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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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A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.
Subject matter experts ...
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Some online learners give indications of great frustrations with the learning / course management technologies, but they’ll do it without direct communications. They’ll send endless emails and treat those like TMs. They’ll send spam emails to the entire class with personal queries. They’ll post unopenable files, and when the first one doesn’t work, they’ll keep doing the same thing a half dozen times instead of just pasting their text into the HTML window.
They’ll ...
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I have heard of some “teaching to the unconscious” in the sense of marketing, advertising, and branding. I have also read that the jury is out in terms of the research on the efficacy / inefficacy of whether such outreaches actually work.
Then recently, after I wheedled a book from a colleague that I’d been wanting to read for a long time, I came across this concept again. The concept here was found in Raph Koster’s much-cited book “A ...
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Most people can tell a 1970s movie by its design, the soundtrack, the generational jokes, the hairstyles, the fashions, and the video technologies. In the same way, dated multimedia and curricular materials may be identifiable by their styling…and their lack of direct and applied relevance.
One method for cost savings in instructional design is to pursue designs for curriculum which are “sustainable.” Another term for this is “future-proofing,” which is a little high-minded and ...
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For many freshman-level courses, it may be fair to assume that learners will be coming in cold to the learning domain. Coming in “cold” means that they lack basic background in the field. It also means that their skillsets may be scatter-shot in terms of the subject materials, and the learners may well be acquiring their learning skills as they go.
Strategies for supporting novice learners to a learning domain are manifold. First, one strategy involves building ...
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There are a number of strategies to organize course contents in the field of instructional design. One de facto one is to rely on the tables of contents of the selected textbook(s) for a course.
For many faculty, this is almost assumed. They are relying on the subject matter experts of a field who also have the ability to write and express themselves. Or they’re using collections that include many contributions from different authors organized ...
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The opening of the article was riveting. An instructor of an introductory course in computer programming was noticing his student demographics, and the high probability that they…
“Are from some minority group Did some portion of their k-12 in a compromised educational system Are students not just out of high school and may be working Are not born in the United States Speak English as there (sic) second language Have very little (sic) computer skills May be dismayed by the ...
Continue reading The Challenges of the "Highly Anxious" Student Profile
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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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Design questions that other people wrangle with regarding socio-technical systems often reveal a lot about people. With the emphasis on self-help and self-management as a money-savings endeavor for education, healthcare, and other aspects of modern life, people have been looking at how to offer sufficient feedback and encouragement to help people self-assess, and further, to help them know when to seek help (and from where).
Help-seeking is not as simple of a phenomena as one might ...
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Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
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At the recent SIDLIT conference, I attended Tracy Newman’s “Digital Storytelling: How to Bring your Stories to Life,” and the presenter offered a helpful concept in the assigning of video storytelling and creation to students.
Newman cited research that showed that student creations of digital stories may address a range of skills: research, writing, organization, technology, presentation, interview, interpersonal, problem-solving, and assessment skills. The secret, though, is to incrementalize the work ...
Continue reading A "Seemingly Simple" Assignment (in Digital Storytelling)
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Check out the trailer for an educational webisode series ("Suzy's Strategies") on doing well in college.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UobRqWGZNK8
for a college student well-being site located at
www.universitylifecafe.org
This webisode series will launch this Fall 2009.
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At the recent SIDLIT conference in Overland Park, KS, Tim Murphy presented on “Meeting the Challenges of International Online Teaching.” His task was to take part in online course redesigns for better acceptance by international audiences. He began with a Venn diagram of overlapping circles representing place, language and culture, for a global classroom.
At one point in the presentation, he asked rhetorically whether synchronous communications were ever advisable for international online classrooms. One ...
Continue reading Adjustments for International Online Teaching
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Accidental learning happens as a byproduct of formal or informal learning. It is unintentional and sometimes not even noticed by the learner. It is informed by serendipity, and it can take a person in powerful directions if they are open-minded, curious, and attuned to the potential for learning at every moment.
For instructional designers, considering ways to enhance the possibilities of learners bumping up against ideas and discovering new information should be part of the design. There can be rich ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 July 2009
A recent article referred to how some companies design technological tools for amateurs vs. novices. In a sense, instructional design may also differentiate between learners based on amateurs vs. novices—as a construct.
Okay, so definitions, first. A “novice” is a person who eventually aims to be an expert. This person is at the beginning stages of learning about a particular area of expertise. This person will be initiated into a field from elementary understandings to ...
Continue reading Designing Technological Tools (and Instruction) for Amateurs vs. Novices
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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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In every academic field, virtually, there is a push for discovering new information and new ways to doing things. This is also true for instructional design, which is a cross-disciplinary area.
There are also innovations from mulling over the extant research, which involve mostly qualitative and case-based works. There are the occasional quantitative types of research, but those are more about doctoral dissertations and system-wide research and the occasional business-funded research study. Truth to tell, it may be that the ...
Continue reading Accelerants for Innovations in Instructional Design Research
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A recent course build by a faculty member built the course foundation on resources found on the Web. Here, the instructor used links to downloadable files, simulations, and videos. She eschewed any textbooks. To create an overlay, she did add a syllabus and supplementary videos to explain the contents. She also invited professional colleagues to take part in videotaped interviews that illuminated the issues further.
It struck me that she was truly relying on the Web for her curriculum—by ...
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Subject matter experts from a variety of fields are turning towards online learning as a way to serve a wider constituency of learners. Some get on online learning projects because of grant funding and the originality of their expertise. Not all who get on projects particularly believe in online learning. As a matter of fact, some approach online learning with mixed emotions and attitudes. In a team that works well, these concerns are surfaced and addressed incrementally.
Continue reading Learning about E-Learning as a Team Collaboration Byproduct
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A generic syllabus is one that captures the main contents of an online course: the course description, the defined learning objectives, the catalog information, related texts and resources, a course schedule (to show the overall e-learning trajectory and course structure), the grading structure, and course policies (civility clauses, accessibility issues, and others). I had assumed that it always comes with every online course build, but one of the faculty on the build team asked several times about what this syllabus ...
Continue reading The Uses of Generic Syllabi in Collaborative Course Builds
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Elluminate™ hosted “Informal Learning or Non-Formal Learning: What Makes More Sense In Your Organization” presented by Lance Dublin of Dublin Group (dublinconsulting.net)and a worldwide consultant on learning (on June 10). Between formal and informal learning, is there another way—with “non-formal learning” as a semi-structured, semi-purposeful / semi-random way of learning in Web 2.0 spaces. (This suggests that formal learning tends to be structured and purposive, and informal learning tends to be unstructured and random.)
Dublin seemed to ...
