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Coming up on a new on-campus grant funding cycle for online classes, many faculty members will call or email with questions about what technologies to purchase. For locals, they will swing by to the cubicle to see how various technologies work. Those who are located elsewhere in the state or abroad will either visit when they can or consult by telephone and email.
The requirements for the technology are basic. The faculty member has to be able to use the ...
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When a wiki is under “attack,” the attacks seem to come in waves. Before our system administrator put in a plug-in to limit the creation of automated accounts and instituted a form of email verification for each account, our wiki would get spammed with all sorts of recent activities by machines—with clearly machine-created gibberish names full of alpha-numeric characters (but clearly formulaic).
So once we deactivated what machines could do, the human spammers came into play. Apparently ...
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We’ve all had experiences of going into high-security buildings, whether these are high-target sites like museums that remember some aspects of human history that are deeply contested or manufacturing companies that build critical machines with implications for massive industries.
Sometimes, we run up against the security without realizing it—such as running into the “secret police” in a foreign country in a public venue. (Once, I picked up film of images I took—back in the day—that were ...
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Sometimes, I start an instructional design project and think, Oh, wow, do I really have to know this? That’s my lazy part talking…and it’s definitely the part that I should be listening to. That said, it’s pretty scary having to think about starting at freshman level in terms of learning about a topic…about which I will never ever even get close to being any sort of expert on.
So why should instructional designers make it ...
Continue reading No Arms Length Relationship with the Learning Contents
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People live fairly automated lives, according to Charles Duhigg in “The Power of Habit” (2012). People form habits by sequences of actions and create automatic routines for behavior called “chunking.” They will tend to follow those established patterns of behavior—even unthinkingly—unless they consciously work to change their habits. The better they are at asserting their will over their own behaviors in one part of their lives will help them assert their will over other parts.
Habits, once learned ...
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It was probably not fair to the dryer repair person that I was thinking about troubleshooting and decision-making when he stopped by to replace the heating element. But as luck would have it, a problem arose that illuminated some aspects of both. What happened was that he replaced the heating element, but instead of the clothes actually drying in regular time, the clothes took 3-4-5 times as long. The room would get humid. Was it a heating element that did ...
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Every so often, a class project evolves to the point that it spills over into the professional realm. That’s often a benefit for the learners because they can have a taste of the work life related to the fields that they are studying. For me, this happens a little more often than for many others because I am in professional life already and am just taking a class each term for professional development. Professors are very generous in allowing ...
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The concept of infusing a curriculum is of permeating a particular learning sequence with a distributed element that appears in various points in the curriculum (or throughout). The learning is not pulled out specifically in a discrete piece or lecture or module; rather, it is distributed throughout.
So what is usually infused? Usually, it is something abstract and elusive. On one project, an attitude towards a topic was infused throughout a curriculum that showed an empathy ...
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Assignments to an ID come in various forms. At the most basic level, a faculty member has a particular objective. He / she wants to achieve particular learning aims. Further, most of them already know how they want to achieve that objective. With those barebones goalposts, one knows in general how to proceed. The PI’s personality also affects the direction of the project. The other team members will also have feedback.
Of course, as one immerses into the information, one ...
Continue reading Under-specification of the Instructional Design Model
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It was with dismay that I realized that I was racking up hours on a project that I had hoped to keep as a smaller part of my overall schedule. While the project remained on the back burner for over half a year, when the work of researching, writing, and creating slideshows came to the fore, my hours started to climb. Then, too, there were quizzes to be written, transcripts to be created of videotaped interviews, and other planning. When ...
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If I knew back in the day that I would end up being an instructional designer working in courses that engage science knowledge, I would most certainly have taken more science courses. I would have built a stronger basis for science literacy. I would have worked more on higher-level math.
Why? It does seem like every academic field had a science-based underpinning. There’s the rigor of empirical research. There’s the application of statistical analysis of quantitative data. There ...
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In the past, I’d always thought of myself as a specialist…a person who focused on a topic and learned it in-depth and worked hard to stay up on that knowledge. Now, as I’ve embraced the role of instructional designer even more, I consider myself more of a generalist. I’ve been in enough spaces with subject matter experts to know just how surface of an understanding I have of so many topics (or really just how little ...
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For multiple projects now, I’ve gone into the open-source domain in order to try to track down illustrative images for various videos and slideshows. Consumers of videos only have so much patience for a talking head, and it’s important to offer the video editors plenty of other visual contents that help illustrate the points. Sometimes, the speakers can provide their own images, but many times, they are reliant on content providers like book publishers to provide various images ...
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I have always thought that the idea of letting sleeping dogs lie is a good one, but what if that sleeping dog is lying on something that is valuable to explore? Or what if that sleeping dog is a guard dog in front of a doorway that I need to get past? The challenge was this. I wanted to conduct a research project on a hacking group that was known to hack media organizations that gave them press coverage that ...
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“So how do you know you’re getting spear-phished?” asked my friend and colleague. Good question. For the past couple weeks, ever since I wrote an article about cyber security issues for a general publication, I had been getting strange emails to a private-based work account. It’s possible that the spear-phishing is coming from elsewhere. It’s possible that any number of scammers could be using pretenses to get me to click on an email that would drop keylogger ...
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With the popularization of instructional design, there are more students who are pursuing degrees in this area. This area combines curriculum and instruction with much deeper knowledge of instructional technologies. What this means is that students are out there eliciting insights from practicing instructional designers. Every so often, I’ll agree to take part in a class project…will answer the questions…and then enjoy what the students present for their projects. This is a way that I sort of ...
Continue reading Supporting Graduate Students in their ID Studies
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Every so often, it’s good to learn a new piece of equipment and to maybe benefit a workplace. My supervisor, wisely, suggested that I set aside some time every week to acquire new technologies. And being a little tired of exploring software that I can’t directly apply to a project right now, I decided to learn the Nikon D 7000. That said, I only borrowed the camera a day or two before the event and did some night ...
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I have always been quite ambivalent about bylines, credentialing, and ghost writing. For the majority of my work, I am happy to stay on background and not worry about having a name on a curriculum or on a project. In most cases, the credential is not even offered. PIs would be just as glad to have support staff stay on background. In general, I’m of that mind as well.
It’s not that if one’s name is not ...
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The email from a professor was brief. Her private (free) email account had been hacked. If anyone received any email from that, it wasn’t from her. Go to a safer channel. End of message.
In a follow-up exchange, I found out that she was overseas and also without her luggage, which had been missing some days. She’d finally given up and bought a wardrobe just to function in-country. She had no idea how her account was hacked. She ...
Continue reading Containing Fall-Out from an Email Account Hacking
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