Blog Entry
Business models around higher education are changing based on the downward pressures of “free” digital contents and bits and bytes in the current economy—as it goes through a massive retrenchment.
Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (2009) suggests that business organizations that want to be competitive will need to reconceptualize prices and how to harness the power of digital contents and free products and services in order to offer value and connect with potential consumers ...
Continue reading Reconceptualizing "Free" and Online Higher Education
Blog Entry
The building of online learning does not only draw on the writing of textbooks and contents on websites and in digital libraries. Every so often, faculty members include what is known as “gray” or “fugitive” literature. These are informational and unstructured contents that are not part of the official vetted literature in a domain field.
The items of a fugitive literature involve meeting notes, drafts, unpublished photos, unpublished drafts, policy statements, research data sets, research ...
Blog Entry
Years ago, I wrote about the intimidation factor about “data hungry” models for simulations and decision-making cases. Here, we had projects that involved the uses of massive amounts of information and digital imagery. I ripped through a proprietary repository of some 30,000 images and still had troubles finding imagery for particular concepts…and the simulation piece was a small part of the larger automated learning experience.
Well, I’m having a sense of déjà vu again, albeit with Web ...
Blog Entry
A recent article discussed the phenomena of “psychological ownership” of digital contents. The context of this was about how individual work is marked in a collaborative work environment. The authors discuss various motives for ownership—perceptual (social-cognitive) or part of the human need to categorize the world, instrumental (efficacy and in control) to satisfy (workplace or personal) needs, and symbolic (self-identity) in terms of how people perceive themselves (Wang, Battocchi, Graziola, Pianesi, Tomasini, Zancanaro, & Nass, 2006, p. 226). The researchers ...
Blog Entry
Most people can tell a 1970s movie by its design, the soundtrack, the generational jokes, the hairstyles, the fashions, and the video technologies. In the same way, dated multimedia and curricular materials may be identifiable by their styling…and their lack of direct and applied relevance.
One method for cost savings in instructional design is to pursue designs for curriculum which are “sustainable.” Another term for this is “future-proofing,” which is a little high-minded and ...
Blog Entry
This last entry of this series focuses on finding the resources which may be good “homes” for a particular author. The following then are some of my favorite tips.
One way in this modern age of publishing is to evolve the informal to the formal. One example of this is the writing of a blog and turning that opportunity to writing articles and then maybe chapters and maybe books.
Another strategy is to see ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 6 of 6)
Blog Entry
People who haven’t published think that their lives change after publication of a work. It really doesn’t in a major way. There may be small changes. That’s been my experience, anyway.
Having published for a number of years, I have found that publishing a work really doesn’t change one’s life. There’s always been a muted response. There may be offers to co-write academic works but usually from people with whom I have ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 5 of 6)
Blog Entry
This seminar series then addresses the various written artifacts in writing and publishing. Then, this describes a typical publishing cycle. Finally, this also addresses the publishing implications of digital contents—including multimedia.
The common written artifacts are the following related to academic writing.
Query letter: A cover letter offering topic ideas and a professional author introduction
Book prospectus: An overview of the domain area, objectives of the book, possible audiences, suggested titles, academic value, other textbook competitors ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 4 of 6)
Blog Entry
The sticky issue of authorship then arises. Should a writer author a work himself or herself? Should he / she co-write a work?
Most writers write from central areas of expertise. They have primary research and experience in a particular part of a field, a professional interest in that area, access to all the necessary information, and an ability to create all the informational substance and digital contents. In those situations, there are plenty of reasons to go solo ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 3 of 6)
Blog Entry
The actual contents of the slideshow presentation, after several weeks of evolution, comes together in a nifty two-hour session. The slideshow objectives are defined as follows:
Define academic publishing as a field
Review the conventions and ethics of academic writing
Discuss the relevant laws affecting academic publishing
Describe information gathering and research
Describe some written artifacts related to publishing
Review usual academic publisher processes
Explain imagery concerns for publishing
Describe multimedia often created for academic publication
Discuss issues for writers ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 2 of 6)
Blog Entry
A colleague on a branch campus asked if I wanted to collaborate on a piece of writing for publication. Those invitations are fairly common, and they come from people I’ve never even met to those who invite me out for coffee and are those from peripheral fields. The usual answer is “no” not out of any arrogance, but because the logistics of collaboration require that the collaborators have some shared research and experiences. Without that, what’s there to ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 1 of 6)
Blog Entry
Instructional designers engage in light datamining now and again. There’s going into the back-end of a course to pull records about student interactions for value-added course redesign. There’s tapping into the stats from the survey instruments to evaluate the hardiness of an assessment. There are small overlaps with PI work when they evaluate information from their own research databases.
And then there’s watching others mix and match databases to try to surface hidden information.
Computing ...
Blog Entry
The work of a reviewer is wonderful in a lot of ways—with plenty of access to fresh ideas and opportunities to shape journals in terms of contents, voices, and directions. These works help one see what colleagues are doing around the country and world. The reviewer work also encourages one to stay on top of the field and to make efforts to enhance it.
While journals get what is cutting-edge (sometimes), it’s rare to get anything bleeding-edge. For ...
Blog Entry
In the span of a few days, I had gone online to download open-source free imagery for use in a newspaper article for a for-profit newspaper. I have contacted professionals using free email systems for freelance work. I have visited commercial news with stock images that are alt-texted in a way that shows that they’re stock images—either as freeware or as sold objects.
It used to be that placeholder images would be selected lightly for representations, but I ...
Continue reading For-Profit Reliance on Open-Source Contents and Freebies
Blog Entry
A recent article I perused discussed how the researchers differentiated their research and development (R&D) projects from other companies by a variety of strategies. They discussed how they selected particular research fields where they could excel, and the subtext seemed to be that that particular field was unclaimed. Their predominance in it was unchallenged, with “no or few competition.” They purposefully worked with target customers on strategic collaborations to meet specific market needs. They used external technologies and open ...
Blog Entry
In every academic field, virtually, there is a push for discovering new information and new ways to doing things. This is also true for instructional design, which is a cross-disciplinary area.
