Blog Entry
Usually, most of the reading I do is over subject matters about which I have a small bit of background. And usually, I might have to look up an occasional word or two online, but there is not a concerted need to redefine basic terms. However, when I dip into very new information, I am finding myself actually having to taken a more systematic approach to the learning. I have to actually take notes. I have to actually write up ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
From firsthand experience, after many years of creating diagrams using 2D drawing tools, I find that my initial temptations in building digital visualizations is to noodle with the data to try to get a certain visual output. I was chastened to realize that one tool would allow the download of the original data set, which would confuse any users and would show that the data had been massaged for a certain output. (I was trying to get the system to ...
Continue reading Building in One’s Mental Models into a Data Visualization
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
To be a basically effective instructional designer, there is maybe a listing of a dozen and a half software programs that are useful to know in-depth (or at least to be on one’s way of knowing in-depth). There are many opportunities to learn new apps and new devices (all with simple interfaces). Where things get interesting is when one pursues new software technologies to add to the skill set. The challenge here starts not in the long lag times ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
The expectations for responding to critiques of chapter drafts are high. A respondent is supposed to address all critiques point-by-point in order to show their sincerity and professionalism in revising a work. The quality of their revision and the sincerity and thoroughness of their responses will inform whether their work finds a place in the ultimate publication.
Even if there is something as generous as a contingent acceptance, this is a conditional, and that means that the editor(s) or ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
With how many open-source resources I use on various instruction design and development projects, it is now almost second nature to me to go through the motions of citing every resource and giving credit where it’s due. It feels right to give others their due even if that little note in the alt-text of an image and in the notes of a slideshow will never have any effect on the contributor’s work life. It’s all part of ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
29 April 2012
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
Blog Entry
At a conference I attended last year, a panel of presenters addressed different sorts of learning analytics tied to learning / course management systems and learning sites to help enhance the power of learning. This is very much the new thing—well, a revisioning of an old phenomenon—the idea of collecting behavioral data to profile learners in order to better serve their learning needs. This is yet another endeavor to tap into the “black box” of learning and to try ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
So shortly after a presentation to a small group of academics at a local conference, my supervisor swung by and asked if I would present the same work again in the main conference. I politely declined—for a number of reasons—but the main one was that it was the same hosting organization that would be engaging us. While the audience members would be possibly different and more plentiful in the main conference, I felt that repeating the topic would ...
Continue reading Avoiding the Repetition of Public Presentations
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
After a project is completed and delivered successfully, there is a slight bounce in both attitude and in time because all the weight and demands of the prior project have essentially disappeared (at least until the next round of work). At those times, one is able to consider possibly taking on something new and interesting. I really like these junctures because the world of possibilities seems to open up—even though whatever one proposes really has to be built on ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
There has been much talk about information workers and how we are working in an information economy. This is a valid description for the work of instructional design as well. Plenty of our time is spent learning and packaging that learning in creative ways for various learners.
I suppose every person’s computer work space has its own peculiarities. People have certain organizational structures for where they like to have their information and software placed. When one of my supervisors ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
While slideshows are much-maligned in the boutique-y parts of academia, they are still very much a staple of presentations—both face-to-face and online. And indeed, slideshows have evolved with the times. They not only offer some sequencing and visuals, but there are many ways to present data in tables and columns and informational graphics. There’s live linking. There are notes that may be integrated. Those who prefer voice and interactivity may add those elements as well. This entry, though ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
Coming up on a new on-campus grant funding cycle for online classes, many faculty members will call or email with questions about what technologies to purchase. For locals, they will swing by to the cubicle to see how various technologies work. Those who are located elsewhere in the state or abroad will either visit when they can or consult by telephone and email.
The requirements for the technology are basic. The faculty member has to be able to use the ...
Blog Entry
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).
So once we deactivated what machines could do, the human spammers came into play. Apparently ...
Blog Entry
We’ve all had experiences of going into high-security buildings, whether these are high-target sites like museums that remember some aspects of human history that are deeply contested or manufacturing companies that build critical machines with implications for massive industries.
