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From firsthand experience, after many years of creating diagrams using 2D drawing tools, I find that my initial temptations in building digital visualizations is to noodle with the data to try to get a certain visual output. I was chastened to realize that one tool would allow the download of the original data set, which would confuse any users and would show that the data had been massaged for a certain output. (I was trying to get the system to ...
Continue reading Building in One’s Mental Models into a Data Visualization
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To be a basically effective instructional designer, there is maybe a listing of a dozen and a half software programs that are useful to know in-depth (or at least to be on one’s way of knowing in-depth). There are many opportunities to learn new apps and new devices (all with simple interfaces). Where things get interesting is when one pursues new software technologies to add to the skill set. The challenge here starts not in the long lag times ...
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The rule of the Oxford comma applies to many aspects of instructional design. The Oxford comma is the comma that comes before the end in a list of multiple objects. The rule is that if it is used once in a work, it always has to be used. If it is left out, it should not be used once. The basic concept is uniformity in the document. Those who work in document design are aware of these rules as well ...
Blog Entry
So shortly after a presentation to a small group of academics at a local conference, my supervisor swung by and asked if I would present the same work again in the main conference. I politely declined—for a number of reasons—but the main one was that it was the same hosting organization that would be engaging us. While the audience members would be possibly different and more plentiful in the main conference, I felt that repeating the topic would ...
Continue reading Avoiding the Repetition of Public Presentations
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While slideshows are much-maligned in the boutique-y parts of academia, they are still very much a staple of presentations—both face-to-face and online. And indeed, slideshows have evolved with the times. They not only offer some sequencing and visuals, but there are many ways to present data in tables and columns and informational graphics. There’s live linking. There are notes that may be integrated. Those who prefer voice and interactivity may add those elements as well. This entry, though ...
Blog Entry
Years ago, at a conference on the East Coast, I attended a session by a man working in instructional design who created an automated training (a slideshow) to fulfill compliance requirements for his private company. He had trainees from all over the world who had to go through the compliance trainings annually on a variety of topics, to fulfill a legal requirement, and his job was to make the training as direct and simple and effective as possible. Back then ...
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Coming up on a new on-campus grant funding cycle for online classes, many faculty members will call or email with questions about what technologies to purchase. For locals, they will swing by to the cubicle to see how various technologies work. Those who are located elsewhere in the state or abroad will either visit when they can or consult by telephone and email.
The requirements for the technology are basic. The faculty member has to be able to use the ...
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If I knew back in the day that I would end up being an instructional designer working in courses that engage science knowledge, I would most certainly have taken more science courses. I would have built a stronger basis for science literacy. I would have worked more on higher-level math.
Why? It does seem like every academic field had a science-based underpinning. There’s the rigor of empirical research. There’s the application of statistical analysis of quantitative data. There ...
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Every so often, it’s good to learn a new piece of equipment and to maybe benefit a workplace. My supervisor, wisely, suggested that I set aside some time every week to acquire new technologies. And being a little tired of exploring software that I can’t directly apply to a project right now, I decided to learn the Nikon D 7000. That said, I only borrowed the camera a day or two before the event and did some night ...
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In the absence of information, we as people often go with impressions that come in piecemeal and gut instincts and maybe prior tendencies.
It is easy for a committee (no matter how professional and well intentioned and skilled) to misfocus on impressions and pre-existing ideas if one doesn’t have empirical evidence. It’s easy to sort of lose one’s way into focusing on politics or other external issues to the work. That sort of concern was at the ...
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In IT, a “forcing mechanism” is just a design feature that channels people in responding with particular information in a technical system. These mechanisms are created to increase—ultimately—the functionality of socio-technical spaces. Another use of a “forcing mechanism” in real life, real space, is to structure a work situation in order to acquire a new skill or new knowledge. If one doesn’t focus on our self-interest in self-development and professional growth, one can’t expect anyone else ...
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A lot of instructional design is about the expression of ideas to enhance learning. Much of the ideas expressed are elusive or theoretical or imaginary. Some types of “internal states” are impossible to depict any other way than through fictionalization. Or they may involve processes over time. Or they may involve processes that are infeasible to capture using a camera (such as atom-level processes or cross-sections of organs as they go through particular functions). For a few years now, I ...
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3-3. There I was again using a software program to update contents on a third-party remote Web server, and the system was hanging again and kicking out failure messages and failing to update the site. I was giving the system the benefit of the doubt and trying multiple times. I’ve used software technologies enough to know that sometimes persistence can work, and it helps to tamp down an initial frustration and to get second wind before asking for possible ...
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Recently, I was at a presentation by a high-level CEO of a multinational confectionary company. The speaker said that he received helpful advice from a colleague: “fail early, fail cheap, but always fail forward.” In other words, learn from the mistakes. I talk about failing like I mean it…which also means taking on sufficient risks in order to grow professionally and personally. In the spirit of these, I decided to review some of my worst instructional designer mistakes.
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It doesn’t take more than a few experiences with a computing machine that balks at simple tasks to really just want to trade it in. In a work day, there is only so much time one can spend coaxing basic performance out of a machine. There are the typical underlying reasons for under-performance, the huge amounts of content that may be clogging a machine…some malware possibly…or the behavior of the software…or user error (usually in some ...
Continue reading The Limits of the Machine…and the Software…and the User
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The prior week, I had two experiences that were somewhat scary in terms of technological behavior. First, this blog lost several of its most recent entries—which just disappeared—without any logical reason. There was not any known update to the server or compromise in terms of the accounts. Rather, some of the entries and replies to those entries just vanished. And then, I was working with a faculty member to get onto a wiki. Once she created an account ...
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As a new year commences, I spend some time thinking about what commitments to carry forward and which ones to leave by the wayside. I think about whether to continue blogging, with such a massive onslaught of people who post messages to this only to promote certain SEO (search engine optimization) links—and who never actually check back to realize that their postings have long vanished and seldom last more than a day or two. The emails I get are ...
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In doing research for another project, I came across a phenomenon described as “didactic transposition”—which was described as moving (transposing) some of the skills needed in the professional realm into the academic one in a particular domain field. This is a fancy term for a kind of “gaps analysis” between what a professional needs in the workplace and what is actually known by the novice learner. The point is to identify what is necessary for students to learn and ...
Continue reading “Didactic Transposition” for Instructional Design
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In lots of aspects of life, experience makes a big difference. This came to mind again of late with a colleague who ran into an issue with an open-source wiki (locally hosted). A group of us are using a wiki understructure to create a faculty resource for e-learning. We had stratified the site’s contents in order to enable customizing of contents to particular groups of online faculty based on their amount of experience teaching online. The problem arose when ...
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In a recent meeting, we were talking about the need for one content developer to have single sourcing for his slideshows. He wanted to be able to upload and control his slideshows without having to access proprietary systems in order to make sure that the works were appropriately up-to-date. In that situation, one of the team members suggested deep linking from the content developer’s server…and any other source would just point to that particular link. This offers easy ...
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It is not often that one comes across a faculty or staff member with a very defined thought-out computer management strategy. Many are brilliant in their areas of expertise, but they also often do not see a need to have a computer and data management plan that may make their work more efficient.
A lot of the decisions seem to be made in an ad hoc way. One recent interchange reminded me of this. The occasion was a meeting at ...
Blog Entry
A slideshow is something that is simple enough, yes? That’s what I thought when I headed out to help a staff member with creating a slideshow for an upcoming presentation. He needed a basic refresher. Easy enough, I thought. Three hours later….
Okay, well, I should explain that an early part of the consultation dealt with multiple technologies. I have seen this before with other faculty, staff, and administrators who do not use particular technologies much. They will ask ...
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by IDOS Newswire
21 December 2011
Join us for a Webinar on February 22
Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/210380904
Interactive articles (and e-books) are an enriched form of digital publication which may build in deep exploration, interactivity, and value-added learning for readers. These articles integrate multimedia and other digital contents, are accessible and have mobile friendly content.
This webinar will highlight the building of two published articles created with SoftChalk, with a focus on organizational structure ...
Continue reading Building Interactive Articles for Peer-Reviewed Journals with SoftChalk
Blog Entry
The jury was in. Their verdict: No way.
We had a group of faculty members and administrators crowded into a small room. They had just spent the prior few months using a new third-party software that had been integrated into the university’s learning / course management system. This software was to offer some Web 2.0 functionalities for online learners—in the way of wikis and blogs. Ideally, this would enable students to share information with each other and their ...
Continue reading Selecting by Functions without Considering UI Design
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To simplify the capturing of lectures in classroom spaces for delivery online, many universities and colleges are going with built-in systems that automatically capture the classes and make them available in various online course spaces. These systems involve various sorts of hardware (recorders, servers, cameras, microphones, networking hardware) and software (for the server, for the recorder). All of these items will need maintenance and upgrading. Further, there will have to be local expertise trained in running and maintaining such systems ...
Continue reading Capturing Everything, Purposefully Forgetting
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The PIs that have hired me onto their projects have made spaces for me to innovate and to push the edges of instructional design. In the same way, I try hard to make spaces for my development team members to try new things and to stretch their capabilities. While “proof of concept” is a cool idea, in reality, it’s just anything that has not been broadly tried in the field and which may / may not be directly doable.
In ...
