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Every new technology has to be able to a pool of users who need training, win their loyalty, and continue to deliver quality with each new iteration of their technologies. This is especially true for different types of authoring software with so many “bells and whistles” and different types of terminology and ways of doing things.
The installed base gets used to having certain tools in certain locations. They get familiar with the mental models for the particular technologies. They ...
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Wired Magazine is hosting a contest to see how easily findable one of their reporters may be if he is active as a virtual citizen but is moving around incognito.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=8412415&page=1
How tight is the "digital enclosure"?
P.S. This is assuming that law enforcement's prodigious resources aren't being employed--so no official systems are involved...but just for regular citizens, how effective can they be in finding someone who ...
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There’s that aphorism that suggests that the moment one stops changing, one starts to diminish. Skills decay sets in, and worse yet, boredom. In that vein, I started thinking of “aspirational” instructional design—the kind of work that one hopes will come about from federal grant funding in the pipeline.
Any sort of complex curricular build is desirable. Complex curricular builds with a challenging learning base means more collaborative techniques and creative deployment of technologies. Working on ...
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After years of working with faculty on various curriculum projects, I’ve long known that it helps to have a loose hand on certain aspects of a project but to run with responsibilities seriously in all cases, too. A recent project involved brainstorming a series of scripts for a new website, and the webisode preview of one of those scripts recently was launched to some very positive feedback. I was running through a “lessons learned” from that work.
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 August 2009
In a recent project, an online course was co-developed by multiple institutions, and the digital contents (learning modules with video, flashcards, slideshows, and additional simulations) had to be ported onto several different learning / course management systems (LCMSs).
The numbers and types of features on L/CMSes have stabilized among the surviving online learning systems. Over the years as this field as evolved, many commercial players jumped in; a few open-source ones have been popularized ...
Continue reading Transferring Digital Contents between Learning Management Systems
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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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When faculty clients or groups contract with web designers for a product, they often use a memorandum of agreement (or understanding) to define the work that will be done. The MOA or MOU should often specify a site tune-up within a particular time frame after a site launches.
The rationale is that no matter how prescient a development team is, it takes testing a site in the real world with real users to know how well the design ideas play ...
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Remote learners have many of the same needs as face-to-face students. These needs go beyond the learning to such things as getting letters-of-recommendation. For many such letters—such as verifying writing skills and academic work—I have no problems writing emails or letters or filling out forms.
What things get tougher is when students ask for letters recommending them for certain jobs that mention skill sets that I have no knowledge about. These may involve customer service, private information handling ...
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In every academic field, virtually, there is a push for discovering new information and new ways to doing things. This is also true for instructional design, which is a cross-disciplinary area.
There are also innovations from mulling over the extant research, which involve mostly qualitative and case-based works. There are the occasional quantitative types of research, but those are more about doctoral dissertations and system-wide research and the occasional business-funded research study. Truth to tell, it may be that the ...
Continue reading Accelerants for Innovations in Instructional Design Research
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In a time of economic strain, it seems that maintaining goodwill is more important than ever. So many of the projects that I deal with (both in public and private spheres) depend on benevolence and generosity and patience.
One example of this concept not working was with a publisher that solicited chapters for a book. The editor mentioned that all contributors would get a free contributor copy. Then, when the book was about to be published, they sent ...
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A recent course build by a faculty member built the course foundation on resources found on the Web. Here, the instructor used links to downloadable files, simulations, and videos. She eschewed any textbooks. To create an overlay, she did add a syllabus and supplementary videos to explain the contents. She also invited professional colleagues to take part in videotaped interviews that illuminated the issues further.
It struck me that she was truly relying on the Web for her curriculum—by ...
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Subject matter experts from a variety of fields are turning towards online learning as a way to serve a wider constituency of learners. Some get on online learning projects because of grant funding and the originality of their expertise. Not all who get on projects particularly believe in online learning. As a matter of fact, some approach online learning with mixed emotions and attitudes. In a team that works well, these concerns are surfaced and addressed incrementally.
Continue reading Learning about E-Learning as a Team Collaboration Byproduct
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One of my recent projects has involved the use of peer education, or the use of students to serve as supporters and peer advisors for fellow students on issues of acclimating to campus and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. These programs involve some vetting and training of students to support these services. This endeavor is a way to save on funds, but it’s also about packaging important information in a way that may be more effectively delivered to people—through ...
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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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On a recent and rare afternoon when I had a chance to attend a presentation on tips for writing up NSF grants, I came away with an intriguing angle. (And do instructional designers support the conceptualizing, writing and fulfillment of federal grants—you bet!)
Dr. Parag R. Chitnis described the general guidelines for NSFs…which focus on science and engineering (but not the study of diseases). He suggested that this organization has the defined strategies of funding “discovery, infrastructure, learning ...
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A recent article about game design for a particular application raised the question of the ethical debates the authors went through to decide whether or not to take on the particular project. It strikes me that going through the considerations of whether or not to take on a particular project—based on ethical grounds and personal and professional values—is critical.
Let me clarify. My work has always been public-side and open. As a long-time college instructor and writer, I ...
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In this economic downturn, various articles have cropped up of people who change their high-powered careers to something more relaxing. There was one about an ophthalmologist who became a baker. There are lawyers who step off the corporate ladder to work as chefs. There’s something very culturally based about this sense of the world—getting off the fast track in order to achieve self-fulfillment, a (hopefully) longer and less stressful life, and more satisfaction—at the cost of lower ...
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I’d always thought that it was a pretty big disadvantage to come into a field with only very generalized knowledge (or occasionally, no knowledge). That’s just part of the work life of an instructional designer, I thought.
A recent project has helped me revise my opinion. There’s something to be said for empathizing with the total outsider student. Knowing where questions may arise may help in the curricular design. It may help in identifying what learning experiences ...
Continue reading Student Buy-in of the Instructor Framework for a Course
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In some ways, the understandings of what instructional design is hasn’t penetrated to many parts of a campus. This is not for lack of effort in terms of presenting at on-campus and regional conferences, socializing with faculty, working with administrators, and using various communications technologies to conduct outreach to the faculty audience.
There are hurdles, too, such as the lack of clear ratecards and costs, and perceptions and bureaucratic barriers.
It’s in that context that ...
Continue reading Explaining Instructional Design in a Traveling Show
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A recent project has involved the use of the Quality Matters Rubric to ensure the quality of the e-learning through the curricular design. A trained QM-certified faculty member is spear-heading the critique. That said, the others of us without that training are still finding this rubric very helpful for aligning the elements of the course and ensuring that the basic elements are in place.
This rubric was funded through a FIPSE grant (from the US Department ...
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Bureaucratic reshufflings will affect access to various resources—of money and staffing. In the instructional design move coming on half a year ago now, it resulted in the loss of an “art shop.” By this, I mean access to a graphic designer who could brand websites, create posters, lay out e-newsletters, create logos, and provide creative design ideas.
For instructional design purposes, this was a tough loss. Designing for a visual generation, instructional designers need access to graphic arts talent ...
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In a number of recent projects, there have been more focuses on geospatial information use. This comes in part from the popularization and free costs of a variety of geospatial and mapping tools. These are wide use by the public in practical ways. Tools like Mapquest, Google Maps, various real estate pricing sites, and various satellite image capture sites offer an easy low-cost way to access some of these functionalities.
It’s breathtaking to take a virtual ride from a ...
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When a bicycle gets off-true, the tires begin to rub against some other part of the bike. And it’s then just a short time before a trip to the bike shop is in order.
That same sort of challenge occurs when scripting problems occur in a basic simulation. The various elements act wonky, and it becomes a challenge to get the elements to work. The fun then really begins—to get the object back to “true.”
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The idea of digital “seeding” is to put in some basic ideas to a site in order to get participants started. One puts up “stubs” to a wiki, and the idea is that people will run with the maintenance of the site. At some point. one is supposed to let go, and others are supposed to take over and power the communications vehicle on their own. The problem is when to actually do the hand-off.
In theory, information is attractive ...
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Webisodes are brief video episodes in continuing series that are played out and delivered on the Web. I saw a few through news sites, with stories of characters striving for the usual things—love, self-respect, self-actualization. These shorts were amusing and were sponsored by various advertisers: a car company, food manufacturers, and the like.
A recent project involving an anti-suicide website (universitylifecafe.org) resulted in the creation of a number of different short scripts. One was for a ...
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At some point in every project, there comes a surprise or a twist. These are usually positive. They involve some new learning. Or there may be some travel or a jaunt to a local restaurant. Or there may be an opportunity to reach a unique group of learners. Or most recently, there was an inspired suggestion to build a web-based mystery around a set of public health issues. The concept was dazzling—a character-filled interactive scenario-driven mystery that makes the ...
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Faculty members work with a number of audiences. They connect with their colleagues. They work with grant funders. They rub elbows with people from the business world, political environment, and military circles, and others. They work with students. They work with staff. And they also communicate with the general public.
Sometimes, their many constituencies are forgotten by those outside the professoriate or academia.
Faculty often do a great job of presenting concepts and contents to a class; they facilitate learning ...
Continue reading Sophisticates in Communicating by Digital Video
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 April 2009
The idea of transferability, portability and digital learning object sharing has always been appealing and practical. It’s been years of seeing the back-end technologies to enable course cartridge uploads and templates to add metadata to learning objects….and finally, I can say that I have had a course build that has allowed me to tap into others’ direct contents.
On the surface, this would seem fairly straightforward. There are certain federal government sites that have the incentive of publicizing ...
Continue reading Not Reinventing Wheels...but Chasing Digital Contents through Bureaucracies
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One constant aspect of being an instructional designer is expectations management. Faculty clients (and some admin) often have little sense of what would be required to actualize the work that they imagine--because of the technologies, the content capture, and the processing. Most express surprise that work will cost anything. Or the technologies are so mysterious that they don’t know what their actual options may be. This client expectations management aspect of instructional design work often exists under the radar ...
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The work of an instructor is to make information understandable and easy-to-acquire. This means identifying critical main principles (How much learning is needed before certain concepts are attainable?). This means identifying threshold concepts—those ideas that if grasped will open up whole new vistas in a particular topic. This means identifying the critical decision points in a process that are crucial to the new learner. This is about identifying the learning moment when the “Aha!” occurs.
In mainstream films, these ...
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The chatter about Google Analytics had been positive for a while. Talk was that Google could collect all sorts of information about visitors to a site in order to help site designers better tailor the contents to meet user needs. The data would be aggregate and anonymous, but all one needed was a gmail account and a little tech savvy and one could get a treasure trove of visitor information.
A tour of the Google Analytics site brings out the ...
Continue reading Google Analytics for Site Evolution Strategies
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by IDOS Newswire
06 April 2009
Call for Chapter Proposals
Proposal Submission Deadline: July 15, 2009
Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces: Emerging Technologies and Trends
A book edited by Dr. Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University, USA
To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=626
Introduction and Objectives: Immersive learning has come to the fore with the popularization of Second Life and the development of open-source immersive 3D learning spaces. Those in e-learning have been working to find ways ...
Continue reading Virtual Immersive and 3D Learning Spaces (A Call for Chapter Proposals)
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In most academic fields, editors and publishers play a gatekeeper function by vetting the articles that make it into their vaunted pages (whether paper or digital). These roles involve a lot of power and a lot of responsibility and discretion. New faculty’s careers may be made or broken based on their publishing records. Even those who have published widely and are long-term tenured faculty have a stake in their reputations with the public and their peers when they publish ...
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Those who work as professional videographers may be puzzled at the approach in this particular entry. This may be a concept that is such a central part of their skill set that this all goes without saying. The concept I’m referring to is that of “videographic continuity”. It’s the simple idea that videos should convey a flowing narrative in a way without interruptions or confusions.
As an educator who has come to instructional design, I am learning about ...
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Dr. Marilla D. Svinicki, a professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, spoke Mar. 30 at K-State in a presentation titled “Changing student (and faculty) attitudes about who’s responsible for learning”. This was presented as part of the provost’s lecture series.
She described a mis-match between learner and instructor expectations of each other, particularly over issues of who is responsible for what in a course. She led the audience through activities in which the ...
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I am thinking of breaking a personal policy. That policy is to set up a project, ensure it works, and then move on. That policy is in place to protect against time “sinks,” particularly those that involve no compensation. This is a practical policy. It’s based on the business structure of this university. It makes sense in every logical way.
An “endless project” is one that has no defined conclusion, could conceivably continue on for many ...
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Initial meetings on a project are always interesting. A team of colleagues has gathered around a particular curricular build. There’s an overwhelming amount of expertise at the table. There’s often some technological sophistication. There are rich ideas about what is desirable for the learning experience that they’re creating.
And then there’s a switchover to instructional design. This piece then brings together the pedagogical and technological pieces. How would these be deployed to reach a particular learning ...
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If there are recent trends in questions for instructional designers, one would be how to hold and create live conferences in virtual ways that are still beneficial and lively. How may informal, “hallway conversations” be facilitated and captured in terms of informational value? How can the casual hanging out after a live meeting be emulated in virtual spaces? These seem like anachronistic concerns in a time when there are so many technologies that have been created to promote computer mediated ...
