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A couple weeks ago, I was part of a free webinar that was supposed to be a clinic. People were given simple tasks…sent off to do their work…and were to rejoin the group some 20 minutes later to share their work. The work that emerged was very divergent, and it became clear that these faculty and instructional designers all had different mental models going in. The presenter very graciously made positive comments on their works and quickly moved ...
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Every new technology has to be able to a pool of users who need training, win their loyalty, and continue to deliver quality with each new iteration of their technologies. This is especially true for different types of authoring software with so many “bells and whistles” and different types of terminology and ways of doing things.
The installed base gets used to having certain tools in certain locations. They get familiar with the mental models for the particular technologies. They ...
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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
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The folks I know in academia have mixed feelings about peer review. “Peer review” simply means that colleagues have a lot of power over one’s teaching, one’s social standing, one’s publications, and one’s contributions to a field.
Peers are the “gatekeepers” in academia. They have a say on tenure. They have a say about whether one presents at conferences. They critique articles and chapters and suggest whether works should appear in public venues or not. They ...
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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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Some online learners give indications of great frustrations with the learning / course management technologies, but they’ll do it without direct communications. They’ll send endless emails and treat those like TMs. They’ll send spam emails to the entire class with personal queries. They’ll post unopenable files, and when the first one doesn’t work, they’ll keep doing the same thing a half dozen times instead of just pasting their text into the HTML window.
They’ll ...
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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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http://www.k-state.edu/lafene/h1n1_guidelines_for_instructors.pdf
Continue reading Instructional Contingency Planning in Case of H1N1 Outbreak
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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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The draft article came in a neat little package. Here was a college that had found some open-source freeware that could help its institution deal with student service issues as well as resource management. They are arguing that their going the open-source route was saving them a lot of money and time and resources. However, the argument did not include baseline definitions of the pre- and post- intervention situations. There were no real metrics to speak of, only assertions without ...
Continue reading Making the "Business Case" for a Particular Technology
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For many freshman-level courses, it may be fair to assume that learners will be coming in cold to the learning domain. Coming in “cold” means that they lack basic background in the field. It also means that their skillsets may be scatter-shot in terms of the subject materials, and the learners may well be acquiring their learning skills as they go.
Strategies for supporting novice learners to a learning domain are manifold. First, one strategy involves building ...
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There are a number of strategies to organize course contents in the field of instructional design. One de facto one is to rely on the tables of contents of the selected textbook(s) for a course.
For many faculty, this is almost assumed. They are relying on the subject matter experts of a field who also have the ability to write and express themselves. Or they’re using collections that include many contributions from different authors organized ...
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In light of the H1N1 concerns regarding "high touch" surfaces...
http://itnews.itac.k-state.edu/2009/09/how-to-clean-computer-keyboard-and-mouse-surfaces/
Continue reading How to Clean Computer Keyboard and Mouse Surfaces
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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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Like many people, I care about my work. I want to do a good job on every project that I work on. I’ve also been out in the world enough to know that healthy critique and user feedback are critical to enhance projects, so I’m also not that protective of my work. People have opinions, and they have every right to them.
On the whole, most work developed for a project is used, albeit with some trimming here ...
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It may be the tough funding environment, but I have run across a number of grant proposals by various faculty that are somewhat gap-filled. There are proposals for a full program of courses that have no pay for the instructors in other departments (as if they would work for free). Or there are proposals for development grants that suggest a type of learning of creating learning objects but without actual deliverables. Or faculty will suggest the building of learning objects ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 September 2009
A recent foray into the riches of e-learning research has led to a fascinating article. Here, the researcher cleverly examined the popularity of particular researchers based on a number of factors (their links to other professionals, their visibility, and their professional affiliations) to see if that might lead to any distortions in self-estimation—in terms of estimating how many articles they had published in the past three years (measured against the actual objective number of publications).
People experience ...
Continue reading Network Standing, Attributions for Popularity, and Self Delusions
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A colleague recently emailed me with an interesting concept—the idea that it takes some 18 months for students to decide to take on a particular course of new learning…and the need for at least about a year before a new degree program or course catches on. The concept is something like having to live with an idea for a while before getting used to it sufficiently to accept it.
At this time when so many departments are working ...
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A good friend of mine was befuddled by the manuscript submittal process for an academic paper. This paper was a culmination of a life’s work in reading and dyslexia, and the manuscript had gone through the process of being a dissertation, a co-authored work, and now finally a revised paper that would optimally fit the standards of the international magazine. She kept getting email reminders that her submission was incomplete and that she needed to submit the work. She ...
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There’s a lot to be said for learning from difficulties and challenges, so as to head off future problems or to improve ways of dealing. It’s even better to learn from a near-miss, or it’s at least less costly. Recently, we had a confluence of events that could have been problematic except for some mad scrambling at the last minute. I’ll leave the details alone here. What was learned from this effort was the importance of ...
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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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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 ...
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There’s that aphorism that suggests that the moment one stops changing, one starts to diminish. Skills decay sets in, and worse yet, boredom. In that vein, I started thinking of “aspirational” instructional design—the kind of work that one hopes will come about from federal grant funding in the pipeline.
Any sort of complex curricular build is desirable. Complex curricular builds with a challenging learning base means more collaborative techniques and creative deployment of technologies. Working on ...
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After years of working with faculty on various curriculum projects, I’ve long known that it helps to have a loose hand on certain aspects of a project but to run with responsibilities seriously in all cases, too. A recent project involved brainstorming a series of scripts for a new website, and the webisode preview of one of those scripts recently was launched to some very positive feedback. I was running through a “lessons learned” from that work.
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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
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 August 2009
In a recent project, an online course was co-developed by multiple institutions, and the digital contents (learning modules with video, flashcards, slideshows, and additional simulations) had to be ported onto several different learning / course management systems (LCMSs).
The numbers and types of features on L/CMSes have stabilized among the surviving online learning systems. Over the years as this field as evolved, many commercial players jumped in; a few open-source ones have been popularized ...
Continue reading Transferring Digital Contents between Learning Management Systems
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Check out the trailer for an educational webisode series ("Suzy's Strategies") on doing well in college.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UobRqWGZNK8
for a college student well-being site located at
www.universitylifecafe.org
This webisode series will launch this Fall 2009.
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At the recent SIDLIT conference in Overland Park, KS, Tim Murphy presented on “Meeting the Challenges of International Online Teaching.” His task was to take part in online course redesigns for better acceptance by international audiences. He began with a Venn diagram of overlapping circles representing place, language and culture, for a global classroom.
At one point in the presentation, he asked rhetorically whether synchronous communications were ever advisable for international online classrooms. One ...
Continue reading Adjustments for International Online Teaching
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Accidental learning happens as a byproduct of formal or informal learning. It is unintentional and sometimes not even noticed by the learner. It is informed by serendipity, and it can take a person in powerful directions if they are open-minded, curious, and attuned to the potential for learning at every moment.
For instructional designers, considering ways to enhance the possibilities of learners bumping up against ideas and discovering new information should be part of the design. There can be rich ...
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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 ...
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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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A regular part of email life involves vetting the spam. Many of these are very easy to detect—based on the misspellings, the uses of the Cyrillic Russian alphabet, the come-ins for password or account information, the calls for secrecy, the offers of low-cost pharmaceuticals, body enhancements, and other predictable information.
Recently, I got one that was a personalized spear-phishing venture that broke the mold. It was from Nigeria (red flag) and asked for my editing services for a publication ...
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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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After a complex course build, there may be all sorts of digital detritus. These are raw files, some of them with different names but with similar contents as another file. There may be reference articles. There may be snippets of video that didn’t make it off the cutting-room floor.
In every complex course build, messiness occurs. Messiness would involve a variety of raw files.
For collaborative projects where there is no chokepoint for information and where creativity is the ...
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A recent wrap-up to a project ended with my comment to my direct lead that we were very fortunate that everything went well with this half-year collaborative course build. I quipped, “You have no idea how many things could have gone wrong.”
That same lesson came back to haunt me on a different project, which involved a fair amount of videography. Let me preface this with the reality that I’ve had very good videography support on all my projects ...
Continue reading All the Stuff that can Scotch a Video Project
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When faculty clients or groups contract with web designers for a product, they often use a memorandum of agreement (or understanding) to define the work that will be done. The MOA or MOU should often specify a site tune-up within a particular time frame after a site launches.
The rationale is that no matter how prescient a development team is, it takes testing a site in the real world with real users to know how well the design ideas play ...
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Remote learners have many of the same needs as face-to-face students. These needs go beyond the learning to such things as getting letters-of-recommendation. For many such letters—such as verifying writing skills and academic work—I have no problems writing emails or letters or filling out forms.
What things get tougher is when students ask for letters recommending them for certain jobs that mention skill sets that I have no knowledge about. These may involve customer service, private information handling ...
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Every so often, the proverbial curtain is pulled back, and one gets a sense of the inner workings of a company. This happened recently with an anomaly with a grading system in a learning / course management system. The downloaded grades did not fully download, and a number of columns of student work did not show any points.
I replicated this on my multiple computers and then called the 24/7 helpdesk. The person there asked me to delete my current ...
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There are plenty of educators who can speak coherently and amusingly off-the-cuff. They jot a few notes down about the main points they want to it, and you turn on the camera or the digital audio recorder, and they’re off. One or two takes, and you’re done.
This approach seems quite popular—with greater speeds of creation, more of a sense of speaker personality, more impulsivity, and more casual informality. There are also more chances for instructor gaffes ...
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When I make rookie mistakes, I truly have no one to blame but myself. One recent one left me on the computers for five straight hours downloading video from two mini-DV cassettes because I had failed to save the media files with the project. I was trying to get done quickly, and had not noticed that the “include media” button had been un-clicked / untoggled by whoever used the software before I did. Not only that, but I usually edit the ...
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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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Faculty members do accrue a collection of student excuses for late or poor work. Many of the excuses are dire in terms of health or housing or relationship issues. Students often know the policy parameters sufficiently to where they offer insights that are excusable. And I’ve been around long enough to know that life doesn’t necessarily fit set parameters. There are valid reasons for late work.
I will request evidentiary proof at times. At times, I will even ...
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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
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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 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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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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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 ...
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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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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
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Like most work, projects tend to have stages, and these include a “sunset” stage. This is where the instructional designer takes a quick bow and splits. This is usually defined by the MOU (memorandum of agreement), or more specifically, when the funds run out. Optimally, this coincides with the work’s final wrap-up and acceptance of the curriculum by all parties involved.
Tapering off on a project involves letting the principals and the team members know that the tapering phase ...
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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
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On a recent and rare afternoon when I had a chance to attend a presentation on tips for writing up NSF grants, I came away with an intriguing angle. (And do instructional designers support the conceptualizing, writing and fulfillment of federal grants—you bet!)
Dr. Parag R. Chitnis described the general guidelines for NSFs…which focus on science and engineering (but not the study of diseases). He suggested that this organization has the defined strategies of funding “discovery, infrastructure, learning ...
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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
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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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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
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Professional writers often forget what it’s like to be a starting writer. They forget how sensitive writers may be about their work and how hard it is to share. They forget how stinging simple critiques may be. They forget that writers often conflate themselves with their work.
As an instructor who regularly “workshops” student writing online, I am continually re-learning how to adjust to the changing young writers who take the courses.
In a workshop ...
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In this economic downturn, various articles have cropped up of people who change their high-powered careers to something more relaxing. There was one about an ophthalmologist who became a baker. There are lawyers who step off the corporate ladder to work as chefs. There’s something very culturally based about this sense of the world—getting off the fast track in order to achieve self-fulfillment, a (hopefully) longer and less stressful life, and more satisfaction—at the cost of lower ...
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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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In some ways, the understandings of what instructional design is hasn’t penetrated to many parts of a campus. This is not for lack of effort in terms of presenting at on-campus and regional conferences, socializing with faculty, working with administrators, and using various communications technologies to conduct outreach to the faculty audience.
There are hurdles, too, such as the lack of clear ratecards and costs, and perceptions and bureaucratic barriers.
It’s in that context that ...
Continue reading Explaining Instructional Design in a Traveling Show
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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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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 ...
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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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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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At some point in every project, there comes a surprise or a twist. These are usually positive. They involve some new learning. Or there may be some travel or a jaunt to a local restaurant. Or there may be an opportunity to reach a unique group of learners. Or most recently, there was an inspired suggestion to build a web-based mystery around a set of public health issues. The concept was dazzling—a character-filled interactive scenario-driven mystery that makes the ...
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Some visuals help create changes to people’s perceptions of the world…and this might be one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAlqUkl9_p0
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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 ...
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Faculty members work with a number of audiences. They connect with their colleagues. They work with grant funders. They rub elbows with people from the business world, political environment, and military circles, and others. They work with students. They work with staff. And they also communicate with the general public.
Sometimes, their many constituencies are forgotten by those outside the professoriate or academia.
