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A recent project has had me exploring the ethics of the instructional design profession. As far as I can tell, there is not a professional organization that spells out the ethics. The research literature has a fair amount on information technology (IT) ethics, borrowed to a degree from business and engineering ethics. Instructional design (ID), though, still requires collaborative reflection and analysis to surface practical values of right and wrong.
In the absence of a professional society, the ...
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In pretty much every conference that I have attended, there have been some presentations or workshops on the legal and policy environment in which instructional designers and IT folks work. The affordances and constraints of a litigious environment mean that we have to proceed defensively.
Word is that “anonymity” (which has never truly existed online, no?) also is no defense against libel. People are realizing that there are limits to free speech, just as there are with every legal right ...
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Like most work, projects tend to have stages, and these include a “sunset” stage. This is where the instructional designer takes a quick bow and splits. This is usually defined by the MOU (memorandum of agreement), or more specifically, when the funds run out. Optimally, this coincides with the work’s final wrap-up and acceptance of the curriculum by all parties involved.
Tapering off on a project involves letting the principals and the team members know that the tapering phase ...
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This issue surfaces in the popular media every so often, when a celebrity’s medical records, police file, mug shot, or some other official information gets compromised and released to the press. The idea of “data voyeurism” is that of people who don’t have a “need-to-know” accessing information that they shouldn’t.
I ran across this term again in an article, in the context of Information Technology (IT). It seems to me that instructional designers also handle plenty of ...
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Adapting to a new learning management system involves a fair amount of learning. Going live with it also means dealing with some surprises—in this case, the disappearance of student work. Usually, the default settings I have in Message Boards is to disallow student deletion of their own posts.
There are a number of reasons for that. Foremost is the need to have data integrity, so if students posted a particular message or assignment, and I responded to that work ...
Continue reading Plugging the "Student Editing" Gaps in a New LMS
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Dr. Michael Wesch has offered a view of disruptive informational technos and their impacts on learning...
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able
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A colleague of mine suggests that there’s a “new normal” for the economy. And current signs and projections seem to suggest that to a degree. Watching the aggregate behaviors and thinking of a population has been very informative about massive pendulum swings. No matter where this all goes, the new frugality in my field may be here to stay, an indelible part of doing business.
One part of a job is to create and demonstrate ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 October 2008
I must be some sort of optimist. The “master” courses that I work on building are set up as perennial files, started one day and projected to go out to the year 2030 or beyond.
There’s no possibility that these courses will be offered in the same form as today some 20+ years from now, but that date is shorthand for “sometime into the future” until this course is sunsetted.
While we instructional designers may not ...
Continue reading For the Next Little While: Digital Preservation and Long-term Storage
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From the outside (as a non-lawyer), disclaimers read like legalized clauses that say, “Here are very limited uses of this site, and don’t hold me legally responsible for what others do or say.” A recent project involved plenty of research and pursuit of the legal concepts and practices behind defining a “Terms of Service” for a site that involves both public and private contents for college students, in a site designed to build a protective wall and support around ...
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The patterns have become clearer over time. There was the clause for an ID position in Texas listed in the Chronicle of Higher Education that http://chronicle.com/jobs/search.php?today=2 required a full background check. That’s understandable if a person may handle sensitive materials.
And then there’s word that anyone taking on a non-temp position will need to go through a background check at my university. The areas of interest seem to be in police ...
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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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In student journalism, faculty and advisors work hard to shepherd student work forward towards publication—often locally and then in larger and larger venues. Students had a chance to evolve their work. They made mistakes in small venues before risking mistakes in the larger ones. Some of you already know where I’m going with this.
Students today often publish to the world early on. Various classes may require blogging or wiki postings. While these may ...
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IGI Global has a book coming out titled "Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning" this July 2008. This is edited by Drs. Ugur Demiray of Anadolu University and Ramesh C. Sharma of Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Main Book Site http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985
Table of Contents http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985&v=tableOfContents
This book takes more of an international and global perspective.
Continue reading Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning
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Dr. Alma Clayton-Pederson, Vice President of the American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) presented at the March 26 Provost Lecture Mar. 26, at K-State. I hadn’t realized that I’d actually already seen her speak in a 2006 AAC&U conference as one of the keynotes…until she was introduced. (Back in 2006, I was presenting at the AAC&U conference in Seattle and may have had the mind engaged in meeting up with former colleagues and ...
Continue reading Diversity and the Appreciation of the Other
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Back in my former college teaching days, a debate arose in Faculty Senate about how much to limit student credit hours by policy. As a student who totally slammed in huge numbers of credits in my undergraduate days, I argued for learner freedom. Others felt that the in loco parentis role meant that a little more oversight would be important to ensure student graduation rates.
In the context of this debate, our college VP of Academic Affairs raised the concept ...
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"Are you involved in, or do you plan to be involved in any activity where you have agreed, or plan to agree, to any restriction regarding the publication; disclosure; shipment; distribution or release of a particular item or goods, technology, or information? This includes written, electronic, digital, or verbal information."
This above question was part of an automated training that I took part in recently on export controls. The answer in my mind was, "Well, yes, maybe."
Between the Y ...
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K-State has released a policy that addresses accessible eLearning.
http://www.k-state.edu/academicservices/fhbook/fhsecf.htm (F125)
This will mean positive changes in instructional design and delivery. More thoughts will be forthcoming.
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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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So I just went through a learner-directed "automated" study of six online modules related to human subjects review. There weren't pre- or post- tests per se, but this blog entry may serve as a kind of post-test. (Let's just say I pass.) While the heading for this blog is playful, the contents of IRB trainings are not, often opening with painful reviews of historical abuses of people in various types of biomedical and other "research." The nuances of ...
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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 ...