There are also innovations from mulling over the extant research, which involve mostly qualitative and case-based works. There are the occasional quantitative types of research, but those are more about doctoral dissertations and system-wide research and the occasional business-funded research study. Truth to tell, it may be that the ...
Continue reading Accelerants for Innovations in Instructional Design Research
Blog Entry
The World Digital Library offers various resources from different times and locales around the globe. The contents may well be copyrighted because this resources is contributed to from a variety of copyright holders. The items are well labeled with metadata and tagging.
http://www.wdl.org/en/
Blog Entry
A recent course build by a faculty member built the course foundation on resources found on the Web. Here, the instructor used links to downloadable files, simulations, and videos. She eschewed any textbooks. To create an overlay, she did add a syllabus and supplementary videos to explain the contents. She also invited professional colleagues to take part in videotaped interviews that illuminated the issues further.
It struck me that she was truly relying on the Web for her curriculum—by ...
Blog Entry
Subject matter experts from a variety of fields are turning towards online learning as a way to serve a wider constituency of learners. Some get on online learning projects because of grant funding and the originality of their expertise. Not all who get on projects particularly believe in online learning. As a matter of fact, some approach online learning with mixed emotions and attitudes. In a team that works well, these concerns are surfaced and addressed incrementally.
Continue reading Learning about E-Learning as a Team Collaboration Byproduct
Blog Entry
One of my recent projects has involved the use of peer education, or the use of students to serve as supporters and peer advisors for fellow students on issues of acclimating to campus and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. These programs involve some vetting and training of students to support these services. This endeavor is a way to save on funds, but it’s also about packaging important information in a way that may be more effectively delivered to people—through ...
Blog Entry
A recent project highlighted the phenomena of designing websites to deliver information for synchronous wide-scale interactions. This refers to the delivery of information (via text and multimedia) to a broad-spectrum audience in real-time, often in a crisis or emergency situation. One aspect of this is that the information is not only for situational awareness but for decision supports—making choices in real time and with real implications.
Some basic tenets of crisis communications involve the need for having ...
Blog Entry
The research literature on innovations as they proliferate into a community is engaging. One central concept is the idea that innovations are risky for a world that may not be ready for it. Being first involves changing human attitudes and behaviors, structures, technologies, and the larger economies—for an innovation to actually “take.”
These entrepreneurial risks are important to take to move technologies forward to improve human lives. The challenge though is building to an environment that may not fully ...
Blog Entry
Elluminate™ hosted “Informal Learning or Non-Formal Learning: What Makes More Sense In Your Organization” presented by Lance Dublin of Dublin Group (dublinconsulting.net)and a worldwide consultant on learning (on June 10). Between formal and informal learning, is there another way—with “non-formal learning” as a semi-structured, semi-purposeful / semi-random way of learning in Web 2.0 spaces. (This suggests that formal learning tends to be structured and purposive, and informal learning tends to be unstructured and random.)
Dublin seemed to ...
Blog Entry
With the growing popularity of various repositories of information, many amateurs have joined in the work of informal archival and preservation of contents. And recently, I have heard about a project at a university (not in the US) that encouraged the digital sharing of privately-owned artifacts related to WWII via digital photo captures.
There was no apparent training of those who posted the contents, and there was not apparent vetting. People basically identified artifacts from WWII based on family lore ...
Continue reading Protecting Solicited Amateur Digital Work...into the Future
Blog Entry
Getting information out to people can be a messy business. It gets worse when the information is coming from individuals working in a variety of disciplines in a time-constricted crisis mode. It just so happened that when the H1N1 (Round 1) broke earlier this spring, that I was working on a multi-institutional public health project. I had met a range of experts and was learning of the hard work of capturing raw research and reaching out to the public in ...
Continue reading Rumors, Street Cred, Science, and Misinformation
Blog Entry
For about half a year now, I’ve been reviewing contents for two electronic publications for e-learning, and while both have been on my reading list, I’ve had a comfy insider’s view of some of their policies and editorial practices.
The truth is that for most publications, they would not be able to survive financially if they had to commission the works that they run. An article can take many many many dozens of hours of research, writing ...
Continue reading DIfferent Mindsets and Cultures for Different E-Publications
Blog Entry
Smarter instructional designers would not get themselves into the quandaries that I sometimes do. There I was with my backpack and bicycle helmet. I was ready to head back to my office when the faculty member said: “Go watch TV and eat a doughnut!”
What would lead a health-minded kinesiology professor say that to me, while we were both within earshot of a friendly pickup basketball game in the Gymnasium?
Okay, I’ll admit that the particular ...
Continue reading Conveying Digital Swiping and ID Policies in the Same Breath
Blog Entry
In a number of recent projects, there have been more focuses on geospatial information use. This comes in part from the popularization and free costs of a variety of geospatial and mapping tools. These are wide use by the public in practical ways. Tools like Mapquest, Google Maps, various real estate pricing sites, and various satellite image capture sites offer an easy low-cost way to access some of these functionalities.
It’s breathtaking to take a virtual ride from a ...
Blog Entry
In a short time, the college system that I teach (out-of-state) for will no longer be subscribers to a particular learning / course management system. This shift will mark an end of an era, with their long-term commitment to the use of this system and several generations of students acclimated to the resources in that system.
This changeover will also render all archived courses on that system unopenable, without additional cost and without the cooperation of the company that ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 April 2009
The idea of transferability, portability and digital learning object sharing has always been appealing and practical. It’s been years of seeing the back-end technologies to enable course cartridge uploads and templates to add metadata to learning objects….and finally, I can say that I have had a course build that has allowed me to tap into others’ direct contents.
On the surface, this would seem fairly straightforward. There are certain federal government sites that have the incentive of publicizing ...
Continue reading Not Reinventing Wheels...but Chasing Digital Contents through Bureaucracies
Blog Entry
The work of an instructor is to make information understandable and easy-to-acquire. This means identifying critical main principles (How much learning is needed before certain concepts are attainable?). This means identifying threshold concepts—those ideas that if grasped will open up whole new vistas in a particular topic. This means identifying the critical decision points in a process that are crucial to the new learner. This is about identifying the learning moment when the “Aha!” occurs.