Faculty often do a great job of presenting concepts and contents to a class; they facilitate learning ...
Continue reading Sophisticates in Communicating by Digital Video
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Instructional designers work with a range of folks to have a secure technological working environment. Part of safety means being aware of where information goes and the devices it resides on…especially when data goes portable on small devices like thumb drives.
We recently had a computer security conference, and one of the sessions addressed how to avoid malware infections. The lead presenter highlighted campus statistics of those who had their information compromised or who responded to phishing schemes and ...
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Check out these engaging topics related to e-learning.
https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/event/schedule?etn=training;demo&eef=0
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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
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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 ...
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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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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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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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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 ...
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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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Dr. Marilla D. Svinicki, a professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, spoke Mar. 30 at K-State in a presentation titled “Changing student (and faculty) attitudes about who’s responsible for learning”. This was presented as part of the provost’s lecture series.
She described a mis-match between learner and instructor expectations of each other, particularly over issues of who is responsible for what in a course. She led the audience through activities in which the ...
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I am thinking of breaking a personal policy. That policy is to set up a project, ensure it works, and then move on. That policy is in place to protect against time “sinks,” particularly those that involve no compensation. This is a practical policy. It’s based on the business structure of this university. It makes sense in every logical way.
An “endless project” is one that has no defined conclusion, could conceivably continue on for many ...
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Most major universities have branch campuses, many in-state and some abroad. Instructional design skills may not be a priority in some of the branch campuses, but the needs for that skill set exist in those branches as well.
There have been endeavors to reach out to our local branch campus by live webcasting of presentations. There are invitations to main campus events. And we will sometimes travel out to the branch to do face-to-face and interactive presentations. We work to ...
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Initial meetings on a project are always interesting. A team of colleagues has gathered around a particular curricular build. There’s an overwhelming amount of expertise at the table. There’s often some technological sophistication. There are rich ideas about what is desirable for the learning experience that they’re creating.
And then there’s a switchover to instructional design. This piece then brings together the pedagogical and technological pieces. How would these be deployed to reach a particular learning ...
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ELATEwiki is the Electronic Learning And Teaching Exchange created and edited by those interested in advancing the use of technology in teaching. This site is intended to host a wealth of freely available information categorized and organized into E-Learning and Teaching topics useful to teachers, scholars, students, and administrators seeking to understand the dynamic and changing higher education landscape during this critical time of transformation.
The concept for ELATEwiki emerged during a series of conversations among members of K-State’s ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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The “observer effect” described in quantum physics applies to online human communications. The effect of being “seen” by others on a list or in virtual spaces may have an outsized effect on what people post. That awareness of being watched changes people’s behaviors. This is where it’s helpful to have one-way mirrors or unobtrusive ways of observer, without the fronting or need to impress.
In one case, a group of us were critiquing a website. An editor emailed ...
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One of the PIs on a recent grant project made the point that she preferred to spend grant moneys locally to support other on-campus offices. Given that our office here was the recipient of her largesse, I’ve been thinking more deeply about the purchase of skills and talent to actualize different projects.
A few large grants in motion have brought up this issue of hiring talent. The challenges there seem to involve the discrete skill sets that are involved ...
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David Shieh’s “These Lectures are Gone in 60 Seconds: Minute-long talks find success at a community college” got forwarded to us instructional designers by our supervisor recently. (http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i26/26a00102.htm) This issue had come up because of a request by some departments for a presentation that would cover some topics that are critical for e-learning: new technologies, e-learning quality, accessibility, intellectual property, and some design principles. They wanted this all in a short time ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
06 March 2009
Professional development keeps work life fresh, and it helps keep the skill sets (semi)viable. In a time of scarcity, it takes a bit more initiative to find professional development opportunities. Oftentimes, such opportunities are piecemeal and catch-as-catch-can.
Many workplaces have a serious shut-down of travel out-of-state. We are getting emails about on-campus conferences that have been cancelled. Many conferences are listing the option of tele-porting in to a conference from desktops to save on travel costs. Interestingly, I am ...
Continue reading Maintaining Professional Development in a Scarcity-Based Environment
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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
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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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One current project involves launching a wiki focused around e-learning that will be going global once we have legal cover and a few more understandings and skills in the MediaWiki technology. This endeavor will involve something that involves a pretty massive leap of trust: the building of shared knowledge with quality maintained by community standards.
What makes this harder to anticipate is that the definition of “community” is not clear. As with most wikis, the wikimaster is ...
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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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Bringing a curriculum to life requires an understanding of various dependencies. There are chains of pre-requisites that must be met for an online curriculum to actually launch well and effectively. These include human, technological, and resource dependencies. This includes intellectual property ones.
Why these dependencies matter is because these are required to reach deadline-driven goals. And it’s critical not to build loose ends into the system. While parts of an online course or training may be decoupled from the ...
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The research literature on global virtual teams is intriguing. Most come from multinational companies that work with global laboratories or global work groups. They talk about multiple languages, time zones, different bridging endeavors, and management techniques. They talk about shared camaraderie mixed with never meeting face-to-face.
It all sounds somewhat exotic, something like an artifact of the business world…when I realize that some recent projects of late have been executed as global virtual teams (GVTs), namely, book endeavors. (I ...
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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 ...
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For years now, I’ve been watching freshman and sophomore students interact with each other in a variety of online courses. Even though most of the learning in my courses are asynchronous, the general co-learning in time among college students really enhances the learning experience.
For one, online learners seem very supportive of each other. They pass along kudos and encouragements. They share personal life stories. They share photos—of desserts, of artwork, of ducks from a duck hunt, of ...
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There’s little doubt that these are stressful times for many. Posted student messages show a heightened concern for their studies. And behind that concern seems to be a range of personal challenges that only occasionally make it to the surface of the conversation.
Maybe the higher levels of student stress come from a new L/CMS and the higher learning curve in knowing how to use that. Maybe the higher stress comes from pretty ...
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Several of the conferences that have been staples for e-learning practitioners are offering ways to participate in the conference from a distance—by offering mediated presentations opportunities. One suggested that potential presenters should not hold back from submitting based on travel constraints.
In a time of thinning budgets, a lot of projects get put on ice. Anything can be pulled off the table. And truth is that people seem to start pulling back all around anyway. There are fears of ...
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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
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Design of socio-technical systems is an interesting thing. For all the anticipation and thought that has gone into each one, there are still sometimes surprises when a system goes live. This phenomena has been addressed in many different ways. The “lab” of theoretical use can only anticipate so much. Here, developers work with others to make systems as self-explanatory as possible. They build for the widest common use. They use features that are both explicit and implicit. They build in ...
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So a book editor and I were chatting by email one day, and I suggested that the group of practitioners in this field of instructional design was small enough that one could guess at who authored a particular work. I didn’t fully believe that, but I was trying to make the point that it was hard to “scrub” a piece of writing sufficiently to erase all fingerprints. For that particular project, that editor was right. I couldn’t for ...
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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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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 ...
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Transitioning into an instructional design position, one just focuses on learning the ropes and making sure projects come in pedagogically sound, on deadline and at budget, and ultimately, to the professor’s satisfaction.
Then, three years later, I look up and consider what it is to have an actual instructional design portfolio of courses, designs, and web-based products. Early on, one takes all comers and ends up with some gofer-ish types of jobs mixed in with the more challenging projects ...
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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 ...
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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
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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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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A new site that has been in the works for at least half a year will make its soft launch shortly, which means that it’ll go live without much fanfare. It’ll be built up and used over time, and optimally, it’ll start growing and evolving. It’s an interactive site. Now, we’re at the point in the project that it’s important to get some attention on the WWW for this resource.
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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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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 ...
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The concept of “un-design” is an interesting one to consider in an online course. After all, courses are generally about structure. They’re about the delivery of contents in a way that the learning is accessible, offered in developmental stages, supported by the readings and activities, and memorable. When I initially think of un-design, I think of a rummage sale, but there’s something more to this idea that needs exploration. I have a queasy feeling it won’t go ...
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“I know you from another life!” the professor greets me after reading my name off of an event sign-in.
Oh, no. Say it isn’t so, I’m thinking. What other life? Through what informational channel? And why? In this public venue, I want to be known only by one life, not two. Actually, in this venue, I’m in the audience and don’t care to be known any other way. It helps to have my lives not overlap ...
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Addressing Learners’ Online Test Anxieties
“And one of the things about testing is that it’s harder to do better than you can do, but it’s easy to do worse than you can do.”
– Dr. Ann Johnson, in “A Map of the Stars: Using Test Data to Create Useful Academic Interventions”
Test anxieties have a way of manifesting in various ways. I’ve seen doctoral students, who were college administrators in their “real lives,” fall apart and walk out ...
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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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There are times when a long memory is downright unnecessary, but in most cases, a long memory can be quite beneficial, particularly in e-learning. Several recent incidences have highlighted this for me.
While the four-walls “digital enclosure” doesn’t truly fully exist yet, for all practical purposes, it does in most learning / course management systems. The simple concept of the digital enclosure is that it is a place where a person’s actions are all recorded ...
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I have colleagues who speak dreamily of teaching online from their sailboats or vacation homes. They talk of never having to attend another faculty meeting. Theirs is a glammed-up idea of connecting to students via virtual means and wifi connectivity (or satellite-based connectivity).
Having spent a couple years now teaching online from a distance, via a campus that I’ve never yet physically set foot on, I can say that there’s something to be missed being at a distance ...
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Two faculty from unrelated fields (audiology and interior design) recently presented on how their respective programs use assessment plans. Both concur that assessment is generally just “good practice.” Within the general push to encourage assessments, programs have flexibility and may focus on different aspects to build in different years.
Both faculty are from fields with external accrediting agencies, which focus on the building of knowledge and skills in learners, and their feedback has enhanced the functioning of both programs. Audiology ...
Continue reading Completing an Assessment Plan: Two Programs (Part II)
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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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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 ...
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IDT Roundtable Nov. 12: Podcasting and Vodcasting
The next roundtable is 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. (CDT) Wednesday, Nov. 12, Union 212. Brent Anders, Bryan Vandiviere, and Ben Ward will present “Podcasting and Vodcasting”. Join us as we see what’s hot and what’s not, the effectiveness of these tools in teaching, how to get started, how to look like a pro, and where to show off your efforts when finished.
http://ome.ksu.edu/webcast/live ...
Continue reading Live Streaming Presentation on Podcasting and Vodcasting
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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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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 ...
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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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It usually takes several elements to go wrong in an online situation for things to get really nutty. And reversing this little catastrophe early in an online course is not difficult to see at all. First, I trusted in a pre-made class. While I had gone in and rearranged files, I hadn’t looked to check if the calendar was set up. I didn’t check to make sure that a learner walk-through was working. Mistake 1.
Next, I did ...
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In some fields, the lineage of digital information affects its validity, and therefore its usability in a learning context. This is true for the empirical sciences, for geographic information systems, for legal chain-of-custody, and other fields. And yet, much of this lineage information is never captured, or even if known, is not captured in metadata. Many educators create their own contents, and they just keep the information about the information lineage in their heads…and assume that it’ll always ...
Continue reading The Lineage of Digital Information for Data Quality
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One risk to having taught on a subject for a long time is to disconnect from the experiences of new learners. Long immersion in a topic also leads an instructor to having assumptions about how information may be approached, and hard as a person may try to fight this, it may lead to an intellectual stasis, a comfort.
This seems to be a pretty dangerous place to be as an instructor. And that danger is compounded by teaching online where ...
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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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There’s nothing better on a crisp and sunny fall afternoon than to be traipsing across campus with a sheaf of flyers and plenty of tape and pins. That’s at least so for the first hour. The second and the third ones are not as delightful. How I came to be distributing materials around campus is that I offered to publicize a website that is being built to support the protective elements of students’ lives to combat suicide, which ...
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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
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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
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Usually, by the 2nd, 3rd or 4th weeks of a 10-week term, students will start emailing me with a dilemma, which goes something like this: “I ordered my book as soon as I had the money to pay for it, but it hasn’t arrived yet, so may I get a deadline extension to turn in late work?” They then sometimes include the clause that the book may take up to 3-4 weeks to arrive from the day of ordering ...
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From the outside (as a non-lawyer), disclaimers read like legalized clauses that say, “Here are very limited uses of this site, and don’t hold me legally responsible for what others do or say.” A recent project involved plenty of research and pursuit of the legal concepts and practices behind defining a “Terms of Service” for a site that involves both public and private contents for college students, in a site designed to build a protective wall and support around ...
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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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The rationale goes: Today’s generation is a visual one, so to get their ideas, it’s pretty critical to use imagery surveys…or surveys in which an integral component involves a visual or graphic or photo.
An interesting study used just such images to assess perceptions of the computing disciplne. They first vetted the images to see if they were assessed as positive, negative or neutral—as a way to test for content validity. Then the images were integrated ...