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Usually, if a person you’ve met for the first time asks you, “How did you learn computers?” it’s probably not a good sign. After all, my small professional niche involves some small knowledge of computers. The person asking the question was a high-level administrator who had recently retired and returned to teaching. He had swung by to get some feedback on a particular L/CMS function. We got that all clarified, and then we were just shooting the ...
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Those who work in software development are in a state of constant awareness that there may be bugs in the software. A “bug” is some code that makes the software not quite work right. For those of us in instructional design, we will run across the occasional bug, but these are usually known by the developers, and they are just working through their work before getting to the particular bug. Those who use technologies coax performances out of the software ...
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It is said that too much material wealth spoils people. It makes it harder to get work done efficiently. It is harder to work in a lean and competitive way. If that is all true, and if the opposite is true—that lean times help people run more efficiently—then we’re in the middle of one of the more interesting challenges of our work lives: how to run lean.
When people are under pressure, many shut down ...
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“Learning equivalency” is a complex state to actualize for some types of learning. I was thinking this as I sat on a stool and hovered over my iPad taking notes and making observations during a diagnostic medicine / pathobiology graduate course.
I was sitting in on a lab to see how it might be digitized. I was looking at the learners and how they interacted with the materials and each other. I was looking at the equipment and the functions of ...
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Lately, I’ve been reading articles on artificial intelligence that refer to the Turing Test (of course). This well publicized technology standard suggests that AI will have arrived (in a manner of speaking) when a machine can emulate human intelligence in a conversation with a human interrogator. AI is used in automated tutoring agents. They are in AI spaces in virtual worlds, with virtual chatbots holding court in their own virtual worlds. They are in service centers meeting the needs ...
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In the popular media, Kevin Mitnick was a daring hacker of the late-1980s and 1990s while in his teens and early 20s. He would “social engineer” people to gain the credentials or information or window-of-opportunity to access the various servers of telephone companies, corporations, and government agencies in order to find information, download source code, read emails, and create all sorts of havocs.
In the 1990s, he and co-author William L. Simon authored “The Art of Deception” about some of ...
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I have been thinking about the difficulty in curriculums and rueing the fact that many of the courses that I work on as an instructional designer are ones that I at least have some background in. I want to know how well instructional design works on course topics that are complex and confusing. I want to know how easy it is to create a sense of overlapping understandings for the purpose of building an online learning course.
What ...
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This is a link to an article that just ran in Educause Quarterly:
"The Participatory Design of a (Today and) Future Digital Entomology Lab."
Continue reading The Participatory Design...of a Digital Entomology Lab
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One basic rule in multimedia is that it’s always harder than it looks. It’s also almost always more expensive and more time-consuming. The doing requires a level of sophistication that many people do not realize. For videography alone, the production values are critical.
A “production” makes a situation sound like something complex and highly grand. Any video shoot is part of a video production—because the work has to be produced. The ...
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People who work in instructional design have to like people first. Instructional design is about teaching…and it’s about sharing. It’s about understanding “human factors” in learning—and maximizing what can be done to help people teach and learn. Secondly, instructional designers have to love technologies. And while I’m not the type to go ga-ga over technologies, I do appreciate a designed thing of beauty every now and again. I do very much appreciate how software evolves ...
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The first indicator that there may well be a challenging curricular build is the nature of the question in the initial interactions with a subject matter expert (SME). One recent case involved a professor who came in with a simple question: “How can I actualize the capture of various lecture-captures from around the state?”
An effective approach with a new instructor is to get them situated, and the easiest approach is to base the situating on legal and ...
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In an ideal universe, equipment that is lent out comes back in tip-top shape, and all one has to do is use an anti-bacterial wipe on the common surfaces, and the equipment can be used elsewhere for other purposes. Now, rotating equipment around is not a direct part of instructional design work, but it’s critical to be able to access equipment to actualize a project every now and again.
This all came to mind recently when ...
Blog Entry
Slideshows are some of the most common forms of digital information delivery used in online classes. Presenters have added multimedia elements to them. They have added voice-narration, and they have added some annotations. These all add value, but the nature of the digital file type still has its limits. The main constraint has to do with the appropriate length of a slideshow—in terms of the number of slides that may be coherently consumed. Another limit had to do with ...
Continue reading Moving Beyond Slideshow Limits…to Microsites
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For years now, I’ve read node-link diagrams. These are used to show social relationships. They offer a systems view of different relationships. They are used to define game-theory games and the dynamics of play. They are used in so many ways to show so many dynamics.
That said, I have never actually tried my hand at creating one until recently. The context for this creation was for a course project. Instead of waiting until the end of the term ...
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With new technologies that help in the authoring of mobile activities, the following is an entry about mobile digital learning objects and approaches.
Blog Entry
At the recent SIDLIT conference, Tracy Newman (tnewman@jccc.edu) presented on “Mobile Learning and the Inverted Classroom, Not Just for Hybrid Courses.” She was highlighting a recent phenomena to improve blended learning by having students use their online time to experience pre-recorded lectures and virtual experiences; face-to-face time with the instructors would be used to apply that learning in various types of discussions, games, laboratory experiences, and hands-on applied learning practices.
As a matter of fact, many are going ...
Continue reading Hands-on Work Face-to-Face; Lectures Virtualized
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Dr. Heidi Upton presented on a multimedia project that she used to engage learners titled “Discover New York,” at a recent conference I attended in San Jose. She explained that she had to change this course to a degree because of the competition for contact hours with students, which limited her face-to-face time to only two days a week. This could have threatened the student engagement in her class.
It was useful to have her describe her ...
Continue reading Reaching Out, Reaching In: Embedding Student Engagement
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One of the more creative uses of Twitter for blended education was described in a conference that I attended recently. The European professor taught a graduate-level business course wholly through Twitter. No course site. No L/CMS.
He had his students use their Twitter accounts and follow him and follow each other—to create a real-time and asynchronous circle of communications. People would also post Tweets with hash tags that would identify the nature of the messages being posted. What ...
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People go to conferences to find out “how the other half lives,” to use a quaint phrase. In other words, we want to scope out the competition and find out how to improve our own work. I used to go to conferences on the East Coast to see what money and smarts (including educational psychologists) and feedback data (of the players) can buy the military in terms of immersive games. I went to those conferences expecting some glitzy designs, and ...
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Every so often, a phrase will be eye-catching and thought-provoking. In David Rice’s “Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software” (Addison-Wesley, Pearson Education, 2008), he describes an “asymmetry of intimacy” between what people know about technology and what technology “knows” about them. Computerized technologies affect people’s daily lives and lived experiences. Much of their experiences are captured in electronic profiles and innumerable databases—which may be cobbled and queried in rich ways to form a sense of a ...
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The next new hot thing is the uses of mobile devices for online learning. Or so that’s been said for many years now. But only recently have there been authoring tools that allow us to build to the small screen—and now—even in HTML 5 and without the requirement for a Flash player for much of the interactive contents. Instructional designers do work as the technologies enable them—although some do have the skill sets of coding the ...
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I never thought of how grateful I would be at the fortunate limits of some technologies—in this case—the challenges of putting an authentication layer around a publicly available wiki site. When the technologists went to try to hide a wiki behind an authentication layer, it pretty much rendered the entire site inaccessible and broke all links. This unfortunate turn of events occurred because an administrator unilaterally chose to “protect” the resource because the project had evolved into a ...
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“What is instructional design?”
“Finally, I know that you really exist! So what is it that you do anyway?”
“Do you upload contents for us?”
A lot of the early questions I get when meeting with a new faculty client shows just how common the lack of knowledge is about what instructional designers do. Of course, what they do is defined by the particular work place and the policies that are in place.
In some ways, instructional designers also self-define ...
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Authoring tools are built for particular designed purposes. They are meant to create particular designs. Or they’re set up to edit particular file types and output particular file types. These are designed based on the needs of the particular user base for the software, and these are designed by testing against theoretical and applied “use cases.” Then, too, there’s testing against unintended consequences. Popular software programs will be conceptualized differently than their intended use.
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With the popularization of desktop screen capture software and flip cams and web cams (and faster Internet connectivity for many learners), very simple lecture captures have become more popular with faculty members. While many struggle at first with just learning the technologies, and with adjusting to how they look and sound on camera, many others already have a long history with quality teaching and learning and build for quality early on.
One of the first realities of lecture ...
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Research in instructional design almost always has to align with other partners. It is not a stand-alone sort of field that can offer up deeply fresh insights as a stand-alone situation because instructional design is a field that aligns with certain domain fields, learners, instructors, and technologies. It is not stand-alone in any sense.
Willing partners to conduct research and writing may include faculty members, funding organizations, e-learning consortiums, software technology companies, and students. Out of this lot ...
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At a university, rarely does instructional design involve designing for children. However, every so often, a grant-funded project will surface that offers interesting and unusual work. One recent one has involved the potential of designing learning for Pre-K and K-3 learners.
One of the truisms in instructional design is that the designs are unique to each learning situation. The designs have to be tailored to particular learners. That’s not to say that people cannot generalize about learning. One can ...
Continue reading Designing and Building Learning for Children
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“No way?! I did that!”
Ideally, designed curriculums will be put into service, adapted and evolved over time, and used consistently and continuously over time. That way, it evolves with the learners and the various instructors who use the curriculum. It doesn’t go out-of-date. It stays relevant, and it’s in use.
