicable, must answer ...

Continue reading REVIEW: Embracing ignorance as a driver for discovery

No matter what happens with the U.S.’s “fiscal cliff” or the EU’s financial struggles, it looks like national trends (and global ones) are pointing towards more belt-tightening and focuses on efficient uses of any funds. Closer local indicators might suggest that the same.

A Giveaway on an Electronic Mailing List

A recent posting on a global electronic mailing list described an information hub related to electronic learning that was no longer being funded and was needing a ...

Continue reading Projects Going Unfunded and Offline

TUBES: A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE INTERNET. Andrew Blum. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 2012. $26.99. 294 pp. hardcover.

Andrew Blum’s premise for his new book is that people conceptualize the Internet as something deeply intimate and social—based on its various functions and usages—and do not consider the physical structure. In “Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet,” he de-mythifies what the Internet is by tracking down its physical structure. That may sound ...

Continue reading REVIEW: A “test probe” of the physical structure of the Internet

As a matter of course, I have always found it expedient and common-sensical to archive (hidden) the semi-finished raw files (files that are finalized ones but are the core and editable files in the formats created in the authoring tools vs. the exported versions that are given to learners). Having these posted with the course contents makes it more likely that these files will “travel” with the original course. It also makes it more likely that they’ll be updated ...

Continue reading Handing Over Original Raw Files

THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL—BUT SOME DON’T. Nate Silver. New York: The Penguin Press. 2012. $27.95. 534 pp. hardcover.

The way Nate Silver tells it in “The Signal and the Noise,” people have historically gone far afield in trying to predict the future. They will focus on minutiae of details at the expense of critical thinking and the bigger picture. They will use intuition in lieu of thought. The mistaking of noise ...

Continue reading REVIEW: Sifting through noise for meaningful signal (Part 3 of 3)

THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL—BUT SOME DON’T. Nate Silver. New York: The Penguin Press. 2012. $27.95. 534 pp. hardcover.

Humans were made to make meaning of the world around them. It is a complex world about which there is much to learn and do. The senses can be overwhelmed by the amounts of information that come flooding in. To adapt, people turn the signals around them into shorthand. They use stereotypical understandings ...

Continue reading REVIEW: Sifting through noise for meaningful signal (Part 1 of 3)

Nate Silver’s “The signal and the noise” (2012) introduces a wider public to the concept of predictions (specific and testable projections into the future) and forecasts (probabilities into the future). While people today have more sophisticated models and much more computing power to apply to such work, these generally do poorly in complex scale-free systems where change occurs on an exponential scale.

People have had a long history of striving to predict the future, often with poorly outlandish claims ...

Continue reading Predictivity and Thinking Habits: Foxes or Hedgehogs?

MICROSOFT PRIVATE CLOUD COMPUTING. Aidan Finn, Hans Vredevoort, Patrick Lownds, and Damian Flynn. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons Publisher. 2012. $49.99. 378 pp. softcover.

Of late, much of the chatter in IT has been going to cloud services. For those who just use the cloud services, data management, cloud-based software, data analytics, simulations, decision support, and other enablements, they don’t have to know anything of the back end. And actually, most of what they see is not different than ...

Continue reading REVIEW: Private Cloud Computing with Microsoft’s VM Manager

Recently, as I was going through yet another research sweep, I came across some sources that I needed from a database that is a mainline one but not one that I use so often. What popped up was a long text message from several months ago that indicated that “sensitive personally identifiable information” (PII) appeared in some of the full-text documents in the collection. The management of the collection could not easily isolate the files with PII, so they basically ...

Continue reading PII in Academic Articles?

Usually, one of the factors I would consider before proposing a presentation topic for a conference or an article proposal is to figure out whether the “container” of the event or the article…is sufficient to contain the topic. After all, if the topic is too slim, then it won’t fill the time of the presentation and won’t attract an audience. If the topic is too complex, on the other hand, the presentation will come across as ineffectual ...

Continue reading Getting Past Irreducible Complexity

Those who work on publishing projects often end up collaborating with colleagues from other universities in other countries. There are collaborative rewards to be had in working with others. There are the benefits of assessing others’ thinking and capabilities in the same field. There is something very heartening about moving everyone’s careers forward. There’s plenty of room for “utility gain.”

The challenge though is in the inherent cautions that come with dealing with others, particularly those in countries ...

Continue reading Collaborating Across Cultures

Finding faculty presenters for on-campus events is never that easy. Their schedules are busy. Their departments may not necessarily reward their making presentations. Some departments have a real service orientation towards the main campus, but this cannot be said for all departments. As reasonable and strategic people, faculty members make cost-benefit calculations and decide how they want to spend their time and energy, and their attentional resources. (Faculty have teaching, research and publishing, and service agendas already.)

It’s even ...

Continue reading The Line-up

INTRODUCING AUTODESK® MAYA® 2013 . 9th Edition. Dariush Derakhshani. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons. 2012. $49.99. 626 pp. softcover.

“Art is a marriage of inspiration, hard work, and practice.” -- Dariush Derakhshani

So much in mass media involves immerse 3D: still images in publications and print ads; dynamic animated visualizations in film and video games. (In virtual worlds, the 3D involves a much lower resolution and amount of detail.) While such work has won a broad audience, 3D is also used in ...