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So the water cooler conversations of late have been around the issue of rain-making, drawing in grants and clients that may fund instructional design work. For some, this change is a shock to the system because the prior assumptions were that support positions were somehow folded into the larger budgets…and that’s true. However, the other part of truth is a volatile economy and the need to sort of move some dollars around for equipment and travel needs.
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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 ...
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“Encapsulation” makes a lot of sense not only as a design strategy for software design but also for some instructional design. This basic concept is that of hiding elements that may be distracting or irrelevant or extraneous for learners. Apparently, the term comes from object-oriented programming in software design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
I’ve seen this theory in action in the designing of graphical user interfaces on a learning / course management system (L/CMS) and also in ...
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So I came to this split in the road, and neither turn would lead me directly to the doorway of my destination building. I was loaded with a digital camera, a tripod, a notepad, a bag of required knick-knacks for life, and a water bottle. I could trek across the nicely manicured lawn, or I could turn one way or the other. Then, I saw one of the professors in the department I was heading to, so I turned towards ...
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Learning about learning seems to be a central part of instructional design. And whenever I have a free moment, I try to finalize a course design that started a while ago but lacked funding for transcription. So while transcription is most certainly not part of the actual assigned work, I try to patch this course’s accessibility gaps whenever possible.
It was in this line of work that I ran across some engaging ideas about learning and the building of ...
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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 ...
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The email is a welcome one even though it seems somewhat formulaic. It’s a call for finalized chapters for a text forthcoming in 2009. The acceptance by the editors has gone through (even though it has seemed touch-and-go over the months).
What follows is what’s disconcerting…a form of final iteration fever.
This particular project has been handled through the mediating technology of a book publishing wiki. The workflow is smooth. It’s very easy ...
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The patterns have become clearer over time. There was the clause for an ID position in Texas listed in the Chronicle of Higher Education that http://chronicle.com/jobs/search.php?today=2 required a full background check. That’s understandable if a person may handle sensitive materials.
And then there’s word that anyone taking on a non-temp position will need to go through a background check at my university. The areas of interest seem to be in police ...
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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)
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“New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential—that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and size.” -- Robert Wright in “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (as cited in Rheingold, 2003, p. 183)
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Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” offers a generally benign view of the potentially of ...
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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 ...
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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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It’s a professional boon to be invited to the table to develop a grant project from the talking stages and through to the end when the project actually gets funded.
The more typical route seems to be that one is brought on after an initial grant has been rejected and when the comments by the grant critiquers are that the pedagogical learning piece has not been clearly explained.
The work then involves quick learning about what has transpired, what ...
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It’s in virtually all the business textbooks about entrepreneurship. When a new killer app comes on the horizon, a lot of competitors get into development. They all have a sense of what the public needs. They may have no sponsors per se, or they may have a local sponsor, but they get on the bandwagon and innovate with the rest of them.
The choices they make then in terms of how they’re going to execute their infrastructures and ...
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At a recent conference, the presenters discussed their on-campus policy for using Second Life. A few strategies emerged from the presentation.
First, this campus simulated buildings from the physical campus to the virtual island—as grounds for familiarity. I know of another campus that has used its mascot and logo as a design element for an island on SL as well. The term used to describe this was “mimic proximity.” The spaces mimicked were ...
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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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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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In a continuing endeavor to understand how people use visuals for learning, I came across a curious idea—that of “change blindness”. I know people who say that they can tell if even one item in their work space is moved an iota. Personally, I can relate more to the majority of people who apparently fall under the phenomenon of being blind to small changes.
This phenomena comes from an interesting human feature—that of their small visual working memory ...
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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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So it was with surprise that a faculty member found that she had a Facebook page. There was her official photo taken from her website. There were enough facts about her from various professional bios to make her identity seem accurate. There were postings from students.
The rub: that wasn’t her page. She had nothing to do with the posted information.
Some students (she never actually found out which ones) had stolen her identity in ...
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Surely, most people have received invitations to join professional social sites. Almost invariably, these come from people that one has met fleetingly at a professional conference. Or a person whom one hasn’t spoken to for years because of differing interests and divergent lives.
The idea is to maximize professional relationships as busy professionals by highlighting the relationship and taking advantage of each other’s connections. It’s like how people scaffold relationships through mutual acquaintances… It’s a kind ...
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Effective sound in instructional design refers to the initial sound capture and then the editing that follows. Initial poor sound capture (full of ambient sounds, poor voice quality) cannot really be enhanced much with desktop software. Live events that are not properly mic-ed ends up as a lost event.
With many departments videotaping their own events, there are plenty of digital videos with all-right video but fuzzy audio. Unintended ambient sounds—people walking down a hallway, the closing of a ...
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It would seem that a central piece to designing well for online learning involves deeper understandings of the learner. So it’s not just the curricula, the domain knowledge and the technology that’s critical, but the nature of humans at their core is relevant.
It was in that spirit that I embarked on reading a classic—Colin Ware’s Information Visualization: Perception for Design (2004).
One curious observation was that people have very limited visual working memory. Given that ...
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“Digital media is more fragile than paper. Software bugs, power outages, hackers, and other problems threaten the reliability of digital collections. The risks can be mitigated when multiple copies of the data collection are generated and updated consistently.” -- Dr. Fran Berman in “One Hundred Years of Data”
The nightmare is an old one. A lot of work goes into the development of various digital objects—slidehshows, manuscripts, transcripts, digital flashcards, photos, and images. The memory drive crashes, and that’s ...
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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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At a national conference a year ago, in Chicago, one of the presenters spoke about using learning management system (LMS) information about student performance to raise red flags about their learning and to provide the faculty with some sort of early warning. The idea then was to have academic interventions come into play.
At that time, I wondered how oblivious an online faculty member would have to be not to have some red flags raised with certain student behaviors: absenteeism ...
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It’s hard enough to future-proof the present moment. The dynamism of the future involves unpredictability that takes most by surprise at one point or another. Even the past is not closed to revision; it’s not future-proofed. Interpretations change continuously. It is in this reality that people strive to future-proof a curriculum.
What is a future-proofed curriculum? Ideally, it would be curriculum that gets magnified over time and built upon by many and used because of its high learning ...
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In literary critique, there’s the idea that an author does not fully know what his or her writing is about. There’s a subconscious level of production that may reveal hidden psychological insights. That was always a nifty principle to help students feel more comfortable in their interpretations—as long as they could find evidence of their interpretation in the text itself.
This approach has fine value, too, in analyzing nonfiction. Recently, I went through a chapter to identify ...
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So bingo cards can draw numbers from between 1 – 75. There’s often a free spot on the card. And the cards may be 5 x 5 (25 spots – the one freebie)…or 5 x 6 (30 spots – the one freebie). The randomizer could put out as many sets of the numbers as I wanted. I needed 29 numbers chosen from the 1-75 inclusive pool, and I needed them in random order. I needed three bingo cards per sheet, so ...
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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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During a recent trip to my former haunts, I was chatting with a former colleague and was reminded of a vaporware incident. In this case, a former school president lost my former state some half a million dollars for vaporware—to a special friend of the president’s who had apparently no prior coding experience.
Three college presidents ended up supporting this unfortunate endeavor, and no actual product was produced at the end of the sorry episode. (The state ethics ...
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On Sept. 18 - 19, at K-State, the third annual Axio Learning Community and Conference will be held. This is open to Axio LMS users.
http://www.axioconference.org/
Continue reading The Third Annual Axio Learning Community Meeting and Conference
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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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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 ...
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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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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 ...
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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 ...
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It doesn’t take long for the doctoral students to find their way to those involved in instructional design. There’s research on quality matrices, hybrid learning strategies, interactive television, strategic deployment of e-learning, and any number of other issues and combinations of issues.
The outreaches come through on listservs, broadcast or micro-cast emails, telephone calls, online surveys, shoutouts at conferences, face-to-face queries, and conferences.
Students want advice. They want readers for their draft chapters. They want access and connections ...
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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 ...
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It was a friendly invitation between two Kansas universities to chat about ITV via Polycom. We were meeting from two universities and one branch campus. The dry run had gone well. The automated dialing system didn’t quite work, but we all did finally get online live to discuss the issues at hand.
One of the universities in the state was seeing ITV (interactive television) as the way to do distance learning. While they ...
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One of the basic assumptions when I judged grants on various committees (civil rights, literature, academic, and in-house ones) was that people are going to do no more than they promise in a grant application. Often, they’ll do quite a bit less.
So the balance was choosing work that would be cutting-edge and prosocial but also that was doable. It was rare to find any grants that were cutting-edge, at least in my experiences ...
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In a recent professional conference, one of the speakers presented on his use of virtual fairs and expositions. As a computer science professor, he would combine these virtual fairs (which people may attend from their desktop computers) with short research assignments for students.
He demonstrated a few of these for the audience. Essentially, these were websites that put a mental frame around the delivery of pre-packaged or live digital contents. There was a screen for live or canned speeches. There ...
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In my line of work, I occasionally meet people who are quite intriguing. A recent individual was a university professor for many years who now works for a peace organization in the West. She has traveled to numerous global hotspots around the world.
She has a nimble mind that analyzes the world as a power-based place, full of human emotions and angers that needed directing and diplomatic interventions and leadership interventions, or else these situations would hit “trigger point” and ...
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This clipart shows a gymnast standing on a balance beam in a balanced but difficult pose.
This stock image shows a man wearing a business suit and tie presenting to a group while standing in front of a whiteboard with writing on it.
This clipart image shows a man and a woman holding up an award in the form of a large trophy cup.
This image shows a bright pink "bot" that looks like a head floating in the screen ...
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So here was a pretty in-depth online training on two fairly large technological systems. One was an LMS, and one was an instance manager for that LMS. The learning involved the use of various slideshows, animated tutorials, and practice assessments.
In addition, these technical systems are deployed socially, for use in sometimes high-pressured academic environments.
Once all the mechanical parts of this training were built to spec, and the policy aspects for the role of the trainees upon graduation had ...
Continue reading Adding the Human Piece to an Automated Training
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The warning signs of high maintenance online learners come early. Give me about a half dozen postings in a course…or the first half dozen emails, and a pattern establishes itself fairly quickly. Or maybe one gets a suspicion early…even if it may take a while longer to fully bear out (or not).
They’ll asked an inordinate number of questions that have already been answered in the course announcements and documentation. They will second-guess the teaching ...
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A university-level office had been doing business for years on campus but had no coherent logo. Now that my office has been collaborating with them on a number of projects, they decided to get logo-ed up, which makes a lot of sense. Now that they’re on board with that, we’ve had a flurry of emails to coalesce ideas for the logo and to move ahead with this.
There’s something to be said for the hot graphics talent ...
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A number of times now, various departments have approached this office with a common lament: their grant applications got positive feedback except that they were asked to shore up their pedagogical research, reasoning and execution. An ID then gets called in.
Few professors want to change their teaching approach. And for online learning, what many want to do is the same-old same-old (they’ll videotape everything).
At a meeting last month, the group wanted to learn about ...
Continue reading Supporting the Pedagogical Piece to a Grant Application
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Online learners have become much more diverse now over time, as e-learning has become more mainstreamed and accessible. And in writing classes, people bring much more about the inner texture of their lives. They joyfully share about being rednecks, vegans, Buddhists, and vintners.
In my F2F classes, students would bring in photos of the aftermath of an accident after a jump on the snowboarding slopes with plenty of stained snow. They would bring in slides of their ...
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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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One of the first tenets of political storytelling is to embody one’s story. Have a clear alignment between one’s lived life and one’s presentations…the theories-in-action vs. the professed theories-in-use.
At a recent national conference, a large corporation fielded a team of presenters who demonstrated a system that they used for automated training of their staff. However, instead of showing any of their actual trainings, they used fictional training contents—in this case, how to tell why ...
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With work that may be a little boring, it helps to spice it up by thinking of ways to add value. That especially applies to transcripting. Of course, it is a slippery slope to integrate transcription into instructional design, and I most certainly don’t mean to integrate this. That said, I am assuming that most IDs will occasionally get dragged into some transcripting by the needs of a particular project every now and again.
Either that, or I’m ...
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Every new functionality that I learn regarding my university LMS gives me that much more ability. A recent one increased my skills in a pretty major order of magnitude. I say this in part because I spent years working unintelligently in terms of question creation and upload…for a few faculty clients. One involved plenty of chemistry symbols, which meant very slow creation of the formulas and questions. (And yes, this is not typical ID work, but I make it ...
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One requirement of being a geek is to enjoy reading pretty technical articles about what people are doing in their respective fields.
For me, with a background in more of the “soft sciences,” that means forays into IEEE and ACM to see what developers have been working on and how their technologies are being applied in various e-learning endeavors.
By the time I get to reading these articles, I can pretty much assume that the research is ...
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Colin Barras’ “'Matrix'-Style Virtual Worlds 'a Few Years Away'” (Apr. 4, 2008, by ABC Internet News Ventures) suggests that people can immerse in 3D spaces in protracted and possibly even inextricable ways with the new realistic virtual worlds that are being created.