In mainstream films, these ...
Blog Entry
The chatter about Google Analytics had been positive for a while. Talk was that Google could collect all sorts of information about visitors to a site in order to help site designers better tailor the contents to meet user needs. The data would be aggregate and anonymous, but all one needed was a gmail account and a little tech savvy and one could get a treasure trove of visitor information.
A tour of the Google Analytics site brings out the ...
Continue reading Google Analytics for Site Evolution Strategies
Blog Entry
by IDOS Newswire
06 April 2009
Call for Chapter Proposals
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 2009
Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends
A book edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=626
Introduction and Objectives: Immersive learning has come to the fore with the popularization of Second Life and the development of open-source immersive 3D learning spaces. Those in e-learning have been working to find ways ...
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces (A Call for Chapter Proposals)
Blog Entry
The launch issue of EQ online is now live.
http://www.educause.edu/eq
This publication strives to use the multimedia Web space creatively. Check it out!
Blog Entry
In most academic fields, editors and publishers play a gatekeeper function by vetting the articles that make it into their vaunted pages (whether paper or digital). These roles involve a lot of power and a lot of responsibility and discretion. New faculty’s careers may be made or broken based on their publishing records. Even those who have published widely and are long-term tenured faculty have a stake in their reputations with the public and their peers when they publish ...
Blog Entry
The concept of cultural sensitivity in designing curricula is an important aspect of instructional design. Some domain-field assumptions are elusive and not well articulated. Or particular fields have a range of opinions that affect the dissonant voices in a field. Because of the need to understand what is going on in different domains, it helps immensely to attend different face-to-face conferences on campus.
These conferences not only result in helpful contacts, but they also enhance one’s sense of paradigms ...
Blog Entry
This issue surfaces in the popular media every so often, when a celebrity’s medical records, police file, mug shot, or some other official information gets compromised and released to the press. The idea of “data voyeurism” is that of people who don’t have a “need-to-know” accessing information that they shouldn’t.
I ran across this term again in an article, in the context of Information Technology (IT). It seems to me that instructional designers also handle plenty of ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
04 March 2009
My student probably had no idea how happy she made me with her simple question. She had read one of our course readings and wondered how a circuit court case got resolved. I suggested she find the official site for the court and look up the case by name. She chased the issue and found out how the case resolved. It did cost her some money for copies under e-FOIA (http://epic.org/open_gov/efoia.html) , and it did cost ...
Continue reading Getting Online Students Immersed in the Informational Universe
Blog Entry
I see students in various stages of distress as they wrangle with their academic papers. They’re lying across their desks staring into the computer screens as they search for the words or ideas that they need to build the contents. They send emails about their concerns as their papers are in various stages of development, particularly when they’re stuck on a thesis or on the possible use of a particular source.
Recently, I had a déjà vu moment ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 February 2009
A recent book I’ve been reading talks about a nation’s power in part as ideational. Besides its economy and its military clout, a nation has “soft power,” the ability to influence other nations and peoples through the power of its ideas. This is about using charisma and the strength of ideas. Some of the more engaging ideas of late have involved Web 2.0 or the collaboration around shared ideas.
In that light, I’ve been thinking about ...
Continue reading The Ideational Power of Open Source and Creative Commons Releases
Blog Entry
I got to thinking of the uses of e-learning for the development of muscle memory in a beginner’s ski class while I was crossing my skis and doing the duck walk up a hill and sliding back a step for every two I went up. My trainer had a couple graduate degrees…had survived five avalanches…and had plenty of experience training speed skiers. Our group, by contrast, were all beginners, with both children and adults. Our ski instructor ...
Blog Entry
After coming off a spate of case studies and qualitative research, I came across a lecture in my work that suddenly put that work in a different light. The basic assertion of the lecturer was the need for quantitative metrics to inform decision-making. That’s a simple enough point. Quantitative measures are used often for decision-making. There’s a kind unknowability for various types of information using qualitative methods or mixed methods. (That’s also true in the reverse, in ...
Continue reading The "Sugar" of Case Studies and Qualitative Work
Blog Entry
A recent project is bringing together a cross-functional development team that is distributed, multi-institutional and virtual. The work that people are creating needs to coalesce and work in an interoperable way on multiple learning management systems. The work, of course, also has to be accessible and fully legal in terms of intellectual property. What this meant on the front end is that we would start with a stylebook.
The rationale for a stylebook is to surface ...
Blog Entry
After finalizing work on a project, a colleague and I were commiserating about how it’s always good to have a project finish smoothly and on deadline. He wrote of how various projects have a way of bogging down and not resulting in a usable final product in any timely fashion. I recalled my former supervisor advising—half-jokingly--“If the project collapses, don’t be under it.” That project didn’t collapse. I haven’t had one fail yet, but ...
Blog Entry
A small team has been researching and mulling the idea of launching an e-learning faculty wiki for “the good of the order” and as a university contribution to the Web-enabled information spaces. The idea would be to use the wiki to surface implicit knowledge and also to create a professional community mediated through technologies.
The team diligently scoped out the competition through direct research and queries posted to professional listservs. They found quality wikis like Edutech ...
Continue reading Early Proposal of a New E-Learning Faculty Wiki
Blog Entry
Dr. Michael Wesch has offered a view of disruptive informational technos and their impacts on learning...
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 January 2009
Why do computer games need to evolve to keep people’s interests? How may AI enhance game playability?
For Darryl Charles, Colin Fyfe, Daniel Livingstone, and Stephen McGlinchey, who have teamed up for a new text that highlights biologically inspired AI for computer games, the answer is to create worthy game opponents. Games that adapt and learn are more challenging and therefore offer more learning and play value.
In Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games, these authors offer case ...
Continue reading Biologically Inspired AI for Computer Games (brief resource review)
Blog Entry
Handing over a project is a necessity, or else one could be a stringer for a project into eternity, which would mean lost project opportunities into the future. The handover moment is a fragile one because it involves conveying the rich understandings of a project over the many months of the design and build work. It’s also about letting go in a way so that the work is successful into the future.