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Professional writers often forget what it’s like to be a starting writer. They forget how sensitive writers may be about their work and how hard it is to share. They forget how stinging simple critiques may be. They forget that writers often conflate themselves with their work.
As an instructor who regularly “workshops” student writing online, I am continually re-learning how to adjust to the changing young writers who take the courses.
In a workshop ...
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I’d always thought that it was a pretty big disadvantage to come into a field with only very generalized knowledge (or occasionally, no knowledge). That’s just part of the work life of an instructional designer, I thought.
A recent project has helped me revise my opinion. There’s something to be said for empathizing with the total outsider student. Knowing where questions may arise may help in the curricular design. It may help in identifying what learning experiences ...
Continue reading Student Buy-in of the Instructor Framework for a Course
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A recent project has involved the use of the Quality Matters Rubric to ensure the quality of the e-learning through the curricular design. A trained QM-certified faculty member is spear-heading the critique. That said, the others of us without that training are still finding this rubric very helpful for aligning the elements of the course and ensuring that the basic elements are in place.
This rubric was funded through a FIPSE grant (from the US Department ...
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Bureaucratic reshufflings will affect access to various resources—of money and staffing. In the instructional design move coming on half a year ago now, it resulted in the loss of an “art shop.” By this, I mean access to a graphic designer who could brand websites, create posters, lay out e-newsletters, create logos, and provide creative design ideas.
For instructional design purposes, this was a tough loss. Designing for a visual generation, instructional designers need access to graphic arts talent ...
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Understanding the context of an instructional build is helpful for the instructional design. A recent project involves the professionalization of a field—or the formalizing of the training and education for individuals who work in a high-demand workforce that has not traditionally had high standards for entry.
The interesting part of this instructional design work was that the curriculum would be designed for online delivery. The curriculum would eventually have to fit a state-level assessment ...
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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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ELATEwiki is the Electronic Learning And Teaching Exchange created and edited by those interested in advancing the use of technology in teaching. This site is intended to host a wealth of freely available information categorized and organized into E-Learning and Teaching topics useful to teachers, scholars, students, and administrators seeking to understand the dynamic and changing higher education landscape during this critical time of transformation.
The concept for ELATEwiki emerged during a series of conversations among members of K-State’s ...
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David Shieh’s “These Lectures are Gone in 60 Seconds: Minute-long talks find success at a community college” got forwarded to us instructional designers by our supervisor recently. (http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i26/26a00102.htm) This issue had come up because of a request by some departments for a presentation that would cover some topics that are critical for e-learning: new technologies, e-learning quality, accessibility, intellectual property, and some design principles. They wanted this all in a short time ...
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Bringing a curriculum to life requires an understanding of various dependencies. There are chains of pre-requisites that must be met for an online curriculum to actually launch well and effectively. These include human, technological, and resource dependencies. This includes intellectual property ones.
Why these dependencies matter is because these are required to reach deadline-driven goals. And it’s critical not to build loose ends into the system. While parts of an online course or training may be decoupled from the ...
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After finalizing work on a project, a colleague and I were commiserating about how it’s always good to have a project finish smoothly and on deadline. He wrote of how various projects have a way of bogging down and not resulting in a usable final product in any timely fashion. I recalled my former supervisor advising—half-jokingly--“If the project collapses, don’t be under it.” That project didn’t collapse. I haven’t had one fail yet, but ...
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A small team has been researching and mulling the idea of launching an e-learning faculty wiki for “the good of the order” and as a university contribution to the Web-enabled information spaces. The idea would be to use the wiki to surface implicit knowledge and also to create a professional community mediated through technologies.
The team diligently scoped out the competition through direct research and queries posted to professional listservs. They found quality wikis like Edutech ...
Continue reading Early Proposal of a New E-Learning Faculty Wiki
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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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“Teaching with Online Games” Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
I’d never taken part in a truly global webinar. Most of the ones I attend are local…or only have the occasional person tapping in from a few other locales. Then, I attended Dr. Gibson’s “Teaching with Online Games,” and as a warm-up to the actual presentation, the facilitator asked participants to indicate their locations on a virtual map. She turned on that annotation tool in Elluminate, and the ...
Continue reading "Teaching with Online Games" Webinar with Dr. David Gibson
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For many, deadlines just sort of blow right past them, and changes don’t get made. One of the more seductive aspects of digital content is that it feels sort of permanent even though it can so easily be updated. So much digital content in courses need updating because of changes in research, in available digital resources, in pedagogical methods, and in technologies.
Some make changes on the fly. As they realize there are issues to fix, they go ahead ...
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Addressing Learners’ Online Test Anxieties
“And one of the things about testing is that it’s harder to do better than you can do, but it’s easy to do worse than you can do.”
– Dr. Ann Johnson, in “A Map of the Stars: Using Test Data to Create Useful Academic Interventions”
Test anxieties have a way of manifesting in various ways. I’ve seen doctoral students, who were college administrators in their “real lives,” fall apart and walk out ...
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There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.
Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little ...
Continue reading A Phone Interview about Culturally Sensitive E-Learning
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There are times when a long memory is downright unnecessary, but in most cases, a long memory can be quite beneficial, particularly in e-learning. Several recent incidences have highlighted this for me.
While the four-walls “digital enclosure” doesn’t truly fully exist yet, for all practical purposes, it does in most learning / course management systems. The simple concept of the digital enclosure is that it is a place where a person’s actions are all recorded ...
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Our campus has an assessment conference earlier this month. The main message to faculty and administrators was the importance of assessing inputs and learning outcomes.
This endeavor is encouraged in part because of the upcoming accreditation visit for the university in a few more years, but program assessment has continuing value—to study and measure academic achievements, student learning, and even coincidental learning. This knowledge is not just for in-house use but for the requirement to publicly account for the ...
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Conventional wisdom has it that most of an online course should be complete before it launches.
A more challenging approach for experienced faculty is to use an “emergent” curriculum. That is a course that evolves the curriculum—with or without student input—as the course evolves. This may apply to learning that is also emergent in the world, such as a new course about a cutting-edge technology or policy or phenomena…which is rare but does occur now and again ...
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It usually takes several elements to go wrong in an online situation for things to get really nutty. And reversing this little catastrophe early in an online course is not difficult to see at all. First, I trusted in a pre-made class. While I had gone in and rearranged files, I hadn’t looked to check if the calendar was set up. I didn’t check to make sure that a learner walk-through was working. Mistake 1.
Next, I did ...
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One risk to having taught on a subject for a long time is to disconnect from the experiences of new learners. Long immersion in a topic also leads an instructor to having assumptions about how information may be approached, and hard as a person may try to fight this, it may lead to an intellectual stasis, a comfort.