Continue reading REVIEW: 3D Illustration and Animation with Maya

Here is an article on how to disappear from the Internet.

I'm not sure it's this easy, but it sounds like a lifelong vigilance thing, in addition to initial scrubbing.

Continue reading Going Invisible

At a recent university conference on assessments, I caught up on some of the discussions occurring around this “high impact” assessments. The keynote speaker was from the American Association of Colleges & Universities. She described the importance of focusing on the types of people that we are “making” with the educational system. The speaker described the importance of maximizing the learners’ energy, time and talent not only for their own sakes but for the ultimate betterment of society. She said that ...

Continue reading High Impact Assessments

Usually, the way it goes is that I work on a project. I create the work files necessary to achieve the work—the templates, the proposals of work, the drafts, the annotated research, the diagrams, the imagery, the videos—and then the project is finalized. I hold on to the work files for a while. Then, when I’m sure the project is working fine on its own, I move the work files off the servers or easily accessible hard ...

Continue reading The Value of Raw Work Files

Every week or two, I make a point of going through my various computer systems and cleaning off the digital detritus that has collected from the various projects. This is not a project-based clean-off. Rather, it’s a clean-off of extra materials from the computer systems, so the basic functions are available.

As part of the regular work of a day, I’ll do a CCleaner clean-off. That wipes off temporary files, memory dumps, file fragments, log files, temporary Internet ...

Continue reading Functioning Computer Systems

It’s totally not fashionable to own up to reading manuals. After all, there are intuitive interfaces. It’s not that hard to use many technology programs, at least at a base level. What I’ve learned is that these assumptions are a little reckless.

What is the organizational regime for the software, and what terminology is used? What is going on on the back end when a particular tool is used? How is the software used in various research ...

Continue reading Re-Reading a Software “Manual”

In online learning, there are repositories of learning objects of varying degrees of complexity. Most seem to be short-term development projects that result in discrete learning objects. A few are multi-year projects such as knowledge structures built in websites or wiki structures. Lately, I came across an intriguing agent-based modeling simulation tool that has been in development over about 15 years and has been supported by steady foundation funding during many of those years. It is a project hosted by ...

Continue reading Tapping An Agent-Based Modeling Tool’s Code Library

In most work places, people are constantly assessing each other to understand two core characteristics: personality and expertise. The basic questions are: How easy will it be to collaborate with this person, and what will their level of performance and follow-through be on the work? These questions are about the alignment of the person’s capabilities, life, personality, and home life to actually deliver on the goods.

For an instructional designer, though, sometimes, one ends up in blind commitments to ...

Continue reading Principal Investigators (PIs) and Follow-through

The way modern digital media organizations package contents has always been of interest to me. They are able to take complex information, and while maintaining the integrity of the information, present it to a broad readership in a way that is engaging to them. I have long decided that I needed to look at technologies to build such contents and to advocate their use on projects as needed (e.g. beneficial to the project). What are some of these elements ...

Continue reading Integrating Mainstream Media Strategies

Check out Brandi Miller's Audio/Video/Podcast Activity - Multimedia Interview Assignment. Very cool effects. Nice candor about how this came together. :)

Continue reading A Virtualized Interview about SoftChalk

Rarely, after writing a chapter, there is a little something extra that might be able to be converted into an article. Part of this is a factor of additional examples that may be used. There may be ideas that haven’t yet hit the particular readership. If the two publications being considered are quite different, and there may be assumed to be highly variant feedback from the reviewers and readers, then it’s often worth a try. Finally, it’s ...

Continue reading Sufficient Divergence between Writings

The first thing I noticed about online node-link diagrams was that many were dazzlingly appealing. They came in many colors. Some were 2D and others 3D. It was clear that there were inherent relationships and understandings related to each of them. They all had back stories even if not all of them were legible or interpretable from the outside. Then, an off-campus colleague of mine sent a cool video snippet in which he used social networks to express something about ...

Continue reading Acquiring…Acquiring…

This month, a book will come out that includes multiple chapters that I’d written. That all sounds good, but there is a pretty deep concern. That concern is that the text is one that I’ve edited. While all chapters were peer-reviewed and revised, it’s generally not good practice to include more than a few chapters by the editors. (And those chapters should be way in the back, usually). Such a practice can open one up to professional ...

Continue reading A Double-Edged Sword

I’ve been on a number of projects now where the leadership and sometimes even the development team have decided to have a presence on social networking sites. They need to have pages on various social networking sites. They need to micro-blog. They want to come across as engaged (which is good), but they’re trying too hard to be cool. They want to have a presence but haven’t fully decided on what the channel will bring, what contents ...

Continue reading Getting in with the Cool Crowd

“Mind-mapping” on the surface sounds like something complicated and maybe a little snobbish. After all, what does it mean to “map” a person’s mind? Really, what mind-mapping is is a way to brainstorm ideas in a spatialized 2D way. These are expressed in node-link diagrams (entities and relationships).

The Free-Wheeling Process of Mind-Mapping

The process of mind-mapping is supposed to include a freeform session that involves pure brainstorming, with the suspension of the critical mind. On paper, it ends ...