However, based on circumstances, free courses may or may not be offered, and if a busy schedule takes over, then a curriculum can be left to lapse ...
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One presentation I attended dealt with the uses of free apps on mobile devices. The presenter emphasized the importance of reading directions and end user license agreements (EULAs) before downloading apps. He suggested the importance of making sure that all apps are being downloaded from reputable sites, such as those vouched for by the makers of the particular mobile device or official appstores. He also suggested that it’s important to crowd-source information about the value of the various apps ...
Continue reading Cautions re: the Uses of Apps on Mobile Devices
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Images are a critical part of numerous instructional design projects. At the lowest level, free clip art and imagery may be used to illustrate some basic concepts. Middle-range projects may involve the collection of some original imagery to illustrate concepts and resources. In some image-intensive projects, the team originates all of the images for the project. The images are all original. And oftentimes, the equipment used for the image capture may be fairly high-end.
Every project has its own unique ...
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Instructional designers are not generally given access to undesignated server space. Rather, they are given access to particularly defined spaces, so they can upload and publish contents in particular circumstances. Usually, this means plenty of vetting by the principal investigators on projects.
I was going to write that it has taken me years to get access to server space, but that’s not quite true. I had access from very early on in my work at my university. However, it ...
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After a dozen years in online education, I am realizing that many of the technologies that I used early on are no longer around, or they’re only around in limited use as glorified ego projects by wealthy company owners (my highly interpretive read). And others seem to have utterly disappeared or been sidelined to a limited custom use. Survival in a highly malleable field such as high-tech seems to really depend on survivability in the marketplace first—and that ...
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This is a link to an article and slideshow about a "digital entomology lab" project at Kansas State University. This project is in its early phases.
Starting a Digital Entomology Lab at K-state
Continue reading Starting a Digital Entomology Lab at K-State
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There’s a lot to be said for getting complex processes right the first time. A certain amount of this may be done through proper planning. After that, it helps to pay close attention to how the process is working in a couple dry runs and tweaking the process for efficacy. This came to mind in a recent project, which partially involved the processing of specialized images for a particular domain field. What is not taken care of upstream has ...
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Once a project starts rolling, a certain dynamism sets in. Different people with different skill sets are brought on board to execute certain parts of the project. People come in from out-of-town. A few technology experts are brought in from around the campus, and there are longer-term alliances to tap particular skill sets. I was thinking about this in relation to a particular project in which I set up a meeting for the team precipitously—in response to a meeting ...
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by IDOS Newswire
18 February 2011
Call for Chapters: Proposals Submission Deadline: March 30, 2011 Full Chapters Due: July 30, 2011
http://www.igi-global.com/authorseditors/authoreditorresources/callforbookchapters/callforchapterdetails.aspx?callforcontentid=49406cf9-f565-4649-a5c5-3c863bf5629c
Open-source development of tools and contents have existed for a long time as a complement to for-profit approaches. This concept and practice describe R&D and production that includes savvy users of a particular software or information product and enables the widespread sharing and distribution of created resources among users. In information and ...
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Most of us do not pay attention to conversations in deep detail unless there is something critical on the line. In most cases, deeper attention is not warranted. However, when one does actually start paying attention to interviews and other conversations, one starts noticing interesting dynamics. On a recent project, I focused on transcribing a series of interviews and conversations in order to understand what had gone on on-the-road while I was working on other aspects of the project. We ...
Continue reading Human Interplay and Videotaped Group Interviews
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One of the key affordances of an online e-learning environment involves the tenacity of an electronic memory. By this, I mean that all student and instructor actions in an online space are recorded and are searchable and archivable. This is all fine and good unless one begins with magical thinking or adopts magical thinking at any time during or later. In other words, this level of electronic memory becomes problematic if you want to change your narrative purposefully.
Instructors who ...
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One of the main aims of a university involves research, the surfacing of new information and insights. New faculty members make their names by the quality of their work and their thoughts. The research spills over into the teaching, by helping faculty train new researchers and also encouraging the uses of more updated learning materials / information. Publishing and presenting at conferences help further the field. They also help information spill out into the public.
The university culture ...
Continue reading A University Substructure that Encourages Research
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In my visits to various faculty offices, I’ve seen plenty of types of data storage. Papers and print journals are not uncommon. All manner of digital storage devices are popular—from giant plate-sized digital memory devices (for real—but the professor was just keeping those for fun) to floppy disks to 3.5” disks and then to all the various miniaturized hard drives and thumb drives and what-not that people use today.
When faculty members retire or go on ...
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In instructional design, part of our work is to tell stories or create contexts. And the materials we use range from the non-photo-realistic to the photo-realistic. The non-photo-realistic may be drawings and diagrams; they may be image captures from virtual worlds. The photo-realistic images are actual photos.
Recently, a PI working on a storytelling slideshow sent us a variety of screen captures overlaid with different image filters—to emulate oil painting effects, water color effects, and so on. Her question ...
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For a long time now, I’ve been following what is considered to be quality learning in online courses. There is a lot that has been learned about quality in general for mainline students, but there has also been a bit of research in terms of case studies based on certain domain fields. I have wondered what some unique aspects of quality may be…and thought I would review what I’ve heard about domain-specific quality issues. It may well ...
Continue reading Domain-Specific Requirements for Quality E-Learning
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Back in 1986, young astronomer Clifford Stoll ended up shifting jobs and was writing software for academic usage to support professors in the hard sciences. While managing the servers and looking at the office’s billing, he noticed a small 75-cent discrepancy in the billing. He ran the system through the paces and could not find any mistake in the accounting software even though that software had been cobbled together informally by various students who’d worked in the lab ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 January 2011
Just a year or two ago, the world was aflutter with the possibilities of virtual world learning. There was talk of engaging simulations. There were dazzling examples of eye candy. A local project involved the uses of a virtual island for multicultural studies. Another project involved a simulated geological time space. People offered very nuanced versions of their digital doppelgangers. And then, almost overnight, it seemed, people were saying, That’s so passé!
This phenomenon of using virtual worlds seemed ...
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by IDOS Newswire
15 December 2010
Blog Entry
Authors and editors all have different relationships based on each other’s working styles. Plenty of such relationships last over time because a certain level of comfort is created in the interactions between these two groups, and there’s less of that necessary level of work in feeling out the work styles and standards of others.
A recent endeavor involved working with a new editor on a very short deadline. There was a call for drafted chapters on a set ...
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At the work station or at the laptop, one’s work is constantly interrupted. And this is not necessarily only in reference to a cubicle environment where people are stopping by to chat or people are calling on the work line. The computer itself has all sorts of interruptions built in—email notifications, IM-messages, system alerts, agent requests (such as for software updates), probes for electronic mailing lists, emergency notices on the cell phone and the work phone and the ...
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The WWW is a great tool to use to jog one’s memory. Just recently, I was remembering a snippet of a song I wanted to hear, put in a line, and the artist and title of the song appeared in milli-seconds. The electronic collective memory that we have around us has made it near impossible to forget anything. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger makes this point thoughtfully in “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing” (2007) (available ...
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A recent presenter on campus discussed a recent strategy in another state university to open up its supercomputers for statewide use to crunch various data, create simulations, project into the future, and solve large problems. He said that such openness to the state enabled his university to go after grants more competitively and did not cost much—only 1% of the processing of their machines. There clearly involves some work in training new users, but he pointed out that many ...
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So I spent a part of the afternoon at a lecture by a renowned expert on using Web 2.0 technologies for teaching and learning. He had founded digital ethnography and made his reputation via the Web. In person, he’s articulate, smart, funny, and amenable to handling pretty much any question which comes his way.
This day, he was speaking on “Crowdsourcing.” He went through a litany of ways that people collaborate around music—by singing to a man ...
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It’s surprising how long one can work in IT and still really know so little about different types of code. I own up. I have always had the support of great site designers who’ve built sites that are usable and which have a back-end piece which allowed me to upload textual and visual contents directly. Or I would use wikis that used a very simple mark-up or markdown syntax that really didn’t require much work. After all ...
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There’s a lot to be said for attending conferences purely to learn and without the need to focus on either organization work or presentation logistics. A recent conference (“Frontiers in Mobile Learning”) sponsored by the C2C organization highlighted some of the challenges to the uses of mobile devices in education.
The most fundamental challenge has been the wide range of mobile devices available—from smart phones to laptops to iPads to netbooks to e-readers. These devices ...
Continue reading "Frontiers in Mobile Learning”: A Mobile Devices Conference
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
08 October 2010
In a recent conference, I was chatting with a small group that had stayed after, and one asked about a small notation I’d made about digital “slow fires.” We were talking about a wiki project and the collecting of information…and then later that day, I was talking about value-added digital imagery, and the issue of slow fires came up again. I was asked to talk a bit about this issue, at some later date, and I realized that ...