This seems to be a pretty dangerous place to be as an instructor. And that danger is compounded by teaching online where ...
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Dr. Michael Wesch always offers an engaging presentation, mixed with aptly used high tech, and there are always surprises—of the technological kind and absolutely of the human kind. In a recent standing-room only presentation at K-State, he spoke of the need to use technologies to help college students engage with learning. (“A Portal to New Media Literacy: Engaging New Technologies to Engage Students”)
He showed his digital ethnography dashboard http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography To show his uses ...
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Every quarter or two or three, I get into an online scape. Most scrapes can be seen forming like a storm cloud from a long way away. Usually, a student takes offense at a perceived slight because they’ve received a particular comment about their writing. They’ve conflated their idea of self with their work. Or their grades aren’t what they feel they deserve: they assume that they have earned full points before they’ve done any work ...
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A current federally-funded project involves the building of a site that hopes to improve student mental health, and in so doing, prevent suicides.
The stats say that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Young adults 18 – 24 have the highest incidence of reported suicide ideation. A recent study apparently found that half of students had suicidal thoughts at some point in their history. Mood, interpersonal and academic concerns apparently have driven some students to be ...
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Sometimes, engaging in ID work means interacting with a course on-and-off over a year or more. I was revisiting just such a course when I saw it with new eyes. The professor had put in study breaks in the online learning. These study breaks involved deep breathing exercises. They involved humorous out-takes. They involved stretches.
This add-on at the ends of each videotaped lecture segment really added a light touch to the learning. This course deals with learning principles, and ...
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In Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” (2008), he talks about the competitive advantage that open source environments have as labs for creating and evolving new technologies. He suggests that for-profits run into the challenge of a “fitness landscape” that encourages settling for the first and easiest solution and discourages further exploration for more creative or elegant solutions.
“Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of ...
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A recent presentation at C2C's SIDLIT (Aug. 1, 2008) addressed the physical prototyping of a high-tech classroom in order to make it the most flexible and functional possible. The idea was that once this prototype had been experienced by many different types of users that that feedback would be assiduously collected and then applied to a brand new government building, with standardized classrooms.
Here, the prototype classroom was built to specs in a warehouse…after an initial planning process ...
Continue reading Prototyping a Physical Classroom for Hybrid Learning
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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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Instructional designers engage in knowledge work. They collaborate with faculty to collect and transfer information, which must somehow be designed to evolve into knowledge. Our main tools are pedagogical and technological. As service personnel, we support or lead from behind, often based on the instructors’ comfort levels.
The faculty members are the default subject matter experts (SMEs). They have to identify the elements of learning that may be transferable. They must define the degree of abstraction of knowledge needed ...
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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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E-learning mitigates time and distance to a degree, but it does not totally collapse time.
At around the 8th week of a 10-week quarter, occasionally, a student will come up with a proposal that goes something like this: How about if I do all the work I missed in the prior 8 weeks and graduate because this is the last course I need? The student promises a Herculean effort to get a course done in a very short time. The ...
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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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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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A number of times now, various departments have approached this office with a common lament: their grant applications got positive feedback except that they were asked to shore up their pedagogical research, reasoning and execution. An ID then gets called in.
Few professors want to change their teaching approach. And for online learning, what many want to do is the same-old same-old (they’ll videotape everything).
At a meeting last month, the group wanted to learn about ...
Continue reading Supporting the Pedagogical Piece to a Grant Application
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An online course, by the time it’s complete and ready for deployment, often has plenty of moving parts. It involves documents that provide an overview of the learning—through the syllabus, the course policies, and the course calendar. There are the presential materials like videos, slideshows, simulations, texts, and other forms of lectures and demonstrations. There are the assignments. There are the sample student works. There are assessments, with rubrics and gradesheets. There are research project ideas.
And then ...
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It is a simple truism that most people would not want to be replaced out of their jobs. Suggesting that might make a person downright uncomfortable. So it was with amusement that I came across a phrase in my readings on automated learning: “offloading the instructor.”
That very blunt phrase highlights a very real factor in the support for automation of learning. Less offensive phrasing is usually used, more like “cost-savings.”
I recently co-presented on automated learning at this campus ...
Continue reading "Offloading the Instructor" and Automated Learning
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One of the first tenets of political storytelling is to embody one’s story. Have a clear alignment between one’s lived life and one’s presentations…the theories-in-action vs. the professed theories-in-use.
At a recent national conference, a large corporation fielded a team of presenters who demonstrated a system that they used for automated training of their staff. However, instead of showing any of their actual trainings, they used fictional training contents—in this case, how to tell why ...
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A colleague generously set up a campus tour for me, and during this tour, we visited a state-of-the-art e-learning lab.
The lab itself looked like any other set of academic offices, with a mixture of computers, papers and books….and students…and comfortable furniture. We all crowded into a small meeting room to see some of the work of this office (which has a strong track record of federal educational grant funding as well ...
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In the quest for high learner retention and high participation, one strategy in the building of CSCL spaces (computer supported collaborative learning) has been to encourage the building of so-called “back channels.”
In all sorts of communication environments, having such informal back channels is useful. It allows for richer interchanges without people having to necessarily go on the formal record. And if vetted, such information can be highly useful and pro-social and pro-learning.
One example of such ...
Continue reading Developing Back Channels for Online Learners
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
01 May 2008
On Feb. 11, 2008, Dr. Cable Green (Director of eLearning for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges) hosted a virtual session for 42 faculty and administrators from around the US (with a cluster in Washington State) around “Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources.” This used the Elluminate technology for the virtual participants and actually had a physical location, too, at the Bellingham Technical College.
This was billed as a ...
Continue reading Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources
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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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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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Every so often, in a presentation or conversation, a comment has a way of sticking in one’s memory. Here was a presentation by an individual presenting on the importance of leadership training. His presentation was tailored for the audience members in the military in order to sell this training.
He talked about crystallized and fluid intelligence, in terms of knowledge, abilities, skills and attitudes. He offered a global leadership model with meta-competencies. He showed a taxonomy of leadership competencies ...
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The past several months, the issue of e-learning accessibility has escalated to be one of the central issues of concern on this campus. As such, that has meant that a fair amount of time has been spent on the laws and regulations for accessibility and then on the various technological strategies to ensure the accessibility of images, data tables, films, audio files, and other digital learning objects.
An interesting twist on this relates to The Layered Model of Computer Supported ...
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At a recent e-learning conference, a presenter on informal learning demonstrated his instrument that involved basic trivia questions and also involved an assessment of how much confidence each respondent had to the certainty of correctness for each answer.