Sometimes, we run up against the security without realizing it—such as running into the “secret police” in a foreign country in a public venue. (Once, I picked up film of images I took—back in the day—that were ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
People live fairly automated lives, according to Charles Duhigg in “The Power of Habit” (2012). People form habits by sequences of actions and create automatic routines for behavior called “chunking.” They will tend to follow those established patterns of behavior—even unthinkingly—unless they consciously work to change their habits. The better they are at asserting their will over their own behaviors in one part of their lives will help them assert their will over other parts.
Habits, once learned ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
Every so often, a class project evolves to the point that it spills over into the professional realm. That’s often a benefit for the learners because they can have a taste of the work life related to the fields that they are studying. For me, this happens a little more often than for many others because I am in professional life already and am just taking a class each term for professional development. Professors are very generous in allowing ...
Blog Entry
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.
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 ...
Blog Entry
Assignments to an ID come in various forms. At the most basic level, a faculty member has a particular objective. He / she wants to achieve particular learning aims. Further, most of them already know how they want to achieve that objective. With those barebones goalposts, one knows in general how to proceed. The PI’s personality also affects the direction of the project. The other team members will also have feedback.
Of course, as one immerses into the information, one ...
Continue reading Under-specification of the Instructional Design Model
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
If I knew back in the day that I would end up being an instructional designer working in courses that engage science knowledge, I would most certainly have taken more science courses. I would have built a stronger basis for science literacy. I would have worked more on higher-level math.
Why? It does seem like every academic field had a science-based underpinning. There’s the rigor of empirical research. There’s the application of statistical analysis of quantitative data. There ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
For multiple projects now, I’ve gone into the open-source domain in order to try to track down illustrative images for various videos and slideshows. Consumers of videos only have so much patience for a talking head, and it’s important to offer the video editors plenty of other visual contents that help illustrate the points. Sometimes, the speakers can provide their own images, but many times, they are reliant on content providers like book publishers to provide various images ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
“So how do you know you’re getting spear-phished?” asked my friend and colleague. Good question. For the past couple weeks, ever since I wrote an article about cyber security issues for a general publication, I had been getting strange emails to a private-based work account. It’s possible that the spear-phishing is coming from elsewhere. It’s possible that any number of scammers could be using pretenses to get me to click on an email that would drop keylogger ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
Every so often, it’s good to learn a new piece of equipment and to maybe benefit a workplace. My supervisor, wisely, suggested that I set aside some time every week to acquire new technologies. And being a little tired of exploring software that I can’t directly apply to a project right now, I decided to learn the Nikon D 7000. That said, I only borrowed the camera a day or two before the event and did some night ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
The email from a professor was brief. Her private (free) email account had been hacked. If anyone received any email from that, it wasn’t from her. Go to a safer channel. End of message.
In a follow-up exchange, I found out that she was overseas and also without her luggage, which had been missing some days. She’d finally given up and bought a wardrobe just to function in-country. She had no idea how her account was hacked. She ...
Continue reading Containing Fall-Out from an Email Account Hacking
Blog Entry
Blog Entry
A computer science professional who recently visited the campus gave multiple talks, and he mentioned that the individuals who are capable of managing large data systems securely are “vanishingly small and getting smaller.” Most institutions of higher education, he was suggesting, should go with third party vendors to host their data and learning / course management systems and cloud contents—because of the sheer difficulty of the work. The threats are ever-evolving. There are many after the prizes of private data ...