This author paraphrases Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. “He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away,” asserts Barras. He describes ...
Continue reading Photorealistic Virtuality: Light and Animation
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For many quarters and semesters now, I’ve included a learner lounge space where learners can collaborate, share information, and socialize without any instructor presence. The only caveat is that an instructor will enter the space if something goes awry, and that presence is requested.
This space allows learners to have their own privacy, and it stands in the place of four-walls hallway conversations and chitter-chatter that doesn’t include the instructor.
I’ve ...
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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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In the quest for high learner retention and high participation, one strategy in the building of CSCL spaces (computer supported collaborative learning) has been to encourage the building of so-called “back channels.”
In all sorts of communication environments, having such informal back channels is useful. It allows for richer interchanges without people having to necessarily go on the formal record. And if vetted, such information can be highly useful and pro-social and pro-learning.
One example of such ...
Continue reading Developing Back Channels for Online Learners
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
01 May 2008
On Feb. 11, 2008, Dr. Cable Green (Director of eLearning for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges) hosted a virtual session for 42 faculty and administrators from around the US (with a cluster in Washington State) around “Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources.” This used the Elluminate technology for the virtual participants and actually had a physical location, too, at the Bellingham Technical College.
This was billed as a ...
Continue reading Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources
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Some public debate has surrounded the issue of public universities and colleges displaying greater responsibility for their troubled students, in order to head off potential on-campus violence.
There have been government studies on students who engage in violence on campus. There have been various universities that have shared publicly some of their endeavors, usually through their counseling support programs for students.
Recent articles have suggested that such institutions of higher education need to be more interventionist. They need to take ...
Continue reading A Watch List of Troubled Students...and Virtuality
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One central premise of most support offices for online learning is the faculty DIY aspect, that is, the “do-it-yourself” potential of faculty. This idea has been persistent for a very long time even though there have been examples that might lead one to abandon this concept.
The stories abound. One faculty member had wrapped a scarf around her CPU, so it wouldn’t get too cold. Others have somehow lost their courses that they created on the learning ...
Continue reading Expanding the Faculty DIY Sphere in Academia
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While ubiquitous and mobile learning have not made that much headway in higher ed, I am reading more and more about various technologies that would enable some truly rich and engaging learning using such technologies.
I was quite amused to read about the idea of the “web of things,” or various electronic devices that are semi-sentient and wired in wifi space and that can embody virtuality. They would be connected by “hyperpipes”. (The authors explain: “The two endpoints of a ...
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A self-professed “peripatetic” professor, Dr. Chris Sorensen presented on “A University without Walls” at the final Provost Lecture of the year at K-State on Apr. 24.
He pointed out that those in academia tend to specialize in their respective fields. Yet, the creativity happens in the interfaces between domains of knowledge. He used Arthur Koestler’s idea of “bisociation” from “The Act of Creation” to show the interstices where new things may coalesce—in the intersections between disciplines and human ...
Continue reading Expanding the Traditional Lecture in F2F Space
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Every so often, a faculty member will start a query that leads in intriguing directions. And delightfully, this often comes from faculty who are new to online learning.
So this came about when a faculty member asked about letting her distance students learn how to use a digital microscope…and also wanting them to see various slides virtually. She wanted pretty much all live F2F microscope functionalities as well as access to a number of slides that ...
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It seems to be a basic truism that people need to practice shared endeavors. Coordination requires tight communications and cooperation.
At a recent conference, a presenter from the Department of Homeland Security described some desktop “spiral” exercises that brought together various offices to deal with shared potential large-scale disasters.
For example, one involved a pandemic sequence broken down in vignettes for a chronology of interactions and decision-making. Another involved flooding. These virtual simulated experiences involved various ...
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While driving in to work today, I was thinking about a new crop of online students, and it occurred to me that online learners do have a system of self-regulation of learning as a group. What does that mean? Well, online learners create a sense of community online, and they regulate their own community - in a sense.
They pay attention to each other’s asynchronous posts. They read each other’s works with interest and share joys ...
Continue reading The Self Regulation of Virtual Community by Online Learners
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Now, I truly know what it’s like to be a spammer from firsthand experience. After perusing plenty of literature on digital imagery and e-learning, I culled a list of people who have published in the field. I found several Writer Zeroes who appeared on at least a half-dozen publications that were intriguing, and I just finally sent off the last batch of email queries to see if any may be interested in contributing to the text.
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So our in-house videographer had MacGyver-ed a solution for the sun streaming in through the shades behind the make-shift green screen (a piece of cloth he hung off some lighting poles). He had used clips to hold lights to get proper lighting on the subject. In the cramped office, he had set up the chairs and hidden the peace-inducing rockery left by an employee on leave.
After all that hard work, he had his subject well posed. The subject was ...
Continue reading Handling the Giggles during a Videotaping Session
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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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Every so often, in a presentation or conversation, a comment has a way of sticking in one’s memory. Here was a presentation by an individual presenting on the importance of leadership training. His presentation was tailored for the audience members in the military in order to sell this training.
He talked about crystallized and fluid intelligence, in terms of knowledge, abilities, skills and attitudes. He offered a global leadership model with meta-competencies. He showed a taxonomy of leadership competencies ...
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There it was in a mainstream article—the concept of being “web dead.” The concept is that some people want to be off-the-grid. They don’t want an online persona. They don’t want to be easily trackable. They don’t want automated digital messages selling them all sorts of unwanted junk and false promises. They don’t want to be known for what they’re doing or where they’re going.
In a sense, what can be made can ...
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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
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There’s something charming about being able to watch a small college come online in creating an online program. What’s even more intriguing is watching from a distance and through the framework of an online course to train the faculty, staff and administrators—using the LMS they’ve selected for their program.
Having never set foot on the campus of this college and only driven by the small town where it’s based once on my way elsewhere, I ...
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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 ...
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The past several months, the issue of e-learning accessibility has escalated to be one of the central issues of concern on this campus. As such, that has meant that a fair amount of time has been spent on the laws and regulations for accessibility and then on the various technological strategies to ensure the accessibility of images, data tables, films, audio files, and other digital learning objects.
An interesting twist on this relates to The Layered Model of Computer Supported ...
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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
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I have never been very sympathetic with those who go to conferences with a product to sell. That might be a new book or a company name or a new product or themselves, for a career change. Now, I’ll have to sheepishly re-evaluate and come up with a strategy for attracting talent for a book that I’ll be editing on digital imagery in e-learning.
While the concept itself is solid, and there’s plenty of strong academic writing ...
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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
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Professor John Scigliano’s initiation into online space was not very salutary the way he tells it. He had logged on to Second Life when he was approached by a “furry” in lizard form, who promptly assaulted his avatar. This professor at the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences of Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, was somewhat traumatized, the way he tells it.
In “Payoffs, Spin-offs, and Ripoffs in Virtual Worlds: What Gain? What Pain?” at the ...
Continue reading IRBs, Video Releases and 3D Virtual Avatars
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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
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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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At a recent e-learning conference, a presenter on informal learning demonstrated his instrument that involved basic trivia questions and also involved an assessment of how much confidence each respondent had to the certainty of correctness for each answer.
He showed that people had quite a few incidences of high confidence linked with incorrect answers.
At another event, the speaker asked the audience how many of them made decisions in their lives knowing they were wrong. No ...
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The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching just released its Mar. 2008 issue (Vol. 4, No. 1). Please find the current issue at the link below.
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
Check it out.
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Every time we come up to spring break, I’m feeling more of that sense of anticipation. I truly adore my job, and the busier it gets, usually the happier and more productive I am. But the really cool thing about spring break is that there’s often a week to de-compress and focus on the less harried projects. The town empties out. The faculty all disappear to their respective homes. The campus has an abandoned feeling. The IT folks ...
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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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One of my prime faculty members with whom I'd worked intensively building an online course for three months suddenly told me that she was planning on resigning. When? I asked. In two weeks, she said. She basically meant, "Right away" because she was using her leftover leave time for the following days. It was between semesters, and she was using this short lull to make a run for it.
This was a sudden declaration - even for her - in a ...
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Invariably, part-way through the interaction in the faculty member's office, a look of caution, skepticism and cunning will cross that individual's face. Sometimes, it'll occur after weeks of support work. For others, it'll occur at the first meeting.
"Is this going to cost me?"
The "this" is the service of instructional design, the advisement, the work, the multimedia, and the digital artifacts. The "me" actually refers to the department or bureaucratic entity ...
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That my supervisors elfed themselves for the holidays has given me a little hope. That hope is that I can convince two of my supervisors to be a "Max Headroom" figure in an automated course I created for an elite few who may manage instances of our Axio LMS.
The automated learning is important for functionality but a little thick. Learners will be dealing with complex socio-technical systems within their own respective bureaucracies. This training will initiate them into a ...
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Whitepapers are not usually much in the purview of instructional design, except maybe as a way to understand a new pedagogical method originated from private industry or a commercial whitepaper to understand a new software product.
That said, whitepapers can be so helpful in in-house learning and decision-making. For the office where I work, whitepapers are authoritative reports used to educate not customers per se but all of us in-house staff.
Instead of the very brief whitepapers that ...
Continue reading Using Whitepapers to Change (My) Mindset(s)
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So on a Friday just before a long-awaited holiday, I discovered that I had committed a "rookie" mistake. I'd been building contents for a CD and had saved the master file to one area, forgot where I'd saved it, and had been covering over the updates with an older file in another area.
It was totally a situation of misreading my own strategies, forgetting, not double checking, and then taking an action that affected a number of folders ...
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So one of my unofficial goals for this past year was to collaborate with a colleague on a piece of published writing.
I tried to do that with an article for an online newsletter on retrofitting a course for accessibility. That fell through when one of the advisory board members nixed my choice of a colleague. I tried again recently with a colleague at a different university who suggested that maybe we could find areas of shared interest for writing ...
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So why is ---'s name on the publication? I asked a former colleague. It's political, so I can get my doctorate, he said.
When I worked in private industry, the team lead on a project packed it with his friends not because they would contribute anything but because he wanted to give them political cover - to use their time as they saw fit. We met the team members early on, and we simply never saw them again throughout the ...
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After a professional conference, I often end up with a goodie bag full of CDs, DVDs, business cards, and marketing decks of cards. For weeks after, I run across the candies I've squirreled away in my backpack from the varous displays. My email box captures the occasional follow-up emails, and I am popular for a period with sales reps who call, full of cheer and hope. The presenters have had their bit of glory after slogging through the day-to-day ...
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One of the coolest aspects of working as an instructional designer is the openness to learning new things and working with talented people from a variety of fields.
Just this day (in early Dec.), I had the pleasure of sitting in on cumulating projects for landscape architecture. In a small studio with wooden floors, some dozen fifth-year students had their project plans for various land use spaces - an urban plaza next to a concert hall in Tennessee, a village in ...
Continue reading A Cumulative Project in Landscape Architecture
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We're nearing the end of 2008, and I'm coming up short on ideas. I want to comfortably segue to 2008 with plenty of blogs on tap, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen currently.
And I've started brainstorming a list of topics for something even more challenging - future research. Part of this is inspired by emails I've been getting from a faculty member at another institution of higher education who thinks that ...
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Perusing the academic literature often results in delightful endeavors of others. Even if the work never directly overlaps with mine in instructional design and instruction, I can at least ponder it. It offers a brain tickle. A recent article addressed the issue of how one hardy band of academics would map between printed and digtal document instances.
In various design plans, paper has a role. While much paper has been ...
Continue reading Endeavors to Cross the Paper-Digital Divide
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Some technologies just have an "attraction." They're well designed enough to empower users to look smart and produce well. While many people seem to like to Microsoft-bash, they keep turning out technologies that are highly usable, fun, and that really help people to think. They make capturing digital contents easy. As a person who works in a tech office, I am beginning to learn how much design and thought and expertise goes into the back-end in terms of the ...
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When the ice storm settled in on Tuesday (Dec. 11), our school was ready with a "Stay home" message. The first day seemed innocuous on the face of it - with occasional sounds of crackling branches dropping into the river in the back yard. The trees were awe-inspiring in their glittering coldness. The electricity sputtered a few times, but it never quite went out. Things were fine enough to get stored up on water and food...and ...
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A recent local conference on informational security in this modern age introduced a new concept. It's that of "media sanitation". I heard about it at a presentation on a different topic and missed the actual presentation on "Cleaning Spells," so I went online and found an informative article by T. Olzak (June 2006). His article "Fundamentals of Storage Media Sanitation" offers a very accessible view of this issue.
Olzak cites Scholl, et al.'s 2006 definition of ...
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The relationship between learners and an online instructor is defined by the structure of the course but also by their interactions.
I'm not sure what went awry, but I'm starting to feel a bit like a bill collector. I've never actually been one. The only one I ever spoke with was one of my students who moonlighted as a bill collector. She said she used charm to get people to pay their bills. She said - and I ...