Continue reading Preventing Digital “Slow Fires” at the Content Creation Level
Blog Entry
For faculty members, it’s a fairly easy process to get complimentary copies of textbooks. They just have to call up or email their book rep, and the new books arrive in crisp packages and with zeroed out invoices. Running books by faculty members is a huge part of the work of book companies, and they can often find that faculty can be quite loyal to a text that they enjoy and which they’ve built plenty of assignments and ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
11 September 2010
The late Garrett Hardin proposed the term “tragedy of the commons” early in his career to describe a situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and in their own interests, will deplete shared limited resources. (He was arguing for limited international aid to poor countries that could not sustain themselves, and in later essays, he compared the US to a lifeboat. He suggested that having excess capacity would be important in terms of resources.)
Continue reading Ways to Avoid “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Online Knowledge Spaces
Blog Entry
The email messages would show up in the email box—about various services on campus…the recreation center, the student union, the performance hall, the grant research resources, the PR wing of campus. A university of a middling size will have thousands of electronic mailing lists from many entities on campus.
There will be many electronic mailing lists for particular projects and groups, with many activated and live only for the life span of the project. The more silent electronic ...
Continue reading Strategic Program Use of Electronic Mailing Lists
Blog Entry
Sometimes, it takes seeing a lot of “bad” examples to begin seeing what makes a particular learning object—like a slideshow—“good.” A recent project involved some work perusing videotaped graduate student presentations on a range of public health issues. These were captured by tapping into a tech classroom’s audio feed (which resulted in some strange electronic fluctuations that added noise and “gain” to the audio feed) and the room’s camera…and then the slides portrayed on the ...
Continue reading The Art of the Slideshow for F2F and Online Presentations
Blog Entry
by IDOS Newswire
08 August 2010
A new resource for immersive learning will be released by IGI-Global in late August 2010.
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Space Emerging Technologies and Trends
Blog Entry
In a recent online conference, one of the “sidebars” dealt with poster sessions. Those were my first exposures to creating poster sessions…and it was also my first exposure to a range of different types of poster sessions. These do add plenty of value. Those whose presentations did not get accepted into the main synchronous presentations are sometimes offered slots in the poster sessions in live face-to-face conferences. That is so here, too. In online conferences, the live presentations are ...
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This entry is based on very thin experiences…just about a year of work tending a public wiki. During that initial year, I spent most of it conducting research and creating contents to offer lures for site visitors to explore the site more deeply. I was interested in setting a baseline for quality. I also wanted to share relevant information with a larger public. In that first year and a half, now, tens of thousands of visitors have come to ...
Blog Entry
There is a free e-book available through Athabasca University Press on mobile learning that sets a clear baseline for this possible new direction in e-learning in higher education. Dr. Mohammed Ally's "Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training" is available at the following URL.
Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training
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Several months ago, the query came in to the office. A colleague wondered if I’d be willing to present a live webinar to a conference with approximately 70 people in the room and possibly others logging in online. The webinar would be recorded. The default for me has always been, “Sure,” particularly if the work has its own fresh challenges.
First, I spoke to a couple of the representatives and got a sense of the audience ...
Continue reading Preparing and Presenting a Live Two-Hour Webinar
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Online learning work does involve digital preservation albeit not in ways that one might generally imagine. So many works are “born-digital” and need to be protected in multiple digital formats and proper storage. Another method for digital preservation, though, involves taking from-world artifacts and storing them in digital format. This issue arose recently with a history course in a hard science field.
A conversation with the instructor illuminated this situation. He featured digital ...
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The following is a link to an article about an open-access scholarly press which makes all of its contents available in .pdf form from their site.
Blog Entry
Two hours into the meeting with the faculty member, we finally got around to doing a desktop lecture capture using his brand new computer and his new headset. We had tested his equipment, reset his computer settings, deleted and re-installed his software…and finally did the piece that was probably the initial problem. We updated the lecture capture software we’d just installed. We’d gone on the false assumption that an update that we’d done based on an ...
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Every so often, there is a push for some mind-numbing work. A colleague of mine had to render a bunch of contents from DVDs in order to repurpose them for a new client who wanted all the contents on a website. (This was done with copyright permission.) And recently, I worked on several projects just to get some slideshows rendered for some online courses. No ID really goes into this field in order to have to format slideshows, but this ...
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Hrrrrmmm. The student was clearing his throat again. We were looking at him through a large screen. He was several hours away taking our shared course. And he was alone in a classroom, just him, his readings, and his laptop. He was clearing his throat because he was looking for a way to jump into the conversation without seeming rude. The really cool upside was that he was well prepared for class every day even though the class was an ...
Continue reading Remote Accessing a Site in a Live F2F Classroom
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Educause Quarterly has a riveting new issue on cloud computing
This is an issue which affects a number of aspects of instructional design work but seems like an issue only about hardware, software, and where data resides.
Blog Entry
As an instructional designer, I work with at least a dozen (or two) different software programs that are used for the editing of raw digital files and the authoring of born-digital files—for e-learning. Plenty of this work involves “transcoding” between different digital file types in order to add value to a particular text, image, slideshow, audio file, or video file.
A transcoding effort involves the digital-to-digital conversion of one digital file type to another (http ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
14 June 2010
Invariably, a new socio-technical system will run into first technical problems, then structural problems, and then social ones. This truism has implications for the design work.
For an instructional designer, to get a system to fully “stand up,” it is important to make sure that all the layers of technological dependencies actually function. The only way to discover where problems are is to push the system. For me, this has meant creating a variety of ...
Continue reading Testing Dependencies, Template Structures, and then the "People Piece"
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The nature of work is that there are often needs that are not directly met by existing technologies. In cases where the needs exist sufficiently close to the existing technologies, there can be work-arounds and the imposition of an artificial structure around the technologies to achieve particular aims.
One common example is the use of learning / course management systems as virtual teaming work spaces. Hiring committees will use L/CMSes to share privy documents and to exchange information and to ...
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Learning / course management systems (L/CMSes) usually collect quantitative grade information for students. This is because of a tradition regarding the use of grades, and this is also because numbers are very easy to manage, handle, and calculate. Qualitative feedback and critiques are usually sent to students via email or private messages in the online classrooms.
Rarely do online grade books include textual feedback. However, one of the L/CMSes I use does include a text window next to the ...
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It was with trepidation that I thought of manually moving over a couple months’ worth of scheduled events over to a new calendaring, email, and collaboration system. There were enough horror stories of problems batch-moving all the events, and repeating events apparently do not show up at all. The smart money was on physically moving events and then removing the old calendar client.
Moving to a new laptop without the old calendaring system was one ...
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It probably helps to have a little desperation to drive some risk. Here it was the day before the launch of an intensive intersession course, and the two faculty teaching the course were not fully ready. They had captured an interview using one (desktop lecture capture) technology but had switched to another technology because they felt more comfortable using that technology to edit out some repetitive comments. They also wanted to add in some annotations.
What happened was that they ...
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In any number of fields, SMEs come to work with a range of tech savvy. Many now seem to have a basic understanding of learning / course management systems (L/CMSes). They may not grasp the more esoteric and complex tools, but they have the general gist. A majority also have a firm general grasp of the office suite of tools, particularly word-processing and slideshow building (but not so the Excel-sorts of files). A few have a grasp on lecture capture ...
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Recently, several of us instructional designers presented to faculty working on a graduate degree project. One of the early presentations involved training the faculty on some technologies for screen-based lecture captures. That involved lowering the learning curve on those technologies and encouraging them to be comfortable with the experimentation, the fumbling, and the way they sound to themselves online. We showed that it was okay to show themselves as human, and we showcased some endeavors for telepresence.
Continue reading Adding Value to Screen-Based Lecture Capture
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Sometimes, simple tools can add an outsized contribution to the overall quality of a curricular build. Dr. Atul Gawande, in The Checklist Manifesto, showed the application of checklists to a variety of fields—medical, flight, and others—that added plenty of value.
In the same way, templates may be pedestrian, but they can offer efficiencies and competitive advantages that are quite surprising.
A template is a form that is used to create other objects of a ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
22 April 2010
The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds by Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck New York: New York University Press 2006 304 pp. hardcover
“I always knew what virtual worlds promised: freedom. Freedom to do, to be, to realize. I like this kind of freedom, it’s a good thing; virtual worlds are a force for good. Furthermore, what we have at the moment is just a foretaste of the wonders that idealists like me believe are ...
Continue reading The State of Play: Debating Laws and Policies for Immersive Gaming
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"While Internet users claim to be concerned about online privacy, their behavior rarely reflects those concerns." -- Julia Gideon, Lorrie Cranor, Serge Egelman, and Alessandro Acquisti in "Power Strips, Prophylactics, and Privacy, Oh My!" (2006)
A greater sense of sobriety seems to have seeped into discussions of social networking sites used for higher education. Two recent webinar presentations addressed this issue. This seems appropriate given that social networks and blogs are the fourth most popular online category for information sharing, and ...
Continue reading Two Angles on Educational Social Networking
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It’s easy enough to maintain a sense of niceties for short webinars. Then, it’s easy to know when to activate the polite clapping button. It’s easy to know when to put one’s marker on a world map to show one’s location. It’s easy enough to annotate a whiteboard or a slide. It’s fairly easy to type in responses in the chat window at the behest of the presenter.
However, what exactly is different ...
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Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games By Edward Castronova Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2005 332 pp. hardcover
The way Dr. Edward Castronova tells it, he was an economist minding his own business some years ago when he got blindsided by the phenomena of virtual worlds.
Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games then is his intelligently written foray into MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” pronounced by some as “mor-pegs”) and metaverses, which ...