Continue reading Those “Few” Who Can Manage Computer Systems Security
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
Recently, I finally fulfilled my end of a bargain: access to an online resource into perpetuity in trade for a presentation that actually spun out to multiple presentations and digital learning objects. Even though the work stretched out more than I had intended, I think it’s a good deal for both sides. We both stand to gain. I have access to a digital repository space forever, and they have a small plug for their software product (which is quite ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
One of the skills that an instructor strives to learn is to assess where a learner is in terms of a so-called break-out capacity. When is the individual ready, in a learning situation, to take their skills live into a public space? In the public media, we read about the assessment of group’s or country’s break-out capacities for a particular capability (such as in sophisticated weapons systems, for example). On a less critical plane, I started thinking about ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
There are times when one is aware of the illusions (broad misunderstandings) a broader public has about an issue that will get many of them into trouble, but about which one can hardly change a lot of minds. That’s my sense anyway of a radio program on “agile publishing” that aired recently. This term refers basically to electronic self-publishing (known in the old days as “vanity publishing”). It may be that I’m responding to the fact that the ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
There’s plenty of information now out in public spaces about how much is knowable about a person’s online wanderings and searches. There’s a lot to be said about the electronic doppelganger that people have—with people assiduously grooming what they can see, piling on personal information, but being barely able to make changes at the margins for the invisible electronic identities they have cultivated by their actions (often in other spheres of life). We already know that ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
A job perk that I’ve been all too happy to exploit has been the offer of a “free” graduate course per term. I take the courses for the mental challenge. I pay attention to pedagogical strategies. I am attentive to some unique aspects of the particular domain field and how learning is achieved (particularly the primary research strategies). I often choose classes that can add a piece to my instructional design skill set and which can inform research into ...
Blog Entry
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.
Continue reading The Uses of True Stories to Authenticate the Learning
Blog Entry
Recently, I was at a presentation by a high-level CEO of a multinational confectionary company. The speaker said that he received helpful advice from a colleague: “fail early, fail cheap, but always fail forward.” In other words, learn from the mistakes. I talk about failing like I mean it…which also means taking on sufficient risks in order to grow professionally and personally. In the spirit of these, I decided to review some of my worst instructional designer mistakes.
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
There is a phrase that relates a person’s proximity to the self and the risk he / she poses: “close enough to hurt you.” The idea is that the individual has privy knowledge of one’s vulnerabilities. In the same way, in organizations, the sense of “insider threat” is much higher than outsider threat—due to several factors: the insider’s knowledge of organizational vulnerabilities, the potential build-up of frustrations or anger that may be a motivation to destructive actions ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 February 2012
After many years as a reviewer for various publications, I find myself reading submittals from abroad (whether the near- or far-abroad) exciting. I approach these with a kind of hopefulness and the sense that those from a different culture or educational / professional context will be able to offer fresh insights on a topic. There is an unspoken race on to discover new writers and to foster new talents. There’s also a race to be as inclusive as possible of ...
Continue reading The Implications of an Overseas Submittal Rejection in an Academic Publication
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
14 February 2012
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
Blog Entry
A recent instructional design question arose over how to help train novices in a field to ask the right questions in a situation to elicit the necessary information to analyze a situation and diagnose a particular crop issue. Musing on some technological ways to achieve what the group wanted, I started thinking again about the research on human decision-making.
It should surprise no one that plenty of work has been done on human decision-making. Much of the research has been ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
Every so often, I run across a person who is an actual innovator in their particular fields. Most often, these are professors who have new ideas who actually work towards actualizing their ideas. In other situations, though, these are young students who have spent their growing up years developing various skill sets and evolving their learning in order to contribute to the world. I had the pleasure of such a conversation recently, and I realized some intriguing aspects to the ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
It’s almost always a bad idea when people want to share privy information—mostly because it’s usually a ploy to get me more deeply involved in a political escapade or an unfunded project. Just recently, a faculty member offered to tell me of some privy research that was in the works, and I declined knowing. If I cannot for the life of me see a benefit to knowing, I am not going to pursue that information. I’ve ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
The first message started innocently enough. It was a welcome back to the new year and a projection to forthcoming work that a dispersed group of peer reviewers would be engaging in the coming year. The publication was shifting to a rolling publication deadline. Some of the group members would be continuing from prior years, and others were brand new invitees to the endeavor.