He showed that people had quite a few incidences of high confidence linked with incorrect answers.
At another event, the speaker asked the audience how many of them made decisions in their lives knowing they were wrong. No ...
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Every so often, the educational literature offers some snippet of intrigue. There I was in a paper about LMSes when the authors - out of Japan - mentioned the use of permanent mixed ability groups in some of their higher education learning. These are groups that are set up to work together through various academic subject matters and courses, and they are of mixed abilities, which means that there are elite high-achieving groups or groups set apart by personalities or same-tier abilities ...
Continue reading The Use of "Permanent Mixed Ability Groups" in Higher Ed
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Serving on committees may be boring on the face of it, but there's always plenty to learn about others' roles and how their expertise may affect one's own work and learning. That and an online course that I teach on how to teach online...culminated in an eye-opening visit to a music "studio."
A music instructor at a local private school accepted an invitation to visit a state-of-the-art music lab at K-State, and so it was that about ...
Continue reading Studios (Pedagogically Focused High-Tech Spaces)
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A number of published works have addressed issues of designed interactivity in online courses to create a sense of community and to promote learning. There are discovery spaces where communities just evolve and grow on their own. There are facilitated communities of practice.
It seems like strategies for creating hallway conversations in online learning spaces would be helpful.
When I worked for a major aircraft manufacturer years ago, I remember my supervisor would do a ...
Continue reading Trying to Create Hallway Conversations in an Online Course
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Those who've worked in education for some time have seen this phenomena of flat-lining - that moment when a learner hits a learning wall and can't get over it. This is no small learning hurdle. Rather, I think of it as something like a learner trying to draw on resources that were never quite built up, and there just aren't the tools to get over that wall.
That is, the learner has to start from the fundamentals...and ...
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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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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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Genevieve Wood (Concurrent Technologies Corporation), a speaker at the Washingotn Interactive Technologies conference in late August, introduced a tool that may help instructional designers collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs), through the use of a shared building site. Her presentation was titled "Collaborative Design of Immersive Simulations." One front-line challenge for instructional designers may be that they receive contradictory feedback from subject matter experts and may have difficulties resolving these, particularly when there is no overriding power of a lead ...
Continue reading Collaborative Design of Immersive Simulations
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
17 September 2007
"The immersive nature of computer games, and the invisibility or transparency of the medium that Moulthrop suggests this produces, works both to empower the user and to simultaneously serve the interests of the oligopolies that produce them. The nature of immersion is seen not only as a desired quality for the production of active, engaging and meaningful experiences, but also simultaneously as the means through which the gameplayer is most likely to be exploited in the interests of monster conglomerates ...
Continue reading Creating "Controlled" Cyber Addiction for Training Purposes
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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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Lou Iorizzo, the head of the Army Training Staff Center in Training and Doctrine Command, gave the Interactive Technologies keynote for SALT in Crystal City, Virginia, on Aug. 22. He spoke on "Enabling Authentic Environments." One of the main challenges is to help their learners acclimate and function well in changing and adaptive situations. While people tend to be comfortable with a known through-put, those who would design learning need to focus, too on unintended consequences and flux in situations ...
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Sims have been a part of higher education for many years. A simple one may be a kind of role play held in a classroom where students take on different roles. It may be a mock court.
My first design of an online sim occurred about a year ago, and it involved designing a digital replacement for a real nation-wide sim that stretched over several weeks. The sim design was coming near the end of a three-university grant (and I ...
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The 2007 Interactive Technologies Conference (sponsored by SALT) included a presentation by two Apple staff--LeRoy Dennison and Russ White. The presentation (full of multimedia and levity) was titled: "Rapid Development at Apple (Quickly and Effectively Delivering Training to a Worldwide Sales Force)."
The training work in this organization manifests in a variety of ways. The training work involves training both the direct and indirect channel sales force. They also offer fee-based customer training (which from the design angle involves the ...
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So over break, as part of a family road trip, I got to visit some condo models in Chicago. One in particular was a luxury building that involved the use of a sophisticated DVD with virtual depictions of the various units and the new building itself just a few blocks off the Magnificant Mile. The quality of this simulated experience was something only an established builder with many years of marketing could really build or commission. And this experience, while ...
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"There's no reason to have walls in a classroom."
In any number of conferences - whether about journalism or advertising / branding or filmmaking or eLearning - the phenom of Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) keeps resurfacing. It's 3D; it's immersive; it's creative, and it's the in-thing right now.
At the recent SIDLIT (Summer Institute on Distance Learning, of C2C or Colleague-to-Colleague), Stacey Fox of the University of Kansas offered "Synthetic Worlds: Second Life in Education ...
Continue reading Classrooms without Walls and Thousands of Feet Above Ground
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Some mainline media organizations offer some fine quality slideshows and digital movies. I'm thinking of the tightly edited food and restaurant reviews of Phil Vettel The Chicago News Tribune with their condensed mix of food appreciation, chef interviews, atmospheric digital captures, music, and scrumptious food views. I'm also thinking of The New York Times in its real estate section with its slideshows and voiceover narratives related to real estate.
One of these was by an architect, and he ...
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At several institutions of higher education that I've worked in, I've seen some tentative moves towards engaging the world for global eLearning. The steps seem to be wobbly and tentative, more hopeful than effective. These endeavors often involve third-party vendors who may represent different entities or populations in other countries. These efforts involve small groups that are budgeted to go overseas to try to attract learners. And often, these endeavors are not supported by overseas offices or anything ...
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An eLearning Course Curriculum Wizard Building an Instructor-Led "High-Tech / High-Touch" LMS-delivered Course
Preconference Tutorial Washington Interactive Technologies Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) Arlington, Virginia August 2007
This goes through the steps for creating an instructor-led eLearning course for higher ed. Combining educational theory and modern technologies, this session will address efforts in the following areas: project scope, learner analysis, course contents, learning outcomes, applied pedagogical theory for eLearning, technology selection (especially for multimedia builds), project checkpoint definition, course structuring ...
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Those who nose around graduate school and academia will run up against a computerized locked-down lab for true assessments / testing.
A locked down computer lab is one that does not allow for Web surfing. It is password protected in terms of entry. It captures learner inputs and makes them available to the instructors. It disallows the saving of information on the desktop. It's used for doctoral comprehensives, masters comps, and any range of strict tests.
Those who have the ...