Continue reading Designing Synthetic Worlds through a Macro-Economics Lens
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A recent project evolved into an intriguing conversation. I won’t go into the specifics of the project, but the conversation involved the use of Second Life avatars to tell a story and to create a sense of loyalty among a defined set of learners. The idea would be to use four central characters around whom particular stories would be told.
All the planners at the table are attuned to the needs to be inclusive, to avoid stereotyping, to “mirror ...
Continue reading The Designing of Avatars for Inclusiveness and Diversity
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 April 2010
Control and Constraint in e-Learning: Choosing when to Choose By Jon Dron Hershey: IDEA Group Publishing 2007 340 pp. hard cover
“The most interesting potential for a virtual environment for learning is that it is itself far more plastic and malleable than physical space—the computer is the medium and tool as well as the environment. Through e-learning, it is therefore possible for the context to actively shift, playing a role in changing both the intrinsic and extrinsic constraints that ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
07 April 2010
E-Learning and the Science of Instruction By Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer Pfeiffer, A Wiley Imprint 2003 322 pp. hardcover
For many, multimedia evokes splashy effects and the best that digital technology can offer. Yet, when multimedia is applied for learning purposes, a more grounded approach is effective. Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer’s E-learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning have created a handy topic-based text for ...
Continue reading Clark and Mayer: Extracting Principles of E-Learning from Research and Practice
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
03 April 2010
e-Moderating: The Key to Teaching & Learning Online by Gilly Salmon London: RoutledgeFalmer 2004/2005 2nd Ed. 242 pp. softcover
Dr. Gilly Salmon’s e-Moderating: The Key to Teaching & Learning Online focuses on a particular support role in online learning that may be crucial for the larger, higher education, online classes with professors, teaching assistants, research assistants, and now e-moderators.
Early on, the role of the e-moderator seems to be a culmination of mediator, online facilitator, teacher, trainer, and digital friend ...
Continue reading Job Requirement for E-Moderating: Digital Socio-Cognitive Finesse
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
31 March 2010
Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning (5th Ed.) by Mark Grabe and Cindy Grabe New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 2007 431 pp. softcover
The next big push in eLearning may occur in K-12. The acceptance of distance learning is at an all-time high. K-12 instructors are training in the online curriculum development and instruction methods. And there are strong texts supporting such endeavors, as with Mark and Cindy Grabe’s stellar Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning (5th ed.).
These two authors ...
Continue reading K-12: Grabes' Integrating Technology...for Active and Transferable Learning
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People who’ve worked for a time in a field become harder to impress. I’m no different. And yet, last week, I participated in a two-day online web conference that left a strong positive impression.
First, this featured a range of presenters and keynote speakers. These had been culled from a competitive list of presenters. Many who didn’t have a chance to present offered online poster sessions. The live event was scheduled with a fine choice of seminars ...
Continue reading A Classy International Online Web Conference
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 March 2010
Instructional Design for Web-based Training By Kerri Conrad and TrainingLinks HRD Press 2000 280 pp. soft cover
Kerri Conrad and TrainingLinks’ formulated Instructional Design for Web-based Training through their various projects as a small Web-based training (WBT) company. As happens with many texts, they’d looked for one to use, and when they couldn’t find the one, they decided to write a book themselves.
The final product is a highly-accessible conversational text that starts readers off with an assessment ...
Continue reading Text Helps Middle Management Lead Web-Based Training (WBT) Projects
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An Introduction to Interactive Multimedia by Stephen J. Misovich, Jerome Katrichis, David Demers, and William B. Sanders Boston: Pearson Education 2003 212 pp. softcover
“…computers are literal machines. That is, you must include all of the marks and words that you see in the scripts in this book. Even a tiny difference can cause a script to fail.” --An Introduction to Interactive Multimedia (p. 165)
Instructional designers working in interactive online courses would do well to approach their craft with ...
Continue reading Function ask Q (): Interactive Multimedia 101
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Academics have taken various stances on the changes to their respective fields with the popularization of the Internet and the WWW these past couple decades. Dr. T. Mills Kelly, of the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, swung by K-State for a presentation titled “Building a Better Yesterday, Bit by Bit or What hurricanes, communism and pirates can do for your teaching” on Mar. 9.
He described a course that he teaches to undergraduates that is ...
Continue reading "You're supposed to be skeptical all the time!"
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There’s been a slow move towards building commercial learning from academic courses. Our campus has looked at ways to create such short courses and ways to transition from situations of “fair use” to commercial…with some very effective ideas. Now that some of the early thinking work has gone in, we have a theoretical template that now needs actual building work.
A short course then consists of one to two hours of study on a particular ...
Continue reading Starting the Design of Digital Short Courses
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Many of us in instructional design are challenged by the interesting work of creating online labs. Some types of lab learning are created by stringing together various online resources, such as simulations and open-source learning. Others are commercial types of labs that include learning aids and digital recording devices like digital journals. A recent on-campus science course involves a corresponding lab course, and while the instructor wants to focus on the lecture course first, the question of whether the lab ...
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As various projects have become more complicated, it’s quite common to have multiple authoring tools and editing programs open and functioning in fairly integrated ways. For example, one could have a screen capture tool for stills of various websites and software; photo editing software open to process imagery, and then a drawing tool open for manipulating those images. There would be a lot of recursiveness in terms of moving between the software for particular effects.
Software makers ...
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The classroom laptop was all set up and ready to go when the students filed in. The prof stepped out to fill his mug with water, and by the time he’d stepped back, the machine had turned itself off.
That started the prof on a riff about his department’s laptop. It had gotten infected with a particular virus because it had not been used sufficiently to have a continuing updated profile of malware. He had used the computer ...
Continue reading Updating and Upkeeping Public Departmental Computers
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It’s always inspiring when a faculty member decides to get off the beaten track and to try something new. “New,” of course, is a relative term. However, the idea for doing video captures using machinima was sufficiently sparkly to be interesting and to require a basic tour of the extant machine + cinema videos in public spaces—to get a sense of the state-of-the-art. I was also motivated to sort of control for client expectations, so the mental imagery of ...
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Popularity ratings have been all the rage with social sites, where people may be evaluated on any number of things, usually “hotness.” And there are evaluations of digital visuals and contents that people share. On art sites, people can post comments and feedback about the effect that a particular work had on them. Faculty members may be rated by their students. I even read fleetingly of a site that sort of lists people’s gripes about each other. This came ...
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Uploading new software for the new year is often a joyful experience of discovery of new functionalities and affordances. Yesterday, not so much.
A new software package includes some 9 GB of integrated authoring and editing tools, and it’s a fantastic package from a superb company. However, putting 9 GB of contents a computer means a lot of uninstalling of extant software programs, some of which are used more than others. Many of the programs were used a few ...
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An engaging article dealt with the phenomenon of failed instructional designs and the importance of learning from them. Taking a page out of that work, I decided to mull some of my failed designs as learning opportunities.
First, what is meant by a “failed” instructional design? For me, failure may be defined in a number of ways.
A non-executable design is the worst kind. Instructional design is an applied science. It’s not a theoretical construct (although it ...
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Back in November, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology hosted an “E-Book Expo: LYRASIS Panel Discussion” that examined some challenges with integrating e-books for use in higher education. This event occurred live and face-to-face but also with webcasting to an equal-sized audience. This was one of those events which I’d planned to participate in but which had such a weird scheduled time (probably a mistake) that I wasn’t even in the office by the time this event occurred ...
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LYRASIS hosted a recent eBook Expo that surfaced quite a few intriguing concepts about some of the gaps preventing the smoother integration of electronic books into university libraries and repositories.
The audio could be better, but the web conference may be viewed at the following URL.
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So here, I had nearly 4 gigabytes of contents for a complex course that needed to be uploaded into a new learning / course management system (L/CMS). This L/CMS had been developed by a small company and was bought out by a mainline publisher, and its interface was like nothing I had seen before. As a person who has worked with a dozen or more L/CMSes over the years, that’s saying something. (And yes, this is low-level ...
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A recent article described a major mobile phone maker that removed over a thousand device apps created by a particular developer who apparently swiped others’ codes and who tried to manipulate the system by hiring people to give his apps high popularity ratings. A fellow user wised up and notified the company. The company apparently went into the back end and checked out the statistics of the popularity ratings and found anomalies—such as the ranges of evaluations (all 1s ...
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A computer science assistant professor at one of my alma maters is working on a subject I’ve long wondered about—how to erase information or destroy data after a certain amount of time. Apparently, there are quite a few ways to achieve this in the digital space, but in peer-to-peer social networks, this researcher has found a way to disappear it.
“The Vanish program encrypts a message, breaks the encryption key into many tiny pieces, and ...
Continue reading Purposively Appearing and Disappearing Information
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Edward Castronova’s “Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality” melds his economics and policy background with his enjoyment of “synthetic worlds” to offer a provocative thesis, namely: people will head to virtual spaces en masse (“hundreds of millions”) within the next generation and bring with it huge impacts on the real world economies, workforces, and policy-making.
In a work that he terms “speculative nonfiction,” he projects into the future and sees virtual reality ...
