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The items of a fugitive literature involve meeting notes, drafts, unpublished photos, unpublished drafts, policy statements, research data sets, research ...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
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
A recent project has had me exploring the ethics of the instructional design profession. As far as I can tell, there is not a professional organization that spells out the ethics. The research literature has a fair amount on information technology (IT) ethics, borrowed to a degree from business and engineering ethics. Instructional design (ID), though, still requires collaborative reflection and analysis to surface practical values of right and wrong.
In the absence of a professional society, the ...
Blog Entry
Collaborations across institutions involve rotating access points to various technological systems—learning / course management systems, digital repositories, and databases—and that means slivers of time when one has differing identities and codes. These are necessary to access information, collaborate with others, troubleshoot technologies, and learn new systems.
These “access windows” are often instructive. They show ways that different institutions deploy their technologies. One learns how systems work or don’t work with various digital artifacts ...
Blog Entry
One of the journals that I work with on occasion has a stated policy goal of going global linguistically. They already are on four continents and a half-dozen countries, in terms of their editorial pool. Their readers are from all over. Now, some six and a half years into publishing, they want to move their abstracts into a range of different languages.
The question then is how and what sort of human talent is there to do the translating and ...
Continue reading An E-Journal: Multiple Languages and Going Global
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 use of e-learning to back up universities during times of crisis or emergencies has long been in discussions on various campuses. With the WHO declaration of H1N1 at the pandemic flu level on June 11, some are re-looking at virtual learning as a way to support social distancing—or strategies for self-isolating as a protective measure to keep the flu from being passed from person-to-person and possibly recombining in other more dangerous ways.
It’s interesting, but faculty uses ...
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
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 ...
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
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 ...
Blog Entry
One constant aspect of being an instructional designer is expectations management. Faculty clients (and some admin) often have little sense of what would be required to actualize the work that they imagine--because of the technologies, the content capture, and the processing. Most express surprise that work will cost anything. Or the technologies are so mysterious that they don’t know what their actual options may be. This client expectations management aspect of instructional design work often exists under the radar ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
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
Dr. Allen G. Johnson presented as part of the Provost’s Lecture Series and participated in MLK Day events at K-State. He gave a presentation based on “Power, Privilege and Difference,” which is based on his most recent book. As a full-time author and speaker with a long history in academia, Johnson came highly recommended to the campus.
He suggested that the debates around the recent presidential campaigning avoiding hot-button issues of ...
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
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
A colleague of mine suggests that there’s a “new normal” for the economy. And current signs and projections seem to suggest that to a degree. Watching the aggregate behaviors and thinking of a population has been very informative about massive pendulum swings. No matter where this all goes, the new frugality in my field may be here to stay, an indelible part of doing business.
One part of a job is to create and demonstrate ...
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
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
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
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
E-learning mitigates time and distance to a degree, but it does not totally collapse time.
At around the 8th week of a 10-week quarter, occasionally, a student will come up with a proposal that goes something like this: How about if I do all the work I missed in the prior 8 weeks and graduate because this is the last course I need? The student promises a Herculean effort to get a course done in a very short time. The ...
Blog Entry
IGI Global has a book coming out titled "Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning" this July 2008. This is edited by Drs. Ugur Demiray of Anadolu University and Ramesh C. Sharma of Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Main Book Site http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985
Table of Contents http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985&v=tableOfContents
This book takes more of an international and global perspective.
Continue reading Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning
Blog Entry
Dr. Alma Clayton-Pederson, Vice President of the American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) presented at the March 26 Provost Lecture Mar. 26, at K-State. I hadn’t realized that I’d actually already seen her speak in a 2006 AAC&U conference as one of the keynotes…until she was introduced. (Back in 2006, I was presenting at the AAC&U conference in Seattle and may have had the mind engaged in meeting up with former colleagues and ...
Continue reading Diversity and the Appreciation of the Other
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
22 March 2008
Unfunded mandates are as popular in higher education as they are pretty much anywhere: not.
However, recently, our campus faculty and administration passed a policy that requires that e-learning meet accessibility guidelines. That aligns with national and state laws, but as an unfunded mandate, that requires plenty of creative hard work.
All the intentions here are good and positive, but there may be a lag between the desire and the actual doing. This campus has signed on for a big ...
Continue reading A Tip Sheet and an E-Learning Module to Promote E-Learning Accessibility
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 April 2007
Really in a time of need, no one really wants to depend on trickle down effects alone. These take time. These take goodwill. These take the structural levers in a society to make them work well.
I was watching a video off of a news site about how old PCs were being sold in large cheap lots and refurbished and sold into a West African nation. In their second incarnations, these computers were enabling small businesses ...
Continue reading Social Justice: The "Trickle Down" Effect and Educational Techno
Blog Entry
The technology learning curve for instructional designers seems as steep as the cutting edge roller coasters that plaster your cheeks against your ears as you pull out of the starting platform and do the first loop-de-loop. There's no real keeping up. If it's any comfort, technologists will tell you that they know their areas very well, but it's near impossible to extend their expertise beyond a region of specialty. Their learning curve gets too high, too, and ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
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
If one walks through the neighborhood at pretty much any time of day, one can hear a wide range of dogs barking. There's the Gus Welcome, which comes along with a frantic run up and down a fence and some 80 pounds of German shepherd hurling itself against a new fence and bending part of it into the neighbor's yard. There are the yappies. There are mysterious growls coming through doors. It was on one such walk - dog-sitting ...
Blog Entry
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 ...