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In an information technology office, I often hear snippets of telephone conversations. That comes with cubicle-land living. That sort of hearing (vs. listening) is unavoidable. I hear now and again the term “known problems.” In IT-speak, that’s a kind of comfort. It’s the idea that the problem has been noticed and replicated and likely has an IT professional looking into solving it.
In a larger context, the world is full of “known problems” that are unwieldy and challenging ...
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The concept of cultural sensitivity in designing curricula is an important aspect of instructional design. Some domain-field assumptions are elusive and not well articulated. Or particular fields have a range of opinions that affect the dissonant voices in a field. Because of the need to understand what is going on in different domains, it helps immensely to attend different face-to-face conferences on campus.
These conferences not only result in helpful contacts, but they also enhance one’s sense of paradigms ...
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As the economy goes deeper into the tank, the nature of instructional design in the workplace has been changing. Now, it’s not only a matter of taking on all comers but ensuring that there are funds that come with the constant work.
Instructional designers (IDs) now have to work hard to earn a place in the line-up for every single project that comes forward. There has to be value-added. This has always been so for those in industry, and ...
Continue reading Earning a Place in the Line-up...Every Time
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This issue surfaces in the popular media every so often, when a celebrity’s medical records, police file, mug shot, or some other official information gets compromised and released to the press. The idea of “data voyeurism” is that of people who don’t have a “need-to-know” accessing information that they shouldn’t.
I ran across this term again in an article, in the context of Information Technology (IT). It seems to me that instructional designers also handle plenty of ...
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The “observer effect” described in quantum physics applies to online human communications. The effect of being “seen” by others on a list or in virtual spaces may have an outsized effect on what people post. That awareness of being watched changes people’s behaviors. This is where it’s helpful to have one-way mirrors or unobtrusive ways of observer, without the fronting or need to impress.
In one case, a group of us were critiquing a website. An editor emailed ...
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Hello, all: I am soliciting responses to a brief survey on the experiences instructors and facilitators have had regarding security in 3D immersive, interactive and persistent spaces (like Second Life) in higher education. This information will be used for a forthcoming article or chapter.
Survey Title: Security in 3D Immersive and Interactive Spaces in Higher Education
This survey will be offered Mar 9, 2009 through Mar 31, 2009.
To participate in the survey, please go to the following link:
https ...
Continue reading Survey on Security in 3D Immersive Spaces in Higher Education
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One of the PIs on a recent grant project made the point that she preferred to spend grant moneys locally to support other on-campus offices. Given that our office here was the recipient of her largesse, I’ve been thinking more deeply about the purchase of skills and talent to actualize different projects.
A few large grants in motion have brought up this issue of hiring talent. The challenges there seem to involve the discrete skill sets that are involved ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
06 March 2009
Professional development keeps work life fresh, and it helps keep the skill sets (semi)viable. In a time of scarcity, it takes a bit more initiative to find professional development opportunities. Oftentimes, such opportunities are piecemeal and catch-as-catch-can.
Many workplaces have a serious shut-down of travel out-of-state. We are getting emails about on-campus conferences that have been cancelled. Many conferences are listing the option of tele-porting in to a conference from desktops to save on travel costs. Interestingly, I am ...
Continue reading Maintaining Professional Development in a Scarcity-Based Environment
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
04 March 2009
My student probably had no idea how happy she made me with her simple question. She had read one of our course readings and wondered how a circuit court case got resolved. I suggested she find the official site for the court and look up the case by name. She chased the issue and found out how the case resolved. It did cost her some money for copies under e-FOIA (http://epic.org/open_gov/efoia.html) , and it did cost ...
Continue reading Getting Online Students Immersed in the Informational Universe
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I see students in various stages of distress as they wrangle with their academic papers. They’re lying across their desks staring into the computer screens as they search for the words or ideas that they need to build the contents. They send emails about their concerns as their papers are in various stages of development, particularly when they’re stuck on a thesis or on the possible use of a particular source.
Recently, I had a déjà vu moment ...
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I was revisiting one of the projects that I served as instructional designer on and noticed in a very tiny font that the site now identifies the sponsoring university. This project had been brainstormed and evolved with the help of several dozen students, and the consensus then (and now) has been to soft-pedal the university tie. The rationale was to let the interactive site stand on its own merits and contents, and the greater access and support for our university ...
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Bringing a curriculum to life requires an understanding of various dependencies. There are chains of pre-requisites that must be met for an online curriculum to actually launch well and effectively. These include human, technological, and resource dependencies. This includes intellectual property ones.
Why these dependencies matter is because these are required to reach deadline-driven goals. And it’s critical not to build loose ends into the system. While parts of an online course or training may be decoupled from the ...
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The research literature on global virtual teams is intriguing. Most come from multinational companies that work with global laboratories or global work groups. They talk about multiple languages, time zones, different bridging endeavors, and management techniques. They talk about shared camaraderie mixed with never meeting face-to-face.
It all sounds somewhat exotic, something like an artifact of the business world…when I realize that some recent projects of late have been executed as global virtual teams (GVTs), namely, book endeavors. (I ...
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After coming off a spate of case studies and qualitative research, I came across a lecture in my work that suddenly put that work in a different light. The basic assertion of the lecturer was the need for quantitative metrics to inform decision-making. That’s a simple enough point. Quantitative measures are used often for decision-making. There’s a kind unknowability for various types of information using qualitative methods or mixed methods. (That’s also true in the reverse, in ...
Continue reading The "Sugar" of Case Studies and Qualitative Work
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A recent project is bringing together a cross-functional development team that is distributed, multi-institutional and virtual. The work that people are creating needs to coalesce and work in an interoperable way on multiple learning management systems. The work, of course, also has to be accessible and fully legal in terms of intellectual property. What this meant on the front end is that we would start with a stylebook.
The rationale for a stylebook is to surface ...
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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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Transitioning into an instructional design position, one just focuses on learning the ropes and making sure projects come in pedagogically sound, on deadline and at budget, and ultimately, to the professor’s satisfaction.
Then, three years later, I look up and consider what it is to have an actual instructional design portfolio of courses, designs, and web-based products. Early on, one takes all comers and ends up with some gofer-ish types of jobs mixed in with the more challenging projects ...
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After finalizing work on a project, a colleague and I were commiserating about how it’s always good to have a project finish smoothly and on deadline. He wrote of how various projects have a way of bogging down and not resulting in a usable final product in any timely fashion. I recalled my former supervisor advising—half-jokingly--“If the project collapses, don’t be under it.” That project didn’t collapse. I haven’t had one fail yet, but ...
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A small team has been researching and mulling the idea of launching an e-learning faculty wiki for “the good of the order” and as a university contribution to the Web-enabled information spaces. The idea would be to use the wiki to surface implicit knowledge and also to create a professional community mediated through technologies.
The team diligently scoped out the competition through direct research and queries posted to professional listservs. They found quality wikis like Edutech ...
Continue reading Early Proposal of a New E-Learning Faculty Wiki
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A colleague of mine suggests that there’s a “new normal” for the economy. And current signs and projections seem to suggest that to a degree. Watching the aggregate behaviors and thinking of a population has been very informative about massive pendulum swings. No matter where this all goes, the new frugality in my field may be here to stay, an indelible part of doing business.
One part of a job is to create and demonstrate ...
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Handing over a project is a necessity, or else one could be a stringer for a project into eternity, which would mean lost project opportunities into the future. The handover moment is a fragile one because it involves conveying the rich understandings of a project over the many months of the design and build work. It’s also about letting go in a way so that the work is successful into the future.
One critical piece is to ...
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Getting candid critique on a manuscript can be a tough challenge—not in terms of receiving honest feedback but in terms of readers being willing to really go full bore into ways to improve a piece of writing. Editors are to writers as choreographers to dancers, directors to actors, and masters to apprentices. They offer critical constructive directions to improve a work.
Let me clarify. It does take years to be able to take critique well and to use it ...
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A new site that has been in the works for at least half a year will make its soft launch shortly, which means that it’ll go live without much fanfare. It’ll be built up and used over time, and optimally, it’ll start growing and evolving. It’s an interactive site. Now, we’re at the point in the project that it’s important to get some attention on the WWW for this resource.
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One ongoing project has involved the launching of a brand new site with plenty of interactivity, some curious AI security functionalities, and plenty of user-generated contents, along with professionally created contents. The ambition of the site meant that the coding would likely take longer than initially planned. And the many voices at the table would also mean more delays.
To push the site’s development, while the site was still in development, a version was pushed out into ...
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A month or so ago, I went ahead and zipped up course materials on Blackboard and downloaded that onto my desktop. Then I uploaded the zipped contents into a course shell in ANGEL Learning. And that was as far as I got in terms of transferring curricular contents en masse. I will admit to a great deal of skepticism that this particular organization should just ask faculty to move their own work even though I have instance manager privileges on ...
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The concept of “un-design” is an interesting one to consider in an online course. After all, courses are generally about structure. They’re about the delivery of contents in a way that the learning is accessible, offered in developmental stages, supported by the readings and activities, and memorable. When I initially think of un-design, I think of a rummage sale, but there’s something more to this idea that needs exploration. I have a queasy feeling it won’t go ...
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It came as a bit of a shock to faculty at my university that there would be a foray into Second Life for educational purposes, social networking, and university service provision. There had been apparently long debates over concerns of what could happen in immersive 3D spaces in terms of griefers or other buses. And after some deep analysis, the advisory committee apparently was putting forward some solid recommendations along with hopes to maximize the use of this social virtual ...
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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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IDT Roundtable Nov. 12: Podcasting and Vodcasting
The next roundtable is 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. (CDT) Wednesday, Nov. 12, Union 212. Brent Anders, Bryan Vandiviere, and Ben Ward will present “Podcasting and Vodcasting”. Join us as we see what’s hot and what’s not, the effectiveness of these tools in teaching, how to get started, how to look like a pro, and where to show off your efforts when finished.
http://ome.ksu.edu/webcast/live ...
Continue reading Live Streaming Presentation on Podcasting and Vodcasting
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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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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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Chasing information has become somewhat more exciting of late because I’m understanding a little more of what is going on when digital repositories are queried for various resources. I’ve been spoiled with my on-campus ILL office, which has been able to electronically track down four out of five requested sources and deliver them to my desktop computer with ease and panache.
Then, I just got a cancellation. The message politely notified me that the request I made for ...
Continue reading Interlibrary Loan Services and the Human Element
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 October 2008
I must be some sort of optimist. The “master” courses that I work on building are set up as perennial files, started one day and projected to go out to the year 2030 or beyond.
There’s no possibility that these courses will be offered in the same form as today some 20+ years from now, but that date is shorthand for “sometime into the future” until this course is sunsetted.
While we instructional designers may not ...
Continue reading For the Next Little While: Digital Preservation and Long-term Storage
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Usually, by the 2nd, 3rd or 4th weeks of a 10-week term, students will start emailing me with a dilemma, which goes something like this: “I ordered my book as soon as I had the money to pay for it, but it hasn’t arrived yet, so may I get a deadline extension to turn in late work?” They then sometimes include the clause that the book may take up to 3-4 weeks to arrive from the day of ordering ...
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Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” shows how the affordances of Web 2.0 changes human potential. As a socio-technical system, Web 2.0 benefits through the power of networks—which grows in complexity “faster than its size.”
Connective technologies enable people to cover much more ground. Photo-sharing sites enable photographers to be virtually anywhere at any time…and to capture digital information that may not have apparent value enough for a company or ...
Continue reading "Here Comes Everybody" (Brief Resource Review)
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From the outside (as a non-lawyer), disclaimers read like legalized clauses that say, “Here are very limited uses of this site, and don’t hold me legally responsible for what others do or say.” A recent project involved plenty of research and pursuit of the legal concepts and practices behind defining a “Terms of Service” for a site that involves both public and private contents for college students, in a site designed to build a protective wall and support around ...
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A current federally-funded project involves the building of a site that hopes to improve student mental health, and in so doing, prevent suicides.
The stats say that suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students. Young adults 18 – 24 have the highest incidence of reported suicide ideation. A recent study apparently found that half of students had suicidal thoughts at some point in their history. Mood, interpersonal and academic concerns apparently have driven some students to be ...
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So the water cooler conversations of late have been around the issue of rain-making, drawing in grants and clients that may fund instructional design work. For some, this change is a shock to the system because the prior assumptions were that support positions were somehow folded into the larger budgets…and that’s true. However, the other part of truth is a volatile economy and the need to sort of move some dollars around for equipment and travel needs.
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“Encapsulation” makes a lot of sense not only as a design strategy for software design but also for some instructional design. This basic concept is that of hiding elements that may be distracting or irrelevant or extraneous for learners. Apparently, the term comes from object-oriented programming in software design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
I’ve seen this theory in action in the designing of graphical user interfaces on a learning / course management system (L/CMS) and also in ...
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Learning about learning seems to be a central part of instructional design. And whenever I have a free moment, I try to finalize a course design that started a while ago but lacked funding for transcription. So while transcription is most certainly not part of the actual assigned work, I try to patch this course’s accessibility gaps whenever possible.