Continue reading Virtual Worlds: Opportunities and Opportunity Costs
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"Digital Imagery and Informational Graphics in E-Learning: Maximizing Visual Technologies" will be released in November 2009.
http://www.igi-global.com/marketingdept/newsletter/novnewsletter/hai-jew.html
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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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Recently, I caught the tail end of a webinar that left a strong, positive impression. The presenter Dr. Patricia Ritschel-Trifilo (of Hardin-Simmons University) was demonstrating how she versioned a course lesson for the various types of learning styles based on a conceptualization by Albert Canfield summarized here http://people.usd.edu/~ssanto/canfield.html .
She applied the Canfield’s Learning Styles Inventory
http://arispa.com/styles/canfield1.html
or
www.tecweb.org/styles/canfield1.html
to her students and compared ...
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Participatory Sensing
For a kind of “situational awareness,” various fields (law enforcement, environmental science, landscape architecture, biological sciences, architecture, agriculture, and others) are now tapping into “participatory sensing.” This is a kind of information capture based on the widespread distribution of mobile devices that capture imagery and sounds in a location-sensitive way. Many mobile technologies enable live and easy emailing of the information and uploading of the contents to the WWW. Dedicated remote sensors also enable rich information captures.
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For a long time, my mental conceptualization of digital documents was that of finalized ones. I thought of finalized videos…finalized slideshows…finalized imagery…finalized articles.
However, after some consideration, I realize that many of my digital documents are transitory and temporal ones. They are raw images, audio, or video clips that get processed into a finalized work. Or they are annotated research documents that feed the research. Or they are sticky notes for feedback on a finalized project. By ...
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“The Network is your computer,” goes one of the slogans.
The techno buzz around the office and online has been about “cloud computing.” So when the email appeared in my box about Sun Microsystems offering a webinar called “Introduction to Cloud Computing…for Enterprise Users,” I signed up—only to see that opportunity get overshadowed by other commitments. Then, they sent a follow-up email offering the archived webinar online. Perfect.
Dr. Lew Tucker ...
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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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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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MERLOT's JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching) just published a position paper titled "Exploring the Immersive Parasocial: Is it You or the Thought of You?" related to 3D immersive learning.
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no3/hai-jew_0909.htm
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
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The implications of the future internet are that it will have a kind of machine knowledge of the individual user, so searches for information may be customized, and services (and advertising) may be tailored to the particular users. In a ubiquitous setting (with wifi and mobile devices and ambient intelligence), people could have their needs (digital and beyond) met in a variety of ways.
If that sounds claustrophobic to some (as it does to M. Andrejevic in his insightful book ...
Continue reading The Future Internet and its Implications for E-Learning
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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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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 July 2009
The simulation creator and author Clark Aldrich held a webinar recently titled “The Unifying View of Highly Interactive Virtual Environment (HIVE) Learning.” While I’d long looked forward to this presentation, I ended up with one of those mash-up days that allowed me to log on for the last 10 minutes of the presentation, and so I ended up experiencing this presentation as a re-run. Still, I found much that was thoughtful about his ideas.
(Truth to tell, I have ...
Continue reading Employing Highly Interactive Virtual Environments for "Learning to Do"
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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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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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This seems like an interesting resource for some specific purposes.
http://www.voki.com/
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Making the world's knowledge computable...and visualizable...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
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http://angeliclearning.blogspot.com/2009/05/flight-from-blackboard-to-angel-and.html (or http://tinyurl.com/BB-Angel
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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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http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html
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The work of an instructor is to make information understandable and easy-to-acquire. This means identifying critical main principles (How much learning is needed before certain concepts are attainable?). This means identifying threshold concepts—those ideas that if grasped will open up whole new vistas in a particular topic. This means identifying the critical decision points in a process that are crucial to the new learner. This is about identifying the learning moment when the “Aha!” occurs.
In mainstream films, these ...
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by IDOS Newswire
06 April 2009
Call for Chapter Proposals
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 2009
Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends
A book edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=626
Introduction and Objectives: Immersive learning has come to the fore with the popularization of Second Life and the development of open-source immersive 3D learning spaces. Those in e-learning have been working to find ways ...
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces (A Call for Chapter Proposals)
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Hello, all: I am soliciting responses to a brief survey on the experiences instructors and facilitators have had regarding security in 3D immersive, interactive and persistent spaces (like Second Life) in higher education. This information will be used for a forthcoming article or chapter.
Survey Title: Security in 3D Immersive and Interactive Spaces in Higher Education
This survey will be offered Mar 9, 2009 through Mar 31, 2009.
To participate in the survey, please go to the following link:
https ...
Continue reading Survey on Security in 3D Immersive Spaces in Higher Education
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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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Here's an interesting column about Facebook, which has been integrated with some e-learning endeavors.
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2009/02/didnt-you-know.html
And the latest
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-fi-facebook19-2009feb19,0,4088613.story
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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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Discussions have been rampant that e-learning may happen more and more outside the structures of a learning / course management system. The concept is that a cobbling of tools may offer learners a loosely coupled online learning experience at a lower cost than the proprietary or open-source L/CMSes may offer. The idea is that people may tap various user sources that are Web 2.0 and improve functionalities from there by adding contents and using the technologies in ways that ...
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Adapting to a new learning management system involves a fair amount of learning. Going live with it also means dealing with some surprises—in this case, the disappearance of student work. Usually, the default settings I have in Message Boards is to disallow student deletion of their own posts.
There are a number of reasons for that. Foremost is the need to have data integrity, so if students posted a particular message or assignment, and I responded to that work ...
Continue reading Plugging the "Student Editing" Gaps in a New LMS
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Check this out.
Dasher Project, Cambridge University http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/uai2005/
Google Tech Talks http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078334075080674416
Continue reading Writing as Navigating in "The Library of All Possible Books"
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 January 2009
Why do computer games need to evolve to keep people’s interests? How may AI enhance game playability?
For Darryl Charles, Colin Fyfe, Daniel Livingstone, and Stephen McGlinchey, who have teamed up for a new text that highlights biologically inspired AI for computer games, the answer is to create worthy game opponents. Games that adapt and learn are more challenging and therefore offer more learning and play value.
In Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games, these authors offer case ...
Continue reading Biologically Inspired AI for Computer Games (brief resource review)
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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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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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A month or so ago, I went ahead and zipped up course materials on Blackboard and downloaded that onto my desktop. Then I uploaded the zipped contents into a course shell in ANGEL Learning. And that was as far as I got in terms of transferring curricular contents en masse. I will admit to a great deal of skepticism that this particular organization should just ask faculty to move their own work even though I have instance manager privileges on ...
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It came as a bit of a shock to faculty at my university that there would be a foray into Second Life for educational purposes, social networking, and university service provision. There had been apparently long debates over concerns of what could happen in immersive 3D spaces in terms of griefers or other buses. And after some deep analysis, the advisory committee apparently was putting forward some solid recommendations along with hopes to maximize the use of this social virtual ...
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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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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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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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K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group will meet Nov. 20, 2008, from noon to 1 p.m. at the Union Stateroom 1...
Current or potential SL users are welcome to attend.
Contact Larry Jackson at ljackson@ksu.edu for more information.
Continue reading K-State's Second Life Academic Users Group Meeting
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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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Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” shows how the affordances of Web 2.0 changes human potential. As a socio-technical system, Web 2.0 benefits through the power of networks—which grows in complexity “faster than its size.”
Connective technologies enable people to cover much more ground. Photo-sharing sites enable photographers to be virtually anywhere at any time…and to capture digital information that may not have apparent value enough for a company or ...
Continue reading "Here Comes Everybody" (Brief Resource Review)
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Human-computer interactions research offers quite a few occasions for laughter. On the one side, you have the machine, with the various affordances and limitations. On the other side, you have the persons, with their affordances and limitations and idiosynracies. The building of socio-technical systems then happens somewhere inbetween and with a complex mix of understandings and inputs / outputs.
It was in this spirit that I ran into a discrete strategy to relax speakers dealing with a speaker-dependent system…in a ...
Continue reading Coded Para-Verbals to Support Live Learner Engagement
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A current federally-funded project involves the building of a site that hopes to improve student mental health, and in so doing, prevent suicides.
The stats say that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Young adults 18 – 24 have the highest incidence of reported suicide ideation. A recent study apparently found that half of students had suicidal thoughts at some point in their history. Mood, interpersonal and academic concerns apparently have driven some students to be ...
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“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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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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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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Usually when an all-day training takes the morning to launch, few will return in the afternoon for the rest of it. So there were about a dozen of us huddled in an upscale hotel conference room with very minimal wireless connectivity and trying to get in on Second Life and to embody our avatars.
Here was yet another foray into Second Life, this time, under the able guidance of Dr. Jonathon Richter (U of Oregon) as part of a day-long ...
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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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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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Various research writings have originated creative ways to capture information as a byproduct of work. For some, creating help texts and directions can be unwieldy and time-consuming. An article by Paris, Colineau, Lu and Linden summarized an endeavor that captured a procedural help based on how people used a computerized system. This automation was to help replace the “labor-intensive and tedious” writing and maintenance of procedural help texts. Their system apparently captures use information from various data streams: textual, graphical ...