Continue reading FreeMind for Mind-Mapping

Instructional design work, at its core, is about designing online curriculums and then developing the learning in depth. It involves conducting research on the learning to see what works. Further, it’s about writing—whether it’s a money chase (for grants) or some other writing work (content creation, work documentation). It crossed my mind recently that there’s also plenty of providing a lifeline to instructors once courses have gone live.

Being on the Virtual “Rolodex”

It is important ...

Continue reading ID Lifeline for Live Courses, Software Tips, and Social Contacts

One strategy in larger IT companies involves deploying competing teams to engineer particular solutions to a challenge. These teams would work in secrecy, and then, they would present their ideas. Their solutions would be independently tested. The best design would win. It would be, as I’m told, pure competition based on technical merits.

There’s something to be learned from using redundant teams in some cases. In situations where technological decisions have very high and often irreversible impacts, it ...

Continue reading Deploying Competing Teams

To protect against data loss, I have always been diligent about saving multiple versions on files on various servers, and internal and external drives. I follow file naming protocols with a general sense of care (although I had long resisted putting dates into the file name and just used the file date when saving—which does not always work because I’ve accidentally saved over fresher files). This has been good practice, especially when a file has corrupted as it ...

Continue reading A Clean Post-Project Scrub

PUBLISHING E-BOOKS FOR DUMMIES. Ali Luke. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. 296 pp. 2012. $24.99 soft cover.

E-publishing has come to the fore online. There are public libraries offering e-books for checkout. Many subscription-based repositories offer access to a wide range of e-books. Many higher education courses use only e-books, delivered on various e-reader platforms. In the physical bookstores, most print books have accessible e-versions for purchase or rent. (This is understandable since all print books go through an electronic ...

Continue reading Review: Indie-Publishing E-Books (Part 1)

WE ARE ANONYMOUS: INSIDE THE HACKER WORLD OF LULZSEC, ANONYMOUS, AND THE GLOBAL CYBER INSURGENCY. Parmy Olson. New York: Little, Brown & Company. 2012. $26.99 hard cover.

It’s probably telling that Parmy Olson (“Forbes” London bureau chief) opens her new book, “We are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency” with Aaron Barr on Feb. 6, 2011, just as the man was gearing up to watch the Super Bowl at home in suburban ...

Continue reading Review: Hacktivism for the Lulz and the Show

Most curriculums used for online courses already have a pre-built structure for most faculty. More precisely, most go with the TOC of a book, or they have a conceptualization in their minds about the proper developmental sequence for learning. Then, they build accordingly.

What’s rarer (but more interesting) involves learning that does not have a pre-built structure. These are curriculums that are emergent or are appearing at a time of a potential paradigm shift. There is any number of ...

Continue reading A Purely Evolved Curriculum and Syllabus

MASTERING WINDOWS NETWORK FORENSICS AND INVESTIGATION. 2nd Ed. Steve Anson, Steve Bunting, Ryan Johnson, and Scott Pearson. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons. 2012. 674 pp. $59.99 soft cover.

For an outsider (like this blogger) to this work, it may help to understand network forensics as a kind of tech-to-tech combat in engineered spaces, full of evolving measures and counter-measures. The systems and tools are constantly changing, and effective network forensics investigators have to stay atop the changing landscape (systems, tools ...

Continue reading Review: Securing Windows Networks (Part 2)

Something that has always concerned me professionally has been the fact that one can get by with a functional level of software usage (authoring tools, data analysis tools) and miss whole modules of functionality. Software users, as a rule, do adore features. Software developers encapsulate complexity with some very high-level functions, which makes it important to understand at least the bare concepts of what’s happening on the back end. Given the pressure of development cycles, one generally learns as ...

Continue reading A Getting-By Level of Technology Use

When a project wraps up, there’s various work done by the grant principal investigator (PI). There is work documentation for the grant funders. A website may be launched to reach out to the wider public. Curricular materials are sent out to the various members of the network. Then, there is the publicity effort to bring eyes on a project and extend the learning value of what was created (whether a course, a site, or a learning sequence).

What finally ...

Continue reading Using a Hard Launch for a Project Finale

Several times a year, the question of how to achieve the learning in on-campus wetlabs via online labs (or distance means) is considered by individual faculty members. Then, every few years, the question of how to achieve the learning in on-campus wetlabs is considered on campus.

The challenges are the same. There has to be the learning of complexity. Visualizations need to be accurate. There has to be accounting for potential negative learning (misunderstandings). There has to be the ability ...

Continue reading On the Hunt for Quality Virtual Labs for Science Courses

The invite came in a forwarded email from a colleague (who shortly thereafter left campus). The invite was from an administrator for a professional organization. The group was in the middle of discussions about a course that they wanted created to train their membership. I participated in a web conference with the group and got a light sense of the various personalities. Further, I shared a couple files of materials I had already created. Then, the original lead sent out ...

Continue reading The Option of Non-Profit Professional Organizations

One of the tropes of mainstream television is that of a contest, the turning of expertise into a major struggle with others for some grand prize and recognition. This has appeared in a series of cooking shows that I’ve been watching on the Web. Several of them—“Iron Chef,” “Chopped”—have chefs who are asked to cook creatively using various ingredients within a sharp time constraint that left very little room for major error.