It was in this line of work that I ran across some engaging ideas about learning and the building of ...
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It seems so easy to walk blithely into a massive project and underestimate the work required. I’m so early in the being swamped stage that it’s hard to see how the elements may start coming together. It’s hard getting a handle on complexity. What I’m talking is about a book that I had hoped would be team-written, but after 300+ emails sent out and plenty of online publicity, I’m finding that the work has fallen ...
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The email is a welcome one even though it seems somewhat formulaic. It’s a call for finalized chapters for a text forthcoming in 2009. The acceptance by the editors has gone through (even though it has seemed touch-and-go over the months).
What follows is what’s disconcerting…a form of final iteration fever.
This particular project has been handled through the mediating technology of a book publishing wiki. The workflow is smooth. It’s very easy ...
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“New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential—that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and size.” -- Robert Wright in “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (as cited in Rheingold, 2003, p. 183)
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Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” offers a generally benign view of the potentially of ...
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Developing a website on a shoestring budget and with many stakeholders is no easy feat. Having multiple institutions working on different parts can also be a challenge, with only partially successful distance mitigations. With the high hopes and high grant-funded ambitions, a site can easily evolve well beyond doability.
One aspect of special risk seems to be “content sustainability.” This means providing sufficient text and images and multimedia over time for the site. From a distance, it would seem that ...
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In Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” (2008), he talks about the competitive advantage that open source environments have as labs for creating and evolving new technologies. He suggests that for-profits run into the challenge of a “fitness landscape” that encourages settling for the first and easiest solution and discourages further exploration for more creative or elegant solutions.
“Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of ...
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It’s a professional boon to be invited to the table to develop a grant project from the talking stages and through to the end when the project actually gets funded.
The more typical route seems to be that one is brought on after an initial grant has been rejected and when the comments by the grant critiquers are that the pedagogical learning piece has not been clearly explained.
The work then involves quick learning about what has transpired, what ...
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It’s in virtually all the business textbooks about entrepreneurship. When a new killer app comes on the horizon, a lot of competitors get into development. They all have a sense of what the public needs. They may have no sponsors per se, or they may have a local sponsor, but they get on the bandwagon and innovate with the rest of them.
The choices they make then in terms of how they’re going to execute their infrastructures and ...
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At a recent conference, the presenters discussed their on-campus policy for using Second Life. A few strategies emerged from the presentation.
First, this campus simulated buildings from the physical campus to the virtual island—as grounds for familiarity. I know of another campus that has used its mascot and logo as a design element for an island on SL as well. The term used to describe this was “mimic proximity.” The spaces mimicked were ...
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During the MERLOT International Conference 2008 http://conference.merlot.org/2008/Program2008.html in the Minneapolis Hilton earlier this month, one of the organizers commented on the intimacy of a first language as an integral part of an engaging learning experience. He mentioned this in the context of looking for translators to help evaluate and analyze the value of learning objects on the MERLOT database. This idea carries over to non-English submittals to the organization’s journal as well.
Continue reading The Intimacy of a First Language for Learning
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Clients know what they want, but they have a hard time explaining what they want in a way that is specific and usable enough for developers and site designers.
I’ve come to this conclusion after seeing projects languish, without any traction or support (and then the predictable finger-pointing). I’ve seen this with websites where faculty clients may not know what is available or possible technologically, and they have one image or groove in their minds. There’s no ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 August 2008
Dr.Michael Wesch’s "digital anthropology" presentation to the Library of Congress resulted in a thought-provoking video that has garnered a lot of airplay.
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179
Some of his observations about virtual “community” showed people with the art of mimicry and highly suggestible in terms of following others’ actions (something like lemmings).
Seeing Dr. Wesch’s presentation and then reading Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007 ...
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In a continuing endeavor to understand how people use visuals for learning, I came across a curious idea—that of “change blindness”. I know people who say that they can tell if even one item in their work space is moved an iota. Personally, I can relate more to the majority of people who apparently fall under the phenomenon of being blind to small changes.
This phenomena comes from an interesting human feature—that of their small visual working memory ...
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The use of modules to organize a curriculum offers more than learning flexibility. For a recent project, modules now allow for co-building a curriculum for both credit and non-credit deployment.
The credit course is defined by the documents that have gone through Faculty Senate and been approved as a high-quality academic course. Those learning objectives are codified in the syllabus and other course materials, and the course description resides in the academic catalogs. The strategies here then come in sequencing ...
Continue reading Academic Credit and Commercial Non-Credit Co-Building
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Usually when an all-day training takes the morning to launch, few will return in the afternoon for the rest of it. So there were about a dozen of us huddled in an upscale hotel conference room with very minimal wireless connectivity and trying to get in on Second Life and to embody our avatars.
Here was yet another foray into Second Life, this time, under the able guidance of Dr. Jonathon Richter (U of Oregon) as part of a day-long ...
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Surely, most people have received invitations to join professional social sites. Almost invariably, these come from people that one has met fleetingly at a professional conference. Or a person whom one hasn’t spoken to for years because of differing interests and divergent lives.
The idea is to maximize professional relationships as busy professionals by highlighting the relationship and taking advantage of each other’s connections. It’s like how people scaffold relationships through mutual acquaintances… It’s a kind ...
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Effective sound in instructional design refers to the initial sound capture and then the editing that follows. Initial poor sound capture (full of ambient sounds, poor voice quality) cannot really be enhanced much with desktop software. Live events that are not properly mic-ed ends up as a lost event.
With many departments videotaping their own events, there are plenty of digital videos with all-right video but fuzzy audio. Unintended ambient sounds—people walking down a hallway, the closing of a ...
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It would seem that a central piece to designing well for online learning involves deeper understandings of the learner. So it’s not just the curricula, the domain knowledge and the technology that’s critical, but the nature of humans at their core is relevant.
It was in that spirit that I embarked on reading a classic—Colin Ware’s Information Visualization: Perception for Design (2004).
One curious observation was that people have very limited visual working memory. Given that ...
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“Digital media is more fragile than paper. Software bugs, power outages, hackers, and other problems threaten the reliability of digital collections. The risks can be mitigated when multiple copies of the data collection are generated and updated consistently.” -- Dr. Fran Berman in “One Hundred Years of Data”
The nightmare is an old one. A lot of work goes into the development of various digital objects—slidehshows, manuscripts, transcripts, digital flashcards, photos, and images. The memory drive crashes, and that’s ...
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With online synchronicity, most presenters do wrap up the interactions with some flourish. There are some closing comments, a thanks to all who participated, URLs of where the digital resources will be posted, and promises for future events. That sense of wrap-up is fairly critical in giving participants a sense of event completion.
In e-learning, though, I see much less design of closure. Too often, there’s a flurry of activity to hit the deadlines. There are cumulative assignments. There ...
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It’s hard enough to future-proof the present moment. The dynamism of the future involves unpredictability that takes most by surprise at one point or another. Even the past is not closed to revision; it’s not future-proofed. Interpretations change continuously. It is in this reality that people strive to future-proof a curriculum.
What is a future-proofed curriculum? Ideally, it would be curriculum that gets magnified over time and built upon by many and used because of its high learning ...
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In literary critique, there’s the idea that an author does not fully know what his or her writing is about. There’s a subconscious level of production that may reveal hidden psychological insights. That was always a nifty principle to help students feel more comfortable in their interpretations—as long as they could find evidence of their interpretation in the text itself.
This approach has fine value, too, in analyzing nonfiction. Recently, I went through a chapter to identify ...
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So bingo cards can draw numbers from between 1 – 75. There’s often a free spot on the card. And the cards may be 5 x 5 (25 spots – the one freebie)…or 5 x 6 (30 spots – the one freebie). The randomizer could put out as many sets of the numbers as I wanted. I needed 29 numbers chosen from the 1-75 inclusive pool, and I needed them in random order. I needed three bingo cards per sheet, so ...
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For the past half-year, I’ve been privileged to take part in several projects that have used the Open Journal Systems software (distributed by the Public Knowledge Project http://pkp.sfu.ca/).
This publishing system uses a logical workflow from when an author submits a work to the site and ends up in a submission cue. Then, the editors select reviewers and submit the writing to the various reviewers. The submission is then revised and edited, copy-edited, laid out, proof-read ...
Continue reading Two Projects and the Open Journal Systems Software
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During a recent trip to my former haunts, I was chatting with a former colleague and was reminded of a vaporware incident. In this case, a former school president lost my former state some half a million dollars for vaporware—to a special friend of the president’s who had apparently no prior coding experience.
Three college presidents ended up supporting this unfortunate endeavor, and no actual product was produced at the end of the sorry episode. (The state ethics ...
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This concept sparked with an article of a guitar-playing astrophysicist who writes semi-risque music to make certain elusive astronomy concepts clear.
Part of instructional design work involves getting a sense of an instructor’s workstyle and personality and trying to capture some of that in an online learning experience—so as to engage and motivate learners. For some professors, their public personality is part of their schtick. For others, the personality may be more subtle and nuanced.
A ...
Continue reading Flavor: The Personality Piece in Instructional Design
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Instructional designers engage in knowledge work. They collaborate with faculty to collect and transfer information, which must somehow be designed to evolve into knowledge. Our main tools are pedagogical and technological. As service personnel, we support or lead from behind, often based on the instructors’ comfort levels.
The faculty members are the default subject matter experts (SMEs). They have to identify the elements of learning that may be transferable. They must define the degree of abstraction of knowledge needed ...
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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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In recent years, people seem to be working on a faster and faster pace. A student journalist will call on a Tues. for an article that will run on Wed. Faculty will call or email with a request for research or advisement, and they’ll want to meet in a day or two. Or two weeks before a grant application is due, the head of a department will arrange a meeting, and the work involves instructional design, research, writing, a ...
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In student journalism, faculty and advisors work hard to shepherd student work forward towards publication—often locally and then in larger and larger venues. Students had a chance to evolve their work. They made mistakes in small venues before risking mistakes in the larger ones. Some of you already know where I’m going with this.
Students today often publish to the world early on. Various classes may require blogging or wiki postings. While these may ...
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E-learning mitigates time and distance to a degree, but it does not totally collapse time.
At around the 8th week of a 10-week quarter, occasionally, a student will come up with a proposal that goes something like this: How about if I do all the work I missed in the prior 8 weeks and graduate because this is the last course I need? The student promises a Herculean effort to get a course done in a very short time. The ...
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It doesn’t take long for the doctoral students to find their way to those involved in instructional design. There’s research on quality matrices, hybrid learning strategies, interactive television, strategic deployment of e-learning, and any number of other issues and combinations of issues.
The outreaches come through on listservs, broadcast or micro-cast emails, telephone calls, online surveys, shoutouts at conferences, face-to-face queries, and conferences.
Students want advice. They want readers for their draft chapters. They want access and connections ...
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Back in the day, there were some of my freshman classes that had some 700 – 800 or more students per auditorium. Our learning was facilitated by TAs, and there were notes that we could buy in case we missed a lecture date or two. That’s how I recall it. I never actually bought lecture notes as study aids although I probably could have earned some extra points with that. I remember seeing some, and they were full of typos ...
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It was a friendly invitation between two Kansas universities to chat about ITV via Polycom. We were meeting from two universities and one branch campus. The dry run had gone well. The automated dialing system didn’t quite work, but we all did finally get online live to discuss the issues at hand.
One of the universities in the state was seeing ITV (interactive television) as the way to do distance learning. While they ...
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One of the basic assumptions when I judged grants on various committees (civil rights, literature, academic, and in-house ones) was that people are going to do no more than they promise in a grant application. Often, they’ll do quite a bit less.
So the balance was choosing work that would be cutting-edge and prosocial but also that was doable. It was rare to find any grants that were cutting-edge, at least in my experiences ...
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In a recent professional conference, one of the speakers presented on his use of virtual fairs and expositions. As a computer science professor, he would combine these virtual fairs (which people may attend from their desktop computers) with short research assignments for students.
He demonstrated a few of these for the audience. Essentially, these were websites that put a mental frame around the delivery of pre-packaged or live digital contents. There was a screen for live or canned speeches. There ...
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In my line of work, I occasionally meet people who are quite intriguing. A recent individual was a university professor for many years who now works for a peace organization in the West. She has traveled to numerous global hotspots around the world.
She has a nimble mind that analyzes the world as a power-based place, full of human emotions and angers that needed directing and diplomatic interventions and leadership interventions, or else these situations would hit “trigger point” and ...
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This clipart shows a gymnast standing on a balance beam in a balanced but difficult pose.
This stock image shows a man wearing a business suit and tie presenting to a group while standing in front of a whiteboard with writing on it.
This clipart image shows a man and a woman holding up an award in the form of a large trophy cup.
This image shows a bright pink "bot" that looks like a head floating in the screen ...
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So here was a pretty in-depth online training on two fairly large technological systems. One was an LMS, and one was an instance manager for that LMS. The learning involved the use of various slideshows, animated tutorials, and practice assessments.
In addition, these technical systems are deployed socially, for use in sometimes high-pressured academic environments.
