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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The items of a fugitive literature involve meeting notes, drafts, unpublished photos, unpublished drafts, policy statements, research data sets, research ...
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A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.
Subject matter experts ...
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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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Doing instructional design work for speed is an occasional reality for IDs at the university. Speed becomes a critical issue whenever there are deadline-sensitive projects. In these situations, there are deadlines from grant funders, compliance trainings, legal requirements, course-launch deadlines, commercial deadlines, and any number of other reasons.
Speed is seldom the first requirement, but in some cases, it can be. Sometimes, speed is the over-riding factor. Sometimes when a crucial staff member has moved on ...
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Depending on the domain field and the leaders of an instructional design project, any number of “design principles” may guide a project. Design principles are the main concepts and values underlying a curricular build. These concepts are rarely explicitly spelled out, possibly because the subject matter experts assume these concepts as a matter-of-course. These are not defined in the documentation supporting projects like grant documents or official course descriptions. And yet, these principles are important for a successful e-learning project ...
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Computer science articles do not usually involve freehand pencil drawings, but recently, I ran across some academic research articles on design that had scanned freehand pencil images embedded in the text. There it was—the charm of hand-drawn early concepts of various navigational structures or design templates.
There was the idiosyncratic scratchy handwriting. There were the varying lines drawn with assurance and a rough artistry. That refreshing feel of a raw pencil on paper is such an Important aspect to ...
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Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
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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 ...
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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 ...
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At the recent SIDLIT conference, I attended Tracy Newman’s “Digital Storytelling: How to Bring your Stories to Life,” and the presenter offered a helpful concept in the assigning of video storytelling and creation to students.
Newman cited research that showed that student creations of digital stories may address a range of skills: research, writing, organization, technology, presentation, interview, interpersonal, problem-solving, and assessment skills. The secret, though, is to incrementalize the work ...
Continue reading A "Seemingly Simple" Assignment (in Digital Storytelling)
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A recent webinar brought to mind again the importance of measuring learning. That’s a given in most professional workplaces, where the return on investment (ROI) has to be measured and justified to support the funding. Dr. Patti Phillips’ “Show me the Money: How to Determine the ROI in People, Projects and Programs” (part of the Provocative Ideas Free Webinars) discussed some of the ROI methodology (as developed by Jack Phillips developed in the early 1970s).
To ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 July 2009
A recent article referred to how some companies design technological tools for amateurs vs. novices. In a sense, instructional design may also differentiate between learners based on amateurs vs. novices—as a construct.
Okay, so definitions, first. A “novice” is a person who eventually aims to be an expert. This person is at the beginning stages of learning about a particular area of expertise. This person will be initiated into a field from elementary understandings to ...
Continue reading Designing Technological Tools (and Instruction) for Amateurs vs. Novices
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Dr. Ray E. Jimenez, Managing Director and Chief Learning Architect of Vignettes for Training, presented on “Do It Yourself E-Learning” through SimplifyeLearning.com and Elluminate™. This presenter highlighted three features that are necessary for DIY builds within organizations with training needs. These include simplicity, succinctness, and reusability.
Building efficient DIY e-learning should be strategized instead of having individuals “wing it,” he said. He cited John Maeda (of MIT)’s book “The New Simplicity” as an informative ...
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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
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In a time of economic strain, it seems that maintaining goodwill is more important than ever. So many of the projects that I deal with (both in public and private spheres) depend on benevolence and generosity and patience.
One example of this concept not working was with a publisher that solicited chapters for a book. The editor mentioned that all contributors would get a free contributor copy. Then, when the book was about to be published, they sent ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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A generic syllabus is one that captures the main contents of an online course: the course description, the defined learning objectives, the catalog information, related texts and resources, a course schedule (to show the overall e-learning trajectory and course structure), the grading structure, and course policies (civility clauses, accessibility issues, and others). I had assumed that it always comes with every online course build, but one of the faculty on the build team asked several times about what this syllabus ...
Continue reading The Uses of Generic Syllabi in Collaborative Course Builds
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A recent article about game design for a particular application raised the question of the ethical debates the authors went through to decide whether or not to take on the particular project. It strikes me that going through the considerations of whether or not to take on a particular project—based on ethical grounds and personal and professional values—is critical.