The conditions of the game ...

Continue reading At the Point of Conceptualization

Making a recommendation for a core technology to use for a training project is always a little iffy, particularly when there is no budget and no real common understandings of the choices on the table. The particular project involved a simple concept of creating modules for online faculty to hone their craft and to enhance their online teaching.

What’s in the World, and What’s Supportable by the IT Administrators

The options were actually not that many. We could ...

Continue reading Recommending a Core Technology for a Project

This presentation was given as part of C2C's SIDLIT ("sidelight") Conference held at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS.

http://www.k-state.edu/ID/BuildingEffectiveStudyGuidesforOnlineLearningandAssessment/

https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/rFnD0AQX3xRVTa

Continue reading Building Effective Study Guides for Online Learning and Assessment

SOCIAL ENGINEERING: THE ART OF HUMAN HACKING. Christopher Hadnagy. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing. 2011. 382 pp. $34.99 soft cover.

Christopher Hadnagy’s “Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking” begins with an impolite but real-world assumption: that people can be malicious and devious.

In light of that reality, pen-tester and author Hadnagy promotes “security through education” by broadening mainstream readers’ imagination for the many ways to break into systems and to hack both computers and humans. “Social engineering” refers to ...

Continue reading Review: Avoiding being a Social Engineering Victim

Recently, I spent a few hours with faculty members whose project will go live shortly. They have invested plenty of time, learning, energy, and resources to writing a grant, getting it funded, conducting vast research, interviewing individuals, and editing digital resources. They are just about ready to launch, except that it has suddenly occurred to them that they do not want their colleagues to download their resources for use in their own courses and unduly claim credit.

I had a ...

Continue reading Over-Protection of Public Goods

There is no official spoken responsibility for digital contents over time. Usually, when a project wraps, one has already moved on. On paper, at least, the transition is clean. The work is done.

However, in truth, many projects will linger for years. There are changes that need to be made to a curriculum. New instructors have to be trained. Accounts for sites remain for years after a project has officially wrapped, and there are occasions to log in and make ...

Continue reading Responsibility for Digital Contents over Time

Usually, I associate academic research with side projects—like an academic publications or a live presentation or the acquisition of a new software program. I do not often think of needing so much intensive research for instructional design, but every so often, there are projects that require in-depth learning and analysis. Given how quickly information ages out, it’s helpful to be able to dip into the research literature to create digital learning objects that are high-quality and informative.

One ...

Continue reading “Findability” for Academic Research

GREAT BY CHOICE. Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 2011. 304 pp. $29.99 hard cover.

Global companies compete in an extreme environment replete with dangers and risks. Their leaders have thin margins for misreading the signals or making mistakes. In this time of global economic turmoil, authors Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, in Great by Choice, ask: “Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?”

The authors drew on ...

Continue reading Companies that Survive in Extreme Environments

For a while there, I was on a run of books about computer security. I would listen in on The Silver Bullet Podcasts and nose around a few security blogs. I ducked in on a computer security conference. I think I am starting to come to the end of that line of interest. It’s starting to look like a lot of policy stuff. And while I like the issues of design, I don’t have sufficient background to fully ...

Continue reading Catching up with the Defectors

If I’ve learned nothing else reading a variety of works from the political science literature, it’s that many who work in the field take on the coloration of the defense industry—the assumption of near-constant malice and the need for a constant defense. It is so, too, with Dr. Gary M. Jackson’s “Predicting Malicious Behavior: Tools and Techniques for Ensuring Global Security.” As a clinical psychologist and former employee with the CIA and U.S. Secret Service ...

Continue reading A Software Suite of Tools for Analyzing Malicious Behaviors and Anticipating New Attacks

It is not often that one actually builds a mirror site in instructional design work. However, every so often, one does. Before I created some mirror sites recently, I had only heard of them in two contexts. One was the context of spoofed sites that people used to trick others into inputting private identity information into a faked site, so the thieves could try to make off with that individual’s moneys. And the other context had to do with ...

Continue reading Setting up Mirror Sites

When I use one of my favorite authoring tools to create digital learning objects, I often have to change its look-and-feel and some other aspects of the labeling. I have to rework the metadata. However, one aspect that I generally leave alone involves the application of a Creative Commons license releasing the contents to the public domain with a non-commercial restriction and a share-alike provision, along with the need to acknowledge the source. The default for me has been to ...

Continue reading Why Open-Source Release as a Default

As part of instructional design work, one constantly has general bids out on various projects. Some of these are for-pay projects. Some are grant projects. Some are unpaid projects but are interesting ones (like publishing projects). And then there are the submittals for presentations at various conferences. There’s always a degree of uncertainty of whether an approach will work or not, so one usually tends to have more “irons in the fire” than will actually result in a full ...

Continue reading Getting Something Down in Writing First (for a Forthcoming Presentation)

One of the subthemes in Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” involves “intuition.” His general approach has been that intuitions really are System 1 thinking kicking in when System 2 really should be at play (in terms of decision-making, analysis, troubleshooting, etc.). He explored whether expert “intuitions” actually exist.

The Brain Working in Two Systems

The author’s basic assertion is that the human brain operates as two systems. The first is involuntary and automatic. It is intuitive ...