One critical piece is to ...
Blog Entry
Getting candid critique on a manuscript can be a tough challenge—not in terms of receiving honest feedback but in terms of readers being willing to really go full bore into ways to improve a piece of writing. Editors are to writers as choreographers to dancers, directors to actors, and masters to apprentices. They offer critical constructive directions to improve a work.
Let me clarify. It does take years to be able to take critique well and to use it ...
Blog Entry
One of the librarians at this university showed me a clause linked to a major educational funding organization that required grant recipients to make their written papers from research findings available to other professionals in the field through a related educational repository < http://www.lib.k-state.edu/geninfo/scholcomm/nih.html >. This endeavor is part of a larger effort to capture informational value for the larger public apparently.
This clause is an interesting one to me because of the endeavor ...
Blog Entry
“Teaching with Online Games” Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
I’d never taken part in a truly global webinar. Most of the ones I attend are local…or only have the occasional person tapping in from a few other locales. Then, I attended Dr. Gibson’s “Teaching with Online Games,” and as a warm-up to the actual presentation, the facilitator asked participants to indicate their locations on a virtual map. She turned on that annotation tool in Elluminate, and the ...
Continue reading "Teaching with Online Games" Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
Blog Entry
There it was in the press, garnering international headlines, the idea that HIV could be brought under control in a decade in a particular country with the proper combination of testing and interventionist medical treatments. This information came from a simulation. The inputs were not clear, but the outputs clearly garnered all sorts of attention.
There’s a healthy dose of skepticism that usually comes with easy solutions and round numbers and easy predictions. The world itself is quite complex ...
Blog Entry
There’s plenty of excitement over open source and Creative Commons-released works. And for a long time now, there have been royalty-free contents from commercial and “amateur” providers. The question then is: What’s actually out there for faculty use? Several recent endeavors brought this challenge to clearer light.
So first, the resources. Wikipedia has plenty of sources released under Creative Commons copyright or fully released into the public domain. I’ve found quite a few cool images on ...
Blog Entry
From the outside, having work embargoed seems like not much fun. It’s work that only goes to a small, limited and elite audience. It’s going to sit on “ice” for any number of years—because of copyright or security or ownership issues (usually). While a person may benefit from the intellectual property of that work, it’s not really there for the public consumption. There may be a release date of sorts, or there may not be any ...
Blog Entry
Back in the day, my students and I studied journalists and how they handled their notes in a way that would protect them. We got two distinct responses.
One school of thought was that it would be good to have all notes and audio and video to show who said what. The idea was that if they had questions in the writing of the article, they could refer to their records. They would have something stronger than pure memory to ...
Blog Entry
There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.
Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little ...
Continue reading A Phone Interview about Culturally Sensitive E-Learning
Blog Entry
A librarian recently gave a presentation of an online reference tool that outputs in-text citations and bibliographies based on quite a few of the main citation methods. This program allows users to create as many accounts as they desire, such as for different projects, and has plenty of folder-level functionality. Even footnoting is possible.
Works that are drawn from data repositories and libraries have a simple interface that populates the various informational fields in a citation-agnostic way. Manual inputs ...
Blog Entry
A Week of Writing Abandon
One comes back refreshed from vacations, typically. I’ve just been back from a “writing vacation,” and it sure is good to be ensconced in my cubicle.
Most people express surprise at the idea of a writing vacation. The idea is this: one takes paid vacation off in order to write professionally. This isn’t the casual blogging sorts of writing. This is about source citations. This is about research. This is about organizing materials into chapters. This is about ...
Blog Entry
Dr. Michael Wesch always offers an engaging presentation, mixed with aptly used high tech, and there are always surprises—of the technological kind and absolutely of the human kind. In a recent standing-room only presentation at K-State, he spoke of the need to use technologies to help college students engage with learning. (“A Portal to New Media Literacy: Engaging New Technologies to Engage Students”)
He showed his digital ethnography dashboard http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography To show his uses ...
Blog Entry
Chasing information has become somewhat more exciting of late because I’m understanding a little more of what is going on when digital repositories are queried for various resources. I’ve been spoiled with my on-campus ILL office, which has been able to electronically track down four out of five requested sources and deliver them to my desktop computer with ease and panache.
Then, I just got a cancellation. The message politely notified me that the request I made for ...
Continue reading Interlibrary Loan Services and the Human Element
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 October 2008
I must be some sort of optimist. The “master” courses that I work on building are set up as perennial files, started one day and projected to go out to the year 2030 or beyond.
There’s no possibility that these courses will be offered in the same form as today some 20+ years from now, but that date is shorthand for “sometime into the future” until this course is sunsetted.
While we instructional designers may not ...
Continue reading For the Next Little While: Digital Preservation and Long-term Storage
Blog Entry
A fast one-day immersion in the concerns of securing electronic votes occurred back in mid-September, with the visit of a leading figure in evaluating the security of electronic voting machines.
Dr. Douglas W. Jones of the U of Iowa Dept. of Computer Science presented “The Trials and Tribulations of Electronic Voting” in mid-Sept. at K-State. He gave a brief history of ballot voting in the US and showed how the various systems in the US have been hacked and abused ...
Blog Entry
It seems so easy to walk blithely into a massive project and underestimate the work required. I’m so early in the being swamped stage that it’s hard to see how the elements may start coming together. It’s hard getting a handle on complexity. What I’m talking is about a book that I had hoped would be team-written, but after 300+ emails sent out and plenty of online publicity, I’m finding that the work has fallen ...
Blog Entry
It seems fitting that the first full-length text that I’ll be tackling on my desktop computer is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2006), which he has made available for free off his own site at http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf .
This work is about ways to strengthen human collaboration on a larger scale with computer-mediated communications and to shape policies that would strengthen virtual communities.
He explains how “non-market and nonproprietary production” of ...