Once all the mechanical parts of this training were built to spec, and the policy aspects for the role of the trainees upon graduation had ...
Continue reading Adding the Human Piece to an Automated Training
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The warning signs of high maintenance online learners come early. Give me about a half dozen postings in a course…or the first half dozen emails, and a pattern establishes itself fairly quickly. Or maybe one gets a suspicion early…even if it may take a while longer to fully bear out (or not).
They’ll asked an inordinate number of questions that have already been answered in the course announcements and documentation. They will second-guess the teaching ...
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A university-level office had been doing business for years on campus but had no coherent logo. Now that my office has been collaborating with them on a number of projects, they decided to get logo-ed up, which makes a lot of sense. Now that they’re on board with that, we’ve had a flurry of emails to coalesce ideas for the logo and to move ahead with this.
There’s something to be said for the hot graphics talent ...
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A number of times now, various departments have approached this office with a common lament: their grant applications got positive feedback except that they were asked to shore up their pedagogical research, reasoning and execution. An ID then gets called in.
Few professors want to change their teaching approach. And for online learning, what many want to do is the same-old same-old (they’ll videotape everything).
At a meeting last month, the group wanted to learn about ...
Continue reading Supporting the Pedagogical Piece to a Grant Application
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An online course, by the time it’s complete and ready for deployment, often has plenty of moving parts. It involves documents that provide an overview of the learning—through the syllabus, the course policies, and the course calendar. There are the presential materials like videos, slideshows, simulations, texts, and other forms of lectures and demonstrations. There are the assignments. There are the sample student works. There are assessments, with rubrics and gradesheets. There are research project ideas.
And then ...
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It is a simple truism that most people would not want to be replaced out of their jobs. Suggesting that might make a person downright uncomfortable. So it was with amusement that I came across a phrase in my readings on automated learning: “offloading the instructor.”
That very blunt phrase highlights a very real factor in the support for automation of learning. Less offensive phrasing is usually used, more like “cost-savings.”
I recently co-presented on automated learning at this campus ...
Continue reading "Offloading the Instructor" and Automated Learning
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One of the first tenets of political storytelling is to embody one’s story. Have a clear alignment between one’s lived life and one’s presentations…the theories-in-action vs. the professed theories-in-use.
At a recent national conference, a large corporation fielded a team of presenters who demonstrated a system that they used for automated training of their staff. However, instead of showing any of their actual trainings, they used fictional training contents—in this case, how to tell why ...
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With work that may be a little boring, it helps to spice it up by thinking of ways to add value. That especially applies to transcripting. Of course, it is a slippery slope to integrate transcription into instructional design, and I most certainly don’t mean to integrate this. That said, I am assuming that most IDs will occasionally get dragged into some transcripting by the needs of a particular project every now and again.
Either that, or I’m ...
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Every new functionality that I learn regarding my university LMS gives me that much more ability. A recent one increased my skills in a pretty major order of magnitude. I say this in part because I spent years working unintelligently in terms of question creation and upload…for a few faculty clients. One involved plenty of chemistry symbols, which meant very slow creation of the formulas and questions. (And yes, this is not typical ID work, but I make it ...
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One requirement of being a geek is to enjoy reading pretty technical articles about what people are doing in their respective fields.
For me, with a background in more of the “soft sciences,” that means forays into IEEE and ACM to see what developers have been working on and how their technologies are being applied in various e-learning endeavors.
By the time I get to reading these articles, I can pretty much assume that the research is ...
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Colin Barras’ “'Matrix'-Style Virtual Worlds 'a Few Years Away'” (Apr. 4, 2008, by ABC Internet News Ventures) suggests that people can immerse in 3D spaces in protracted and possibly even inextricable ways with the new realistic virtual worlds that are being created.
This author paraphrases Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. “He says that virtual worlds realistic enough to be mistaken for the real thing are just a few years away,” asserts Barras. He describes ...
Continue reading Photorealistic Virtuality: Light and Animation
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For many quarters and semesters now, I’ve included a learner lounge space where learners can collaborate, share information, and socialize without any instructor presence. The only caveat is that an instructor will enter the space if something goes awry, and that presence is requested.
This space allows learners to have their own privacy, and it stands in the place of four-walls hallway conversations and chitter-chatter that doesn’t include the instructor.
I’ve ...
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A colleague generously set up a campus tour for me, and during this tour, we visited a state-of-the-art e-learning lab.
The lab itself looked like any other set of academic offices, with a mixture of computers, papers and books….and students…and comfortable furniture. We all crowded into a small meeting room to see some of the work of this office (which has a strong track record of federal educational grant funding as well ...
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In the quest for high learner retention and high participation, one strategy in the building of CSCL spaces (computer supported collaborative learning) has been to encourage the building of so-called “back channels.”
In all sorts of communication environments, having such informal back channels is useful. It allows for richer interchanges without people having to necessarily go on the formal record. And if vetted, such information can be highly useful and pro-social and pro-learning.
One example of such ...
Continue reading Developing Back Channels for Online Learners
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
01 May 2008
On Feb. 11, 2008, Dr. Cable Green (Director of eLearning for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges) hosted a virtual session for 42 faculty and administrators from around the US (with a cluster in Washington State) around “Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources.” This used the Elluminate technology for the virtual participants and actually had a physical location, too, at the Bellingham Technical College.
This was billed as a ...
Continue reading Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources
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Some public debate has surrounded the issue of public universities and colleges displaying greater responsibility for their troubled students, in order to head off potential on-campus violence.
There have been government studies on students who engage in violence on campus. There have been various universities that have shared publicly some of their endeavors, usually through their counseling support programs for students.
Recent articles have suggested that such institutions of higher education need to be more interventionist. They need to take ...
Continue reading A Watch List of Troubled Students...and Virtuality
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One central premise of most support offices for online learning is the faculty DIY aspect, that is, the “do-it-yourself” potential of faculty. This idea has been persistent for a very long time even though there have been examples that might lead one to abandon this concept.
The stories abound. One faculty member had wrapped a scarf around her CPU, so it wouldn’t get too cold. Others have somehow lost their courses that they created on the learning ...
Continue reading Expanding the Faculty DIY Sphere in Academia
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A self-professed “peripatetic” professor, Dr. Chris Sorensen presented on “A University without Walls” at the final Provost Lecture of the year at K-State on Apr. 24.
He pointed out that those in academia tend to specialize in their respective fields. Yet, the creativity happens in the interfaces between domains of knowledge. He used Arthur Koestler’s idea of “bisociation” from “The Act of Creation” to show the interstices where new things may coalesce—in the intersections between disciplines and human ...
Continue reading Expanding the Traditional Lecture in F2F Space
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Every so often, a faculty member will start a query that leads in intriguing directions. And delightfully, this often comes from faculty who are new to online learning.
So this came about when a faculty member asked about letting her distance students learn how to use a digital microscope…and also wanting them to see various slides virtually. She wanted pretty much all live F2F microscope functionalities as well as access to a number of slides that ...
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It seems to be a basic truism that people need to practice shared endeavors. Coordination requires tight communications and cooperation.
At a recent conference, a presenter from the Department of Homeland Security described some desktop “spiral” exercises that brought together various offices to deal with shared potential large-scale disasters.
For example, one involved a pandemic sequence broken down in vignettes for a chronology of interactions and decision-making. Another involved flooding. These virtual simulated experiences involved various ...
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While driving in to work today, I was thinking about a new crop of online students, and it occurred to me that online learners do have a system of self-regulation of learning as a group. What does that mean? Well, online learners create a sense of community online, and they regulate their own community - in a sense.
They pay attention to each other’s asynchronous posts. They read each other’s works with interest and share joys ...
Continue reading The Self Regulation of Virtual Community by Online Learners
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So our in-house videographer had MacGyver-ed a solution for the sun streaming in through the shades behind the make-shift green screen (a piece of cloth he hung off some lighting poles). He had used clips to hold lights to get proper lighting on the subject. In the cramped office, he had set up the chairs and hidden the peace-inducing rockery left by an employee on leave.
After all that hard work, he had his subject well posed. The subject was ...
Continue reading Handling the Giggles during a Videotaping Session
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A chance comment by a faculty member started me on a brief run of research on “herding” behaviors in automated agents. The idea was initially to have a herd of cows online behavior as their real-life counterparts do when approached from a particular angle. Having only seen one cow up close (at a gas station, no less), I wasn’t sure about the actual behaviors, but I had read a little something about “flocking” behaviors and figured I’d look ...
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There’s something charming about being able to watch a small college come online in creating an online program. What’s even more intriguing is watching from a distance and through the framework of an online course to train the faculty, staff and administrators—using the LMS they’ve selected for their program.
Having never set foot on the campus of this college and only driven by the small town where it’s based once on my way elsewhere, I ...
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Starting out a new venture in an academic setting involves plenty of collaboration-building and consideration. Universities are complex environments, and decisions can have ripple effects and unintended consequences—even when different constituencies have been fully
So we had our first meeting to consider launching a distance learning faculty wiki out of this university…potentially through the division through which the university’s e-learnings offerings are supported, coordinated and created.
Not surprisingly, the first meeting involved some general ...
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The past several months, the issue of e-learning accessibility has escalated to be one of the central issues of concern on this campus. As such, that has meant that a fair amount of time has been spent on the laws and regulations for accessibility and then on the various technological strategies to ensure the accessibility of images, data tables, films, audio files, and other digital learning objects.
An interesting twist on this relates to The Layered Model of Computer Supported ...
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Dr. Alma Clayton-Pederson, Vice President of the American Association for Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) presented at the March 26 Provost Lecture Mar. 26, at K-State. I hadn’t realized that I’d actually already seen her speak in a 2006 AAC&U conference as one of the keynotes…until she was introduced. (Back in 2006, I was presenting at the AAC&U conference in Seattle and may have had the mind engaged in meeting up with former colleagues and ...
Continue reading Diversity and the Appreciation of the Other
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I have never been very sympathetic with those who go to conferences with a product to sell. That might be a new book or a company name or a new product or themselves, for a career change. Now, I’ll have to sheepishly re-evaluate and come up with a strategy for attracting talent for a book that I’ll be editing on digital imagery in e-learning.
While the concept itself is solid, and there’s plenty of strong academic writing ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
22 March 2008
Unfunded mandates are as popular in higher education as they are pretty much anywhere: not.
However, recently, our campus faculty and administration passed a policy that requires that e-learning meet accessibility guidelines. That aligns with national and state laws, but as an unfunded mandate, that requires plenty of creative hard work.
All the intentions here are good and positive, but there may be a lag between the desire and the actual doing. This campus has signed on for a big ...
Continue reading A Tip Sheet and an E-Learning Module to Promote E-Learning Accessibility
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Professor John Scigliano’s initiation into online space was not very salutary the way he tells it. He had logged on to Second Life when he was approached by a “furry” in lizard form, who promptly assaulted his avatar. This professor at the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences of Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, was somewhat traumatized, the way he tells it.
In “Payoffs, Spin-offs, and Ripoffs in Virtual Worlds: What Gain? What Pain?” at the ...
Continue reading IRBs, Video Releases and 3D Virtual Avatars
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The KU Libraries hosted a "Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities" conference back on March 7. They have published the resources of the presenters, and those may be found at the following site.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/CopyrightSymposium/CopyrightSymposiumhandouts.shtml
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Student retention has always been a bit of a challenge in many academic programs. Doctoral programs seem to feature about a 50% dropout rate. High schools have a 30% dropout rate. For e-learning ones, there are additional challenges, many of which have been mitigated with more student screening, student support, learner outreach, and faculty and staff training. That said, the challenge of retention does crop up in different ways.
Recently, a program that has high student entry traffic but low ...
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At a recent e-learning conference, a presenter on informal learning demonstrated his instrument that involved basic trivia questions and also involved an assessment of how much confidence each respondent had to the certainty of correctness for each answer.
He showed that people had quite a few incidences of high confidence linked with incorrect answers.
At another event, the speaker asked the audience how many of them made decisions in their lives knowing they were wrong. No ...
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Every time we come up to spring break, I’m feeling more of that sense of anticipation. I truly adore my job, and the busier it gets, usually the happier and more productive I am. But the really cool thing about spring break is that there’s often a week to de-compress and focus on the less harried projects. The town empties out. The faculty all disappear to their respective homes. The campus has an abandoned feeling. The IT folks ...
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Dale A. Morris, an instructional development meteorologist of NOAA, in the presentation titled "National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario," presented a powerful live tabletop exercise designed to raise the situational awareness of the various entities that may be involved in a severe weather incident - the meteorologists, TV newscasters, and an emergency operations center.
A National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office piped in simulated weather information (based on past weather events). To create this, they built a weather event simulator ...
Continue reading The National Severe Weather Workshop Scenario
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Rich media refers to Web artifacts and sites that provide audio, video and interactivity. This includes downloadable or streaming videos that may be played on different media players like Adobe's Flash Player, Apple's QuickTime, Real Networks' RealPlayer, and Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Rich multimedia can add more full-sensory learning such as sound and dynamic motion video to an online or hybrid learning experience. The digital interactive media may offer a more active learner experience than passive viewing ...