Continue reading Questioning Expert “Intuitions”

Trust is a critical element in a workplace. It paves the way for cooperation. It enhances people’s abilities to share information and skills. These trust assumptions work fairly well until they don’t. In every trust relationship, there is an opportunity to cooperate or defect. We have all been part of that decision before, on a number of sides.

In game theory, a tit-for-tat strategy involves cooperating until the other side defects, and then defecting thereafter. That was all ...

Continue reading Taking Promises to the Bank? Not (Too Often)

There are a number of models (expressed in a graphical form) that are available online that affect a project that I am working on. The challenge though is that the sites that host these put up images that have low resolution, which means that the images are blurry and the text is not readable. Those who work with digital images know just how limiting it is to have a poor quality image, and even if one ups the resolution and ...

Continue reading Redrawing a Complex Image

One of my recent projects has involved the endeavors by leaders in the field to promote greater multi-discipline coordination among various professional practitioners in the hard sciences (related to human / animal / environment health)—in a shared endeavor that may enhance each of their respective fields. This seems like a special moment-in-time in the fields, and it’s fascinating to watch the various ways that innovators in the field are trying to move this idea forward—almost as a kind of ...

Continue reading The Promotion of Multi-Discipline Coordination

Most people, broadly speaking, do not talk about their graduate school years with huge amounts of fondness. Many describe the grueling work loads, the unpredictable professors, the pressures on relationships and marriages, and the many bills—for tuition, for books, for assessments, and various and sundry costs. However, too, there’s the excitement of beginning a new program of study. There’s the heady sense that what one learns will all apply somewhere down the road. There’s the sense ...

Continue reading Getting Sentimental about Graduate School, Sort Of

One of the first things one notices about social networks as an area of study in the social sciences is that the essential focus is on power. The way power is understood in a node-link diagram is that it is central to numerous concerns. Arrows point in to power with resources concentrated there, but fewer arrows point out. (In the “selectorate theory” of power, the core is the central leadership, the semi-periphery would be those that a core leader is ...

Continue reading What to Do about my Social Predicament based on my Social Network Analysis?

When I started Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow,” I knew I was in for an insightful read. What I hadn’t realized was that I was in for a reaffirmation of professional collaborations.

Kahneman opened with a tribute to his long-time colleague, Dr. Amos Tversky. This Israeli-American psychologist offers an insider’s view to how in 1969 he and Amos Tversky started their long-term collaboration at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Kahneman was 32 and Tversky 35. His ...

Continue reading Professional Camaraderie

Dr. Daniel Kahneman, in “Thinking Fast and Slow,” sets aside a few pages to talk about the human tendency to mis-read the difficulty of a particular project, which often ends up taking much more time and more resources before it can be successfully executed. On the one hand, setting aside extra funds to mitigate such rosy estimations of an easy project may involve perverse incentives and encourage slowing.

People tend to over-estimate their own abilities to achieve certain outcomes, even ...

Continue reading Mitigating for Optimism Bias in New Projects

My recent foray into network science has brought up some new words to engage. The words come from searches for certain resources in social networks. More precisely, a “broadcast search” involves telling everyone; a “directed search” involves reaching out to a targeted few who may have the resources that one may need.

As I read those terms, I was considering the efficacy of each. In projects that involve publishing, one obviously does both calls—a broadcast search to reach as ...

Continue reading Eliciting Work through Broadcast and Directed Searches

Some of the most inspiring faculty members are those who reach beyond their areas of expertise and training in order to collaborate with colleagues. [As an example, a subtext of Duncan J. Watts’ “Six Degrees” (2003) describes his evolution of ideas in interacting with colleagues from a range of fields.] That is somewhat easier said than done at times. After all, moving to another field may involve learning from the undergraduate level and adjusting to the assumptions of another field ...

Continue reading Avoiding Domain Field Insularity

An important professional skill involves coming alongside another professional and collaborating on projects. I have read somewhere that most workplace issues involve personalities, and that may be so. One takeaway here is that one has to control one’s own elbows. One has to limit one’s excesses.

One has to respect others’ space. One has to adjust to others’ work styles. Any collaboration suggests taking into consideration one’s own interests but also those of all the other project ...

Continue reading Coming alongside another Professional

Whenever I advise on a new project, I let the principals know that it’s smarter to get all rights releases up front and right away rather than get inspiration for some new work and then have to chase new rights. After all, the individuals in a project have their own lives and interests. They will not be statically waiting and available to give their assent. The legwork put into chasing down individuals may be generally simple with the affordances ...

Continue reading All Potentialities

Sometimes, at a local conference, there will be other conference organizers who will approach with invitations. These may be invitations to collaborate. They may be invitations to present at their respective conferences. Oftentimes, a few months afterwards, nothing is remembered about the conversations. There are the occasional cards that are exchanged. And that’s that.

However, every so often, the original invitee remembers, and the invitation is reiterated closer to when the actual conference is being held.

The first hurdle ...

Continue reading Taking the Brunt of a Potential Rejection

Writing a prospectus can be quite arduous. Many in academia have been through this process. It’s not one that most make a regular part of their lives. I know of many who have burned out at the first attempt because it’s tough to put together, and it’s tough to get rejections from publishers. Others have gotten initial okays on projects only to have them pulled by publishers. Still, the act of putting together a book prospectus enables ...