Let me clarify. My work has always been public-side and open. As a long-time college instructor and writer, I ...
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I’d always thought that it was a pretty big disadvantage to come into a field with only very generalized knowledge (or occasionally, no knowledge). That’s just part of the work life of an instructional designer, I thought.
A recent project has helped me revise my opinion. There’s something to be said for empathizing with the total outsider student. Knowing where questions may arise may help in the curricular design. It may help in identifying what learning experiences ...
Continue reading Student Buy-in of the Instructor Framework for a Course
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A recent project has involved the use of the Quality Matters Rubric to ensure the quality of the e-learning through the curricular design. A trained QM-certified faculty member is spear-heading the critique. That said, the others of us without that training are still finding this rubric very helpful for aligning the elements of the course and ensuring that the basic elements are in place.
This rubric was funded through a FIPSE grant (from the US Department ...
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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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The idea of digital “seeding” is to put in some basic ideas to a site in order to get participants started. One puts up “stubs” to a wiki, and the idea is that people will run with the maintenance of the site. At some point. one is supposed to let go, and others are supposed to take over and power the communications vehicle on their own. The problem is when to actually do the hand-off.
In theory, information is attractive ...
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Understanding the context of an instructional build is helpful for the instructional design. A recent project involves the professionalization of a field—or the formalizing of the training and education for individuals who work in a high-demand workforce that has not traditionally had high standards for entry.
The interesting part of this instructional design work was that the curriculum would be designed for online delivery. The curriculum would eventually have to fit a state-level assessment ...
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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 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 ...
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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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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!
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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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If there are recent trends in questions for instructional designers, one would be how to hold and create live conferences in virtual ways that are still beneficial and lively. How may informal, “hallway conversations” be facilitated and captured in terms of informational value? How can the casual hanging out after a live meeting be emulated in virtual spaces? These seem like anachronistic concerns in a time when there are so many technologies that have been created to promote computer mediated ...
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In an information technology office, I often hear snippets of telephone conversations. That comes with cubicle-land living. That sort of hearing (vs. listening) is unavoidable. I hear now and again the term “known problems.” In IT-speak, that’s a kind of comfort. It’s the idea that the problem has been noticed and replicated and likely has an IT professional looking into solving it.
In a larger context, the world is full of “known problems” that are unwieldy and challenging ...
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I was revisiting one of the projects that I served as instructional designer on and noticed in a very tiny font that the site now identifies the sponsoring university. This project had been brainstormed and evolved with the help of several dozen students, and the consensus then (and now) has been to soft-pedal the university tie. The rationale was to let the interactive site stand on its own merits and contents, and the greater access and support for our university ...
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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 ...
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K-State’s Counseling Services has launched a new interactive website for K-State’s students to promote mental wellness, particularly in relation to preventing suicide. The site offers information for various protective factors to promote student mental health and resiliency.
The site is based on a metaphor of a café, with the idea that students, faculty and staff, will create a sense of warm virtual community that will help make K-State a better place for all. At the site’s center ...
Continue reading The University Life Cafe Promoting Mental Wellness
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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 ...
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The literature on creativity offers some fine insights for instructional design. I don’t want to stretch these ideas too far, but there are some snippets below that may be applied in fresh ways.
The authors Kelly and Littman encourage designers to focus on real people with lived and felt needs. “To make better products and services, you’ve got to care about the person actually using it” (Kelly & Littman, 2001, p. 34). Another way of expressing this is for ...
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One ongoing project has involved the launching of a brand new site with plenty of interactivity, some curious AI security functionalities, and plenty of user-generated contents, along with professionally created contents. The ambition of the site meant that the coding would likely take longer than initially planned. And the many voices at the table would also mean more delays.
To push the site’s development, while the site was still in development, a version was pushed out into ...
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Readers who want a basic primer on how video games may promote learning may wish to give James Paul Gee’s Good Video Games + Good Learning a spin. With his folksy writing style and use of personal anecdotes, Gee’s work is highly accessible and non-threatening, and yet, it does offer some academic perspectives.