The members were using a basic collaboration software, but most of the work would be done ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
The prior week, I had two experiences that were somewhat scary in terms of technological behavior. First, this blog lost several of its most recent entries—which just disappeared—without any logical reason. There was not any known update to the server or compromise in terms of the accounts. Rather, some of the entries and replies to those entries just vanished. And then, I was working with a faculty member to get onto a wiki. Once she created an account ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
As an instructional designer, I am on the constant lookout to find ways of visualizing information in 2D, 3D, 4D, etc. The value in visualization is that one may surface new ideas. Further, one may convey ideas in somewhat fresh ways. A new visual conceptualization method enables doodling around with ideas that may surface new insights.
Recently, I came across a graduate thesis by a student writer who clearly had fallen for fishbone diagrams. She used these visuals excessively, even ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
25 January 2012
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
Blog Entry
Some half-dozen years ago, I took part in building a “demo” course to showcase a learning / course management system (L/CMS) that was merely to be an exploratory space. This was mostly to show the various and full functions of the system for delivering various digital contents, supporting intercommunications, building learning communities, and maintaining student records. This demo course involved curriculum from K-12 and university because this was designed for a wide level of public usage.
Blog Entry
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.
To draw out writing from subject matter experts around the world, one does try to ...
Blog Entry
One of the program coordinators that I spoke with recently expressed her concerns that a funded degree program was moving forward with multiple course developments and new hires, but the program itself was not bringing in sufficient learners. She was using all the data channels to market the courses. The professors were using their connections to try to bring in learners. However, the enrollments for the existing courses were low, and it was unclear whether even those students might commit ...
Blog Entry
Blog Entry
In the past several years, I’ve noticed that our university has been bringing more and more instructors on board from out-of-state. They request instructional design support for the few times that these individuals come to campus to collaborate with colleagues. They also tend to request support from a distance—by phone and email and web conferencing, in order to make sure that their course materials are developed in an effective way.
There is also something about human connections over ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
At some basic level, I differentiate projects that are for-pay ones and those that are internal to the institution. Part of the reason for this is that I have to track hours very carefully for the first set, and while I log hours on the latter, there is a lot more flexibility there. Also, the rules of the game seem somewhat different for the different project types.
What are “good will” projects then? These are ones that ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
A recent day-long workshop on copyright was insightful and salutary in a number of ways (even though I had to put in extra make-up time for the time spent at the conference to keep up on projects). The presenter treated the participants like her law students (she was a former law professor). She was helping the group abstract out principles to be used in understanding particular situations; she was showing them “how” to think about certain legal issues. She set ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
Back in the day when I worked as an aeronautics company, I would marvel at how the politics of the workplace functioned. People would put their friends and colleagues onto projects as a favor. We would all meet once at the beginning of the project, and then we would not really see anyone again thereafter. We would be back to the lean team that did the actual work, and then maybe we would see the others again when it came ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
It is hard to define the right level of a resource buffer to create for a secure work situation. By “resource buffer,” what do I mean? A buffer may be a certain number of excess capacity in terms of hours to apply to a project. It may be a set of drafted ideas that may be further developed to completion for uses on projects. Buffers may be technological capacities to create certain learning objects.
At core, it’s helpful to ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
For those in academia, the budget tightening has meant that positions have not been filled, and job responsibilities have been consolidated. Conferences are not attended. Professional development tends to be closer-to-home. Technologies are not updated. Some research is not pursued, and papers are not written, published, and presented. I was surprised at one international colleague’s situation. In discussing a possible chapter that she might author for a project, we were emailing back-and-forth.
She asked if she could ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
In lots of aspects of life, experience makes a big difference. This came to mind again of late with a colleague who ran into an issue with an open-source wiki (locally hosted). A group of us are using a wiki understructure to create a faculty resource for e-learning. We had stratified the site’s contents in order to enable customizing of contents to particular groups of online faculty based on their amount of experience teaching online. The problem arose when ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
From public accounts, many of the cutting-edge high-tech companies (in biotech, in information technology) support their employees by enabling them to set aside a day a week in order to look for inspiration and to acquire new ideas and skills—by working on projects outside their usual job description. From having been at some of these companies, my sense is that people work well much more than the time required—of their own free will—because these are driven and ...
Blog Entry
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 ...