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The offer was just too good to resist: teaching a four-week course to faculty members in Washington state's community college system through WashingtonOnline. A last-minute change with a faculty member and overwhelming faculty interest in online teaching culminated in an available section of their "Teaching Online: Planning for Success." I was being a sentimentalist - as the course was one I'd taken a decade ago when I started teaching online regularly.
I decided to cut out any other extras ...
Continue reading Elegance: The "Learner Frustration" Assignment
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Now is one of those moments that I've given myself some 15 minutes to writea blog. I just finished a slideshow on "e-learning course branding - simplified" and figured I'd write on something fresh on my mind.
Branding a course is often a hard sell for faculty. Only those who've had some prior exposure to branding take to it, and then, those are happy to work with the graphic artist, multimedia specialist, and others to create a course ...
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Whitepapers are not usually much in the purview of instructional design, except maybe as a way to understand a new pedagogical method originated from private industry or a commercial whitepaper to understand a new software product.
That said, whitepapers can be so helpful in in-house learning and decision-making. For the office where I work, whitepapers are authoritative reports used to educate not customers per se but all of us in-house staff.
Instead of the very brief whitepapers that ...
Continue reading Using Whitepapers to Change (My) Mindset(s)
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by IDOS Newswire
01 February 2008
BTC eLearning is delighted to host Dr. Cable Green presenting on Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources. This presentation will be publicized throughout the system and externally, so please reserve your seat early.
When: February 11, 2008 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM Where: Online via Elluminate /Broadcast at BTC Building G, Conference Room A How to Attend: Email jjones@btc.ctc.edu with the email addresses of those you would like to add to ...
Continue reading "Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources"
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I first read about task decomposition in the context of business processes some years ago. And then, I've come across it in the prototyping of a simulation for a project a couple years ago. Here, I got to break down a number of complex decisions and paths into discrete snippets of information and decisions and potential repercussions of the decisions.
Then, in reading about simulations, I came across the idea of "critical incidences" or relevant events or situations (that ...
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Back in the day, the InDesign and Quark files were for print. Photos were .eps and ramped up dpi and CMYK for the inks.
The day the paper was digitally put to bed, I'd be off to the printers...often small business operations in the industrial parts of town. The layouts would be for tabloid-size papers (vs. broadsheet). The small front offices would be mere fronts for the really fun web presses in the back, which would smell of ...
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Wrapping up different projects often means dealing with all sorts of ephemera. That may mean a thin folder of paper (meeting notes, rubrics, annotated research) and brochures and posters, and fat digital folders of draft logos, images, digital video, sound files, text files, and other elements. There are the added resources from each project - whether it be new software or free graphics downloads or online research resources or connections with other individuals. There are the DVDs or CDs. There are ...
Continue reading Protecting Course Build and Project "Ephemera"
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 January 2008
The Tools for Successful Online Teaching By Lisa Dawley Hershey: Information Science Publishing 2007 244 pp. hardcover
With every resource, it seems somewhat inevitable that the authors will draw on their own experiences. For some, they hide the personal tie-ins through objective research. For others, the firsthand experiences are drawn upon heavily. This latter approach in Dr. Lisa Dawley's The Tools for Successful Online Teaching is its main strength and weakness.
Faculty who like to learn from their own ...
Continue reading The Tools for Successful Online Teaching (Brief Resource Review)
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After a professional conference, I often end up with a goodie bag full of CDs, DVDs, business cards, and marketing decks of cards. For weeks after, I run across the candies I've squirreled away in my backpack from the varous displays. My email box captures the occasional follow-up emails, and I am popular for a period with sales reps who call, full of cheer and hope. The presenters have had their bit of glory after slogging through the day-to-day ...
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Perusing the academic literature often results in delightful endeavors of others. Even if the work never directly overlaps with mine in instructional design and instruction, I can at least ponder it. It offers a brain tickle. A recent article addressed the issue of how one hardy band of academics would map between printed and digtal document instances.
In various design plans, paper has a role. While much paper has been ...
Continue reading Endeavors to Cross the Paper-Digital Divide
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Some technologies just have an "attraction." They're well designed enough to empower users to look smart and produce well. While many people seem to like to Microsoft-bash, they keep turning out technologies that are highly usable, fun, and that really help people to think. They make capturing digital contents easy. As a person who works in a tech office, I am beginning to learn how much design and thought and expertise goes into the back-end in terms of the ...
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"Facebook is a huge identity risk." -- A security guru at K-State
Universities are reaching out into the "metaverse" to retain and attract the "gamer generation" of students.
One part of this endeavor relates to going out into the social software spaces in order to create identities and digital spaces around which they may interact, bond, and get familiar with the university brand.
In service of this idea, I recently went onto Facebook for some initial research. I ...
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There are moments when using technologies that one has a sense of bruised trust. More specifically, in this recent case, I lost a whole demo course.
A demo course, in this case, was one created to showcase the work of various faculty using the LMS that the office I work for puts out. This course was organized along both a university track and a K-12 track.
This course had modules from a variety of fields. It had an e-book on ...
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Those who've worked in education for some time have seen this phenomena of flat-lining - that moment when a learner hits a learning wall and can't get over it. This is no small learning hurdle. Rather, I think of it as something like a learner trying to draw on resources that were never quite built up, and there just aren't the tools to get over that wall.
That is, the learner has to start from the fundamentals...and ...
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Last night, after an exhausting and exhilarating time spent editing a chapter and the graphics within it, I thought fleetingly of why people in this digital age would even bother writing or editing print books anymore. Do the editors have any idea how difficult it may be to engage in such work? Do they know how many work and non-work hours they'll put into coordinating with their contributors and the book publishers and all the others involved in this ...
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Christopher Chambers, with the Juxtopia Group, presented on a virtual sim that occurs in real 3D space. Live fire combat involves some muscle memory, similar to marksmanship.
Based on research into sports psychology and with an eye towards fully exploiting cutting-edge technologies, a traning was created to sustain and improve live fire combat skills: the speed of engagement, identification and acquisition of the target, and the accuracy.
Because of the need to engage actual physical muscle memory, this sim occurs ...
Continue reading Improving Live Fire Combat Training with Virtual Targetry
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"I wonder if there's a way to make a PowerPoint that can be shown, but the slideshow images cannot be captured by a digital camera."
The scenario went something like this. A researcher had put plenty of time into a research project. She went overseas to an international conference to present on her research findings. While she'd written a short overview of her presentation, the actual presentation itself included tables of sensitive never-before-published data that ...
Continue reading Private Information and Very Public Presentations
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In some research on gaming, I ran across interactive fiction (IF) games and the related idea of tangibles. Here, game developers would create boxes that would emulate books that had text and manipulables. They would have other objects created to intensify the mainly text-based gameplay. Indeed, tangibles are created for online learners, so I thought I'd add a small entry about that.
Tangibles most commonly involve textbooks, magazines, CDs and DVDs and even videotapes. Some ...
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There it was again, another department's story of the search for what my supervisor SF calls the "one-button solution." Various academic departments have educational needs. They want to set up particular functionalities.
They then send a graduate student or a staff member to search out a solution. Or an administrator will go to a conference, hear a rave about a software and then throw cash at that. A one-button solution is one that just requires pushing the play button ...
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Attorney C.L. Lindsay, founder of the non-profit national organization Coalition for Student and Academic Rights (CO-STAR), spoke on the dangers of Facebook and MySpace to an enthusiastic crowd on Oct. 16.
He offered some great common-sense approaches to handling personal information on the WWW.
Some principles:
Think of the off-line equivalent first. In the same way that people wouldn't shoplift CDs, they shouldn't download movies or music that doesn't belong to them. Federal copyright law addresses ...
Continue reading College-Level Cautions re: Net Use and eLearners
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 October 2007
Virtual Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures
Dr. Dale Olsen (formerly of Johns Hopkins University and now with SiMmersion LLC) presented on "Virtualized Standardized Patients for Training Health Professionals to Deal with Biological Agent Exposures" (at the Washington Interactive Technologies conference hosted by SALT).
He opened with a short PBS movie clip about the importance of cultural sensitivities in law enforcement approaching people to get information. So ...
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Antoinette Bruciati's "Online Social Networking Communities: Issues for Educators" presentation at the SALT conference in Virginia sparked a cultural divide between some instructors and some technologists.
The gist of her presentation was of the number of risks that young people face online in various social venues. She pointed out various types of predatorial behavior of adults (apparently) in online spaces while she went undercover as a young person. She showed various software ...
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One of the benefits of working in an IT office is that I have plenty of access to computer hardware and software to do my work. What's in short supply though...is paper.
So to earn ice cream money, I sometimes read and write book reviews. And the books I receive range from literature to pop fiction. More on the pop fiction continuum was a novel in which there was a passing conceit: the idea ...
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Demographics figures into projections for the economy, the future workforce, and the price of housing, among other things. The retiring out of the baby boomers is anticipated to have wide-ranging effects on job availability, future pay and also the quality of workplace training. With the complicated machinery in the energy industry, and the average industry worker at 48 years old, "human obsolescence" may prove a challenge to this industry, suggests Matthew Sadinsky, president of System Operations Success, International. Sadinsky presented ...
Continue reading Virtual Sims Standing in for a Dwindling Workforce
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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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Of late, I've spent a fair amount of time doing somewhat mind-numbing work. I ended up with a time-heavy transcription project and then another uploading massive amounts of chemistry formulas and questions for another course. I have the steps down almost in a kind of pure physical memory - scripted behavior. The truth is that I brought both on myself. For the first, I was trying to live up to my accessibility goals and thought it would be worth it ...
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One job descriptor that wasn't on the job description I saw about a year and a half ago for my position was that of serving as a technical support technician. However, a couple encounters of late have brought this whole issue home.
Visiting clients in their respective offices, I've found that serving as tech support is often necessary. Oftentimes, the computers and setups I have tend to outpace those of any faculty members I've dealt with, except ...
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Some mainline media organizations offer some fine quality slideshows and digital movies. I'm thinking of the tightly edited food and restaurant reviews of Phil Vettel The Chicago News Tribune with their condensed mix of food appreciation, chef interviews, atmospheric digital captures, music, and scrumptious food views. I'm also thinking of The New York Times in its real estate section with its slideshows and voiceover narratives related to real estate.
One of these was by an architect, and he ...
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So the other day, I was working with a chemistry professor to help her upload her exams and finals with all the various annotations and symbols, the superscript and subscript. The equation editor was acting funky. In her office, she said expansively, just delete all these prior questions in the Question Bank. As a bit of a neatnik, I was all ready to comply when a little something made me hesitate, and I said to wait until we'd uploaded ...
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At several institutions of higher education that I've worked in, I've seen some tentative moves towards engaging the world for global eLearning. The steps seem to be wobbly and tentative, more hopeful than effective. These endeavors often involve third-party vendors who may represent different entities or populations in other countries. These efforts involve small groups that are budgeted to go overseas to try to attract learners. And often, these endeavors are not supported by overseas offices or anything ...
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Observers have long commented on the dwindling power of the written word. One article I read recently talked about the usefulness of having books as objects of decor and not really for reading. Many students rely on book jacket blurbs and formalized summaries of literary works to understand them. What is occurring seems to be a slippage in the power of written language to serve as a shared code of understanding. Written words, by their ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 July 2007
As sometimes can happen with a project, I was bulding one thing under false assumptions and my supervisors were thinking I was making something else. The divergence wasn't serious, but it meant an extra layer of work later on. My small piece in a project was to teach college composition and research writing courses to Native American students, in a cohort model. One aspect of this project was to create Native case studies as part of a curriculum. My ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 July 2007
When Dr. Michele Lansdowne of the Salish Kootenai College (SKC of Pablo, Montana) went looking for a curriculum for Native American students of business, she found very little that resonated. She found even less in terms of business endeavors on an American Indian reservation. That dearth of academic materials in this field led her to start a project of interviewing American Indian entrepreneurs on reservations, in a grant-funded project that resulted in a widely used text and multimedia CD set ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 July 2007
To get ready for the Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop, I read through various cases from the site. There was an interesting "choose your own adventure" type of quality to these cases.
Various author voices came through clearly, and a range of sourcing strategies were used to capture the information.
"Sovereign Still from the Forest to the Plains" (Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff), "Indian Identity in the Arts" (Tina Kuckkahn, J.D.), "Evil Water" (Dr. Subodh K ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- Current Cases (Part IV)
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An eLearning Course Curriculum Wizard Building an Instructor-Led "High-Tech / High-Touch" LMS-delivered Course
Preconference Tutorial Washington Interactive Technologies Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) Arlington, Virginia August 2007
This goes through the steps for creating an instructor-led eLearning course for higher ed. Combining educational theory and modern technologies, this session will address efforts in the following areas: project scope, learner analysis, course contents, learning outcomes, applied pedagogical theory for eLearning, technology selection (especially for multimedia builds), project checkpoint definition, course structuring ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2007
Getting hands-on is a fine way of learning how case studies may be experienced.