Continue reading The Wealth of Networks (Brief Resource Review)
Blog Entry
Developing a website on a shoestring budget and with many stakeholders is no easy feat. Having multiple institutions working on different parts can also be a challenge, with only partially successful distance mitigations. With the high hopes and high grant-funded ambitions, a site can easily evolve well beyond doability.
One aspect of special risk seems to be “content sustainability.” This means providing sufficient text and images and multimedia over time for the site. From a distance, it would seem that ...
Blog Entry
During the MERLOT International Conference 2008 http://conference.merlot.org/2008/Program2008.html in the Minneapolis Hilton earlier this month, one of the organizers commented on the intimacy of a first language as an integral part of an engaging learning experience. He mentioned this in the context of looking for translators to help evaluate and analyze the value of learning objects on the MERLOT database. This idea carries over to non-English submittals to the organization’s journal as well.
Continue reading The Intimacy of a First Language for Learning
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 August 2008
Dr.Michael Wesch’s "digital anthropology" presentation to the Library of Congress resulted in a thought-provoking video that has garnered a lot of airplay.
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179
Some of his observations about virtual “community” showed people with the art of mimicry and highly suggestible in terms of following others’ actions (something like lemmings).
Seeing Dr. Wesch’s presentation and then reading Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007 ...
Blog Entry
For the past half-year, I’ve been privileged to take part in several projects that have used the Open Journal Systems software (distributed by the Public Knowledge Project http://pkp.sfu.ca/).
This publishing system uses a logical workflow from when an author submits a work to the site and ends up in a submission cue. Then, the editors select reviewers and submit the writing to the various reviewers. The submission is then revised and edited, copy-edited, laid out, proof-read ...
Continue reading Two Projects and the Open Journal Systems Software
Blog Entry
Instructional designers engage in knowledge work. They collaborate with faculty to collect and transfer information, which must somehow be designed to evolve into knowledge. Our main tools are pedagogical and technological. As service personnel, we support or lead from behind, often based on the instructors’ comfort levels.
The faculty members are the default subject matter experts (SMEs). They have to identify the elements of learning that may be transferable. They must define the degree of abstraction of knowledge needed ...
Blog Entry
In student journalism, faculty and advisors work hard to shepherd student work forward towards publication—often locally and then in larger and larger venues. Students had a chance to evolve their work. They made mistakes in small venues before risking mistakes in the larger ones. Some of you already know where I’m going with this.
Students today often publish to the world early on. Various classes may require blogging or wiki postings. While these may ...
Blog Entry
Back in the day, there were some of my freshman classes that had some 700 – 800 or more students per auditorium. Our learning was facilitated by TAs, and there were notes that we could buy in case we missed a lecture date or two. That’s how I recall it. I never actually bought lecture notes as study aids although I probably could have earned some extra points with that. I remember seeing some, and they were full of typos ...
Blog Entry
Check this out. This Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (of MERLOT) special issue focuses on next generation learning management systems.
http://jolt.merlot.org/guest_editors0608.htm (Guest Editor Colleen Carmean Intro)
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html (The Current Summer 2008 Issue)
https://wiki.asu.edu/jolt/index.php/Main_Page (The Response Wiki)
Continue reading New Special JOLT Issue with a Wiki Accompaniment
Blog Entry
I have always had a kind of reverence for books—not the fabric covers and bound paper—but for the craft of writing that goes into quality works of literature.
It’s as the wise Mortimer J. Adler wrote: “Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that ...
Blog Entry
Knowledge and Knowledge Systems: Learning from the Wonders of the Mind
By Eliezer Geisler
Hershey: IGI Publishing
2008
348 pp. hardcover
In this day of an explosion of information and the building of knowledge management systems, Eliezer Geisler (a professor of business at the Illinois Institute of Technology) has decided to get to the heart of the matter by probing exactly what knowledge is.
In Knowledge and Knowledge Systems: Learning from the Wonders of the Mind, Geisler explores the history ...
Continue reading Knowledge as Oobleck (Brief Resource Review)
Blog Entry
Several concepts have emerged regarding academic publishing that require some consideration. One is the phenomenon of born-digital texts. These are texts that totally bypass peer-reviewed for-print and go right to digital e-texts. Then, there’s the other phenomenon of academic writers who will only sign over limited rights to a publisher and retain their own rights, so their own universities will not have to pay for the use of their intellectual property in their classes. Some of the larger universities ...
Continue reading Born-Digital Texts and "Mine Forever" Copyright
Blog Entry
Starting out a new venture in an academic setting involves plenty of collaboration-building and consideration. Universities are complex environments, and decisions can have ripple effects and unintended consequences—even when different constituencies have been fully
So we had our first meeting to consider launching a distance learning faculty wiki out of this university…potentially through the division through which the university’s e-learnings offerings are supported, coordinated and created.
Not surprisingly, the first meeting involved some general ...
Blog Entry
The KU Libraries hosted a "Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities" conference back on March 7. They have published the resources of the presenters, and those may be found at the following site.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/CopyrightSymposium/CopyrightSymposiumhandouts.shtml
Blog Entry
IDs are in the business of handling information. They strive to turn information into actionable knowledge by using what they know about human motivation and learning. They do this in a technology-mediated environment. They do it in fields that they are almost invariably outsiders in. They do this in conjunction with various faculty, administrators and graduate students.
This issue of information comes up in intriguing ways - from academic papers to novels. This musing originated with a couple pieces of writing ...
Blog Entry
Last night, after an exhausting and exhilarating time spent editing a chapter and the graphics within it, I thought fleetingly of why people in this digital age would even bother writing or editing print books anymore. Do the editors have any idea how difficult it may be to engage in such work? Do they know how many work and non-work hours they'll put into coordinating with their contributors and the book publishers and all the others involved in this ...
Blog Entry
It probably comes as no real "news" that we live in a so-called "permanent upgrade culture." Those of us in IT know that ours is a field of perpetual innovation. There is no end point for "stabilization" or "stasis" per se.
What does that mean for our work as instructional designers?
One analogy for the many incoming changes would be that of incoming waves battering a shore. New technologies. New ways of interacting (Web 2.0 ...