Continue reading Flying a Prospectus by Listing Competitive Texts

The rule of the Oxford comma applies to many aspects of instructional design. The Oxford comma is the comma that comes before the end in a list of multiple objects. The rule is that if it is used once in a work, it always has to be used. If it is left out, it should not be used once. The basic concept is uniformity in the document. Those who work in document design are aware of these rules as well ...

Continue reading Designing Uniformity

There are plenty of endeavors to try to assess the quality of an online course. One method involves looking at the quality of the interactivity in the course.

Interactivity, of late, has been defined by the Feds as regular and substantive interactions between online instructors and their students. Having regular interactivity and other aspects of online learning quality will head off the labeling of a course as a mere correspondence one (e.g. the exchanges of learning materials by electronic ...

Continue reading Gauging the Quality Online Course Interactivity and Learner Feedback

There’s a lot to be said for intense work projects. They challenge one’s skills. They humble one in terms of what one knows. They offer opportunities for learning. They offer chances to work on teams. They really help bring one out of boring routines even as the learning curve provides all sorts of demands. They challenge one’s skill sets, and they tend to condense the work in time, which means an extra layer of pressure (generally positive ...

Continue reading Little Bits of Second Wind

This link is from a recent presentation the C2C Spring Symposium at Hutchinson Community College
Using Tableau Public for Spatial and Trendline Data Visualization: An Early Exploration

Continue reading Using Tableau Public...for Data Visualization

Much as I don’t want to admit this, there is a degree of tit-for-tat in professional work. More specifically, people generally will not ask for more than they give—with a few exceptions. And in general, if one gives others a lot of work on a project, they will often strive to return the favor. Those were the general assumptions that I was working with in relation to a colleague of mine who was writing a critical chapter for ...

Continue reading Hard and Soft Deadlines

Those who engage in semi-creative work know what this phenomenon is—this issue of chasing a muse. While I was aware of this in relation to creative writing, I am realizing that this actually does occur, too, with getting into the right mindset to conduct targeted research, create a diagram, write slideshows, analyzing data, draft out articles, design an animation, or to do other work that requires a high level of concentration.

Sometimes if I have more difficult work, I ...

Continue reading In the Mood…to Work

Years ago, at a conference on the East Coast, I attended a session by a man working in instructional design who created an automated training (a slideshow) to fulfill compliance requirements for his private company. He had trainees from all over the world who had to go through the compliance trainings annually on a variety of topics, to fulfill a legal requirement, and his job was to make the training as direct and simple and effective as possible. Back then ...

Continue reading An Automated Training about Policy

When a wiki is under “attack,” the attacks seem to come in waves. Before our system administrator put in a plug-in to limit the creation of automated accounts and instituted a form of email verification for each account, our wiki would get spammed with all sorts of recent activities by machines—with clearly machine-created gibberish names full of alpha-numeric characters (but clearly formulaic).

Human Spammers

So once we deactivated what machines could do, the human spammers came into play. Apparently ...

Continue reading Free Riders on a Wiki

Sometimes, I start an instructional design project and think, Oh, wow, do I really have to know this? That’s my lazy part talking…and it’s definitely the part that I should be listening to. That said, it’s pretty scary having to think about starting at freshman level in terms of learning about a topic…about which I will never ever even get close to being any sort of expert on.

So why should instructional designers make it ...

Continue reading No Arms Length Relationship with the Learning Contents

It was probably not fair to the dryer repair person that I was thinking about troubleshooting and decision-making when he stopped by to replace the heating element. But as luck would have it, a problem arose that illuminated some aspects of both. What happened was that he replaced the heating element, but instead of the clothes actually drying in regular time, the clothes took 3-4-5 times as long. The room would get humid. Was it a heating element that did ...

Continue reading Troubleshooting Outside the Machine

The concept of infusing a curriculum is of permeating a particular learning sequence with a distributed element that appears in various points in the curriculum (or throughout). The learning is not pulled out specifically in a discrete piece or lecture or module; rather, it is distributed throughout.

What is Usually Infused

So what is usually infused? Usually, it is something abstract and elusive. On one project, an attitude towards a topic was infused throughout a curriculum that showed an empathy ...

Continue reading Infusing a Curriculum

It was with dismay that I realized that I was racking up hours on a project that I had hoped to keep as a smaller part of my overall schedule. While the project remained on the back burner for over half a year, when the work of researching, writing, and creating slideshows came to the fore, my hours started to climb. Then, too, there were quizzes to be written, transcripts to be created of videotaped interviews, and other planning. When ...

Continue reading Collaboration and Workplace Efficiencies

In the past, I’d always thought of myself as a specialist…a person who focused on a topic and learned it in-depth and worked hard to stay up on that knowledge. Now, as I’ve embraced the role of instructional designer even more, I consider myself more of a generalist. I’ve been in enough spaces with subject matter experts to know just how surface of an understanding I have of so many topics (or really just how little ...