This author is a social linguist and professor who came to gaming in his 50s, through his son. It may be safe to assert that his ...
Continue reading Good Video Games + Good Learning (brief resource review)
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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
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Our campus has an assessment conference earlier this month. The main message to faculty and administrators was the importance of assessing inputs and learning outcomes.
This endeavor is encouraged in part because of the upcoming accreditation visit for the university in a few more years, but program assessment has continuing value—to study and measure academic achievements, student learning, and even coincidental learning. This knowledge is not just for in-house use but for the requirement to publicly account for the ...
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Dr. Bernard Amadei, founding president of Engineers without Borders-USA (http://www.ewb-usa.org/) exhorted his audience (a full-hourse of students and professors at the Fiedler Hall Auditorium) to consider “service to humanity” as part of their professional work lives.
He joked that his openness to “random processes” led to his founding Engineers without Borders in Fall 2000. By chance, he picked a landscaping company for a project at his home that involved workers from Belize. These people told him about ...
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Conventional wisdom has it that most of an online course should be complete before it launches.
A more challenging approach for experienced faculty is to use an “emergent” curriculum. That is a course that evolves the curriculum—with or without student input—as the course evolves. This may apply to learning that is also emergent in the world, such as a new course about a cutting-edge technology or policy or phenomena…which is rare but does occur now and again ...
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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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Human-computer interactions research offers quite a few occasions for laughter. On the one side, you have the machine, with the various affordances and limitations. On the other side, you have the persons, with their affordances and limitations and idiosynracies. The building of socio-technical systems then happens somewhere inbetween and with a complex mix of understandings and inputs / outputs.
It was in this spirit that I ran into a discrete strategy to relax speakers dealing with a speaker-dependent system…in a ...
Continue reading Coded Para-Verbals to Support Live Learner Engagement
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A current federally-funded project involves the building of a site that hopes to improve student mental health, and in so doing, prevent suicides.
The stats say that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Young adults 18 – 24 have the highest incidence of reported suicide ideation. A recent study apparently found that half of students had suicidal thoughts at some point in their history. Mood, interpersonal and academic concerns apparently have driven some students to be ...
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Sometimes, engaging in ID work means interacting with a course on-and-off over a year or more. I was revisiting just such a course when I saw it with new eyes. The professor had put in study breaks in the online learning. These study breaks involved deep breathing exercises. They involved humorous out-takes. They involved stretches.
This add-on at the ends of each videotaped lecture segment really added a light touch to the learning. This course deals with learning principles, and ...
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In Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” (2008), he talks about the competitive advantage that open source environments have as labs for creating and evolving new technologies. He suggests that for-profits run into the challenge of a “fitness landscape” that encourages settling for the first and easiest solution and discourages further exploration for more creative or elegant solutions.
“Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of ...
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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
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The use of modules to organize a curriculum offers more than learning flexibility. For a recent project, modules now allow for co-building a curriculum for both credit and non-credit deployment.
The credit course is defined by the documents that have gone through Faculty Senate and been approved as a high-quality academic course. Those learning objectives are codified in the syllabus and other course materials, and the course description resides in the academic catalogs. The strategies here then come in sequencing ...
Continue reading Academic Credit and Commercial Non-Credit Co-Building
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With online synchronicity, most presenters do wrap up the interactions with some flourish. There are some closing comments, a thanks to all who participated, URLs of where the digital resources will be posted, and promises for future events. That sense of wrap-up is fairly critical in giving participants a sense of event completion.
In e-learning, though, I see much less design of closure. Too often, there’s a flurry of activity to hit the deadlines. There are cumulative assignments. There ...
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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
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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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In recent years, people seem to be working on a faster and faster pace. A student journalist will call on a Tues. for an article that will run on Wed. Faculty will call or email with a request for research or advisement, and they’ll want to meet in a day or two. Or two weeks before a grant application is due, the head of a department will arrange a meeting, and the work involves instructional design, research, writing, a ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 June 2008
Game Cultures By Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy New York: Open University Press 2006 171 pp. hardcover
Many have suggested the use of digital games for educational purposes, whether these are games seconded for learning or games designed explicitly for learning.