Blog Entry
"I wonder if there's a way to make a PowerPoint that can be shown, but the slideshow images cannot be captured by a digital camera."
The scenario went something like this. A researcher had put plenty of time into a research project. She went overseas to an international conference to present on her research findings. While she'd written a short overview of her presentation, the actual presentation itself included tables of sensitive never-before-published data that ...
Continue reading Private Information and Very Public Presentations
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 October 2007
Paul Jones, creator of ibiblio.org and professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, spoke at K-State as part of the fall University Distinguished Lecture series. His presentation centered around the synergies made possible by various global and technological realities and culminate in part in ibiblio (formerly Metalab and then Sunsite) - which is an open and public archive of various types of information.
Jones has overseen ibiblio for the past 15 years,. This project's open source system hosts ...
Continue reading Paul Jones and ibiblio.org, "the public's library and digital archive"
Blog Entry
Demographics figures into projections for the economy, the future workforce, and the price of housing, among other things. The retiring out of the baby boomers is anticipated to have wide-ranging effects on job availability, future pay and also the quality of workplace training. With the complicated machinery in the energy industry, and the average industry worker at 48 years old, "human obsolescence" may prove a challenge to this industry, suggests Matthew Sadinsky, president of System Operations Success, International. Sadinsky presented ...
Continue reading Virtual Sims Standing in for a Dwindling Workforce
Blog Entry
Libraries often seem to get short shrift when it comes to eLearning. This point was illuminated in a presentation by Kristin Whitehair, a biomedical librarian, of the University of Kansas Medical Center at SIDLIT. Her presentation - "A Survey of Library Instruction for Distance Education Students" - showed numerous outreach efforts made by librarians to connect with their constituencies.
She showed how static websites, dynamic sites, tutorials, video tours, and course management systems are used by librarians to introduce their services and ...
Continue reading Libraries at the Point of Need for eLearning
Blog Entry
H. Wayne Hodgins, in the context of digital learning objects, offers the concept of a periodic table of information. This idea has been around for many years, and it has resided there in the back of my mind for quite a while. This is the concept that if digital learning objects are well-designed at the right level of atomistic granularity that all known information may be categrorized into different types ...
Continue reading Mulling over the Periodic Table of ... Information
Blog Entry
So a couple weeks ago, some snafu with my email resulted in the creation of a second spam folder. And in the work of fixing my spam, the technologist found that numerous emails had been rejected and sort of left to disappear into the digital morass.
I then found out a week or two later that two editors had been trying to reach me for maybe 3-4-5-6 months now...and I'd been missing their digital cues. It wasn't ...
Blog Entry
Copyright seems to be one of those perennial issues, especially as multimedia builds get more complex and involve more diverse sources of materials.
What do you do if you're brought onto a project, and your predecessor downright took a load of writing from another site / from professional colleagues / from published sources? What do you do if a client would like to use copyrighted materials in a course curriculum (and ultimately a book) that was developed in-house, and she ...
Blog Entry
Late last year, I engaged in a research project that involved the use of online surveys. Ostensibly, the contents could apply to any number of instructors who teach f2f and those who teach online. I was going to use a non-reward strategy for the simple reason that I didn't want to pay out hundreds in gift cards for research that itself was not directly funded and would only get small play at a small C2C Fall Forum in Hutchinson ...
Continue reading "Nah": Rallying Interest in "Mirror" Online Surveys
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 April 2007
Jeff Merriman of the OKI / MIT highlighted some interoperability trends. [A quick Wikipedia search defining the Open Knowledge Initiative suggests that this organization works on the specification of software interfaces comprising a "service oriented architecture" (SOA). This endeavor was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIT, and IMS Global Learning Consortium.] "The goal of an SOA is to provide a separation between the interface of a service and its underlying implementation such that consumers (applications) can interoperate across the ...
Blog Entry
Caveat: Whenever I write on technology issues that are beyond my purview, I should use a double or triple cover, so I may disavow that I wrote this. I think that what's going on on the back end is important enough to discuss, but I also know that I'm going to embarrass myself by writing about something in a way that a software engineer never would. I've faced the disdainful glare (once was enough) of a software ...
Continue reading CORDRA and ADL-R (Registry) for Shared Data Environments
Blog Entry
Dr. Bill Blackmon (Chief Technical Officer at ADL), in his presentation "ADL and SCORM," took a lowkey approach but dropped a surprising bit of news. Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) is looking for some other organization to steward "SCORM" and to develop the public global version of SCORM. The Department of Defense's needs for SCORM have long diverged from that of global users' needs, and it's time for new direction, development, and a diverging of paths. The new public ...
Blog Entry
It doesn't take long working as an instructional designer to realize that some curricular builds will be "data hungry" ones. Data hungry curricular builds require massive amounts of digital learning objects and information. They require huge amounts of research. They require complex data tracking. They require lots of legal copyright releases and permission seeking. They demand fact cross-checking and accuracy. They demand attention to details because every change has a price in terms of investment of ...
Continue reading The "Black Hole": Data Hungry Curricular Models
Blog Entry
There's something disconcerting about the term "denaturing." To denature something is to remove the natural character or properties of something. It's to undercut something natural. These would be fighting words for an environmentalist. So when I ran across this word in the context of the design of learning objects (DLOs), I had to take a second look. The concept goes like this: all building of digital learning objects is necessarily unreal, fake, simulated, and not ...
Blog Entry
"Aaaaahhhh." On hot summer days in the Pacific Northwest, at my former college, I would have the office door to the student newspaper open. Every so often, the calm afternoon would be broken by the bloodcurdling screams of the drama students in the nearby theatre or out on the sidewalks, with their digital cameras running. Every quarter, the drama students would engage in a kind of "generative learning." Generative learning tends to be collaborative, creative, dynamic and synergistic. As the ...
Continue reading Generative Learning Materials and Technologies
Blog Entry
Some years ago, H. Wayne Hodgins proposed the creation of a periodic table of information in the context of the development of atomistic reusable learning objects. As I understand it, there would be some structure (akin to Roget's thesaurus?) that would help in the categorization of information. Digital learning objects could be co-created and vetted, and these would be launched and categorized in massive databases. These would be sharable and accessible to all. Knowledge ...