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Recently, we moved to a project management software to log our hours. This process, while a little irritating, does have its value.
The way that they categorize the way we spend our time as IDs has shown me that "down time" is helpful now and again for upgrading our technologies and the software programs on our computers.
The way it's done is usually starting some downloading / updating/ patching / changeover process and letting it work itself through on ...
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There are moments when using technologies that one has a sense of bruised trust. More specifically, in this recent case, I lost a whole demo course.
A demo course, in this case, was one created to showcase the work of various faculty using the LMS that the office I work for puts out. This course was organized along both a university track and a K-12 track.
This course had modules from a variety of fields. It had an e-book on ...
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There's something to be said for a quiet work day. It doesn't happen that often, but getting un-immersed from projects can be a very pleasant thing. I went off on a whimsical track here, considering the habits I've now built since becoming an ID about 21 months ago.
By nature, some people hoard things. By nature, I actually tend to slough things off unless they're proved some level of repeated use. However ...
Continue reading What Becomes Second Nature in Digital Space
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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 ...
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Those who've worked in education for some time have seen this phenomena of flat-lining - that moment when a learner hits a learning wall and can't get over it. This is no small learning hurdle. Rather, I think of it as something like a learner trying to draw on resources that were never quite built up, and there just aren't the tools to get over that wall.
That is, the learner has to start from the fundamentals...and ...
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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 ...
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Some of those who've contributed greatly to different creative fields seem to have idealistic motives. They see room to make a difference, and they contribute where they can. The research literature also has plenty of apparently selfish motives by those who would change an industry. And of course, there's happenstance occurrences that have led to social betterment.
I ran across a recent article and model that examined the motives of those contributing to Wikipedia to see what their ...
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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 ...
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"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
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In some research on gaming, I ran across interactive fiction (IF) games and the related idea of tangibles. Here, game developers would create boxes that would emulate books that had text and manipulables. They would have other objects created to intensify the mainly text-based gameplay. Indeed, tangibles are created for online learners, so I thought I'd add a small entry about that.
Tangibles most commonly involve textbooks, magazines, CDs and DVDs and even videotapes. Some ...
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There it was again, another department's story of the search for what my supervisor SF calls the "one-button solution." Various academic departments have educational needs. They want to set up particular functionalities.
They then send a graduate student or a staff member to search out a solution. Or an administrator will go to a conference, hear a rave about a software and then throw cash at that. A one-button solution is one that just requires pushing the play button ...
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Attorney C.L. Lindsay, founder of the non-profit national organization Coalition for Student and Academic Rights (CO-STAR), spoke on the dangers of Facebook and MySpace to an enthusiastic crowd on Oct. 16.
He offered some great common-sense approaches to handling personal information on the WWW.
Some principles:
Think of the off-line equivalent first. In the same way that people wouldn't shoplift CDs, they shouldn't download movies or music that doesn't belong to them. Federal copyright law addresses ...
Continue reading College-Level Cautions re: Net Use and eLearners
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A couple weeks ago, I had just offered two presentations at a conference and was headed out to another for another two. As I was wrapping up work in anticipation of this next one, I got to thinking about an instructor I'd wanted to meet at the prior conference who was a no-show. Those who knew her already predicted she would not show, but I'd been hopeful that she could somehow make the time and the will to ...
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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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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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Sims have been a part of higher education for many years. A simple one may be a kind of role play held in a classroom where students take on different roles. It may be a mock court.
My first design of an online sim occurred about a year ago, and it involved designing a digital replacement for a real nation-wide sim that stretched over several weeks. The sim design was coming near the end of a three-university grant (and I ...
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A recent crash of the blog brought to mind that this blog has passed its year-long anniversary, about half a year ago. Since this blog started, several colleagues have flown ideas of starting theirs.
There are discussions about shifting this to a techno that will support images, diagrams, voice files, movie files, and other types of multimedia. I am very hopeful about that as I've been wanting to bring these elements into play.
When I was a runner in ...
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Those who head online learning programs have the unenviable task of deciding when it's time to change to a different LMS. As an online instructor, I get to watch this from a comfortable distance.
The scenario looks quite daunting. First, there's the political management piece. Instructors need to understand why changes are necessary, in order to move beyond the built-up inertia of system familiarity and pre-built course materials posted online. Often, people face new learning with an inordinate ...
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I must have been protected somehow my first ramp-up to the fall semester as an instructional designer back in 2006. For some reason, I remember that time as pretty calm and focused. There were a number of projects in play, but it all seemed somewhat manageable and "easy" then.
Well, here it is a year later. And I am totally swamped. There are numerous calls on the phone, many for troubleshooting. There are dozens of emails a day. An instructor ...
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Of late, I've spent a fair amount of time doing somewhat mind-numbing work. I ended up with a time-heavy transcription project and then another uploading massive amounts of chemistry formulas and questions for another course. I have the steps down almost in a kind of pure physical memory - scripted behavior. The truth is that I brought both on myself. For the first, I was trying to live up to my accessibility goals and thought it would be worth it ...
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One job descriptor that wasn't on the job description I saw about a year and a half ago for my position was that of serving as a technical support technician. However, a couple encounters of late have brought this whole issue home.
Visiting clients in their respective offices, I've found that serving as tech support is often necessary. Oftentimes, the computers and setups I have tend to outpace those of any faculty members I've dealt with, except ...
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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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Shortly, I'll be taking a fairly long road trip as part of a family household move. It will be during an intense part of the summer quarter when several weeks' work will be due in condensed weeks. And this quarter, like all others before it, has involved students straggling in late with a variety of reasons for their lateness. To use a running analogy, they will be coming in to the final stretch and will have to sprint the ...
Continue reading To Share or Not: Teaching Online from the Road
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So the other day, I was working with a chemistry professor to help her upload her exams and finals with all the various annotations and symbols, the superscript and subscript. The equation editor was acting funky. In her office, she said expansively, just delete all these prior questions in the Question Bank. As a bit of a neatnik, I was all ready to comply when a little something made me hesitate, and I said to wait until we'd uploaded ...
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At several institutions of higher education that I've worked in, I've seen some tentative moves towards engaging the world for global eLearning. The steps seem to be wobbly and tentative, more hopeful than effective. These endeavors often involve third-party vendors who may represent different entities or populations in other countries. These efforts involve small groups that are budgeted to go overseas to try to attract learners. And often, these endeavors are not supported by overseas offices or anything ...
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A couple years ago when I was teaching full-time at a community college in Washington State, my supervisor let me know that there was a student who wanted to work on an independent study project. This was a software engineer who had created a product that could create automatic writing. He and I met, and it turned out that he wanted help writing a book about his product and also some publicity materials. I went online and read some of ...
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This year when the Axio LMS rolls out on August 6, I will not be in the office sweating any help documentation. That job is in the very capable hands of our content specialist, and I am more than full-time on curricular builds, research, grant proposals, and other work. Still, while I'll actually not even be in with the roll-out, that's a very special time.
The instructional design function is part of an IT office. While this office ...
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Observers have long commented on the dwindling power of the written word. One article I read recently talked about the usefulness of having books as objects of decor and not really for reading. Many students rely on book jacket blurbs and formalized summaries of literary works to understand them. What is occurring seems to be a slippage in the power of written language to serve as a shared code of understanding. Written words, by their ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 July 2007
As sometimes can happen with a project, I was bulding one thing under false assumptions and my supervisors were thinking I was making something else. The divergence wasn't serious, but it meant an extra layer of work later on. My small piece in a project was to teach college composition and research writing courses to Native American students, in a cohort model. One aspect of this project was to create Native case studies as part of a curriculum. My ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 July 2007
When Dr. Michele Lansdowne of the Salish Kootenai College (SKC of Pablo, Montana) went looking for a curriculum for Native American students of business, she found very little that resonated. She found even less in terms of business endeavors on an American Indian reservation. That dearth of academic materials in this field led her to start a project of interviewing American Indian entrepreneurs on reservations, in a grant-funded project that resulted in a widely used text and multimedia CD set ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 July 2007
To get ready for the Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop, I read through various cases from the site. There was an interesting "choose your own adventure" type of quality to these cases.
Various author voices came through clearly, and a range of sourcing strategies were used to capture the information.
"Sovereign Still from the Forest to the Plains" (Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff), "Indian Identity in the Arts" (Tina Kuckkahn, J.D.), "Evil Water" (Dr. Subodh K ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- Current Cases (Part IV)
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An eLearning Course Curriculum Wizard Building an Instructor-Led "High-Tech / High-Touch" LMS-delivered Course
Preconference Tutorial Washington Interactive Technologies Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) Arlington, Virginia August 2007
This goes through the steps for creating an instructor-led eLearning course for higher ed. Combining educational theory and modern technologies, this session will address efforts in the following areas: project scope, learner analysis, course contents, learning outcomes, applied pedagogical theory for eLearning, technology selection (especially for multimedia builds), project checkpoint definition, course structuring ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2007
Getting hands-on is a fine way of learning how case studies may be experienced.
It was a couple of years in the making - this case. Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff started out with the relationship building that is so critical to doing research in Indian Country. Without trust, without a clear showing of personality / motive / "heart," there would not be sufficient synergies or motivations to "do business" there. In her ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- A Forestry Management Case (Part II)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 July 2007
The invitation to present came just about half a week before the conference itself was to be held. I was not brought in to be a space filler but rather to contribute a small bit of knowledge - about half an hour's worth. The knowledge base for my presentation had been in the works for at least two years, but even prior to that, I'd been learning a lot about interactivity, learning communities, DLOs and such. I was looking ...
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At the beginning of summer term, learners tentatively begin preweek with some tentative emails. There are the queries about books, where digital resources may be, and some other probes about the class. There are the few brave souls who'll crack a joke or two. There are some who'll come rambling in with a raft of personal questions. There's the perennial sharing of nicknames and preferred choices of how the students want to be addressed ...
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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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Overnight, people disappear from the streets of Manhattan, KS. The talk in the coffee shops seem more muted. There are shorter wait times for books and resource materials in the libraries. The fellow at the local shoe store can spend time showing his plastic models of foot bones and crack jokes about toes. The local Chinese buffet is full of construction workers, vacationers and the occasional family - but the students are really hard to find. The local businesses ...
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After years in the faculty ranks, I got used to having a rich variety of professional development opportunities. There would be seminars and workshops. There would be guest speakers. There would be conferences and symposia. There would be publication opportunities. And then I switched to instructional design with teaching online on the side. I'm noticing now that there's no real program for instructional designers here to develop their talents and skills. On the DEOS listserv, I read about ...
Continue reading Grab Bag of Professional Development Opportunities for IDs
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Of late, I've been thinking a lot about a software program that I've been using for the past year and a half. It is flexible. It has a kind of elegance after one gets used to it. It facilitates learning for tens of thousands of students. I know from firsthand observation that a lot of work has gone into the architecture of this product. Tens of thousands of people hours have gone into the writing of the code ...
Continue reading Not Giving up on "Four Million Lines of Code"
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Accessibility is one of those critical issues that affect pretty much all ID work. Various authoring software programs have made our jobs a lot easier in terms of templating with the right color contrasts, the ability to add alt texts, the various ways digital files may be output, and so on. My own commitment to accessibility has been put to the test with a 9-module course build that involves plenty of video: lectures, labs ...
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Truth is that it's hard getting scooped. A couple months ago, while at a conference, I met up with a fellow attendee, and we shared some fun hallway chatter. He attended my sessions. We all took away a lot of learning, and then a day or two later, I got a notice that my name had been noticed on a new posting on the WWW. One always assumes that anything presented at a conference will take on ...
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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 ...
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One carry-over between projects have been vocabulary lists. For one project, the vocabulary list was uploaded into a database and connected to various modules of learning. For a current project, the vocabulary list will be deployed as both a Web-table and Flash object flashcards. In another project, pop-ups with word definitions may be created as a rollover effect. Words matter a whole lot in online learning. Every academic field has its own verbiage and meanings tied to those words. Add ...
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by IDOS Newswire
17 May 2007
Greetings all,
I'd like to make you aware of a project I'm starting that I'd love your participation in. Please feel free to forward/post this invitation in other forums that you feel are applicable after reading the rest of this message.
Summary: I would like to invite you to participate in a small research project I'm embarking on: Accessibility in eLearning: an In/Outsider's Perspective. In brief, I will be sitting in on two ...
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The management literature talks a lot about facing change and assuming change. Effective leaders anticipate changes. They don't get blind-sided by the changes in the environment. Change is repeated like a mantra.
Recent articles in various national publications talked about a "clean slate" effort for the redesign of the Internet. The way it was conceptualized years ago did not take into account the widespread commercialization of this tool or of the need for massive security and identity authentication. There ...
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Many years ago when I was a program assistant at a social services agency, I did a lot of work on a grant that was submitted under the auspices of our office. It was a grant to provide service for those with HIV infections, and it actually did get funded. However, what I remember from that process was an issue with bylines. As a published writer, I assumed that bylines should go with all work in a workplace. I hadn ...