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One carry-over between projects have been vocabulary lists. For one project, the vocabulary list was uploaded into a database and connected to various modules of learning. For a current project, the vocabulary list will be deployed as both a Web-table and Flash object flashcards. In another project, pop-ups with word definitions may be created as a rollover effect. Words matter a whole lot in online learning. Every academic field has its own verbiage and meanings tied to those words. Add ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
08 May 2007
Michael Allen's Guide to e-Learning: Building Interactive, Fun, and Effective Learning Programs for Any Company by Michael W. Allen Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons 2003 $34.95 USsoft cover 328 pp.
Sometimes, a new approach takes plenty of sell before people buy into new practices. That's the sense a reader may get in reading Dr. Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning.
The author's enthusiastic and intrusive voice gives a sense of a textual chatbot, but that conversational tone ...
Continue reading Edutainment: Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning (Brief Resource Review)
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One higher education takeaway from the flooding of New Orleans relates to disaster recovery / business continuance (DR/BC). Many of the universities in New Orleans survived because of the good will and contributions of other universities - that took the stranded students and offered them a comparable education but which deflected the tuition back to the universities in that city.
This realization that the brick-and-mortar of a campus could be hit by an unforeseen disaster led various ...
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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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Models have a way of helping people conceptualize processes, among other things. Bates and Poole offer the "SECTIONS" model for instructional design that is helpful in the sense that it offers an instructional view as well as an administrator view (along with some technological savvy). The cost, novelty and speed concerns are more administrative ones, and technology undergirds this. Also, the consideration for swapping in materials is highly helpful.
S "Students: what is known about the students - or potential students ...
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Years ago, I presented a small session on another campus about how to build unique aspects to an online course. The context was that the faculty were inheriting pre-built courses used at the state level in a college consortium. These pre-built courses were well conceptualized, professionally built and porous and flexible enough for instructors to add their own designs and personal touches. Effective teaching and learning often involve a degree of personalization, the application of the ...
Continue reading Inheriting Online Courses...and Owning Them
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It's often refreshing to hear more traditionalist voices in education - those that will laud lectures, text (as a "reusable technology"), and that will decry some of the strategies used in eLearning. M. David Merrill, a visiting professor from the U of Florida, was one of the presenters who joined us by a live Net-mediated videostream. He described learning as continual and goal-based. Good learning is purposeful, not incidental.
He does ...
Continue reading A Skeptical Voice re: Online Exploratory 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 snippet of information was included deep in the presentation. A fascinating curricular build has been achieved for miners to improve safety. The learning was delivered off of a website as well as through mobile devices. The learning met SCORM 2004 compliance and Section 508 standards. It useful integrated prior existing digital contents. It met the standards of the oversight agency, and it did so under budget and within deadline. They had built in an "accident reporting coach" to help ...
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Elearning's rich functionalities may play a large role in the support and promotion of accelerated learning. A recent conference I attended defined this term as the following type of learning situation. Accelerated learning
This is not to be confused ...
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It doesn't take long working as an instructional designer to realize that some curricular builds will be "data hungry" ones. Data hungry curricular builds require massive amounts of digital learning objects and information. They require huge amounts of research. They require complex data tracking. They require lots of legal copyright releases and permission seeking. They demand fact cross-checking and accuracy. They demand attention to details because every change has a price in terms of investment of ...
Continue reading The "Black Hole": Data Hungry Curricular Models
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"Good ideas can lead to good practices..."
Sometimes, in work places, colleagues and supervisors think of theory as something snobby, excessive, unnecessary and maybe wrong. Several times in a recent week, I was given a carefully worded piece of advice - from the same person. His advice went: Avoid theory. He had been on the receiving end of a whitepaper on digital learning objects and SCORM, a work that I am currently revising and updating based on ...
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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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A recent project involved the writing of instructor notes to go along with a three-part online-delivered case study. While the instructional design involved conducing interviews, researching and writing the cases, the ideas for the assignments, and the creation of digital learning objects, the tough part came when I started to draft some commentary to instructors. More specifically, I was drafting the "instructor notes." In thinking about this issue, I refer back to various instructor's manuals that accompanied academic textbooks ...
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Course management for an intimate online course of 20 differs greatly when there's a course of 200 - 1000 students. When I worked in colleges for many years, I saw the occasional "larger" course, and these were for topics that students really enjoyed, and maybe the higher end number of learners was about 60 or 70. Having taught at universities for over five years, I have had some experiences of teaching a face-to-face course with several hundred learners. Some of ...
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"Program" might be too large of a word for this experience, but I'll use it in the heading as a kind of shorthand. At a prior college where I worked, the school made small grants available for individuals with experience in eLearning who wanted to work with colleagues (in cross-functional dyads) to set up online courses. Professionals often like to learn from one another, and this built on that concept. This would be an extension of faculty sharing.
I ...
Continue reading A Low-Cost Faculty Mentoring Program for Online Learning
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So Dr. Michael Wesch (assistant anthro prof at K-state) has caused a YouTube splash with his witty video. Worth a look. Even more electrifying live.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/feb/13/professors_video_creates_sensation_youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
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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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One of the basic tenets of instructional design for online learning is to build for the learner. Without direct insights or access to the learner base, an ID ends up having to speculate based on the demographics of a particular audience. The build then becomes based on speculation, hearsay and guesswork. After all, how does one build for an audience that one has never met? The point of entry then seems to focus on the curriculum. The "what" of what ...
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At the same time that the mass media carry stories of students using text-messaging lingo in their college homework and examinations, the great push for eLearning has hit its stride. Much of this learning is still text-based because of the extra load that multimedia and audio-visual digital resources may place on a system and on learners in terms of the download. Is there a certain baseline literacy needed to take advantage of eLearning - not technologically ...
Continue reading Defining Minimal Literacy Requirements for eLearning?
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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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The features that make a game a strong one often enhances that game's efficacy as an elearning tool. An effective game needs to be engaging, playable and challenging; it shouldn't be confusing or unexciting. In the same way, a training game needs to be engaging in order to foster learning and skills acquisition and mastery. Training games are used in corporate and military environments to address new learning and to head off skills degradation.
(I would argue that ...
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I wouldn't have believed the following if it hadn't actually happened. My students and I were chatting about one thing or another when one of them mentioned that she weighed 350 pounds and had problems with her walking. The shock came not from any weight revelation but from my realizing that I'd forgotten that my students had bodies. We were engaging totally cognitively, and the other aspects of their lives had dropped away.
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So I was at a fair in Puyallup, Washington. In doing a basic walk-around to see what to sample, I noticed two people wearing full head-gear. They had some attachments to their arms and were jabbing at unseen fighters or adversaries in the hot afternoon, a few years ago. They seemed and were oblivious to the crowd around them. They reminded me of how people sometimes sing to themselves while wearing earbuds...and maybe rendering something out-of-tune ...