J. Dovey and H.W. Kennedy’s Game Cultures takes an academically sound approach to analyze the role of games in meeting human needs.
Learning or “decoding” is a main computer game activity. “Playing requires this decoding of ...
Continue reading Understanding Game Cultures for E-Learning (Brief Resource Review)
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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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It is a simple truism that most people would not want to be replaced out of their jobs. Suggesting that might make a person downright uncomfortable. So it was with amusement that I came across a phrase in my readings on automated learning: “offloading the instructor.”
That very blunt phrase highlights a very real factor in the support for automation of learning. Less offensive phrasing is usually used, more like “cost-savings.”
I recently co-presented on automated learning at this campus ...
Continue reading "Offloading the Instructor" and Automated Learning
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A colleague generously set up a campus tour for me, and during this tour, we visited a state-of-the-art e-learning lab.
The lab itself looked like any other set of academic offices, with a mixture of computers, papers and books….and students…and comfortable furniture. We all crowded into a small meeting room to see some of the work of this office (which has a strong track record of federal educational grant funding as well ...
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As part of a parallel to a recent high tech conference, one of the participants set up a discussion on data portability. While quite a few were invited, there were just three of us in addition to the organizer and his assistant. I’m told that most people headed off to enjoy the sunshine and local shopping, and many certainly did even during the main conference.
Well, I went running in late, which meant I couldn’t make too much ...
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Dale A. Morris, an instructional development meteorologist of NOAA, in the presentation titled "National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario," presented a powerful live tabletop exercise designed to raise the situational awareness of the various entities that may be involved in a severe weather incident - the meteorologists, TV newscasters, and an emergency operations center.
A National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office piped in simulated weather information (based on past weather events). To create this, they built a weather event simulator ...
Continue reading The National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario
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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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Christopher Chambers, with the Juxtopia Group, presented on a virtual sim that occurs in real 3D space. Live fire combat involves some muscle memory, similar to marksmanship.
Based on research into sports psychology and with an eye towards fully exploiting cutting-edge technologies, a traning was created to sustain and improve live fire combat skills: the speed of engagement, identification and acquisition of the target, and the accuracy.
Because of the need to engage actual physical muscle memory, this sim occurs ...
Continue reading Improving Live Fire Combat Training with Virtual Targetry
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 October 2007
Virtual Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures
Dr. Dale Olsen (formerly of Johns Hopkins University and now with SiMmersion LLC) presented on "Virtualized Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures" (at the Washington Interactive Technologies conference hosted by SALT).
He opened with a short PBS movie clip about the importance of cultural sensitivities in law enforcement approaching people to get information. So ...
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The 2007 Interactive Technologies Conference (sponsored by SALT) included a presentation by two Apple staff--LeRoy Dennison and Russ White. The presentation (full of multimedia and levity) was titled: "Rapid Development at Apple (Quickly and Effectively Delivering Training to a Worldwide Sales Force)."
The training work in this organization manifests in a variety of ways. The training work involves training both the direct and indirect channel sales force. They also offer fee-based customer training (which from the design angle involves the ...
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So over break, as part of a family road trip, I got to visit some condo models in Chicago. One in particular was a luxury building that involved the use of a sophisticated DVD with virtual depictions of the various units and the new building itself just a few blocks off the Magnificant Mile. The quality of this simulated experience was something only an established builder with many years of marketing could really build or commission. And this experience, while ...
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Some mainline media organizations offer some fine quality slideshows and digital movies. I'm thinking of the tightly edited food and restaurant reviews of Phil Vettel The Chicago News Tribune with their condensed mix of food appreciation, chef interviews, atmospheric digital captures, music, and scrumptious food views. I'm also thinking of The New York Times in its real estate section with its slideshows and voiceover narratives related to real estate.
One of these was by an architect, and he ...
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Digital simulations may be used in situations where live simulations may be expensive, time-consuming, impractical and / or fast-changing.
At a recent conference, a representative of Chi Systems introduced the use of synthetic teammates for undergraduate pilot training. Here, pilots-in-training may practice the various voice communications with the tower (controller) and others in a runway take-off situation. Their voice inputs would be captured by voice recognition software (and VOIP for Net-mediated learning), and their responses and the timing of ...
