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I have heard of some “teaching to the unconscious” in the sense of marketing, advertising, and branding. I have also read that the jury is out in terms of the research on the efficacy / inefficacy of whether such outreaches actually work.
Then recently, after I wheedled a book from a colleague that I’d been wanting to read for a long time, I came across this concept again. The concept here was found in Raph Koster’s much-cited book “A ...
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The World Digital Library offers various resources from different times and locales around the globe. The contents may well be copyrighted because this resources is contributed to from a variety of copyright holders. The items are well labeled with metadata and tagging.
http://www.wdl.org/en/
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A recent project highlighted the phenomena of designing websites to deliver information for synchronous wide-scale interactions. This refers to the delivery of information (via text and multimedia) to a broad-spectrum audience in real-time, often in a crisis or emergency situation. One aspect of this is that the information is not only for situational awareness but for decision supports—making choices in real time and with real implications.
Some basic tenets of crisis communications involve the need for having ...
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The research literature on innovations as they proliferate into a community is engaging. One central concept is the idea that innovations are risky for a world that may not be ready for it. Being first involves changing human attitudes and behaviors, structures, technologies, and the larger economies—for an innovation to actually “take.”
These entrepreneurial risks are important to take to move technologies forward to improve human lives. The challenge though is building to an environment that may not fully ...
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Elluminate™ hosted “Informal Learning or Non-Formal Learning: What Makes More Sense In Your Organization” presented by Lance Dublin of Dublin Group (dublinconsulting.net)and a worldwide consultant on learning (on June 10). Between formal and informal learning, is there another way—with “non-formal learning” as a semi-structured, semi-purposeful / semi-random way of learning in Web 2.0 spaces. (This suggests that formal learning tends to be structured and purposive, and informal learning tends to be unstructured and random.)
Dublin seemed to ...
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Bureaucratic reshufflings will affect access to various resources—of money and staffing. In the instructional design move coming on half a year ago now, it resulted in the loss of an “art shop.” By this, I mean access to a graphic designer who could brand websites, create posters, lay out e-newsletters, create logos, and provide creative design ideas.
For instructional design purposes, this was a tough loss. Designing for a visual generation, instructional designers need access to graphic arts talent ...
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When a bicycle gets off-true, the tires begin to rub against some other part of the bike. And it’s then just a short time before a trip to the bike shop is in order.
That same sort of challenge occurs when scripting problems occur in a basic simulation. The various elements act wonky, and it becomes a challenge to get the elements to work. The fun then really begins—to get the object back to “true.”
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Webisodes are brief video episodes in continuing series that are played out and delivered on the Web. I saw a few through news sites, with stories of characters striving for the usual things—love, self-respect, self-actualization. These shorts were amusing and were sponsored by various advertisers: a car company, food manufacturers, and the like.
A recent project involving an anti-suicide website (universitylifecafe.org) resulted in the creation of a number of different short scripts. One was for a ...
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The chatter about Google Analytics had been positive for a while. Talk was that Google could collect all sorts of information about visitors to a site in order to help site designers better tailor the contents to meet user needs. The data would be aggregate and anonymous, but all one needed was a gmail account and a little tech savvy and one could get a treasure trove of visitor information.
A tour of the Google Analytics site brings out the ...
Continue reading Google Analytics for Site Evolution Strategies
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by IDOS Newswire
06 April 2009
Call for Chapter Proposals
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 2009
Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends
A book edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=626
Introduction and Objectives: Immersive learning has come to the fore with the popularization of Second Life and the development of open-source immersive 3D learning spaces. Those in e-learning have been working to find ways ...
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces (A Call for Chapter Proposals)
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Those who work as professional videographers may be puzzled at the approach in this particular entry. This may be a concept that is such a central part of their skill set that this all goes without saying. The concept I’m referring to is that of “videographic continuity”. It’s the simple idea that videos should convey a flowing narrative in a way without interruptions or confusions.
As an educator who has come to instructional design, I am learning about ...
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I see students in various stages of distress as they wrangle with their academic papers. They’re lying across their desks staring into the computer screens as they search for the words or ideas that they need to build the contents. They send emails about their concerns as their papers are in various stages of development, particularly when they’re stuck on a thesis or on the possible use of a particular source.
Recently, I had a déjà vu moment ...