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Years ago, my UNDP supervisor greeted me with an astute observation, which I'll paraphrase. She essentially said, "I don't care what your motives are coming here, but it's really what you achieve on-ground that matters." Another saying has been, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Those who've applied systems theory analysis to the real-world know how often this saying applies to Northern countries' efforts in Southern countries' affairs. The complexity of the world ...
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One of the toughest challenges of launching an online course seems to be to define an eLearning path. "Where do I go?" seems to be a common query for those who may be taking an online course for the first time, and that's a very valid question. ELearning can be very disorienting.
One of the biggest tasks of an LMS is to provide a sense of an eLearning path albeit without imposing a pre-made structure. Some courses may have ...
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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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The pattern, it seems, is that there are ever more entrancing layers of assimilation into machine life. We're learning scripted behaviors by integrating with machines. We can immerse into our digital alter egos with ease. We can live out a whole day and never leave the digital cocoon. The machine world so far has been one of predictability, do-overs, the quick thrills, the visual / sensory overloads, and ...
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Several academic articles that I've read of late have mentioned an engaging concept that has been around for a long time. The concept is simple: empower faculty to use multimedia to build their online courses and learning artifacts. Faculty have the SME knowledge and skill base. They often have instructional talent. They can use the technology to bring it all together and have a course exactly how they want it. They will have it all, rolled into one neat ...
Continue reading Empowering Instructors to do their own Multimedia Builds
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Pervasive or ubiquitous learning has been evolving with the explosion of new technologies from portable multimedia players to PDAs to cell phones, in a wifi environment. The concept seems to be not only lifelong learning but anytime-anywhere learning. In-class instructors have long struggled with trying to keep student attention in lecture halls where learners are multi-tasking on their laptops by checking email and TMing on their phones and scheduling on their PDAs. Now, instructors who create podcasts for deployment are ...
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So for the past few days, I've engaged in all sorts of conversations. There have been rollicking conversations with one of the learners in an online course about teaching online, and her contributions have been so substantive and pro-learning that she really is one of the honorary instructors. And then my supervisor served as "mystery guest" in our online classroom to engage learners in real-time conversations via the chat. Here, we practiced the protocols of speaking in real time ...
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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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A student-friendly tool for an online class is Week Zero or Pre-Week. Week Zero is the week prior to the first day of an online class. During this period. The online classroom is opened and made available to learners. Some instructors use it just to let learners acclimate to the learning management system (LMS).
Others proactively turn it into a review session. They design instructional paths for learners through the first week. They set up incentives to ...
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A prior blog addressed some of the "ruts" that may influence a course redesign, for all the hopes for a fresh change. Other challenges appear once the redesign has started.
Redesigning an online course often involves remaking various digital artifacts - learning objects, slideshows, lectures, interactive snippets, policies, and what-not. For others, learning objects may be refurbished by swapping out images, updating the language, switching in new slides for old ones, using new graphics, and putting in fresh film ...
Continue reading Course Redesign II: Digital Artifacts and Alignments
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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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The Power of eLearning: The Essential Guide for Teaching in the Digital Age by Shirley Waterhouse Boston: Pearson Education 2005 262 pp. softcover
Dr. Shirley Waterhouse offers a practical and solid text on elearning that should win many over to this learning approach. From academia, she draws on sound principles: Chickering and Gamson's "Seven Principles...Undergraduate Education", Bloom's "Taxonomy of Intellectual Behaviors," and Gagne's "Nine Events of Instruction") and practices. From the business realm, she focuses on ...
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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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As I've worked on more projects involving groups of dispersed stakeholders, I've come to a fundamental conclusion: people need something to shake a stick at.
This holds true even for those projects that originate on campus and evolve on campus - with various stakeholders scattered around various buildings. Often, the work shifts to virtual connections after the first meeting or two. Having lots of eyes on a project can be helpful in terms of its direction and its shaping ...
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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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by Brent Anders
12 July 2006
Learning Styles have become exceedingly common at all levels of academia, yet are Learning Styles real and if so, are they so important that instructors should spend time addressing the issue? The answer is a bit complex but attainable through a thorough understanding of the real issue at hand. The phrase "Learning Styles," is generally defined as a "model [that] classifies students according to where they fit on a number of scales pertaining to the ways they receive and process ...
Continue reading Are Learning Styles Simply A Myth? - If not, are they really that important?
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2006
Managing E-Learning Strategies: Design, Delivery, Implementation and Evaluation By Badrul Khan 2005 426 pp. $69.95 soft cover Information Science Publishing
E-Learning QUICK Checklist By Badrul Khan 2005214 pp. $29.95 soft cover Information Science Publishing
Dr. Badrul Khan's textual resources offer a general look at eLearning through the lens of his 8-category model: "institutional, management, technological, pedagogical, ethical, interface design, resource support, and evaluation" aspects. These, he asserts, are "logically comprehensive and empirically the most useful dimensions for ...
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An occasional goal of online learning instructional designers is to raise the techno-literacy of learners. While many learners use a variety of technologies---often in ways that befuddle their instructors---many do not see through the technology to understand the structures and processes behind the practical glitz. There may be a reification of the technologies, such as the early cyberspace writings on how the Web is a god, not human connections and synergies via electronic communications (phone lines ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 June 2006
"In any class that you have, a third of the people are good writers; a third need more work, and about a third are going to take hours." -- Gail Tremblay
Given that the course that Gail Tremblay would be a SME on would be online, our conversation moved to the work of building community online. As she noted, the quality of an online learning experience depended in part on who the learners are and ...
Continue reading Forming Community Online in a Writing Course (Q&A with Gail Tremblay)
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Gail Tremblay's approach to teaching writing is very conducive to a learner-centered approach. I suspect her style has evolved from her being a considerate human being foremost and then an artist and a writer. Her generosity in agreeing to be one of my two SMEs on a course redesign (English Composition 1) and then inviting me to her home in Olympia, Washington, were both gestures of fine kindness.
The following then are some highlights from our half-day chat.
A ...
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Designing World-Class E-Learning: How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, & Columbia University are Succeeding at e-Learning By Roger C. Schank, Ph.D. New York: McGraw-Hill $34.95 hardcover 2002
Using a folksy, anti-establishment tone, Roger C. Schank, Ph.D., offers real-world case studies of e-learning projects. Along the way, he drops some pretty famous names of corporations and higher education learning institutions. The pedagogical goals: true-to-life, cost-effective, relevant, and connected to learners. What follows are rich anecdotes from the e-learning design ...