Continue reading Reading and Instructional Design

I have always thought that the idea of letting sleeping dogs lie is a good one, but what if that sleeping dog is lying on something that is valuable to explore? Or what if that sleeping dog is a guard dog in front of a doorway that I need to get past? The challenge was this. I wanted to conduct a research project on a hacking group that was known to hack media organizations that gave them press coverage that ...

Continue reading Avoiding a Misadventure (I Hope)

With the popularization of instructional design, there are more students who are pursuing degrees in this area. This area combines curriculum and instruction with much deeper knowledge of instructional technologies. What this means is that students are out there eliciting insights from practicing instructional designers. Every so often, I’ll agree to take part in a class project…will answer the questions…and then enjoy what the students present for their projects. This is a way that I sort of ...

Continue reading Supporting Graduate Students in their ID Studies

I have always been quite ambivalent about bylines, credentialing, and ghost writing. For the majority of my work, I am happy to stay on background and not worry about having a name on a curriculum or on a project. In most cases, the credential is not even offered. PIs would be just as glad to have support staff stay on background. In general, I’m of that mind as well.

It’s not that if one’s name is not ...

Continue reading Ghost Writing from the Outside

Publishing Interactive Articles

Continue reading Publishing Interactive Articles

In the absence of information, we as people often go with impressions that come in piecemeal and gut instincts and maybe prior tendencies.

It is easy for a committee (no matter how professional and well intentioned and skilled) to misfocus on impressions and pre-existing ideas if one doesn’t have empirical evidence. It’s easy to sort of lose one’s way into focusing on politics or other external issues to the work. That sort of concern was at the ...

Continue reading Data Analysis of Responses to a Survey

In IT, a “forcing mechanism” is just a design feature that channels people in responding with particular information in a technical system. These mechanisms are created to increase—ultimately—the functionality of socio-technical spaces. Another use of a “forcing mechanism” in real life, real space, is to structure a work situation in order to acquire a new skill or new knowledge. If one doesn’t focus on our self-interest in self-development and professional growth, one can’t expect anyone else ...

Continue reading Going Public as a “Forcing Mechanism”

A lot of instructional design is about the expression of ideas to enhance learning. Much of the ideas expressed are elusive or theoretical or imaginary. Some types of “internal states” are impossible to depict any other way than through fictionalization. Or they may involve processes over time. Or they may involve processes that are infeasible to capture using a camera (such as atom-level processes or cross-sections of organs as they go through particular functions). For a few years now, I ...

Continue reading The Need for Simple Animation Skills

Instructional designers have been working to try to get a handle around designing for locative learning using mobile devices and the actual physical spaces. We’ve been designing for so long around issues of virtualized (disembodied) learning that we are less able to think of people learning in physical spaces. This may also be a limitation because so much other F2F designed learning has been in classrooms and not outside those four-walls. In other words, we have been designing within ...

Continue reading Locative Learning

3-3. There I was again using a software program to update contents on a third-party remote Web server, and the system was hanging again and kicking out failure messages and failing to update the site. I was giving the system the benefit of the doubt and trying multiple times. I’ve used software technologies enough to know that sometimes persistence can work, and it helps to tamp down an initial frustration and to get second wind before asking for possible ...

Continue reading Smack into Yet another Software Bug

For an instructional designer, it’s hard to look at an online course built by others without analyzing the various strategies that may be in play to create a solid learning experience. This happened recently in a course that was built to various safety training standards. The course itself was methodical and clear. One really cool approach was the use of real-world experiences cited in the academic research literature to bolster certain precautions that should be taken.

Building on the ...

Continue reading The Uses of True Stories to Authenticate the Learning

The two chapters were in the final stages of the submittal process. They had already been vetted. The digital signage had already been done on the contracts for the publisher. And then, the editors realized that the support materials for the two cases had not been done. They were not in the emails. They were not integrated with the main narrative of the cases. In other words, there was still plenty of work to do.

I should have noticed that ...

Continue reading Writing Support Materials for Two Cases

In instructional design, one builds learning with short-term incentivization of the learning by building in rewards and even punishments to encourage human commitment to the learning at hand. Most of these incentives deal with success issues in the short-term. What is intriguing to me is how to design lifelong learning over time.

Then, when I was surfing on my iPad during a class that I’m taking, I ran across Charles Duhigg’s “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” in The ...

Continue reading The Science of Habit Formation and Lifelong Learning

I’ll own up to being quite cynical about prizes and recognition from professional organizations. On the face of it, these endeavors are sometimes about a mutual regard society, in which the universities and colleges affirm the professional organization, and vice versa. They are about a superficial aspect of work that takes place long after the project has been delivered. These bring PR into play, with the packaging of the course developed for an external audience of administrators (who have ...

Continue reading Pursuing Professional Organization Prizes and National Recognition

One cannot begin a new year without a resolution that would be worthy of that time period. Every so often, I get enamored of an idea. My current enamorment is to take a little more risk-taking, or said in the common parlance—“fail like you mean it.” In other words, take sufficient risks by really putting something in the effort. (I came across this phrase in a presentation by an inventor of medical devices and robotics who was speaking in ...

Continue reading “Fail Like you Mean It”

The editor emailed to ask for new contracts for the two chapters that had been accepted to a forthcoming text. New contracts? I doubled-back to check the text, and it all looked kosher. The proper titles had been used. I wasn’t sure what the concerns were. So I went and worked on the formatting and left the contract issue for later. Well, a short while later, another email came. It turns out that the title change was on their ...