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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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Check this out. This Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (of MERLOT) special issue focuses on next generation learning management systems.
http://jolt.merlot.org/guest_editors0608.htm (Guest Editor Colleen Carmean Intro)
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html (The Current Summer 2008 Issue)
https://wiki.asu.edu/jolt/index.php/Main_Page (The Response Wiki)
Continue reading New Special JOLT Issue with a Wiki Accompaniment
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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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I have always had a kind of reverence for books—not the fabric covers and bound paper—but for the craft of writing that goes into quality works of literature.
It’s as the wise Mortimer J. Adler wrote: “Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Visualize a doctor who needs to trim a bone in order to fit a new hip. Or imagine some other surgical procedure which requires a steady hand and practical finesse.
A manufacturer of a haptic device showed what such a learning experience might be like by combining 3D computerized visuals with sound along with a haptic device (linked to the haptic virtual objects on-screen). Haptics, of course, relates to “touch” or “contact.”
The tabletop device was a white pen device ...
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The Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI) group is now the center for the public SCORM development, outside the auspices of the US Department of Defense.
http://www.letsi.org/letsi/display/welcome/Home
It looks like they're still looking for more founding sponsors at a cost of $10K..to have a seat at the table in defining this organization. The deadline to join will be March 13.
Meanwhile, it's wait and "let's see" for the time being.
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 January 2008
Games and Simulations in Online Learning Edited by David Gibson, Clark Aldrich and Marc Prensky Hershey: Information Science Publishing 2007 402 pp. hardcover
The three powerhouse editors of Games and Simulations in Online Learning -- David Gibson, Clark Aldrich and Marc Prensky - each have contributed to the field in their own ways.
Their editorial hands are clear in this text that addresses what's done effectively now, given pedagogical, cost and technology constraints.
The learning created through digital gaming and sims ...
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Every so often, there's a moment for a breather to look around at how the digital landscape has changed for e-learning. I marvel at the quality of various authoring tools for building digital learning objects. These tools now have features for accessibility. They have cooler design elements. They have high usability for even novice users. The designers have taken an anticipatory approach in building well designed tools.
The types of outputs are rich and varied. It used to be ...
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The new year starts off with plenty of resolutions. And this also seems so for community organizations. Years ago, when I was in my teens, I started volunteering for a local community newspaper, and amazingly now, many years later, I'm still friends with many who are related to that paper. And somewhat less surprisingly, I've been called on to work on building a blog site for one aspect of that newspaper.
2008 is opening with the financial pressures ...
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There are various ways to test the efficacy of a computerized system. I've read about how theoretical systems are tested with known inputs and known outputs, and the real-world results are often used to test the theoretical programming that happens in the "black box" in between the inputs and the outputs.
A couple weekends ago, I came across the notion of self-playing games. This, too, is another method to test software games through trial and error. The game developers ...
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It's all becoming do-it-yourself nowadays. One project / conference / publication after another, people are setting up wikis and expecting work and information to be submitted through these.
A conference in the planning stages is using a wiki to store prior digital artifacts and to draw potential attendees. http://arclite.byu.edu/id+scorm/index.php?title=Main_Page
For one publication set to go live early in 2008, the editors set up a wiki page on which contributors may evolve the ...
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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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"Facebook is a huge identity risk." -- A security guru at K-State
Universities are reaching out into the "metaverse" to retain and attract the "gamer generation" of students.
One part of this endeavor relates to going out into the social software spaces in order to create identities and digital spaces around which they may interact, bond, and get familiar with the university brand.
In service of this idea, I recently went onto Facebook for some initial research. I ...
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Christopher Chambers, with the Juxtopia Group, presented on a virtual sim that occurs in real 3D space. Live fire combat involves some muscle memory, similar to marksmanship.
Based on research into sports psychology and with an eye towards fully exploiting cutting-edge technologies, a traning was created to sustain and improve live fire combat skills: the speed of engagement, identification and acquisition of the target, and the accuracy.
Because of the need to engage actual physical muscle memory, this sim occurs ...
Continue reading Improving Live Fire Combat Training with Virtual Targetry
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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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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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Demographics figures into projections for the economy, the future workforce, and the price of housing, among other things. The retiring out of the baby boomers is anticipated to have wide-ranging effects on job availability, future pay and also the quality of workplace training. With the complicated machinery in the energy industry, and the average industry worker at 48 years old, "human obsolescence" may prove a challenge to this industry, suggests Matthew Sadinsky, president of System Operations Success, International. Sadinsky presented ...
Continue reading Virtual Sims Standing in for a Dwindling Workforce
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So I've been working on an in-house whitepaper on educational games and sims for quite a few months now along with my other projects (with all faculty projects taking priority).
I've immersed in a number of books on gaming.
One practice in academic research is to come clean on one's background and initial thoughts, in order to approach the materials without any of that important information un-surfaced. The idea is also to get this on the table ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 September 2007
As part of a blog tour, Dr. Karl M. Kapp agreed to a Q&A. A future "brief resource review" will follow later this year.
Q: What are some strategies that you find are effective in reaching the so-called gamer generation?
A: Well, first I want to say that what we already know about good instructional design works with the software, gadgets and games of the gamer generation. You still teach facts with chunking, association and organization. You still teach ...
Continue reading Q & A with Dr. Karl M Kapp, "Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning"
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Here is the scenario. A successful chain of hotels opens up a new chain of exclusive hotels (approximately 200), with its own unique brand and niche market. They would like to employ some computerized method of training for the service staff, particularly those who would maintain the hotel rooms. Their average stay is 2- 3 years only, which is fairly high turnover. Many are English-as-a-second-language speakers. An organization is brought in to distribute the training. There ...
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It's always good to know that umm the IRS is reaching out to its constituency with trainings. Chris Ammon and Amy Gareis presented on "Adapting IRS Classroom Training Content for Web-based Training" at the recent Interactive Technologies Conference in Virginia. Originally, this training was delivered in a F2F way by the customer education wing of the IRS at various locations around the country and reached several thousand participants. The objective of this was to train those who worked in ...
Continue reading Adapting Classroom Training for the Web...at the IRS
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During the August 22 - 24, 2007, Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Crystal City, Virginia, an international consulting organization offered a powerful presentation on their use of mobile technologies to train their international workforce, with a particular focus on their executives.
I think it may be wiser not to mention their names because I'm going to bring in something that they may not want to be connected with - which is the effective use of low technologies cobbled with high technologies ...
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For many of us who work in the online realm, a lot of what we create is digital representing the real. I attended a session recently at the Washington Interactive Technologies conference that dealt firmly with real-space. Dr. Maria Lizano-DiMare discussed "Rugged Mobile Computer Technology."
The concept here is that ubiquitous research and learning require bringing potentially sensitive computer equipment into the field - whether that be a live volcano or crop field or an ocean habitat. While I've seen ...
Continue reading Stepping out of Virtuality into Real-Space Ruggedness
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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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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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SoftChalk Lesson Builder's most recent Webinar involved a presentation by Lisa Young, a hydrology professor at Gateway Community College (part of the 10 Maricopa Community Colleges of Phoenix, AZ). Young also is a part-time elearning coordinator and co-chair of the RLO Action Group. Some 100 individuals had gathered online to listen in on "Re-usable Learning Objects - The Maricopa College System" (June 13).
Young used a purchased template from SoftChalk that was made for the particular college ...
Continue reading An Aligned RLO Effort in a Community College System
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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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H. Wayne Hodgins, in the context of digital learning objects, offers the concept of a periodic table of information. This idea has been around for many years, and it has resided there in the back of my mind for quite a while. This is the concept that if digital learning objects are well-designed at the right level of atomistic granularity that all known information may be categrorized into different types ...
Continue reading Mulling over the Periodic Table of ... Information
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
10 May 2007
Software makers that reach out to instructional designers with trainings and engaging events improve my ability to do my job. One of the coordinators in our building sent me an email about a series of Webinars ("Innovators in Online Learning") hosted by SoftChalk Lesson Builder, LLC. Their software is used extensively in our office and puts out some very usable and engaging interactive elements in Flash and Javascript and HTML. The other day, I participated in a seminar presented by ...
Continue reading Webinar: Language Instruction and eLearning (Brief Resource Review)
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 April 2007
Jeff Merriman of the OKI / MIT highlighted some interoperability trends. [A quick Wikipedia search defining the Open Knowledge Initiative suggests that this organization works on the specification of software interfaces comprising a "service oriented architecture" (SOA). This endeavor was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MIT, and IMS Global Learning Consortium.] "The goal of an SOA is to provide a separation between the interface of a service and its underlying implementation such that consumers (applications) can interoperate across the ...
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Caveat: Whenever I write on technology issues that are beyond my purview, I should use a double or triple cover, so I may disavow that I wrote this. I think that what's going on on the back end is important enough to discuss, but I also know that I'm going to embarrass myself by writing about something in a way that a software engineer never would. I've faced the disdainful glare (once was enough) of a software ...
Continue reading CORDRA and ADL-R (Registry) for Shared Data Environments
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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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The technology learning curve for instructional designers seems as steep as the cutting edge roller coasters that plaster your cheeks against your ears as you pull out of the starting platform and do the first loop-de-loop. There's no real keeping up. If it's any comfort, technologists will tell you that they know their areas very well, but it's near impossible to extend their expertise beyond a region of specialty. Their learning curve gets too high, too, and ...
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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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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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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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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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Imagine a tool that could help manage the world...