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The Enduring Legacies Reservation-Based Program Course Redesign Conference in Seattle introduced a wonderful approach to course redesign - that seems revolutionary and "but of course" at the same time. This course redesign involved student feedback. This wasn't feedback collected in an impersonal survey format alone, but was based on lurking on online courses, attending face-to-face classes, study leader experiences with learners, quarterly interviews of students, staff and faculty, and other means. The in-person sharing of ideas strengthened learner insights. The ...
Continue reading Listening to Learners in the Course Redesign
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"I tend to try to help people to address whatever it is they need to address...I like to make assignments where people have a way of making it their own, whatever it is. I want them to make it their own." -- Gail Tremblay
"In the Indian community like in all communities, different people have different interests and strengths, and just like among European-Americans, there are great physicists and mathematicians...I make sure my students know that they are not ...
Continue reading A "SME" for Building Curriculum for Native American Learners
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Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction by Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson Jossey-Bass: A Wiley Imprint 2004 129 pp. softcover
Some people have the social skills to get groups of people to warm up and mingle, say, at a party. Drs. Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson are just those sorts of people albeit in online eLearning spaces. In asynchronous courses, instructors need to build community, set up virtual teams and engage learners. Engaging the ...
Continue reading Engaging the Online Learner (Brief Resource Review)
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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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Dr. Joan Lippincott of the Coalition for Networked Information suggested a multi-pronged approach to eLearning space design by considering learning principles, disciplinary applications of eLearning, the Net Gen style, and various environments. Deep learning should entail a social component, be active, contextual, engaging and "student-owned," she suggested. This new generation of learners enjoys figuring out their own learning instead of just drawing from experts. They prefer multi-media to text. They enjoy working in groups, and they multi-task as a matter ...
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A number of software programs have been released to identify and head off plagiarism. Some of these archive digitized learner papers into a database against which they compare other papers. These programs will identify points of similarity. These have not been without problems---as many learner complaints and copyright infringement assertions have been made about these programs. It may well be the low-tech solutions that will carry the day.
Drs. Mary Slavin and Roseanne Torsiello of Berkeley College, presenters at an ...
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Malcolm Brown (of Dartmouth College) in "Trends in Learning Space Designs" offered some fresh insights on the building of so-called "learning spaces". He noted that space might be construed as a "continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied," and also as "the freedom and scope to live, think, and develop in a way that suits one." Both definitions shimmer and interact in the design of digital learning spaces. He defined various learning spaces. Some are formal ones ...
Continue reading Physical and Digital Learning Space Designs
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There are moments when I'm completely baffled. This doesn't happen often, and it doesn't happen for long stretches. A few weeks ago, I inherited a database, fiscal responsibilities, a load of social relationships---all in a volunteer position related to a homeowners association. With that came QuickBooks and a method of accounting that was theoretically straightforward...but the database itself was built idiosyncratically. People's names were listed willy-nilly, some by their last names, some by the first ...
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Creativity in Virtual Teams: Key Components for Success By Jill E. Nemiro The Collaborative Work Systems Series, Center for the Study of Work Teams 2004 San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Pfeiffer 314 pp. softcover
The Fifty Feet Rule of Collaboration "The probability of people communicating or collaborating more than once a week drops off dramatically if they are more than the width of a basketball court apart." - Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps (1997, p. 6) in Virtual Teams
Film editor ...
Continue reading Creativity in Virtual Teams (Brief Resource Review)
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For all the emphasis on digital teaching and learning, there's plenty of focus on the creation of F2F (face-to-face) learning spaces for instructors and learners. One new/old concept was that of the studio classroom. Such studios enable an instructor to watch others learn, so he/she can make better decisions on how to structure the learning environment.
A studio classroom is a collaborative place with plenty of computers organized around clustered desks, so ...
Continue reading Studio Classes: "The Space Should Look like the Doing."
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Sometimes, going to a national conference on technology and learning seems to be an exercise in joyful daydreaming. The endeavors tend to be high-minded. Administrators and instructors will talk about standardizing instructors' electronic presentations. They'll talk about setting up standards for online learning across the campus. They'll talk about having instructors do their own multimedia builds. Setting up that alignment between people in an organization may be quite a challenge. Making change is terrifically hard work.
One exercise ...
Continue reading Force-Field Analysis re: Online Learning on Campuses
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Susan Patrick, the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology of the US Department of Education, spoke at the Beach Museum of Art on Apr. 26 to a receptive crowd. Her talk related to K-state's strengths as an institution of higher education.
Drawing on her national and international level work, she observed that Mexico took three years to digitize its K-12 curriculum in order to maximize their ability to educate its populace.
She shared other inspirational examples and ...
Continue reading Online Teaching and Learning for Global Workforce Training
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For any number of online classes and curriculums, it's a struggle to find sufficient raw materials for the development. Finding images with copyright releases can be a challenge. People's promises of sending images may sort of drop off their mental agendas, and voila---nothing. Resources may be handed over but often without the metadata needed for integration into a project. Sometimes, an ID gets so desperate that she has to go out into the field herself with a ...
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As a new young instructor with the UNDP in PR China (my third and fourth years there), I'd been getting subtle hints that a prior American instructor hadn't come across so well. For a while, my students would avoid telling me outright what it was that made her somewhat distasteful to them. Since she was on their minds, I knew I would eventually get the story. The story went like this...and the reasons ...
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An unavoidable truth on university and college campuses is that (at one level) it's all about the Benjamins. The very direct administrators will own up without much prodding, and then it's all about filling the course rolls with paying students. The secondary concern has to do with the learning needs of students and their "takeaways." For a purist, that's sort of going to the dark side. As a person who has been around a while in the ...
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I can empathize with my colleagues when it comes to working with technology. I spent a good chunk of last week creating an example of a simulated message board with annotations for our Demo course for Axio Learning Online. Although it sounds like a very simple task, it has quite a few layers to it. First, you have to create an instructor (at least one, but there can be more) and several students in the course. Then you have to ...
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There's little doubt that alpha and beta testing are important parts to the design process. There must be a procedure to evaluate whether a multimedia design is working or not.
For years, my former students in "Writing for New Media" had set up alpha and beta tests. They had test-run their sites. Some of them went live and built up a following. Others never went live, just sort of existed in electronic portfolios and student sample work DVDs. I ...
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It seems like in every discussion for selecting technologies that decision-makers have to vote between one platform or another, or go platform agnostic. They have to play off against others in commercialism... They have to figure what combinations to configure for service to learners. They have to decide what would best serve their users' needs.
The temptation is to remain non-committal. After all, any decision made means an investment in staff time, mental space, hard work, server space, potential licensing ...