It was a couple of years in the making - this case. Dr. Linda Moon Stumpff started out with the relationship building that is so critical to doing research in Indian Country. Without trust, without a clear showing of personality / motive / "heart," there would not be sufficient synergies or motivations to "do business" there. In her ...
Continue reading Teaching and Writing Native Cases Workshop -- A Forestry Management Case (Part II)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 July 2007
The invitation to present came just about half a week before the conference itself was to be held. I was not brought in to be a space filler but rather to contribute a small bit of knowledge - about half an hour's worth. The knowledge base for my presentation had been in the works for at least two years, but even prior to that, I'd been learning a lot about interactivity, learning communities, DLOs and such. I was looking ...
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IDs have to draw on the expertise and resources of a number of others to bring the design of an online course together. The clients / SMEs are an assumed group. What's often not seen may be the work of graphic designers. The work of IDs often is that of a cross-functional team.
Graphic designers create covers for e-books. They create logos for course series. They create posters to advertise events on campus ...
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One of the coolest things about reading other people's research is how immersed people may be in their respective fields and how maybe even a part of their learning may have impact on what I do (or even think).
Most of us have likely engaged with informal learning. Learning...to rollerblade...about the real estate market...how to cook a particular type of food...and how to use a new software program...often is ...
Continue reading Informal or Untaught Learning ... and eSpaces
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A couple weeks ago, I zipped up a fat file of digital materials that I'd been developing for well over half a year...used Yousendit (that godsend) to send the file...and almost danced a jig. If it weren't for the dancing cadet, I might have.
Anyway, in packaging this work, I found the need to review naming protocols on the digital files. I used folders to organize the contents...for slideshows....for graphics...and other elements. Flash ...
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After years in the faculty ranks, I got used to having a rich variety of professional development opportunities. There would be seminars and workshops. There would be guest speakers. There would be conferences and symposia. There would be publication opportunities. And then I switched to instructional design with teaching online on the side. I'm noticing now that there's no real program for instructional designers here to develop their talents and skills. On the DEOS listserv, I read about ...
Continue reading Grab Bag of Professional Development Opportunities for IDs
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SoftChalk Lesson Builder's most recent Webinar involved a presentation by Lisa Young, a hydrology professor at Gateway Community College (part of the 10 Maricopa Community Colleges of Phoenix, AZ). Young also is a part-time elearning coordinator and co-chair of the RLO Action Group. Some 100 individuals had gathered online to listen in on "Re-usable Learning Objects - The Maricopa College System" (June 13).
Young used a purchased template from SoftChalk that was made for the particular college ...
Continue reading An Aligned RLO Effort in a Community College System
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Accessibility is one of those critical issues that affect pretty much all ID work. Various authoring software programs have made our jobs a lot easier in terms of templating with the right color contrasts, the ability to add alt texts, the various ways digital files may be output, and so on. My own commitment to accessibility has been put to the test with a 9-module course build that involves plenty of video: lectures, labs ...
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"Learning outlasts all other pleasures." Isaac Asimov (1980)
Dr. Michael Bush in his "SCORM-enabled Knowledge Economy: Willit be Hollywood or YouTube?" suggested that the ID + SCORM conference offered an opportunity for scholarly endeavors...and made suggestions to reach an academic audience. He said that human conservatism and slowness to change may not be negative per se. This reluctance may protect some valuable instructional approaches, for example. He seconded M. David Merrill's ideas that learning communities are tantamount to "pooled ...
Continue reading Gauging Speeds for the Status Quo and Innovations
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So a couple weeks ago, some snafu with my email resulted in the creation of a second spam folder. And in the work of fixing my spam, the technologist found that numerous emails had been rejected and sort of left to disappear into the digital morass.
I then found out a week or two later that two editors had been trying to reach me for maybe 3-4-5-6 months now...and I'd been missing their digital cues. It wasn't ...
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One carry-over between projects have been vocabulary lists. For one project, the vocabulary list was uploaded into a database and connected to various modules of learning. For a current project, the vocabulary list will be deployed as both a Web-table and Flash object flashcards. In another project, pop-ups with word definitions may be created as a rollover effect. Words matter a whole lot in online learning. Every academic field has its own verbiage and meanings tied to those words. Add ...
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by 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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In reconsidering the "Educating the Client" entry, I realized that that could sound like it was full of hubris. A more balanced approach would involve this other half: educating the self. How does one listen as an instructional designer to the needs of a client? After all, our job is to support projects to a successful completion. It's to ultimately make our clients themselves successful. It's to make them look good. The optimal way for a ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
07 May 2007
The recent spate of tornadoes that touched down in Kansas highlighted the importance of real-time accurate online information. Just a day before, Greensburg, KS, took a terrible beating in a "wedge" tornado that took out 90% of the town and resulted in 9-10 deaths (with that information changing). Now, on May 5, the whole area where we were in Manhattan, KS, was under a tornado watch. A short moment after I got a warning call, the tornado sirens went off ...
Continue reading EF-5 Tornadoes, Tornado Watches and Enhanced Real-time Decision-making
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The customer is always right. So goes this old saw.
For instructional designers (IDs), that concept requires a kind of eloquence in describing multimedia and LMS technologies in a way that non-experts may understand. They must be able to explicate various back-end processes when relevant. They must explain the rationales for why particular outcomes may be achieved particular ways.
"Magical thinking" exists in a number of realms. One of them clearly involves technologies. I think back to ...
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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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One of the more engaging aspects of ID work here involves being able to sit in on development meetings where individuals brainstorm various features to add to a new tool, the developers argue over specs, and final decisions get made about the functions. At a recent meeting, one of the developers said something about "this spaghetti of a mess," which I thought was very apt. The various constituencies represented by the members at the table all need their parts heard ...
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A meditation is supposed to be something reflective and calming. These are often accompanied by soothing intonations, bells and backstories stemming out of the Himalayas and clouds. Maybe I can just say that an ID may not always have time to meditate. Or maybe the rush is part of the techno age.
I was digitally scrolling through a series of video captures of a course that involved stress management. Part of the curricular build involved the live course sequencing to ...
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In an academic office with plenty of technology-minded people around, it's not often that one sees a lot of obvious primping. As I consider this further, I am awestruck by the rarity of this event that occurred.
So there we were at the end of a virtual simulated tour conducted by a representative of an East Coast company. A group of us were beings in Second Life. One kept walking around with a virtual torch for quite a while ...
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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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Late last year, I engaged in a research project that involved the use of online surveys. Ostensibly, the contents could apply to any number of instructors who teach f2f and those who teach online. I was going to use a non-reward strategy for the simple reason that I didn't want to pay out hundreds in gift cards for research that itself was not directly funded and would only get small play at a small C2C Fall Forum in Hutchinson ...
Continue reading "Nah": Rallying Interest in "Mirror" Online Surveys
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Caveat: Whenever I write on technology issues that are beyond my purview, I should use a double or triple cover, so I may disavow that I wrote this. I think that what's going on on the back end is important enough to discuss, but I also know that I'm going to embarrass myself by writing about something in a way that a software engineer never would. I've faced the disdainful glare (once was enough) of a software ...
Continue reading CORDRA and ADL-R (Registry) for Shared Data Environments
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
12 April 2007
Really in a time of need, no one really wants to depend on trickle down effects alone. These take time. These take goodwill. These take the structural levers in a society to make them work well.
I was watching a video off of a news site about how old PCs were being sold in large cheap lots and refurbished and sold into a West African nation. In their second incarnations, these computers were enabling small businesses ...
Continue reading Social Justice: The "Trickle Down" Effect and Educational Techno
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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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"Use cases could be a cultural tool (Lave & Wnger, 1991; Candlin et al., 1999) that (is) used for mediation between the various 'cultures' that take part in learning technology specification." (Hoel, n.d., pp. 2 - 22)
As an outsider to software development, I would never have assumed the importance of a so-called "use case." Now, as a person with a small toe in the door, I at least have a better sense of why "use cases" are ...
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Digital simulations may be used in situations where live simulations may be expensive, time-consuming, impractical and / or fast-changing.
At a recent conference, a representative of Chi Systems introduced the use of synthetic teammates for undergraduate pilot training. Here, pilots-in-training may practice the various voice communications with the tower (controller) and others in a runway take-off situation. Their voice inputs would be captured by voice recognition software (and VOIP for Net-mediated learning), and their responses and the timing of ...
Continue reading Fielding Synthetic Teammates for a Flying Simulation
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The Alice-in-Wonderland moment happened a couple days ago. There I was in the middle of an online course. I was making a change to an announcement when I accidentally hit some weird combination of keys and ended up in another person's account. I had access to that person's courses and all her "powers." I had attained "super powers" even without using my actual "instance manager" powers.
That got me musing about Alice-in-Wonderland moments. In these past 10 ...
Continue reading The Insidiousness (and Necessity) of Plug-and-Play
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"A risk is a potential event that, should it occur, would have an impact on the project." -- Mike Wright ("Project Management: From Managing Cost to Managing Risk," Educause Seminar 4, Mar. 12, 2007, Chicago, IL)
Our seminar presenter said, "I like to walk around dumb and happy." His expression made it clear that much as he might like to walk around that way, his better sense was that it was not advisable to do so, particularly ...
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Sometimes, I indulge myself and apply to a conference without any idea whether I'll get accepted. I do this in order to give me the space to consider a particular research question or concept or practice. Recently, I proposed a topic (haven't heard back yet about its status) in order to consider a project postmortem.
A project postmortem is an analysis of the work - from proposal to finish - in harsh light. Some use analytical rubrics or ...
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It doesn't take long working as an instructional designer to realize that some curricular builds will be "data hungry" ones. Data hungry curricular builds require massive amounts of digital learning objects and information. They require huge amounts of research. They require complex data tracking. They require lots of legal copyright releases and permission seeking. They demand fact cross-checking and accuracy. They demand attention to details because every change has a price in terms of investment of ...
Continue reading The "Black Hole": Data Hungry Curricular Models
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"Good ideas can lead to good practices..."
Sometimes, in work places, colleagues and supervisors think of theory as something snobby, excessive, unnecessary and maybe wrong. Several times in a recent week, I was given a carefully worded piece of advice - from the same person. His advice went: Avoid theory. He had been on the receiving end of a whitepaper on digital learning objects and SCORM, a work that I am currently revising and updating based on ...
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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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Getting smart machines to collaborate with humans may require some cajoling. One of my colleagues has a way with both people and with machines. He very masterfully originates workarounds that solve a variety of live issues for faculty as they use the campus-originated LMS. Being able to deliver such support requires a mental agility and a deep knowledge of the various technological systems. The very human demands on the technologies originate in the intersection of the teaching, communications, learners and ...
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I had ensconced myself in a 24-hour student cafe in the basement under the main library. The only "cafe" food was from vending machines, but at least I was out of the office enough to read a stack of articles on SCORM and digital learning objects. It had been a year since my last whitepaper on this subject, and I'd been snowed with numerous projects and clients. I was behind ...
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For many years, I earned my keep by giving lectures and speaking in public. I know what I sound like in various spaces - from a room with hundreds to more intimate 20-30 student spaces. I know what I sound like in various moods and circumstances. I know what I sound like in several languages. I know what I sound like in full strength as well as with laryngitis coming on. Indeed, this voice has been on radio. It's been ...
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One of the more creative forms of teaching online at the university level involves the use of custom-originated case studies. In the Native American learner context, these teaching cases are used to surface new research and to provide learners with more open-ended and analytical learning online.
www.evergreen.edu/tribal/cases
The following public site (out of The Evergreen State College) recently debuted and may be helpful.
Continue reading Native American Teaching Case Studies Online
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Christopher Stapleton, one of the staff members of Simiosys at the University of Central Florida, calls himself a "faculty entrepreneur." With decades of experience working in the entertainment industry "creating memories of a lifetime," he left managing a megabudget (over a hundred million) and a fat salary...in order to apply himself to meaningful work. That said, he still describes some of his works that he's helped create with an earned sense of pride. He describes the ...
Continue reading Virtual Puppetry and a Simulated Urban Classroom
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"Aaaaahhhh." On hot summer days in the Pacific Northwest, at my former college, I would have the office door to the student newspaper open. Every so often, the calm afternoon would be broken by the bloodcurdling screams of the drama students in the nearby theatre or out on the sidewalks, with their digital cameras running. Every quarter, the drama students would engage in a kind of "generative learning." Generative learning tends to be collaborative, creative, dynamic and synergistic. As the ...
Continue reading Generative Learning Materials and Technologies
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Some years ago, H. Wayne Hodgins proposed the creation of a periodic table of information in the context of the development of atomistic reusable learning objects. As I understand it, there would be some structure (akin to Roget's thesaurus?) that would help in the categorization of information. Digital learning objects could be co-created and vetted, and these would be launched and categorized in massive databases. These would be sharable and accessible to all. Knowledge ...
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Like the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz, I have been thinking of heart and the lack of it. What sparked this was a face-to-face meeting with some of my online students. Usually, it takes a while to build relationships to the point where candor is assumed. In this case, the candor came right out early on. Students "check heart" before they can take risks with an instructor. The question was, did I have a "heart" for them?