Continue reading A Midstream Correction

I’ve always thought it was a risk to get too defensive about one’s stances and one’s work. After all, those who sort of hoard their digital work and try to make outsized claims about their achievements often remain static. They live off the past to their own detriment. In the same way, people who define their roles in very fixed ways and will not accept any other task outside their own sense of themselves (often self-importance) will ...

Continue reading Playing all Positions

It doesn’t take more than a few experiences with a computing machine that balks at simple tasks to really just want to trade it in. In a work day, there is only so much time one can spend coaxing basic performance out of a machine. There are the typical underlying reasons for under-performance, the huge amounts of content that may be clogging a machine…some malware possibly…or the behavior of the software…or user error (usually in some ...

Continue reading The Limits of the Machine…and the Software…and the User

For a recent project, I have been tracking ownership of various images that we would like to use in a video. The topic is quite elusive and possibly incendiary. People who have imagery tend to have these buried deep within a site or within a .pdf document that is delivered online. Some companies have images of manufactured products that they make and advertise.

Clearly, those who share information on the Web and Internet do so for a purpose. This is ...

Continue reading Tracking People across the Web and Net

I can’t say that I’ve ever dealt with anything with a million data points and still found them useless informationally—as Nassim Nicholas Taleb has asserted in “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” (2007 / 2010). This book has garnered plenty of attention of late, and his ideas have found their way into broad debates about disaster preparedness and predictive analytics.

A so-called “black swan” event has three main attributes, according to Taleb: “First, it is ...

Continue reading Why Averages and the Bell Curve Matter at the Micro Lived Levels

In putting together a book manuscript, one always hopes for a wide range of writers who can address a broad collection of issues from unique points-of-view. As an editor, one generally does not want to have to jump in and write chapters—because, frankly, it shows that there were gaps in information that the editor had to jump in to address.

Wide Solicitation of Work

To draw out writing from subject matter experts around the world, one does try to ...

Continue reading Going Anonymous to Get Pure Critique

IGI-Global Blog Entry

Continue reading Modes of Self-Discovery Learning

Many instructional designers never have to worry about monetizing a project. They don’t have to worry about fund-raising. They don’t have to necessarily bill hours. And maybe some even consider thinking about this a little vulgar. I don’t simply because it has almost always been part of my workplace landscape. I had to bill hours from my first month on-the-job as an instructional designer, and I have always had some role in budgeting projects over the years ...

Continue reading Monetizing a Project

As a new year commences, I spend some time thinking about what commitments to carry forward and which ones to leave by the wayside. I think about whether to continue blogging, with such a massive onslaught of people who post messages to this only to promote certain SEO (search engine optimization) links—and who never actually check back to realize that their postings have long vanished and seldom last more than a day or two. The emails I get are ...

Continue reading Using a Blog for Heuristic Research

Recently, I’ve had the privilege of writing a recommendation of a colleague for a new position. This situation led me to think about what I actually know about my colleagues. I learned a new term from Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) which is WYSIATI, or “what you see is all there is.” Given that reality, people have to work hard to exercise due diligence to learn everything that they do not know to understand what ...

Continue reading Recommending a Colleague

One of the mainstays of basic macroeconomics involves the Pareto efficiency curve, which conceptualizes the total output of a society based on its resources and human capabilities. The idea is that every society makes choices about where to put their resources and how to allocate their human capabilities. This curve is conceptually achieved when no one may be better off without making someone else worse off. This assumes that all resources are used in the maximal ways possible—in a ...

Continue reading Open-Source Pushing out the Pareto Efficiency Curve

In doing research for another project, I came across a phenomenon described as “didactic transposition”—which was described as moving (transposing) some of the skills needed in the professional realm into the academic one in a particular domain field. This is a fancy term for a kind of “gaps analysis” between what a professional needs in the workplace and what is actually known by the novice learner. The point is to identify what is necessary for students to learn and ...

Continue reading “Didactic Transposition” for Instructional Design

The student self-introduction bios that that are posted at the beginning of a course are an early indicator that students are swamped with busy-ness. Students describe their commitments to family, to part- or full-time jobs, to hobbies, and to their education. Sometimes, it seems like a course or two serves as an afterthought. It is certainly not Priority 1, and that is fully understandable.

The challenge comes in when there are scheduling bottlenecks, and one of the first things to ...

Continue reading The Challenges of Student Over-Scheduling

There is something very satisfying about having a small portion of work life based on freelance work. For me, the freelance work occurs on the side. It has nothing to do with my professional life. It’s just some work that augments a generally feeling of satisfaction.

That said, the freelance work has some benefits to me as an instructional designer. I am learning new ideas and practices that may augment my design work. After all, an ID is a ...

Continue reading No Promises, Just the Work

It seems appropriate to begin the new year with a blog entry about anticipated opportunities. After all, this is the time of year when one looks back and completes a report on goals and how those goals were or were not met (and how the progress may be quantified). Those reports have to align with the goals of the office and supervisors. These tend to be set in a fairly basic way, based on past experiences and achievements. One doesn ...

Continue reading Recognizing Opportunities