Continue reading Platform Agnosticism and ID Development on Technologies
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Many head into projects by doing "rapid prototyping", which often means getting into the technologies and starting the work right away. Some people are brilliant this way, and they can do all that front-end work in their heads...and while they're actually creating. They're willing to go through the messiness of creation and then fixing things iteratively.
That's not a talent that I have. I can, but the messes I make in creation mean more back end ...
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Last week, I talked about the presentation from FETE on arousing curiosity in students, in class. Today, I will share some tips I got from the discussion. Before I talk about it, I would like to say these are by no means my ideas, but ideas/comments from everyone in the presentation.
Here is a summary of the tips that was voiced in the presentation ( in no particular order):
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One of my favorite books in my recent spate of studies had to do with Annalee Saxenian's Regional Advantage, which discussed the "culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (ripped from the book's subtitle). This author examined how Silicon Valley came out ahead because of its proximity to major institutions of higher learning like Stanford University and the synergies that come from informal and formal alliances and the sharing of knowledge. By contrast, Route 128 is ...
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Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy is used to represent different levels of learning, with the highest as the ability to evaluate, while drawing on all the prior levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Some would argue that an even higher level would be that of creativity, innovation, seeing beyond what has already been and is to uncharted territories.
Certainly, the ability to make new mental connections and to see unexploited opportunities could well lead to benefits in a number ...
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An online instructor may breathe "life" into a course through his/her enthusiasm, experiences, personality, instructional design, and sheer telepresence. The communications and interactivity in such courses enliven and enrich the learning. Online instructors may often be the linchipin of the learning experience.
In academia, there is not often a lot of opportunity to use "boxed" pre-made digital courses. Simply, faculty are rather hands-on in their teaching, and they tend to be skeptical of the effectiveness of online courses without ...
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Much of first (early)-generation online learning is highly text-based. This means that learners have to engage their reading minds to understand the concepts, facts and practices.
Reading, a common staple of adult education, is more complex than many realize. Tony Buzan in Use Both Sides of Your Brain identifies seven steps in the process of learning (Boyles and Contadino 102). Being aware of the complexity of reading will help instructors provide the necessary support for adult learners in their ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
07 March 2006
In instructional design, a lot gets left unsaid in terms of underlying theories and implications of the learning object. Instructors who meld both teaching and instructional design probably have the best of both worlds because they get to test and adjust the learning based on how it plays out in the classroom.
P.B. Joseph and her colleagues' concepts of the cultures of curriculum offer a framework that analyzes the subtext in how a field or course is approached. If ...
Continue reading Questions to Probe the Cultures of Curriculum behind the Instructional Design
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One of my favorite classes to teach has been "Writing for New Media." In this course, my students would find a live client in the (Seattle) community. They would hustle friends, colleagues and supervisors for business. We ended up with a fish restaurant, a local computer business, a coffee shop, an on-campus music group, a maritime museum, a fledgling environmental organization, a music e-zine, and a variety of others. Then, we'd go through the steps of brainstorming, researching, branding ...
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Value-adding seems to be a fundamental principle of differentiation in the very competitive eLearning marketplace. LMSes have to offer functionality, design, namebrand, and ease-of-use. Many now have content streams by partnering with media organizations, such as Bb with the New York Times. Data inventories need constantly refreshed information and convenience, sort of like wikis today.
The concept of adding "intelligence" with each new information exchange also is a basic one. To do that, people may conduct new research and offer ...
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Writing into a silent blog is a privilege for a short time until launch. Then, there will be those who participant and others who hang out silently. This one will be an open-ended question, with a few broad guides.
One of the factors that can cause the most strife in an online classroom is that of values, particularly ethical and moral ones. Students come to the classroom with any number of values influences and ideas, and the same goes for ...
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One of the assumptions of online learning has been the controversial theory of different types of learning styles, different intelligences, and different preferred learning situations. While this is by no means fully accepted, this theory does shed light on the need to "deliver" online learning in various ways for a diverse body of students. Learning styles differ among people. Howard Gardner, author of The Unschooled Mind, suggests that all people have "multiple intelligences" or at least seven different "ways of ...
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Much in the Accessibility literature deals with technology mitigations and assistive devices. Less has been done on the curricular ways to mitigate for learning disabilities. So far any who are so inclined, this may be an intriguing direction for further research. What is a learning disability? A learning disability entails any combination of the following:
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Let me open with a sincere doubt (scary way to start a virtual conversation). I sincerely doubt that cultural neutrality is an actual possibility in digital course design.
The reasons are several-fold. For one, information is rarely culturally neutral. Virtually all information used in education has a human source and springs from a culture and a time. Information has assumptions about world-view and truth. There's a degree of plausible deniability about virtually everything.
Yet, I would say that the ...
Continue reading "Cultural Neutrality" in Digital Course Design
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A more socially provocative way to approach this question of curricula is to consider the concept of whether the curricula is "explicit, implicit or null." This question assumes a larger knowledge of the field and curriculum, something else that IDs don't often probe.
What's said? What's not said? What is not even noticed?
Eisner (1985) suggests that schools teach three curricula: the explicit (obvious and stated), implicit (unofficial, hidden, both intentional and inadvertent), and null (non-existing curriculum ...
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Instructional designers never quite get the chance to go into the in-depth assumptions of instructors regarding their curricular culture. We exist often to deal with assignment-level builds, and the theoretical seldom gets brought up. As a matter of fact, one of my interviewers for this present job said that he could count on one hand the times that he's had such discussions in his many years in his job as an ID.
So after his laughter quieted, I thought ...
Continue reading Joseph, et al.'s Six Cultures of Curriculum
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So, a couple years ago when I lived in M. Corp.'s backyard (Seattle), I got to attend a presentation by one of their geopolitical strategists. His name was Tom Edwards, and he was their senior geopolitical strategist back in Apr. 9, 2004. While his ideas relate to a company's global strategies, his concepts have great utility for designing Web pages for academic purposes.
Publishing online to a non-password protected space makes the digital contents open to global perusal ...
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So our campus is discussing the use of mobile student response systems for use in classrooms. Apparently, some early adopters have been using such systems for years, including some with custom-made software on HP devices. There's a push now to establish some campus-wide standards, so all the units on campus that need to support this technology can be on board.
We brainstormed a massive list of desirables in whatever technology would be chosen. These included things like cost, technological ...
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Research has a funny way of informing work if one actually goes out in pursuit of new ideas. For some, we've got research coming to us through subscriptions to listservs and the occasional trek to the library and the use of online databases. I ran across a small gem in Patrick E. Parrish's "Embracing the Aesthetics of Instructional Design" from Educational Technology (March - April 2005). This author suggests that instructional design should take on some pragmatic aesthetics. Like ...