That was the proposition made by Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI, the forefront company that designs and develops GIS technology. Dangermond visited K-state to present "GIS Vision and Enabling Technology" on Mar. 8. He visited as a speaker for the Provost's Lecture Series.
(A blurb introducing him reads: "Dangermond fostered the growth of the company from a small research group to an organization with more than 3,100 ...
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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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A training by our resident security expert touched on various ways digital information may be grabbed and exploited. He addressed issues of open wifi networks. He talked about the risks of portable memory devices. He discussed regular patching. He talked about encryption. He gave vivid examples of data compromises along with some humorous Rumsfeldian quotes.
He didn't go into the weakest link, which would be the human factor. He maybe was being too polite.
A while ago, I'd ...
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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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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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The elements that would allow the integration of mobile learning with an LMS have been seriously evolving. Dr. Heather Katz and Bob Sanregret presented on "How to link mobile content results into your LMS system" at the recent SALT conference in Orlando, FL. Using the Hot Lava Mobile Learning Author (open source?), mobile devices may be set up do up to 5 API calls for SCORM-compliant data: the start and end times, the test results, and other data. Using SOAP ...
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Christopher Stapleton, one of the staff members of Simiosys at the University of Central Florida, calls himself a "faculty entrepreneur." With decades of experience working in the entertainment industry "creating memories of a lifetime," he left managing a megabudget (over a hundred million) and a fat salary...in order to apply himself to meaningful work. That said, he still describes some of his works that he's helped create with an earned sense of pride. He describes the ...
Continue reading Virtual Puppetry and a Simulated Urban Classroom
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Scott Edwards (of Outstart) presented on "Why your LCMS should be PENS Enabled" at the Jan. - Feb. 2007 SALT conference in Orlando. -His presentation addressed why the standard "package exchange notification services" (PENS) standard should be integrated into an LCMS or LMS. PENS is an AICC and SCORM-supported specification. PENS allows for the automating of the process of content publication, transportation, and messaging between servers hosting LCMSes, LMSes, and data repositories. PENS allows not only for the transfer but the ...
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Thomas Held (of MetaMedia Training International) came right out with his view in his keynote: Instructional designers coming out of the various higher education institutions need more scripting and video capture experiences. I'd have to agree with this assessment.
From the outside, multimedia looks quite simple to create. Neophyte consumers of multimedia consume the end product in very short time and often do not have any idea of how much work goes into the back end to create the ...
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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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There's something disconcerting about the term "denaturing." To denature something is to remove the natural character or properties of something. It's to undercut something natural. These would be fighting words for an environmentalist. So when I ran across this word in the context of the design of learning objects (DLOs), I had to take a second look. The concept goes like this: all building of digital learning objects is necessarily unreal, fake, simulated, and not ...
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"Humanists look at these games as a new expressive genre like drama, opera, or movies; social scientists view them as anew form of collective behavior; computer scientists, engineers, and industrial designers find them a new focus of invention." -- Murray, Bogost, Mateas and Nitsche
So digital gaming has been around for 35 years now. So the talk in the academic literature on educational gaming is that games can be much more than that. They serve a learning purpose. They ...
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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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'Tis the season for wish lists, at least in our commercialized culture. In that spirit, I thought I'd put out a wish list of affordances for an imaginary LMS.
I want to be able to post grades right at the point of responding to the learner's posting of the assignment. I don't want to have to skip over several screens in order to punch in a grade. I want a running update of each learner's grade ...
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Academics and theorists have discussed the self-organization theory of (informal) learning communities, with these creations identified as critical to lifelong learning. These grow not by any designed infrastructure per se but evolve on their own as people pursue their individual and shared interests. This concept relates to the one of the Internet evolving like a "tree," with its main trunk and branching off until the tips, where there are no nodes but tiny petioles. It's a form of ...
Continue reading Stigmergy: Digital Crumbs a la Hansel and Gretel
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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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Virtual reality consists of simulations. Users suspend reality in order to participate in this universe. Augmented reality consists of add-ons to the real-world.
The sci-fi version goes like this. A person puts on fashionable light-weight glasses empowered with cameras and displays. He or she goes into a live environment. The glasses collect information in the live environment and report that back to a computer. The computer generates informational overlays and details not available in the natural environment in ...
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For the past several years, a series of articles in academic journals have engaged the technological strategies deployed for customizing or adapting learning for different learners. This, of course, is done by the faculty (some) in an instructor-led course. However, in automated courses, the instructional design and the technologies then come into play to try to achieve this. The research discusses various strategies from creating learning models to profile users (based on psychology, cognition, preferences, personality ...
Continue reading Educational Technology Standing in for the Live Instructor
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Representing information in different ways changes people's senses of reality. IDs have a suite of various authorware tools to present data - whether it be in tables, graphical representations, drawings, 3D models, audio-video, and a range of other data.
The Wikipedia offers a formal and informal definition of fractals. For my purposes, I'll quote their informal definition: "In colloquial usage, a fractal is a shape that is recursively constructed or self-similar, that is, a shape that appears similar at ...
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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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I returned from the E-Learn 2006 conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, which was from October 13-17. This was my first time to attend the E-Learn conference. I had registered to attend the tutorial sessions on Friday, (a day before the conference started for everyone). Each was scheduled for three hours. The first session I went to was "Blended Learning Situations, Solutions, and Several Stunning Surprises", by Curt Bonk, professor at Indiana University. He talked about blended learning and gave several examples ...
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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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When we buy a piece of software, we pretty much assume that it'll be plug-and-play. Few of us read the manual first, and most just follow the directions for the upload and then noodle around until the pieces start coalescing into sense. The immense amounts of support that go into a software product's launch and the continuing help provided for its users often seem invisible to most users. Lately, I've been noticing this "digital bubble wrap" that ...
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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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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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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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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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"It's my brother's paper, and I didn't know he cheated."
Professor Mary Pat McQueeney of Johnson County Community College spoke about plagiarism detection software. (This was at the SIDLIT / Summer Institute on Distance Learning conference on Aug. 3 - 4 at the Kansas University Edwards campus.) She identified some side benefits to such software. One is that publicity about the uses of such universal adoption of programs at an institution of higher learning may deter academic dishonesty and ...
Continue reading Age of the "Literate" Machines II: Plagiarism Detection
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English professors Maureen Fitzpatrick and Mary Pat McQueeney presented on software programs that ostensibly "grade" writing. (This was at the SIDLIT conference at the Kansas University Edwards campus on Aug. 3 - 4, 2006.) Apparently, various standardized testing outfits use such software. The development of such programs begin with measuring and quantifying elements such as English mechanics, writing organization, development, stylistics, and content. How would one begin to measure this? How would one be able to quantify this? Fitzpatrick explained that ...
Continue reading Age of the "Literate" Machines: Electronic Grading
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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So a fair amount of research dollars have gone into natural language systems, AIs, and computerized intelligent agents. When I call some phone systems for information, I get the automated voice that directs me to where I want to go. At the grocery store, I check out my items by interacting with a canned digital voice. My banking is done online, but if I need to go to the phone, there's that same digital voice. I can go to ...
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Dr. Roberto H. Bamberger, a Government, Education, and Public Health Briefing Consultant with Executive Engagement and currently working with Microsoft Corp., suggests that eLearning may lead to a global exchange of ideas and the combined wisdom of people from various cultures, in a sense echoing Tim Berners-Lee's idealistic ideas for the WWW.
In his AAC&U plenary presentation "Creating Spaces for Learning: Exploring Technology's Role," he envisioned a world where technology is applied to solve shared challenges.
He ...
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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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When an LMS gets extremely popular, it becomes used 24/7 daily, which means there's no down time except for the mere slices when changes may be made. Programmers know when they have the most traffic to their servers, and they assiduously avoid using those times to upload and update. However, every so often, updates need to be made without much prior warning. And those are done in short stints.
Such an update was made to an LMS (which ...
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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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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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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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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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The buzzwords at the Educause Annual Conference in Orlando, last year was blogging, RSS feeds and readers. Even though everyone was talking about RSS at last year's conference, it has been around since 2002, when the New York Times began offering news by RSS feeds for the first time. Learn more on the history of RSS.
Some of you may already know what a RSS feed is and how to use it. But for those of you who do ...
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I found myself in an unintended discussion about the nature of blogs last night. I mentioned to my wife what I was going online under the guise of work (spreading the word about online learning, instructional design and community building), and next thing I know we are having a head-to-head about whether anyone is going to bother to read this stuff given the style of writing I am using (kinda a stream of consciousness, quasi-literary style, or in other words ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 February 2006
There has always been a mystique regarding software developers, at least where I'm from. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I met various people from the tech industry---some on the periphery and others at the heart. Those at the heart were the developers and the project leads. They were the ones who could speak to the machine and command it to execute on certain commands, with a deep precision and elegance. That was the ideal, of course, and one certainly ...
Continue reading The Human- Machine Interface and Learning Management System Versioning
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So a conference participant asked about what factors would make for a useful learning management system (LMS). This participant never left a business card or a note, so I was never able to deliver the details.
In doing some quick research, I found a great rubric tool from Edutools. However, before I got to this great tool, I went ahead and did a quick brainstorm.
Brand Reputation: The brand does matter in terms of how well they back up their ...