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In reconsidering the "Educating the Client" entry, I realized that that could sound like it was full of hubris. A more balanced approach would involve this other half: educating the self. How does one listen as an instructional designer to the needs of a client? After all, our job is to support projects to a successful completion. It's to ultimately make our clients themselves successful. It's to make them look good. The optimal way for a ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
07 May 2007
The recent spate of tornadoes that touched down in Kansas highlighted the importance of real-time accurate online information. Just a day before, Greensburg, KS, took a terrible beating in a "wedge" tornado that took out 90% of the town and resulted in 9-10 deaths (with that information changing). Now, on May 5, the whole area where we were in Manhattan, KS, was under a tornado watch. A short moment after I got a warning call, the tornado sirens went off ...
Continue reading EF-5 Tornadoes, Tornado Watches and Enhanced Real-time Decision-making
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The customer is always right. So goes this old saw.
For instructional designers (IDs), that concept requires a kind of eloquence in describing multimedia and LMS technologies in a way that non-experts may understand. They must be able to explicate various back-end processes when relevant. They must explain the rationales for why particular outcomes may be achieved particular ways.
"Magical thinking" exists in a number of realms. One of them clearly involves technologies. I think back to ...
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Before I starting learning about IT, I'd always seen the word "legacy" as a generally positive one. It's something that politicians try to shape; it's something that a person leaves behind, in terms of something useful to future generations. It's a clean name that future generations may laud.
However, in IT, which is constantly updating and changing, "legacy" implies something like leftovers in the fridge, ruts worn into the road, or ...
Continue reading Legacies, Cosmologies and Unfunded Mandate Technologies
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One of the more engaging aspects of ID work here involves being able to sit in on development meetings where individuals brainstorm various features to add to a new tool, the developers argue over specs, and final decisions get made about the functions. At a recent meeting, one of the developers said something about "this spaghetti of a mess," which I thought was very apt. The various constituencies represented by the members at the table all need their parts heard ...
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A meditation is supposed to be something reflective and calming. These are often accompanied by soothing intonations, bells and backstories stemming out of the Himalayas and clouds. Maybe I can just say that an ID may not always have time to meditate. Or maybe the rush is part of the techno age.
I was digitally scrolling through a series of video captures of a course that involved stress management. Part of the curricular build involved the live course sequencing to ...
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In an academic office with plenty of technology-minded people around, it's not often that one sees a lot of obvious primping. As I consider this further, I am awestruck by the rarity of this event that occurred.
So there we were at the end of a virtual simulated tour conducted by a representative of an East Coast company. A group of us were beings in Second Life. One kept walking around with a virtual torch for quite a while ...
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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
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Brent Anders (of the Office of Mediated Education) and M.E. Yeager (a doctoral candidate in the College of Ed at KSU) created the following video to publicize a forthcoming course offered by Dr. Fred Newton and Professor Art Rathbun. Andrea Mendoza (graphic artist with OME) created the snazzy logo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tucjbL1GdU
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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
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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 ...
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"Use cases could be a cultural tool (Lave & Wnger, 1991; Candlin et al., 1999) that (is) used for mediation between the various 'cultures' that take part in learning technology specification." (Hoel, n.d., pp. 2 - 22)
As an outsider to software development, I would never have assumed the importance of a so-called "use case." Now, as a person with a small toe in the door, I at least have a better sense of why "use cases" are ...
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My skeptical supervisor looked askance at the invitation. Indeed, I was not looking to head off to another conference. I had my hopes on a few that I'd submitted proposals to and was waiting to hear back from.
The email invitation was like any number of other electronic come-ons. Upon opening the email, I saw that it was a mass emailing invite to a conference. The email had names and led to a ...
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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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Several presenters at the SALT Orlando Jan. - Feb. 2007 conference echoed a similar point. One was a simulation virtuoso who'd adored this method of learning for 20 years but had yet to see this approach adopted. She said wearily, such technologies - no matter how fantastical and effective - will not sell themselves. Innovations need commercial level promotion. Another presenter, who'd been around from the time of the Plato System, described the slowness with which some technologies "take." He gave ...
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The snippet of information was included deep in the presentation. A fascinating curricular build has been achieved for miners to improve safety. The learning was delivered off of a website as well as through mobile devices. The learning met SCORM 2004 compliance and Section 508 standards. It useful integrated prior existing digital contents. It met the standards of the oversight agency, and it did so under budget and within deadline. They had built in an "accident reporting coach" to help ...
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I'm doing a mental inventory of the various software programs I've decided to purchase from the professional conferences I've attended. Truth is that there have been very few such products. Yet, a staple of various conferences has been that of vendors and salespeople-as-presenters who have a new product or functionality that they'd like to sell. One "inoculation" for me has been that of working in an office full of technoids, who would generally not let me ...
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The Alice-in-Wonderland moment happened a couple days ago. There I was in the middle of an online course. I was making a change to an announcement when I accidentally hit some weird combination of keys and ended up in another person's account. I had access to that person's courses and all her "powers." I had attained "super powers" even without using my actual "instance manager" powers.
That got me musing about Alice-in-Wonderland moments. In these past 10 ...
Continue reading The Insidiousness (and Necessity) of Plug-and-Play
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As a seasoned college instructor, I've had a fair amount of experience dealing with "grade hounds." Grade hounds are those learners who focus a lot on their formal grade. That's not a negative in and of itself. That gives an instructor some leverage in the teaching and learning / learner motivation department. Where grade hounds get a little exasperating is when they do some of the following things.
They'll wait until their peers have ...
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"A risk is a potential event that, should it occur, would have an impact on the project." -- Mike Wright ("Project Management: From Managing Cost to Managing Risk," Educause Seminar 4, Mar. 12, 2007, Chicago, IL)
Our seminar presenter said, "I like to walk around dumb and happy." His expression made it clear that much as he might like to walk around that way, his better sense was that it was not advisable to do so, particularly ...
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Sometimes, I indulge myself and apply to a conference without any idea whether I'll get accepted. I do this in order to give me the space to consider a particular research question or concept or practice. Recently, I proposed a topic (haven't heard back yet about its status) in order to consider a project postmortem.
A project postmortem is an analysis of the work - from proposal to finish - in harsh light. Some use analytical rubrics or ...
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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
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"Good ideas can lead to good practices..."
Sometimes, in work places, colleagues and supervisors think of theory as something snobby, excessive, unnecessary and maybe wrong. Several times in a recent week, I was given a carefully worded piece of advice - from the same person. His advice went: Avoid theory. He had been on the receiving end of a whitepaper on digital learning objects and SCORM, a work that I am currently revising and updating based on ...
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A recent project involved the writing of instructor notes to go along with a three-part online-delivered case study. While the instructional design involved conducing interviews, researching and writing the cases, the ideas for the assignments, and the creation of digital learning objects, the tough part came when I started to draft some commentary to instructors. More specifically, I was drafting the "instructor notes." In thinking about this issue, I refer back to various instructor's manuals that accompanied academic textbooks ...
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Getting smart machines to collaborate with humans may require some cajoling. One of my colleagues has a way with both people and with machines. He very masterfully originates workarounds that solve a variety of live issues for faculty as they use the campus-originated LMS. Being able to deliver such support requires a mental agility and a deep knowledge of the various technological systems. The very human demands on the technologies originate in the intersection of the teaching, communications, learners and ...
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I had ensconced myself in a 24-hour student cafe in the basement under the main library. The only "cafe" food was from vending machines, but at least I was out of the office enough to read a stack of articles on SCORM and digital learning objects. It had been a year since my last whitepaper on this subject, and I'd been snowed with numerous projects and clients. I was behind ...
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For many years, I earned my keep by giving lectures and speaking in public. I know what I sound like in various spaces - from a room with hundreds to more intimate 20-30 student spaces. I know what I sound like in various moods and circumstances. I know what I sound like in several languages. I know what I sound like in full strength as well as with laryngitis coming on. Indeed, this voice has been on radio. It's been ...
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Back in the day, when I was a full-time faculty member, I could do my job without wondering what my colleagues thought about my email life. Sure, there were emails from students and colleagues daily. And the assumption was that one would answer in a day or so. However, in this shift to an ID environment (and in an IT position of sorts - yes, my friends are laughing about this), I'm seeing that my email life really makes a ...
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"Program" might be too large of a word for this experience, but I'll use it in the heading as a kind of shorthand. At a prior college where I worked, the school made small grants available for individuals with experience in eLearning who wanted to work with colleagues (in cross-functional dyads) to set up online courses. Professionals often like to learn from one another, and this built on that concept. This would be an extension of faculty sharing.
I ...
Continue reading A Low-Cost Faculty Mentoring Program for Online Learning
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So Dr. Michael Wesch (assistant anthro prof at K-state) has caused a YouTube splash with his witty video. Worth a look. Even more electrifying live.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/feb/13/professors_video_creates_sensation_youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
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Cubicles are too Dilbert-ish. They're not cool. Any person who appreciates them must be a little "off."
Well, I have to admit that I finally have my very own state-of-the-art cubicle. It has high gray walls. It's modular. I have mod shelves, mod lights, a massive electrical hookup, and neutral gray shelves. It's tall enough for privacy, but if I had to get over the walls, I could, possibly scraping a bit of asbestos off ...
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One of the more creative forms of teaching online at the university level involves the use of custom-originated case studies. In the Native American learner context, these teaching cases are used to surface new research and to provide learners with more open-ended and analytical learning online.
www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases
The following public site (out of The Evergreen State College) recently debuted and may be helpful.
Continue reading Native American Teaching Case Studies Online
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So Tom Held of MetaMedia Training International, in his address at a prior SALT conference, talked about the concept of the "installed base" while considering which of the various DVD types (blue ray, high def, holographic) may be around for the (relatively) long haul. (This is only one small aspect of his content rich talk, but this is the only aspect I want to talk about here.) The concept here is that a critical mass of people will own a ...
Continue reading Building Digital Content to the "Installed Base"
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All sorts of talent move through a healthy office. Hardened administrators know this to be true. They know that every individual serves for a time and in a role. When a person leaves, he / she leaves a vacuum, usually fillable. The so-called "keyman" insurance assumes the symbolic and strategic value of an individual and the cost that the loss of that individual to a company that might have (not via leaving per se but more from unforeseen accidents). Well our ...
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Like the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz, I have been thinking of heart and the lack of it. What sparked this was a face-to-face meeting with some of my online students. Usually, it takes a while to build relationships to the point where candor is assumed. In this case, the candor came right out early on. Students "check heart" before they can take risks with an instructor. The question was, did I have a "heart" for them?
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Former Microsoft "chief architect" Charles Simonyi's has said that he wants to be the first geek in outer space. He has bought a round-trip ticket for just such a trip and will make history as the fifth tourist cosmonaut ever. In a recent interview (in this case, with The Seattle Times), he has described his engineering approach to studying for this out-of-this-world fieldtrip. The interviewer asks him: "Is it circa 1990 technology on the spacecraft you'll ride?" He ...
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So Jan. 3 marks the anniversary of my first day at OME. In a recent grocery run, I saw a can of Turkey Spam on the shelves and couldn't resist buying it. Okay, so it's really not for the flavor or the texture or the can shape. That Spam was something bought on a lark in our first days holed up in a cheap motel in Manhattan, KS. One doesn't come to a small college town expecting ...
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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
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The fastest way to get people to scramble for something is to throw money out the window in one televised stunt. To achieve the same aims in academia, credit seems to do the trick. Getting a name on a project, protecting reputation as a "brand," and coining new terms and processes all seem to lead to a mad scramble. For many, "name" means greater access to resources, esteem, choice projects, and street credibility. The prestige piece has always been an ...
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One main task of an ID is to protect a project to its successful completion. The work of achieving this begins before even the first commitment is made. It begins with the client and the projected work. What's the true level of commitment to this project? What utility will it have upon creation? Does the instructor have the technological skills to carry off this endeavor? Do the administrators have the savvy and will to carry the project on to ...
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The features that make a game a strong one often enhances that game's efficacy as an elearning tool. An effective game needs to be engaging, playable and challenging; it shouldn't be confusing or unexciting. In the same way, a training game needs to be engaging in order to foster learning and skills acquisition and mastery. Training games are used in corporate and military environments to address new learning and to head off skills degradation.
(I would argue that ...
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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
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Sometimes, the Internet acts like a live amorphous being ready to lash out at users who poke it. Okay, that's a little melodramatic. Maybe a lot melodramatic, but I've noticed some interesting issues.
Last month, I launched an online survey, and to publicize it, sent emails out through listservs and postings to various eLearning sites. I got maybe a couple dozen responses on the survey, which was a complex one, but also, I had ...
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A recent book I read on creativity in design brought up the concept of "ritual attachments." These are ways of doing things that individuals make part of their habits, and even if more efficient and cleaner / safer / better ways of doing things are introduced, they may not be willing to try them. These authors offered a range of examples and showed how design has to take these into account if they're going to have new products get accepted. (One ...