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One of the professional listservs that I belong to involved a comment by an individual who asserted that his skills as a multimedia designer have become worse since he went into teaching. So much of his time now is spent on committees, student support, teaching, and publishing - I'm guessing. That comment struck me as astute.
Time, energy and resources are often zero-sum. Once used, it's gone. There are developmental windows of time to be ...
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'Tis the season for wish lists, at least in our commercialized culture. In that spirit, I thought I'd put out a wish list of affordances for an imaginary LMS.
I want to be able to post grades right at the point of responding to the learner's posting of the assignment. I don't want to have to skip over several screens in order to punch in a grade. I want a running update of each learner's grade ...
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One main task of an ID is to protect a project to its successful completion. The work of achieving this begins before even the first commitment is made. It begins with the client and the projected work. What's the true level of commitment to this project? What utility will it have upon creation? Does the instructor have the technological skills to carry off this endeavor? Do the administrators have the savvy and will to carry the project on to ...
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The features that make a game a strong one often enhances that game's efficacy as an elearning tool. An effective game needs to be engaging, playable and challenging; it shouldn't be confusing or unexciting. In the same way, a training game needs to be engaging in order to foster learning and skills acquisition and mastery. Training games are used in corporate and military environments to address new learning and to head off skills degradation.
(I would argue that ...
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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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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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Pre-Online Lurking Pre-online times, lurking had a very negative connotation. It suggested someone with ulterior motives scoping out a target or multiple targets. Now, the online version of "lurking" often is mentioned with a laugh. There's something charming about observing others in online space as a quiet non-participant.
Lurking Experience I've only lurked in online space once. I logged onto a parallel universe sort of site to check out its learning possibilities but probably didn't get past ...
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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 my more engaging projects has been a multi-state endeavor that involves teaching and course redesigns based on the cultural backgrounds and worldviews of a particular diverse group of learners. One of the tools that this community uses is a shared virtual site where individuals may share resources, hold conversations, post questions and observations, and feel a sense of connection to others involved in this shared labor.
One of the challenges of making this virtual group ...
Continue reading Virtual Spaces for Instructional Collaborators
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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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One of my favorite memories about my doctoral students when I was teaching overseas was their enthusiasm and hard-working approach to the world. The classrooms, though, were another matter. Here I was in an agricultural university in the NE part of this country...and we used chalk and chalkboards, stencils and hand-typed texts, cassette tapes and tape players. The podium usually was constructed of wood and usually had some broken pieces, so one's leg could ...
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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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When we buy a piece of software, we pretty much assume that it'll be plug-and-play. Few of us read the manual first, and most just follow the directions for the upload and then noodle around until the pieces start coalescing into sense. The immense amounts of support that go into a software product's launch and the continuing help provided for its users often seem invisible to most users. Lately, I've been noticing this "digital bubble wrap" that ...
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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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Anyone who has worked in digital space in curricular design has run up against the occasional mindlessness of such work. This mindlessness creeps in when there are hundreds or thousands of images to render. It creeps in when a project is at the stage when it needs final polishing before it goes live...and it's all about small fixes and corrections. Then there's the uploading of a curriculum onto a database or a course management system. It's ...
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A prior blog addressed some of the "ruts" that may influence a course redesign, for all the hopes for a fresh change. Other challenges appear once the redesign has started.
Redesigning an online course often involves remaking various digital artifacts - learning objects, slideshows, lectures, interactive snippets, policies, and what-not. For others, learning objects may be refurbished by swapping out images, updating the language, switching in new slides for old ones, using new graphics, and putting in fresh film ...
Continue reading Course Redesign II: Digital Artifacts and Alignments
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Redesigning a course reminds me of a bicycle crash I had recently. I'll start with the crash and work backwards from that. So I was going around the local park's trail, which is paved partially with concrete (lots of broken pavement) and then also with dirt / mud / pebbles. I had ridden up on the grass median to give an elderly couple room to walk...and as I was merging back, the tires ...
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Part of the seductiveness of technology relates to the "Wizard of Oz" effect. This is that ability to multiply the effect of one's work as through a megaphone. It's the digital multiplier effect. It's about creating a big impression from modest means (you know Frank Baum's story with the wizard's identity eventually revealed). An example of a multiplier effect occurred at a presentation that I saw about a year ago. It was one on educational ...
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Some career fields apparently involve a goodly amount of waiting. There's filmmaking where there may be waiting on sets, people, lighting and what-not. There's road construction work - you know - where you can see several construction workers standing watching a fourth doing the actual work (well, sometimes). I got to thinking about this phenomenon of this think-do disconnect, which seems quite large sometimes in instructional design.
There's the initial meeting with the faculty member, some early probes regarding ...
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Instructional designers work with the constant awareness that whatever they're building has a shelf life. Nothing will last forever. Little will last more than a few years. Something stays relevant only for a period, and at the same time learning contents are aging out, the learners who would potentially provide eyes on this material are evolving, and their learning needs are changing. Of course, many instructors hang on to their favorite learning materials long after their relevance. Indeed, I ...
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In an office that originates its own LMS, survey system, grade submission system, and other technologies, there is a major geek factor going on. And that rubs off on the instructional designers. I submit to you that my colleagues both have this geek characteristic although you'd never tell it by looking at them.
You can see that LCD glow on their faces when they get new hardware like tablet PCs. One of the IDs just got one with ...
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So here it was on a Saturday. It was go-for-launch day. Much like NASA with their launches, the weather and everything had come ...
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So the SIDLIT (Summer Institute on Distance Learning" conference (Aug. 3 - 4) had an insightful presentation on different software programs that may convert PowerPoints to Flash. Davy Jones of Johnson County Community College offered some reasons for why this might be done. Converted files tend to be smaller and may download faster and be more email friendly. There's a broader availability of Flash which allows for deployment and play on Macs, PCs, and PDAs...and on various browsers. The ...
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How could the instructional designers (IDs) come together to build an online public-access course that people could come visit to learn more about the learning management system, AxioTM? The IDs would have to build using AxioTM. They would have to use copyright-released materials, many from KSU faculty (with their permission). They would have to show materials from a variety of curricular fields, with the learners ranging from K-12 through university. They would have to showcase some of the more common ...
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As I've worked on more projects involving groups of dispersed stakeholders, I've come to a fundamental conclusion: people need something to shake a stick at.
This holds true even for those projects that originate on campus and evolve on campus - with various stakeholders scattered around various buildings. Often, the work shifts to virtual connections after the first meeting or two. Having lots of eyes on a project can be helpful in terms of its direction and its shaping ...
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One of my most engaging projects of late has been a national one involving the use of reusable learning object or RLOs. In this case, I used Cisco System's RLO model, with its rigorous standards. This work reminded me a lot of my days as a distance runner a long time ago and the pacing needed to make sure I could hit my marks. While I did not absolutely fill in every single blank in the tables needed to ...
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After all the sweltering heat yesterday, I am glad it's raining today. I have a million small tasks to complete before getting away from the office for two days to attend the 7th Annual SIDLIT (Summer Institute of Distance Learning and Instructional Technology) conference in Kansas City on Aug 3-4. I am excited and eager to present with my colleagues on the launching of the IDOS blog. I also plan to attend several sessions and have marked those sessions ...
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"Project creep" - in the industry parlance - tends to be something to be dealt with skeptically. It's something that is negative and risky. It's a black hole that can devour all sorts of energy, resources, employee goodwill and time. It can take over mental workspace, and it can turn a whole project soggy and incomplete. My argument here though is counterintuitive. Project creep has a positive side. As work progresses on a project, new information surfaces. Sometimes, that information ...
Continue reading Project Creep and Turning Points and Goodbye
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The pundits say that learning from and during failure is important. I'd agree, but it sure doesn't feel good. I've been thinking of academic publishing of late. I talk to professionals in the field who've had varying publishing experiences. One of the local profs here has no trouble landing his articles at will. He has quite a range of them - both co-authored and single-authored, and he's so settled in his tenure track that he breezily ...
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Bugginess has been on my mind lately. It's bugginess in terms of Kansas insects, with spiders that run incredibly fast, grasshoppers and an unusual bug on my window screen that was white and looked like it was wearing a fur (it had poor recovery skills when I flicked it off the screen, and I think it fell into my egress window well). Bugginess has been on my mind relating to a project I'm engaged in which has plenty ...
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"Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all; amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat. Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength. Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder is simply a question of subdivision; concealing courage under a show of timidity presupposes a fund of latent energy; masking strength with ...
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So it's the weekend again, and a few cars pull in and out of the parking lot driveway. I'm vaguely aware of others working in the building. Sometimes, I'm only aware that they've left because I've tripped the building's alarm system, which they set as they left. (The motion detectors are just sort of there, but they light up to let me know that the movement has been recorded.) The weekend is a great ...
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Software development often happens in a siloized way. Except for instances when international or national organizations take a lead on standards-setting or a mega-corporation ends up in a semi-monopolistic situation with a software program, there often are many versions of a thing...and the versions often don't talk to each other. They're interoperable. They're stand-alone.
A recent article by Nicholas L. Carroll and Rafael A.Calvo of the U of Sydney ("Certified assessment artifacts for ePortfolios") addresses ...
Continue reading Necessary Functions of an ePortfolio System
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by Brent Anders
12 July 2006
Learning Styles have become exceedingly common at all levels of academia, yet are Learning Styles real and if so, are they so important that instructors should spend time addressing the issue? The answer is a bit complex but attainable through a thorough understanding of the real issue at hand. The phrase "Learning Styles," is generally defined as a "model [that] classifies students according to where they fit on a number of scales pertaining to the ways they receive and process ...
Continue reading Are Learning Styles Simply A Myth? - If not, are they really that important?
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The chemical engineer sat across from me in the coffee shop. We had two scones and two coffees there on the table, and also a napkin on which she was writing. She was drawing circles and lines of trajectories to represent her studies. She wrote a symbol for a particular chemical that she was representing. She spoke of environmental sustainability and pharmaceuticals. She spoke of synthesizing catalysts and nanomaterials and other mysteries of the universe. Just the day before, I ...
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If one walks through the neighborhood at pretty much any time of day, one can hear a wide range of dogs barking. There's the Gus Welcome, which comes along with a frantic run up and down a fence and some 80 pounds of German shepherd hurling itself against a new fence and bending part of it into the neighbor's yard. There are the yappies. There are mysterious growls coming through doors. It was on one such walk - dog-sitting ...
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An occasional goal of online learning instructional designers is to raise the techno-literacy of learners. While many learners use a variety of technologies---often in ways that befuddle their instructors---many do not see through the technology to understand the structures and processes behind the practical glitz. There may be a reification of the technologies, such as the early cyberspace writings on how the Web is a god, not human connections and synergies via electronic communications (phone lines ...
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Inexplicable things happen in a complex universe. In digital space, this human-made mass of data and interaction and messiness, mysterious occurrence happen as a matter of course. In a word processing program, my text suddenly starts to puddle. I receive mysterious programmer messages from the great beyond, which then takes some online research to find out what that means. Files disappear into cyberspace. I wonder if they'll morph and come back in a different form Internet years later. (in ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 June 2006
"In any class that you have, a third of the people are good writers; a third need more work, and about a third are going to take hours." -- Gail Tremblay
Given that the course that Gail Tremblay would be a SME on would be online, our conversation moved to the work of building community online. As she noted, the quality of an online learning experience depended in part on who the learners are and ...
Continue reading Forming Community Online in a Writing Course (Q&A with Gail Tremblay)
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So a fair amount of research dollars have gone into natural language systems, AIs, and computerized intelligent agents. When I call some phone systems for information, I get the automated voice that directs me to where I want to go. At the grocery store, I check out my items by interacting with a canned digital voice. My banking is done online, but if I need to go to the phone, there's that same digital voice. I can go to ...
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Gail Tremblay's approach to teaching writing is very conducive to a learner-centered approach. I suspect her style has evolved from her being a considerate human being foremost and then an artist and a writer. Her generosity in agreeing to be one of my two SMEs on a course redesign (English Composition 1) and then inviting me to her home in Olympia, Washington, were both gestures of fine kindness.
The following then are some highlights from our half-day chat.
A ...
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How much is enough? It is said that we Americans have a hard time defining sufficiency. In research terms, enough is when one can draw a statistically significant conclusion (for quantitative research). It's when triangulation of data seems to point in a particular direction with some measure of confidence (for qualitative research). With so much data available online, it's not that hard to find another mother lode of relevant information. One twist to a term may open up ...
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In journalism, I learned that publicity isn't all it's cracked up to be. It doesn't suddenly make a person more real. It doesn't improve character. It doesn't enhance a poorly-conceptualized project. It doesn't necessarily bring any outpouring of sympathy. It doesn't promote justice if the levers of that weren't in place to begin with. It doesn't combat apathy, except in rare cases. Media attention doesn't change fundamental ...
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So my former doctoral advisor and professor is moving on. The news came in an email almost a year from the date I graduated from the Seattle University doctoral program. The announcement led to a flurry of group emails, many lamenting the move and worrying about the quality of the program with this change. Others started organizing a farewell dinner. It turns out that my former advisor will be a couple states away from me now instead of half a ...