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“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
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It came as a bit of a shock to faculty at my university that there would be a foray into Second Life for educational purposes, social networking, and university service provision. There had been apparently long debates over concerns of what could happen in immersive 3D spaces in terms of griefers or other buses. And after some deep analysis, the advisory committee apparently was putting forward some solid recommendations along with hopes to maximize the use of this social virtual ...
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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 ...
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Clients know what they want, but they have a hard time explaining what they want in a way that is specific and usable enough for developers and site designers.
I’ve come to this conclusion after seeing projects languish, without any traction or support (and then the predictable finger-pointing). I’ve seen this with websites where faculty clients may not know what is available or possible technologically, and they have one image or groove in their minds. There’s no ...
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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 ...
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This concept sparked with an article of a guitar-playing astrophysicist who writes semi-risque music to make certain elusive astronomy concepts clear.
Part of instructional design work involves getting a sense of an instructor’s workstyle and personality and trying to capture some of that in an online learning experience—so as to engage and motivate learners. For some professors, their public personality is part of their schtick. For others, the personality may be more subtle and nuanced.
A ...
Continue reading Flavor: The Personality Piece in Instructional Design
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An online course, by the time it’s complete and ready for deployment, often has plenty of moving parts. It involves documents that provide an overview of the learning—through the syllabus, the course policies, and the course calendar. There are the presential materials like videos, slideshows, simulations, texts, and other forms of lectures and demonstrations. There are the assignments. There are the sample student works. There are assessments, with rubrics and gradesheets. There are research project ideas.
And then ...
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A chance comment by a faculty member started me on a brief run of research on “herding” behaviors in automated agents. The idea was initially to have a herd of cows online behavior as their real-life counterparts do when approached from a particular angle. Having only seen one cow up close (at a gas station, no less), I wasn’t sure about the actual behaviors, but I had read a little something about “flocking” behaviors and figured I’d look ...
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Student retention has always been a bit of a challenge in many academic programs. Doctoral programs seem to feature about a 50% dropout rate. High schools have a 30% dropout rate. For e-learning ones, there are additional challenges, many of which have been mitigated with more student screening, student support, learner outreach, and faculty and staff training. That said, the challenge of retention does crop up in different ways.
Recently, a program that has high student entry traffic but low ...
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Rich media refers to Web artifacts and sites that provide audio, video and interactivity. This includes downloadable or streaming videos that may be played on different media players like Adobe's Flash Player, Apple's QuickTime, Real Networks' RealPlayer, and Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Rich multimedia can add more full-sensory learning such as sound and dynamic motion video to an online or hybrid learning experience. The digital interactive media may offer a more active learner experience than passive viewing ...
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One of the benefits of having some slow days now and again is that one has some time to think about improving what is already extant. One of my favorite things is teaching a course called "Online Teaching, Design and Development" on the AxioTM Learning Management System.
This is a 5-week course (with a pre-week and a post-week for stragglers) that covers a range of topics:
Pre-week Learning and Review Week 1: Making the Change Week 2: Learning Curricular Issues ...
Continue reading Retrofitting a Course for Branding and Accessibility
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One of the benefits of working in an IT office is that I have plenty of access to computer hardware and software to do my work. What's in short supply though...is paper.
So to earn ice cream money, I sometimes read and write book reviews. And the books I receive range from literature to pop fiction. More on the pop fiction continuum was a novel in which there was a passing conceit: the idea ...
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IDs have to draw on the expertise and resources of a number of others to bring the design of an online course together. The clients / SMEs are an assumed group. What's often not seen may be the work of graphic designers. The work of IDs often is that of a cross-functional team.
Graphic designers create covers for e-books. They create logos for course series. They create posters to advertise events on campus ...
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One of the basic tenets of instructional design for online learning is to build for the learner. Without direct insights or access to the learner base, an ID ends up having to speculate based on the demographics of a particular audience. The build then becomes based on speculation, hearsay and guesswork. After all, how does one build for an audience that one has never met? The point of entry then seems to focus on the curriculum. The "what" of what ...
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Representing information in different ways changes people's senses of reality. IDs have a suite of various authorware tools to present data - whether it be in tables, graphical representations, drawings, 3D models, audio-video, and a range of other data.
The Wikipedia offers a formal and informal definition of fractals. For my purposes, I'll quote their informal definition: "In colloquial usage, a fractal is a shape that is recursively constructed or self-similar, that is, a shape that appears similar at ...