Continue reading Ritual Attachments: Checks, Envelopes and ID Stuff
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Pre-Online Lurking Pre-online times, lurking had a very negative connotation. It suggested someone with ulterior motives scoping out a target or multiple targets. Now, the online version of "lurking" often is mentioned with a laugh. There's something charming about observing others in online space as a quiet non-participant.
Lurking Experience I've only lurked in online space once. I logged onto a parallel universe sort of site to check out its learning possibilities but probably didn't get past ...
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Many of us have had the experience of calling in to a government office or bank and having to go through layers of computerized voices before finally getting to a live person. Worse yet, if one is trying to reach a top-level decision-maker, there are often layers of gatekeepers between one and that person. Sometimes, with the growing automation of online learning, I think this may well be the scenario in trying to reach a live expert in a particular ...
Continue reading Finding the Human "You" in the Technologies
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Years ago, my UNDP supervisor greeted me with an astute observation, which I'll paraphrase. She essentially said, "I don't care what your motives are coming here, but it's really what you achieve on-ground that matters." Another saying has been, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Those who've applied systems theory analysis to the real-world know how often this saying applies to Northern countries' efforts in Southern countries' affairs. The complexity of the world ...
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So there it was in the news again. Craig Newmark of Craigslist had decided not to cash in on his famous lists used by people for their various selling - of things notable and not-so-notable - and then the various meet and greets - for (some) nefarious and other common purposes. Okay, so I've ever only sold one thing on Craigslist. One of my colleagues emptied out her whole store of antiques that she was selling for a downsizing effort. I've ...
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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 ...
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One of the major skills / talents of seasoned instructors (and some new ones) relates to their live "run-time adaptation." This computer term refers to the operation of a computer program. As applied to instructors, this relates to how an instructor leads and supports a group of learners. This involves a fair amount of complex multi-tasking and the nuances of reading human behavior and meaning (verbal and non-verbal). This run-time adaptation also involves a deep body of knowledge about a particular ...
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One of my more engaging projects has been a multi-state endeavor that involves teaching and course redesigns based on the cultural backgrounds and worldviews of a particular diverse group of learners. One of the tools that this community uses is a shared virtual site where individuals may share resources, hold conversations, post questions and observations, and feel a sense of connection to others involved in this shared labor.
One of the challenges of making this virtual group ...
Continue reading Virtual Spaces for Instructional Collaborators
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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
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One of the toughest challenges of launching an online course seems to be to define an eLearning path. "Where do I go?" seems to be a common query for those who may be taking an online course for the first time, and that's a very valid question. ELearning can be very disorienting.
One of the biggest tasks of an LMS is to provide a sense of an eLearning path albeit without imposing a pre-made structure. Some courses may have ...
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Definitely, this commentary will offend some. (If you're my direct supervisor, you can stop reading here.) It's a good thing I'm using a pseudonym. After I attended an international conferences on elearning, it's impossible not to feel like I work in a backwater. The irony is that I would feel the same wherever I was, probably, and whatever I was doing.
What was once cutting edge becomes passe very quickly in terms of digital functionalities. Building ...
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So celebrity usually doesn't affect me. I've met famous people and even talked to quite a few of them for the purposes of writing articles. I have a high threshold for the ga-ga factor. But sometimes, some modern celebs sort of push the mold, and so it was today.
One thing about Vinton Cerf that I liked right away was that he looked like his press photos. Usually, the mismatch is quite great, and if it weren't ...
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It's said that hindsight is 20-20. I'm not sure that it's ever 20-20. With so much "noise" in an environment, it's hard to get a clear read of a situation, even with many data points and effective triangulation of information.
I think back to a meeting my friend H. and I had with a college administrator, T.O. This administrator and I had spoken many years earlier ...
Continue reading On the Diving Board: eLearning and Risk Aversion
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Several academic articles that I've read of late have mentioned an engaging concept that has been around for a long time. The concept is simple: empower faculty to use multimedia to build their online courses and learning artifacts. Faculty have the SME knowledge and skill base. They often have instructional talent. They can use the technology to bring it all together and have a course exactly how they want it. They will have it all, rolled into one neat ...
Continue reading Empowering Instructors to do their own Multimedia Builds
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Pervasive or ubiquitous learning has been evolving with the explosion of new technologies from portable multimedia players to PDAs to cell phones, in a wifi environment. The concept seems to be not only lifelong learning but anytime-anywhere learning. In-class instructors have long struggled with trying to keep student attention in lecture halls where learners are multi-tasking on their laptops by checking email and TMing on their phones and scheduling on their PDAs. Now, instructors who create podcasts for deployment are ...
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So for the past few days, I've engaged in all sorts of conversations. There have been rollicking conversations with one of the learners in an online course about teaching online, and her contributions have been so substantive and pro-learning that she really is one of the honorary instructors. And then my supervisor served as "mystery guest" in our online classroom to engage learners in real-time conversations via the chat. Here, we practiced the protocols of speaking in real time ...
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Having back-up speakers for a conference makes a lot of sense. Life happens, and people occasionally cannot show up to present on their expertise. People change their minds. They get sick. Their transportation fails. I'd submitted a paper for a national conference and received my first-ever alternate speaker offer. The offer came with free "tuition" for the conference and the promise that the work (a paper and a slideshow) would appear in the formal CD that came with the ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 October 2006
How much of yourself do you bring to a classroom?
As a writing / mass communications / literature instructor, I find my students and I will get into various types of unpredictable discussions. One of them led to the issue of identity and how much of a "self" is brought into a classroom. Their responses ranged from about 5% to 100%. The 100% responder said that he brought all of himself to the classroom and communicated all of himself wholeheartedly and without ...
Continue reading "Partial Identities" in Learning: Technologically Disaggregating Information
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At a recent conference I attended on interactive learning technologies, I noticed intriguing culture clashes among the participants. Four main identifiable groups were engaged in this conference. Most noticeable were those who worked within and for the military. These people brought some of the strongest minds in the field. They were able to design using cutting-edge technologies. They clearly had their own in-house software developers because of what they were able to deliver. They had cozy relationships with some private ...
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Anyone who has worked in digital space in curricular design has run up against the occasional mindlessness of such work. This mindlessness creeps in when there are hundreds or thousands of images to render. It creeps in when a project is at the stage when it needs final polishing before it goes live...and it's all about small fixes and corrections. Then there's the uploading of a curriculum onto a database or a course management system. It's ...
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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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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
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Part of the seductiveness of technology relates to the "Wizard of Oz" effect. This is that ability to multiply the effect of one's work as through a megaphone. It's the digital multiplier effect. It's about creating a big impression from modest means (you know Frank Baum's story with the wizard's identity eventually revealed). An example of a multiplier effect occurred at a presentation that I saw about a year ago. It was one on educational ...
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Some career fields apparently involve a goodly amount of waiting. There's filmmaking where there may be waiting on sets, people, lighting and what-not. There's road construction work - you know - where you can see several construction workers standing watching a fourth doing the actual work (well, sometimes). I got to thinking about this phenomenon of this think-do disconnect, which seems quite large sometimes in instructional design.
There's the initial meeting with the faculty member, some early probes regarding ...
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"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 ...
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"Are you a medical doctor?" asked the man next to me on my airplane row. I was in 18F for all four flights I took to get from Kansas to DC and DC back to Kansas, so I was in my seat by the window sort of above the wing of the plane. It couldn't have been a white jacket and stethoscope. I was in jeans and some cotton top. I had been reading academic articles and dozing now ...
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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 ...
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In a recent conference I attended, I noticed an engaging subtext. Given the tough competition for the LMS / CMS market in both K-12 and higher education, the various companies representing various LMSes were all scoping out the competition. In one presentation, I saw various reps from the various LMS-maker tables attending conferences showcasing each other's products and taking notes furiously onto laptops. There were strategic questions about functionalities. So why are the eportfolios linked to the various courses? What ...
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In an office that originates its own LMS, survey system, grade submission system, and other technologies, there is a major geek factor going on. And that rubs off on the instructional designers. I submit to you that my colleagues both have this geek characteristic although you'd never tell it by looking at them.
You can see that LCD glow on their faces when they get new hardware like tablet PCs. One of the IDs just got one with ...
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So here it was on a Saturday. It was go-for-launch day. Much like NASA with their launches, the weather and everything had come ...
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Writing about t - r in the context of instructional design seems to be inflammatory, potentially evocative of histrionics, and a little over-the-top.
I have a mental note that when I fly out to the SALT Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Virginia in a few days that I'll pack my toothpaste, sunscreen, lipstick and lotion in my check-in baggage. I'll drink my fill of juice before I board. I'll actually buy trial sizes for once...and do a ...
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So the SIDLIT (Summer Institute on Distance Learning" conference (Aug. 3 - 4) had an insightful presentation on different software programs that may convert PowerPoints to Flash. Davy Jones of Johnson County Community College offered some reasons for why this might be done. Converted files tend to be smaller and may download faster and be more email friendly. There's a broader availability of Flash which allows for deployment and play on Macs, PCs, and PDAs...and on various browsers. The ...
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How could the instructional designers (IDs) come together to build an online public-access course that people could come visit to learn more about the learning management system, AxioTM? The IDs would have to build using AxioTM. They would have to use copyright-released materials, many from KSU faculty (with their permission). They would have to show materials from a variety of curricular fields, with the learners ranging from K-12 through university. They would have to showcase some of the more common ...
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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 ...
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People in customer service have to get tough. When they're faced with irate and frustrated customers, they can handle the issue by troubleshooting it and getting out of the way. Others will "get back" at the complainer with further delaying tactics, ignoring strategies, baleful looks or filing the complaint in the circular bin.
For the past several hours, I've been reading digitally archived complaints. These are textual ones submitted by email and web forms. I'm not ...
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As I've worked on more projects involving groups of dispersed stakeholders, I've come to a fundamental conclusion: people need something to shake a stick at.
This holds true even for those projects that originate on campus and evolve on campus - with various stakeholders scattered around various buildings. Often, the work shifts to virtual connections after the first meeting or two. Having lots of eyes on a project can be helpful in terms of its direction and its shaping ...
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One of my most engaging projects of late has been a national one involving the use of reusable learning object or RLOs. In this case, I used Cisco System's RLO model, with its rigorous standards. This work reminded me a lot of my days as a distance runner a long time ago and the pacing needed to make sure I could hit my marks. While I did not absolutely fill in every single blank in the tables needed to ...
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After all the sweltering heat yesterday, I am glad it's raining today. I have a million small tasks to complete before getting away from the office for two days to attend the 7th Annual SIDLIT (Summer Institute of Distance Learning and Instructional Technology) conference in Kansas City on Aug 3-4. I am excited and eager to present with my colleagues on the launching of the IDOS blog. I also plan to attend several sessions and have marked those sessions ...
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"Project creep" - in the industry parlance - tends to be something to be dealt with skeptically. It's something that is negative and risky. It's a black hole that can devour all sorts of energy, resources, employee goodwill and time. It can take over mental workspace, and it can turn a whole project soggy and incomplete. My argument here though is counterintuitive. Project creep has a positive side. As work progresses on a project, new information surfaces. Sometimes, that information ...
Continue reading Project Creep and Turning Points and Goodbye
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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 ...
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Bugginess has been on my mind lately. It's bugginess in terms of Kansas insects, with spiders that run incredibly fast, grasshoppers and an unusual bug on my window screen that was white and looked like it was wearing a fur (it had poor recovery skills when I flicked it off the screen, and I think it fell into my egress window well). Bugginess has been on my mind relating to a project I'm engaged in which has plenty ...
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It's rare that a workplace recommends a book to read, so it was with delight that I got into the email line for Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat, his "brief history of the twenty-first century" with its tongue-in-cheek title (2005). I suspect this book was recommended because it posits that areas that have few resources and riches will turn out people who can make opportunities for achievement in innovative ways. Kansas is pretty flat (except for ...
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There has always been a price to pay for the attainment of knowledge, whether it's time or money, now we can add our eyes as payment as well. Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a growing problem that is affecting more and more of all of us. There was a time, only a few years ago, when this document would have at the very least been written out in rough draft form on paper, then typed out on a typewriter ...
Continue reading Computer Vision Syndrome - The Price of Knowledge?
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"Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all; amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat. Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength. Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder is simply a question of subdivision; concealing courage under a show of timidity presupposes a fund of latent energy; masking strength with ...
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So it's the weekend again, and a few cars pull in and out of the parking lot driveway. I'm vaguely aware of others working in the building. Sometimes, I'm only aware that they've left because I've tripped the building's alarm system, which they set as they left. (The motion detectors are just sort of there, but they light up to let me know that the movement has been recorded.) The weekend is a great ...
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Software development often happens in a siloized way. Except for instances when international or national organizations take a lead on standards-setting or a mega-corporation ends up in a semi-monopolistic situation with a software program, there often are many versions of a thing...and the versions often don't talk to each other. They're interoperable. They're stand-alone.