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One way to remember an experience well is to get stood up. And there I was at the auction house looking at any number of pieces of furniture and jewelry and heirlooms being marched across the stage, highlighted under the stage lights, and shown by camera to the live audience. I was on 3rd Avenue in Seattle, and I was waiting for a colleague who hadn't shown up. (He did later, after I'd left.) He was a fantastic ...
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The Enduring Legacies Reservation-Based Program Course Redesign Conference in Seattle introduced a wonderful approach to course redesign - that seems revolutionary and "but of course" at the same time. This course redesign involved student feedback. This wasn't feedback collected in an impersonal survey format alone, but was based on lurking on online courses, attending face-to-face classes, study leader experiences with learners, quarterly interviews of students, staff and faculty, and other means. The in-person sharing of ideas strengthened learner insights. The ...
Continue reading Listening to Learners in the Course Redesign
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"I tend to try to help people to address whatever it is they need to address...I like to make assignments where people have a way of making it their own, whatever it is. I want them to make it their own." -- Gail Tremblay
"In the Indian community like in all communities, different people have different interests and strengths, and just like among European-Americans, there are great physicists and mathematicians...I make sure my students know that they are not ...
Continue reading A "SME" for Building Curriculum for Native American Learners
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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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One of the more engaging poster presentations at the recent AAC&U conference engaged the use of human patient simulators in nursing. Dr. Paula Dunn Tropello's "Interactive Learning with Human Patient Simulators" shed light on the practical use of human patient simulators, which have grown in complexity.
I'd recently had a brief run-on with a simulated baby when I was at an open house at KSU. I was at a table introducing eLearning when a young woman came ...
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For the longest time, I'd wanted to read The Art of War. I'd already read quite a few Chinese classics, which often dealt with feudal warfare and then familial warfare. And now, without hundreds of student papers to read every other day, I found myself at the library with a copy of this ancient tome in hand. I came across the following passage on foreknowledge.
"What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and ...
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We heard Dr. Michael Wesch (professor of anthropology) talk about tags at the last IDTR. I spoke to a few people after the session, and realized they didn't fully understand about tags. This inspired me to write something about it in our blog and do some research too.
This is what Wikipedia says about Tags. If you Google the word "tags", you get some 7 million hits. But most of us, just need to understand the basics and how ...
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There are moments when I'm completely baffled. This doesn't happen often, and it doesn't happen for long stretches. A few weeks ago, I inherited a database, fiscal responsibilities, a load of social relationships---all in a volunteer position related to a homeowners association. With that came QuickBooks and a method of accounting that was theoretically straightforward...but the database itself was built idiosyncratically. People's names were listed willy-nilly, some by their last names, some by the first ...
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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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My fifth month into this job as ID, I've heard plenty of stories about clients. Some have been complimentary - about the complexity of curricular builds, creative interactive assignment building, innovative uses of AxioTM LMS, graciousness in working with the IDs, and any number of other insights.
There, too, are the stories of clients who use online space merely to deliver "shovelware" digital contents. There are those who are reluctant to teach online and so foot-drag until the last minute ...
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e-portfolios has been a term used for various digital compendiums of learner work. There are various software programs for the compilation of such portfolios. Others simply use websites and some back-end basic programming.
The idea is that learners need to "think" with artifacts that convey their thoughts coherently---mixing words, images, sound, and even video. There should be a clear sense of audience and purpose in these portfolios. To be deployed well ...
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 April 2006
Debriefings are often used in learning---to reinforce the main ideas. It's often helpful after a conference to unpack the overloaded suitcases and backpacks to find what the takeaways are from the meeting.
From the Association of American Colleges and University (AAC&U) conference "Learning and Technology: Implications for Liberal Education and the Disciplines" in Seattle (Apr. 20 -- 22, 2006), I ended up with folders of materials, a dozen business cards, lots of URLs, and ideas---plenty of them. The challenge ...
Continue reading White Asparagus, PowerPoints, and Per Diem: Conference Debriefing
Blog Entry
When an LMS gets extremely popular, it becomes used 24/7 daily, which means there's no down time except for the mere slices when changes may be made. Programmers know when they have the most traffic to their servers, and they assiduously avoid using those times to upload and update. However, every so often, updates need to be made without much prior warning. And those are done in short stints.
Such an update was made to an LMS (which ...
Blog Entry
Susan Patrick, the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology of the US Department of Education, spoke at the Beach Museum of Art on Apr. 26 to a receptive crowd. Her talk related to K-state's strengths as an institution of higher education.
Drawing on her national and international level work, she observed that Mexico took three years to digitize its K-12 curriculum in order to maximize their ability to educate its populace.
She shared other inspirational examples and ...
Continue reading Online Teaching and Learning for Global Workforce Training
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I was speaking to Nick deKanter, VP of Muzzy Lane Software (http://www.muzzylane.com/). His company creates educational software games of varying complexity for the liberal arts.
One complaint of online games is that many are necessarily closed-systems. Players choose limited options. There are only so many factors that may be played or input, and every game is bounded. Real-time interactive live-player games add open-systems complexity by the addition of the other ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
Those who are in the freelance writing gig know this. One seldom starts writing a work with an editor who has a place for that work and possibly a check in the mail. Usually, a freelancer ends up maybe with a semi-encouraging response, if that. Then, it's all about writing the work and hoping it finds a home.
I think freelancers all have had articles written that got accepted but never appeared---or at least the editor never did the ...
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There's little doubt that alpha and beta testing are important parts to the design process. There must be a procedure to evaluate whether a multimedia design is working or not.
For years, my former students in "Writing for New Media" had set up alpha and beta tests. They had test-run their sites. Some of them went live and built up a following. Others never went live, just sort of existed in electronic portfolios and student sample work DVDs. I ...
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Chaos theory was one of the more unusual things my doctoral cohort at Seattle University addressed. It's a theory---broadly summarized---that suggests that chaos is a natural part of life and the world, and being able to find the creativity and form in chaos is part of leadership. I was thinking about this in the context of starting new projects with clients.
Starting a new project almost always entails a period of muddle-ness. The muddle-ness refers to who the members ...
Continue reading Muddle-ness: Being Comfortable with Amorphousness
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Recently, a gamer magazine arrived at my house. It was full of vivid images: a computerized Vin Diesel in full action as a "spy," a Lara Croft out to get the scoundrels, fighting characters with their unique characteristics and styles, and lots of game developer lingo. I thought that since the magazine had arrived, I'd better check it out before consigning it to the recycle pile in the garage. I dutifully perused it.
Then, I thought about the think-do ...
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Anyone who has dealt with technologies has had moments of stupefaction. I'm sure of it. I just had one on Saturday. I was uploading images into a database (hosted off another out-of-state university) when I kept getting graphics boxes that wouldn't accept an image...and wouldn't disappear. I could move them around, and they just sat there shadowed and unresponsive.
I could live with some computer garbage, I thought. Then, the whole thing froze. And I was ...
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Many head into projects by doing "rapid prototyping", which often means getting into the technologies and starting the work right away. Some people are brilliant this way, and they can do all that front-end work in their heads...and while they're actually creating. They're willing to go through the messiness of creation and then fixing things iteratively.
That's not a talent that I have. I can, but the messes I make in creation mean more back end ...
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The nightmare scenario (as has been told to me) goes like this. A faculty member calls up, and an appointment with an instructional designer is made. The instructor shows up with a giant box of printed materials and says, "I want to teach online. Could you help me digitize all these files?" Don't look now, but we're in the middle of the Techno Information Age.
Handling large amounts of information, particularly outside one's field of expertise, seems ...
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Gatekeeping as a concept makes sense. There are times when some people should have access to particular information and other times when they don't really need to know. I thought of this recently when I got turned away by some army folks at the nearby military base. It turns out I didn't have the full documentation needed to gain entry, and they were right. When I returned in the afternoon with the proper documentation, they very graciously gave ...
Continue reading Gatekeeping, Keys and Trying to get on Base
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One of my favorite books in my recent spate of studies had to do with Annalee Saxenian's Regional Advantage, which discussed the "culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (ripped from the book's subtitle). This author examined how Silicon Valley came out ahead because of its proximity to major institutions of higher learning like Stanford University and the synergies that come from informal and formal alliances and the sharing of knowledge. By contrast, Route 128 is ...
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I was reading a book on technology in education recently, and the authors observe that "work and university study have always been closely related" (A.W. Bates and G. Poole, 2003, p. 17). That got me to thinking about how we actually design for student employability. (Research says that employers tend to be more leery of degrees earned totally online vs. those that involve some face-to-face time.)
To be employable, people need a sense of self-discipline and polish. They need ...
Continue reading Instructional Design for Student Employability
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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 ...
Blog Entry
by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 March 2006
I sometimes think about when I first became aware of my own learning and sense of being. I always come back to the age of 10 as the time when a greater awareness of myself and others seemed to emerge. Of course, that was only the first glimmer. In the ensuing years, there have been moments of greater learning and self-awareness. It probably wasn't until I was some years into college education as an instructor that the issues of ...
Continue reading The Importance of Meta-Cognition regarding Learning Styles and Preferences
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An online instructor may breathe "life" into a course through his/her enthusiasm, experiences, personality, instructional design, and sheer telepresence. The communications and interactivity in such courses enliven and enrich the learning. Online instructors may often be the linchipin of the learning experience.
In academia, there is not often a lot of opportunity to use "boxed" pre-made digital courses. Simply, faculty are rather hands-on in their teaching, and they tend to be skeptical of the effectiveness of online courses without ...
Blog Entry
Much of first (early)-generation online learning is highly text-based. This means that learners have to engage their reading minds to understand the concepts, facts and practices.
Reading, a common staple of adult education, is more complex than many realize. Tony Buzan in Use Both Sides of Your Brain identifies seven steps in the process of learning (Boyles and Contadino 102). Being aware of the complexity of reading will help instructors provide the necessary support for adult learners in their ...
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A recurring theme in instructional design seems to be that of instructors who are hesitant to try online teaching and learning. Even though online teaching and learning have been around for well over a decade and a half, from K-12 to university graduate level studies, there are still many who are skeptical of this "method of instructional delivery." The business world has built large digital delivery methods for their farflung employees with mostly automated non-instructor-led courses.
Yet, in many areas ...
Blog Entry
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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Building a course for various subject matter experts (SMEs) involves a lot of give and take, particularly when it's design-by-committee. I experienced that at the Boeing Co. when I worked there for two summers as a faculty fellow. I suspect that in this new job in Kansas that such work will involve much the same sort of give and take. So far, my work here has been project-specific site-building and Help sorts of things, but I have yet to ...
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Without further ado, I am going to jump in on our blog before I disappear under the weight of my peer's contributions (that would be you, Erudito Loginquitas!). I have been putting off logging on and posting for more days than I should as I find myself faced with the inevitable deluge of too many tasks and too many projects for the scant little time I have available on any given day. Such is the fate that many of ...
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Please ignore the "SOS" in the title. It's easy enough to fall into hyperbole after days spent re-compiling Help files for an LMS through RoboHelp software (this is the RoboHelp HTML version, for which there is apparently not a technological decompiler). The title should just read "Help," and that should be sufficient. So much time is spent "tricking the machine" to get it to output what is desired. And the Wizards in the system sometimes cause a lot more ...
Blog Entry
One of my colleagues has been struggling mightily to name herself as a blogger. She has an open promise that I'll update and change any references to her based on her new name. She has gone through dozens of different incarnations and tried them all on and discarded them like a heap of hats. Representing "self" in online space is no easy feat. There are about a million ways to be misread and misunderstood. Ideas may ...
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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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So there's the burden of the blank screen. It's not a heavy burden, but it's one of weaving content strings to create value (new perspectives, new procedures). It strikes me that in our jobs, we do a lot of repurposing of content, and this may also be true in blogging. We take the stuff of our thoughts and parts of our daily lives, do a James Frey twist, and try to offer something else. We dramatize the ...
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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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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 February 2006
There has always been a mystique regarding software developers, at least where I'm from. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I met various people from the tech industry---some on the periphery and others at the heart. Those at the heart were the developers and the project leads. They were the ones who could speak to the machine and command it to execute on certain commands, with a deep precision and elegance. That was the ideal, of course, and one certainly ...
Continue reading The Human- Machine Interface and Learning Management System Versioning
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
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 Angelo and Cross (1993) have some essential questions for instructors to consider before they build an assessment.
Begin with "What do you want to know? Is it assessable?" Consider, "What's the best way to surface this information with the most efficient use of both student and faculty time?" Consider, "What is the most fair, objective and efficient way to gain this information?" Consider, "How will I use this information to enhance student learning? Will this assessment benefit student ...
Continue reading Initial Points to Consider in Creating Online Assessments
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There are a number of federal laws that deal with the issue of accessibility and websites. When I used to teach "Writing for New Media" at a college in the Pacific Northwest, my students would come in well-armed with firsthand observations about the challenges of disabilities and any number of strategies on how to design sites (often from scratch) that were accessible and welcoming to those with various combinations of disabilities. Various software makers have built accessible templates. Technologists have ...
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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 ...