Blog Entry
Back in November (a full year ago...or rather a couple months), one of my blogs dealt with the issue of using free e-texts in lieu of textbooks (in a unique course design situation) and the internal debate about the pros and cons of that.
I thought of a colleague who told me once that she earned some $70 from selling the free book samples she got from book reps of various book companies that ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
03 January 2007
Years ago, I was visiting a library in the PRChina. There, I got to look at and briefly touch a 600-year-old book. I didn't know what the contents were, and the librarian didn't tell me. The value was in the book's age and its frailty. It was kept under glass in a semi-controlled environment. One didn't quite dare to breathe around it lest it turn to dust.
For those of us ...
Continue reading "Slow Fires" and the Preservation of (Print and Digital) Information
Blog Entry
Back in the day, when I worked with my students who were building websites for clients, the conventional wisdom was to build in-house capacity in terms of information. This meant that they would do the research and collect the information needed and make it their own. They were not advised to link out to dynamic sites with relevant information because these sites could change their contents at any time. They could take a political turn that the students might not ...
Continue reading In-House Capacity or Reliance on the WWW Wilds
Blog Entry
Disclaiming responsibility offers thin legal cover if a site engages in various misdeeds. That said, disclaiming is also de rigueur for most sites. Years ago when I was teaching a New Media writing course, one of our assignments was to review existing disclaimers on the WWW. We identified the various uses of disclaimers for content sites. These often addressed The type of information covered in the website The original intention of the website builders and owner for the proper use ...
Blog Entry
I was speaking with a chemical engineer, who mentioned research that had been done that surfaced some helpful information - but the data did not culminate into anything deeply useful. What was discovered would help researchers know which roads not to take in making particular materials, but did not result in a successful final product, so it was left to languish. She mentioned that there is a journal that publishes unreproducible results. The name of most scientific games is to find ...
Blog Entry
For many years now, companies have been talking about delivering etexts for a small fee (micropayments). Whatever is in the public domain will be downloadable for free, and online epublishers will sell what they can by well-known authors (such as the ground-breaking Stephen King who let one of his books be serialized and sold purely as an e-text). For my mass media course, we would talk about the changing technologies that enabled easier reading of foldable light e-book-readers and the ...
Continue reading Free Etexts and the Academic Textbook Companies
Blog Entry
Faculty will ask, Well, if I want to use this video in a class, can't I upload it in my password protected online classroom? It'll be like me showing a video that I own in my face-to-face classroom. Another will ask, Can't I just upload an article to my online class? There are resources that I want to share with my students. In a recent grain science book, we put in the USDA's revised food pyramid ...
Blog Entry
A prior blog addressed some of the "ruts" that may influence a course redesign, for all the hopes for a fresh change. Other challenges appear once the redesign has started.
Redesigning an online course often involves remaking various digital artifacts - learning objects, slideshows, lectures, interactive snippets, policies, and what-not. For others, learning objects may be refurbished by swapping out images, updating the language, switching in new slides for old ones, using new graphics, and putting in fresh film ...
Continue reading Course Redesign II: Digital Artifacts and Alignments
Blog Entry
Redesigning a course reminds me of a bicycle crash I had recently. I'll start with the crash and work backwards from that. So I was going around the local park's trail, which is paved partially with concrete (lots of broken pavement) and then also with dirt / mud / pebbles. I had ridden up on the grass median to give an elderly couple room to walk...and as I was merging back, the tires ...
Blog Entry
Whenever I go scouting for academic research articles on eLearning, I pay attention to the publications and their criteria for the peer review of articles. In a search recently, I realized that a pretty big-name ejournal had stopped publishing as of last year. The WWW had its old issues archived, and there were useful research pieces there, but there was something like a "ghost town" feel to it.
I thought about a former editor who started a military magazine for ...
Blog Entry
"May I borrow a cup of sugar?" That quote is used as a cliche of friendliness between neighbors. It's a quote that harkens back to the days when going to the store might be an imposition and not something as simple as bicycling over to the corner store or jumping into the car.
An ID sometimes ends up asking that question, "May I borrow...?" and "May I have...?" from pure strangers who work in a particular field. The request ...
Blog Entry
Instructional designers work with the constant awareness that whatever they're building has a shelf life. Nothing will last forever. Little will last more than a few years. Something stays relevant only for a period, and at the same time learning contents are aging out, the learners who would potentially provide eyes on this material are evolving, and their learning needs are changing. Of course, many instructors hang on to their favorite learning materials long after their relevance. Indeed, I ...
Blog Entry
For almost half a year now, I've been in hot pursuit of a copyright release. This release is for certain intellectual property and templates used for designing digital learning objects. The company being pursued (although they seemed to hardly notice) is a large multinational one specializing in networking. The pursuit involved lots of phone calls, some toll free and some simply long distance. It involved emails and plenty of documentation. It involved working with three PIs, with two of ...
Blog Entry
The pundits say that learning from and during failure is important. I'd agree, but it sure doesn't feel good. I've been thinking of academic publishing of late. I talk to professionals in the field who've had varying publishing experiences. One of the local profs here has no trouble landing his articles at will. He has quite a range of them - both co-authored and single-authored, and he's so settled in his tenure track that he breezily ...
Blog Entry
How much is enough? It is said that we Americans have a hard time defining sufficiency. In research terms, enough is when one can draw a statistically significant conclusion (for quantitative research). It's when triangulation of data seems to point in a particular direction with some measure of confidence (for qualitative research). With so much data available online, it's not that hard to find another mother lode of relevant information. One twist to a term may open up ...
Blog Entry
So my students have said to me. So new acquaintances have quipped. I assume that there are others who say and do this without nary a comment. The assumption is that the caching of Google's prodigious servers captures some angle of a person that he/she wouldn't reveal otherwise. Certainly, I've seen sufficient articles to know that a solid detective can ferret out all sorts of financial, health, and other pseudo-personal information from the WWW. Those who ...