A recent article by Nicholas L. Carroll and Rafael A.Calvo of the U of Sydney ("Certified assessment artifacts for ePortfolios") addresses ...
Continue reading Necessary Functions of an ePortfolio System
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So I just got spammed another round. It's sort of strange to get these emails with apparently word-generator-created subject lines that make no human sense. And while I haven't opened one of these in ages, the contents never seemed to make any sort of rational sense either. I have wondered why people would generate these, or if this is just some sort of scripting run wild (sort of like virus strands). The only thrill seems to be the ...
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So my client flipped on me. Well, it's not as bad as that might sound. She didn't "flip out." What I mean is that one of my clients changed her mind again about what she wanted for a course. A fair amount of graphic design work is lost with her decision-making. Consultation with the domain master of a database has been lost. The enthusiasm for a particular effect and branding look/feel has dissipated. The mental space I ...
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by Brent Anders
12 July 2006
Learning Styles have become exceedingly common at all levels of academia, yet are Learning Styles real and if so, are they so important that instructors should spend time addressing the issue? The answer is a bit complex but attainable through a thorough understanding of the real issue at hand. The phrase "Learning Styles," is generally defined as a "model [that] classifies students according to where they fit on a number of scales pertaining to the ways they receive and process ...
Continue reading Are Learning Styles Simply A Myth? - If not, are they really that important?
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The chemical engineer sat across from me in the coffee shop. We had two scones and two coffees there on the table, and also a napkin on which she was writing. She was drawing circles and lines of trajectories to represent her studies. She wrote a symbol for a particular chemical that she was representing. She spoke of environmental sustainability and pharmaceuticals. She spoke of synthesizing catalysts and nanomaterials and other mysteries of the universe. Just the day before, I ...
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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 ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2006
Managing E-Learning Strategies: Design, Delivery, Implementation and Evaluation By Badrul Khan 2005 426 pp. $69.95 soft cover Information Science Publishing
E-Learning QUICK Checklist By Badrul Khan 2005214 pp. $29.95 soft cover Information Science Publishing
Dr. Badrul Khan's textual resources offer a general look at eLearning through the lens of his 8-category model: "institutional, management, technological, pedagogical, ethical, interface design, resource support, and evaluation" aspects. These, he asserts, are "logically comprehensive and empirically the most useful dimensions for ...
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An occasional goal of online learning instructional designers is to raise the techno-literacy of learners. While many learners use a variety of technologies---often in ways that befuddle their instructors---many do not see through the technology to understand the structures and processes behind the practical glitz. There may be a reification of the technologies, such as the early cyberspace writings on how the Web is a god, not human connections and synergies via electronic communications (phone lines ...
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Inexplicable things happen in a complex universe. In digital space, this human-made mass of data and interaction and messiness, mysterious occurrence happen as a matter of course. In a word processing program, my text suddenly starts to puddle. I receive mysterious programmer messages from the great beyond, which then takes some online research to find out what that means. Files disappear into cyberspace. I wonder if they'll morph and come back in a different form Internet years later. (in ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 June 2006
"In any class that you have, a third of the people are good writers; a third need more work, and about a third are going to take hours." -- Gail Tremblay
Given that the course that Gail Tremblay would be a SME on would be online, our conversation moved to the work of building community online. As she noted, the quality of an online learning experience depended in part on who the learners are and ...
Continue reading Forming Community Online in a Writing Course (Q&A with Gail Tremblay)
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E-Learning Companion: A Student's Guide to Online Success by Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry The George Washington University Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 2005 188 pp. wirebound softcover
Dr. Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry's E-learning companion helps a modern young college learner segue into online learning. This text serves as a college study skills handbook with college tutorials and foundational insights on online learning. Taking a practical approach, these authors advise online learners to annotate readings to strengthen their ...
Continue reading E-Learning Companion (Brief Resource Review)
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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 ...
Blog Entry
Gail Tremblay's approach to teaching writing is very conducive to a learner-centered approach. I suspect her style has evolved from her being a considerate human being foremost and then an artist and a writer. Her generosity in agreeing to be one of my two SMEs on a course redesign (English Composition 1) and then inviting me to her home in Olympia, Washington, were both gestures of fine kindness.
The following then are some highlights from our half-day chat.
A ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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In my years in the classroom, I've always thought it was one of the highest compliments to dream big for my students. (My students didn't always think so.) I think it's important to expect much for them to live up and aspire to. This thought came up again recently as I was reading program literature for the Evergreen State College's (TESC) Reservation-Based program. Their brochure reads in part:
"Program faculty believe that we best meet students ...
Continue reading Dreaming Big, Planning for the Real and Seeing Truth
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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 ...
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So my former doctoral advisor and professor is moving on. The news came in an email almost a year from the date I graduated from the Seattle University doctoral program. The announcement led to a flurry of group emails, many lamenting the move and worrying about the quality of the program with this change. Others started organizing a farewell dinner. It turns out that my former advisor will be a couple states away from me now instead of half a ...
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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 ...
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The Enduring Legacies Reservation-Based Program Course Redesign Conference in Seattle introduced a wonderful approach to course redesign - that seems revolutionary and "but of course" at the same time. This course redesign involved student feedback. This wasn't feedback collected in an impersonal survey format alone, but was based on lurking on online courses, attending face-to-face classes, study leader experiences with learners, quarterly interviews of students, staff and faculty, and other means. The in-person sharing of ideas strengthened learner insights. The ...
Continue reading Listening to Learners in the Course Redesign
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"I tend to try to help people to address whatever it is they need to address...I like to make assignments where people have a way of making it their own, whatever it is. I want them to make it their own." -- Gail Tremblay
"In the Indian community like in all communities, different people have different interests and strengths, and just like among European-Americans, there are great physicists and mathematicians...I make sure my students know that they are not ...
Continue reading A "SME" for Building Curriculum for Native American Learners
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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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One of the more engaging poster presentations at the recent AAC&U conference engaged the use of human patient simulators in nursing. Dr. Paula Dunn Tropello's "Interactive Learning with Human Patient Simulators" shed light on the practical use of human patient simulators, which have grown in complexity.
I'd recently had a brief run-on with a simulated baby when I was at an open house at KSU. I was at a table introducing eLearning when a young woman came ...
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For the longest time, I'd wanted to read The Art of War. I'd already read quite a few Chinese classics, which often dealt with feudal warfare and then familial warfare. And now, without hundreds of student papers to read every other day, I found myself at the library with a copy of this ancient tome in hand. I came across the following passage on foreknowledge.
"What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and ...
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So last Friday night ended up spent in a cavernous theatre on opening day for Mission Impossible 3. The movie was typical MI fare. Going with university instructors (most with Ph.D.s), I noticed some snorts of derision and some eyeball rolling...but lest I give too much of the movie away, I'll just say that I went because I was having an MI type of work week. People in sales know that a lot of ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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My fifth month into this job as ID, I've heard plenty of stories about clients. Some have been complimentary - about the complexity of curricular builds, creative interactive assignment building, innovative uses of AxioTM LMS, graciousness in working with the IDs, and any number of other insights.
There, too, are the stories of clients who use online space merely to deliver "shovelware" digital contents. There are those who are reluctant to teach online and so foot-drag until the last minute ...
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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 ...
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Earlier that Saturday morning, people had been bringing their luggage down to the concierge's desk. This was the third day of a three-day conference that had been intense. It had been full of presentations, roundtables, a reception, a poster session, and various keynote addresses.
Now, it was later afternoon, and others were catching flights across the country. A ragtag band of participants convened in the West Room of the Third Floor of the Renaissance Hotel in Seattle.
They were ...
Continue reading Social and Cultural Implications of Education with Technology
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I got an email from one of my supervisors on a national curriculum design project, and she let slip that she thought I was going on vacation for six days. I was actually hitting the road to present at a national teaching and learning conference in Seattle on my dissertation research (on the role of trust in instructor-led online college courses).
Anyway, I started thinking about all the work that one usually does while on the road. That doesn't ...
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Sometimes, going to a national conference on technology and learning seems to be an exercise in joyful daydreaming. The endeavors tend to be high-minded. Administrators and instructors will talk about standardizing instructors' electronic presentations. They'll talk about setting up standards for online learning across the campus. They'll talk about having instructors do their own multimedia builds. Setting up that alignment between people in an organization may be quite a challenge. Making change is terrifically hard work.
One exercise ...
Continue reading Force-Field Analysis re: Online Learning on Campuses
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Susan Patrick, the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology of the US Department of Education, spoke at the Beach Museum of Art on Apr. 26 to a receptive crowd. Her talk related to K-state's strengths as an institution of higher education.
Drawing on her national and international level work, she observed that Mexico took three years to digitize its K-12 curriculum in order to maximize their ability to educate its populace.
She shared other inspirational examples and ...
Continue reading Online Teaching and Learning for Global Workforce Training
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I was speaking to Nick deKanter, VP of Muzzy Lane Software (http://www.muzzylane.com/). His company creates educational software games of varying complexity for the liberal arts.
One complaint of online games is that many are necessarily closed-systems. Players choose limited options. There are only so many factors that may be played or input, and every game is bounded. Real-time interactive live-player games add open-systems complexity by the addition of the other ...
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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 ...
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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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An unavoidable truth on university and college campuses is that (at one level) it's all about the Benjamins. The very direct administrators will own up without much prodding, and then it's all about filling the course rolls with paying students. The secondary concern has to do with the learning needs of students and their "takeaways." For a purist, that's sort of going to the dark side. As a person who has been around a while in the ...
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I can empathize with my colleagues when it comes to working with technology. I spent a good chunk of last week creating an example of a simulated message board with annotations for our Demo course for Axio Learning Online. Although it sounds like a very simple task, it has quite a few layers to it. First, you have to create an instructor (at least one, but there can be more) and several students in the course. Then you have to ...
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There's little doubt that alpha and beta testing are important parts to the design process. There must be a procedure to evaluate whether a multimedia design is working or not.
For years, my former students in "Writing for New Media" had set up alpha and beta tests. They had test-run their sites. Some of them went live and built up a following. Others never went live, just sort of existed in electronic portfolios and student sample work DVDs. I ...
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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
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Recently, a gamer magazine arrived at my house. It was full of vivid images: a computerized Vin Diesel in full action as a "spy," a Lara Croft out to get the scoundrels, fighting characters with their unique characteristics and styles, and lots of game developer lingo. I thought that since the magazine had arrived, I'd better check it out before consigning it to the recycle pile in the garage. I dutifully perused it.
Then, I thought about the think-do ...
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Anyone who has dealt with technologies has had moments of stupefaction. I'm sure of it. I just had one on Saturday. I was uploading images into a database (hosted off another out-of-state university) when I kept getting graphics boxes that wouldn't accept an image...and wouldn't disappear. I could move them around, and they just sat there shadowed and unresponsive.
I could live with some computer garbage, I thought. Then, the whole thing froze. And I was ...
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OME is no yoga chant. It's the Office of Mediated Education where I work, lured away from tenure and the big city and bright lights of Seattle.
So I'm a newbie here, if I can say that about three months in. I still feel like a newbie. And coming fresh from a program that had a major study angle on organizational culture, I thought I would apply some of that to my surroundings.
First off, working in a ...
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It seems like in every discussion for selecting technologies that decision-makers have to vote between one platform or another, or go platform agnostic. They have to play off against others in commercialism... They have to figure what combinations to configure for service to learners. They have to decide what would best serve their users' needs.
The temptation is to remain non-committal. After all, any decision made means an investment in staff time, mental space, hard work, server space, potential licensing ...
Continue reading Platform Agnosticism and ID Development on Technologies
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Many head into projects by doing "rapid prototyping", which often means getting into the technologies and starting the work right away. Some people are brilliant this way, and they can do all that front-end work in their heads...and while they're actually creating. They're willing to go through the messiness of creation and then fixing things iteratively.
That's not a talent that I have. I can, but the messes I make in creation mean more back end ...
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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 ...
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Gatekeeping as a concept makes sense. There are times when some people should have access to particular information and other times when they don't really need to know. I thought of this recently when I got turned away by some army folks at the nearby military base. It turns out I didn't have the full documentation needed to gain entry, and they were right. When I returned in the afternoon with the proper documentation, they very graciously gave ...
Continue reading Gatekeeping, Keys and Trying to get on Base
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One of my favorite books in my recent spate of studies had to do with Annalee Saxenian's Regional Advantage, which discussed the "culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (ripped from the book's subtitle). This author examined how Silicon Valley came out ahead because of its proximity to major institutions of higher learning like Stanford University and the synergies that come from informal and formal alliances and the sharing of knowledge. By contrast, Route 128 is ...
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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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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 ...
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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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A recurring theme in instructional design seems to be that of instructors who are hesitant to try online teaching and learning. Even though online teaching and learning have been around for well over a decade and a