Continue reading Fielding Synthetic Teammates for a Flying Simulation
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A student-friendly tool for an online class is Week Zero or Pre-Week. Week Zero is the week prior to the first day of an online class. During this period. The online classroom is opened and made available to learners. Some instructors use it just to let learners acclimate to the learning management system (LMS).
Others proactively turn it into a review session. They design instructional paths for learners through the first week. They set up incentives to ...
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So a fair amount of research dollars have gone into natural language systems, AIs, and computerized intelligent agents. When I call some phone systems for information, I get the automated voice that directs me to where I want to go. At the grocery store, I check out my items by interacting with a canned digital voice. My banking is done online, but if I need to go to the phone, there's that same digital voice. I can go to ...
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Dr. Joan Lippincott of the Coalition for Networked Information suggested a multi-pronged approach to eLearning space design by considering learning principles, disciplinary applications of eLearning, the Net Gen style, and various environments. Deep learning should entail a social component, be active, contextual, engaging and "student-owned," she suggested. This new generation of learners enjoys figuring out their own learning instead of just drawing from experts. They prefer multi-media to text. They enjoy working in groups, and they multi-task as a matter ...
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Malcolm Brown (of Dartmouth College) in "Trends in Learning Space Designs" offered some fresh insights on the building of so-called "learning spaces". He noted that space might be construed as a "continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied," and also as "the freedom and scope to live, think, and develop in a way that suits one." Both definitions shimmer and interact in the design of digital learning spaces. He defined various learning spaces. Some are formal ones ...
Continue reading Physical and Digital Learning Space Designs
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As a new young instructor with the UNDP in PR China (my third and fourth years there), I'd been getting subtle hints that a prior American instructor hadn't come across so well. For a while, my students would avoid telling me outright what it was that made her somewhat distasteful to them. Since she was on their minds, I knew I would eventually get the story. The story went like this...and the reasons ...
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I was reading a book on technology in education recently, and the authors observe that "work and university study have always been closely related" (A.W. Bates and G. Poole, 2003, p. 17). That got me to thinking about how we actually design for student employability. (Research says that employers tend to be more leery of degrees earned totally online vs. those that involve some face-to-face time.)
To be employable, people need a sense of self-discipline and polish. They need ...
Continue reading Instructional Design for Student Employability
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Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy is used to represent different levels of learning, with the highest as the ability to evaluate, while drawing on all the prior levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Some would argue that an even higher level would be that of creativity, innovation, seeing beyond what has already been and is to uncharted territories.
Certainly, the ability to make new mental connections and to see unexploited opportunities could well lead to benefits in a number ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 March 2006
I sometimes think about when I first became aware of my own learning and sense of being. I always come back to the age of 10 as the time when a greater awareness of myself and others seemed to emerge. Of course, that was only the first glimmer. In the ensuing years, there have been moments of greater learning and self-awareness. It probably wasn't until I was some years into college education as an instructor that the issues of ...
Continue reading The Importance of Meta-Cognition regarding Learning Styles and Preferences
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An online instructor may breathe "life" into a course through his/her enthusiasm, experiences, personality, instructional design, and sheer telepresence. The communications and interactivity in such courses enliven and enrich the learning. Online instructors may often be the linchipin of the learning experience.
In academia, there is not often a lot of opportunity to use "boxed" pre-made digital courses. Simply, faculty are rather hands-on in their teaching, and they tend to be skeptical of the effectiveness of online courses without ...
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Much of first (early)-generation online learning is highly text-based. This means that learners have to engage their reading minds to understand the concepts, facts and practices.
Reading, a common staple of adult education, is more complex than many realize. Tony Buzan in Use Both Sides of Your Brain identifies seven steps in the process of learning (Boyles and Contadino 102). Being aware of the complexity of reading will help instructors provide the necessary support for adult learners in their ...