Blog Entry
In journalism, I learned that publicity isn't all it's cracked up to be. It doesn't suddenly make a person more real. It doesn't improve character. It doesn't enhance a poorly-conceptualized project. It doesn't necessarily bring any outpouring of sympathy. It doesn't promote justice if the levers of that weren't in place to begin with. It doesn't combat apathy, except in rare cases. Media attention doesn't change fundamental ...
Blog Entry
One way to remember an experience well is to get stood up. And there I was at the auction house looking at any number of pieces of furniture and jewelry and heirlooms being marched across the stage, highlighted under the stage lights, and shown by camera to the live audience. I was on 3rd Avenue in Seattle, and I was waiting for a colleague who hadn't shown up. (He did later, after I'd left.) He was a fantastic ...
Blog Entry
A number of software programs have been released to identify and head off plagiarism. Some of these archive digitized learner papers into a database against which they compare other papers. These programs will identify points of similarity. These have not been without problems---as many learner complaints and copyright infringement assertions have been made about these programs. It may well be the low-tech solutions that will carry the day.
Drs. Mary Slavin and Roseanne Torsiello of Berkeley College, presenters at an ...
Blog Entry
We heard Dr. Michael Wesch (professor of anthropology) talk about tags at the last IDTR. I spoke to a few people after the session, and realized they didn't fully understand about tags. This inspired me to write something about it in our blog and do some research too.
This is what Wikipedia says about Tags. If you Google the word "tags", you get some 7 million hits. But most of us, just need to understand the basics and how ...
Blog Entry
There are moments when I'm completely baffled. This doesn't happen often, and it doesn't happen for long stretches. A few weeks ago, I inherited a database, fiscal responsibilities, a load of social relationships---all in a volunteer position related to a homeowners association. With that came QuickBooks and a method of accounting that was theoretically straightforward...but the database itself was built idiosyncratically. People's names were listed willy-nilly, some by their last names, some by the first ...
Blog Entry
e-portfolios has been a term used for various digital compendiums of learner work. There are various software programs for the compilation of such portfolios. Others simply use websites and some back-end basic programming.
The idea is that learners need to "think" with artifacts that convey their thoughts coherently---mixing words, images, sound, and even video. There should be a clear sense of audience and purpose in these portfolios. To be deployed well ...
Blog Entry
For any number of online classes and curriculums, it's a struggle to find sufficient raw materials for the development. Finding images with copyright releases can be a challenge. People's promises of sending images may sort of drop off their mental agendas, and voila---nothing. Resources may be handed over but often without the metadata needed for integration into a project. Sometimes, an ID gets so desperate that she has to go out into the field herself with a ...
Blog Entry
Chaos theory was one of the more unusual things my doctoral cohort at Seattle University addressed. It's a theory---broadly summarized---that suggests that chaos is a natural part of life and the world, and being able to find the creativity and form in chaos is part of leadership. I was thinking about this in the context of starting new projects with clients.
Starting a new project almost always entails a period of muddle-ness. The muddle-ness refers to who the members ...
Continue reading Muddle-ness: Being Comfortable with Amorphousness
Blog Entry
The nightmare scenario (as has been told to me) goes like this. A faculty member calls up, and an appointment with an instructional designer is made. The instructor shows up with a giant box of printed materials and says, "I want to teach online. Could you help me digitize all these files?" Don't look now, but we're in the middle of the Techno Information Age.
Handling large amounts of information, particularly outside one's field of expertise, seems ...
Blog Entry
All the recent press coverage about the territoriality of those in law enforcement ...and the efforts from the top to encourage more sharing of information probably rings true for the many of us who are not in law enforcement. Information tends to silo. Those who feel that their professional standing is linked to what unique pockets of information and talents they have will not likely want to share what they know with others.
In academia, at least at the college ...
Blog Entry
Value-adding seems to be a fundamental principle of differentiation in the very competitive eLearning marketplace. LMSes have to offer functionality, design, namebrand, and ease-of-use. Many now have content streams by partnering with media organizations, such as Bb with the New York Times. Data inventories need constantly refreshed information and convenience, sort of like wikis today.
The concept of adding "intelligence" with each new information exchange also is a basic one. To do that, people may conduct new research and offer ...
Blog Entry
Building a course for various subject matter experts (SMEs) involves a lot of give and take, particularly when it's design-by-committee. I experienced that at the Boeing Co. when I worked there for two summers as a faculty fellow. I suspect that in this new job in Kansas that such work will involve much the same sort of give and take. So far, my work here has been project-specific site-building and Help sorts of things, but I have yet to ...
Blog Entry
So there's the burden of the blank screen. It's not a heavy burden, but it's one of weaving content strings to create value (new perspectives, new procedures). It strikes me that in our jobs, we do a lot of repurposing of content, and this may also be true in blogging. We take the stuff of our thoughts and parts of our daily lives, do a James Frey twist, and try to offer something else. We dramatize the ...
Blog Entry
These past years, various vendors have gotten on the digital bandwagon to create products that might spark the next great round of expenditures. E-books were considered a potential winner. These would be totally digital and usable on various e-book platforms and devices.
If these could be deployed through just the proper reader, people would want to read digitally. If a pop author like Stephen King would support this, these would make print books obsolete. This hasn't happened.
A version ...
Blog Entry
The Web works its magic now and again. And today it was so for me. I went browsing for information on reusable learning objects after having read my fill of SCORM and Cisco RLO information parts of last week and this week.
I ran across a nonprofit organization called the Creative Commons (started in 2001 by lawyer and author Lawrence "Code" Lessig). This organization strives to build the shared commons body of knowledge through education and releases of copyrighted works ...
Blog Entry
The contents of IDOS may not reflect the opinions or policies of the Office of Mediated Education or Kansas State University. This blog is offered here for information only, and this information is used at the readers' own risk. Outbound links from this site do not indicate advocacy or verification of any other site's contents. Any trademarks or registered marks used here do not indicate any permission release from the trademark holder and are owned by the respective ...