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One of my favorite classes to teach has been "Writing for New Media." In this course, my students would find a live client in the (Seattle) community. They would hustle friends, colleagues and supervisors for business. We ended up with a fish restaurant, a local computer business, a coffee shop, an on-campus music group, a maritime museum, a fledgling environmental organization, a music e-zine, and a variety of others. Then, we'd go through the steps of brainstorming, researching, branding ...
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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 ...
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One of my colleagues has been struggling mightily to name herself as a blogger. She has an open promise that I'll update and change any references to her based on her new name. She has gone through dozens of different incarnations and tried them all on and discarded them like a heap of hats. Representing "self" in online space is no easy feat. There are about a million ways to be misread and misunderstood. Ideas may ...
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Writing into a silent blog is a privilege for a short time until launch. Then, there will be those who participant and others who hang out silently. This one will be an open-ended question, with a few broad guides.
One of the factors that can cause the most strife in an online classroom is that of values, particularly ethical and moral ones. Students come to the classroom with any number of values influences and ideas, and the same goes for ...
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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 ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 February 2006
There has always been a mystique regarding software developers, at least where I'm from. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I met various people from the tech industry---some on the periphery and others at the heart. Those at the heart were the developers and the project leads. They were the ones who could speak to the machine and command it to execute on certain commands, with a deep precision and elegance. That was the ideal, of course, and one certainly ...
Continue reading The Human- Machine Interface and Learning Management System Versioning
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Let me open with a sincere doubt (scary way to start a virtual conversation). I sincerely doubt that cultural neutrality is an actual possibility in digital course design.
The reasons are several-fold. For one, information is rarely culturally neutral. Virtually all information used in education has a human source and springs from a culture and a time. Information has assumptions about world-view and truth. There's a degree of plausible deniability about virtually everything.
Yet, I would say that the ...
Continue reading "Cultural Neutrality" in Digital Course Design
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A more socially provocative way to approach this question of curricula is to consider the concept of whether the curricula is "explicit, implicit or null." This question assumes a larger knowledge of the field and curriculum, something else that IDs don't often probe.
What's said? What's not said? What is not even noticed?
Eisner (1985) suggests that schools teach three curricula: the explicit (obvious and stated), implicit (unofficial, hidden, both intentional and inadvertent), and null (non-existing curriculum ...
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Instructional designers never quite get the chance to go into the in-depth assumptions of instructors regarding their curricular culture. We exist often to deal with assignment-level builds, and the theoretical seldom gets brought up. As a matter of fact, one of my interviewers for this present job said that he could count on one hand the times that he's had such discussions in his many years in his job as an ID.
So after his laughter quieted, I thought ...
Continue reading Joseph, et al.'s Six Cultures of Curriculum
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So, a couple years ago when I lived in M. Corp.'s backyard (Seattle), I got to attend a presentation by one of their geopolitical strategists. His name was Tom Edwards, and he was their senior geopolitical strategist back in Apr. 9, 2004. While his ideas relate to a company's global strategies, his concepts have great utility for designing Web pages for academic purposes.
Publishing online to a non-password protected space makes the digital contents open to global perusal ...
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So Angelo and Cross (1993) have some essential questions for instructors to consider before they build an assessment.
Begin with "What do you want to know? Is it assessable?" Consider, "What's the best way to surface this information with the most efficient use of both student and faculty time?" Consider, "What is the most fair, objective and efficient way to gain this information?" Consider, "How will I use this information to enhance student learning? Will this assessment benefit student ...
Continue reading Initial Points to Consider in Creating Online Assessments
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There are a number of federal laws that deal with the issue of accessibility and websites. When I used to teach "Writing for New Media" at a college in the Pacific Northwest, my students would come in well-armed with firsthand observations about the challenges of disabilities and any number of strategies on how to design sites (often from scratch) that were accessible and welcoming to those with various combinations of disabilities. Various software makers have built accessible templates. Technologists have ...
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Research has a funny way of informing work if one actually goes out in pursuit of new ideas. For some, we've got research coming to us through subscriptions to listservs and the occasional trek to the library and the use of online databases. I ran across a small gem in Patrick E. Parrish's "Embracing the Aesthetics of Instructional Design" from Educational Technology (March - April 2005). This author suggests that instructional design should take on some pragmatic aesthetics. Like ...