Blog Entry
There are a number of strategies to organize course contents in the field of instructional design. One de facto one is to rely on the tables of contents of the selected textbook(s) for a course.
For many faculty, this is almost assumed. They are relying on the subject matter experts of a field who also have the ability to write and express themselves. Or they’re using collections that include many contributions from different authors organized ...
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The opening of the article was riveting. An instructor of an introductory course in computer programming was noticing his student demographics, and the high probability that they…
“Are from some minority group Did some portion of their k-12 in a compromised educational system Are students not just out of high school and may be working Are not born in the United States Speak English as there (sic) second language Have very little (sic) computer skills May be dismayed by the ...
Continue reading The Challenges of the "Highly Anxious" Student Profile
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In light of the H1N1 concerns regarding "high touch" surfaces...
http://itnews.itac.k-state.edu/2009/09/how-to-clean-computer-keyboard-and-mouse-surfaces/
Continue reading How to Clean Computer Keyboard and Mouse Surfaces
Blog Entry
Depending on the domain field and the leaders of an instructional design project, any number of “design principles” may guide a project. Design principles are the main concepts and values underlying a curricular build. These concepts are rarely explicitly spelled out, possibly because the subject matter experts assume these concepts as a matter-of-course. These are not defined in the documentation supporting projects like grant documents or official course descriptions. And yet, these principles are important for a successful e-learning project ...
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Computer science articles do not usually involve freehand pencil drawings, but recently, I ran across some academic research articles on design that had scanned freehand pencil images embedded in the text. There it was—the charm of hand-drawn early concepts of various navigational structures or design templates.
There was the idiosyncratic scratchy handwriting. There were the varying lines drawn with assurance and a rough artistry. That refreshing feel of a raw pencil on paper is such an Important aspect to ...
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Like many people, I care about my work. I want to do a good job on every project that I work on. I’ve also been out in the world enough to know that healthy critique and user feedback are critical to enhance projects, so I’m also not that protective of my work. People have opinions, and they have every right to them.
On the whole, most work developed for a project is used, albeit with some trimming here ...
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MERLOT's JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching) just published a position paper titled "Exploring the Immersive Parasocial: Is it You or the Thought of You?" related to 3D immersive learning.
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no3/hai-jew_0909.htm
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
Blog Entry
Design questions that other people wrangle with regarding socio-technical systems often reveal a lot about people. With the emphasis on self-help and self-management as a money-savings endeavor for education, healthcare, and other aspects of modern life, people have been looking at how to offer sufficient feedback and encouragement to help people self-assess, and further, to help them know when to seek help (and from where).
Help-seeking is not as simple of a phenomena as one might ...
Blog Entry
It may be the tough funding environment, but I have run across a number of grant proposals by various faculty that are somewhat gap-filled. There are proposals for a full program of courses that have no pay for the instructors in other departments (as if they would work for free). Or there are proposals for development grants that suggest a type of learning of creating learning objects but without actual deliverables. Or faculty will suggest the building of learning objects ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 September 2009
A recent foray into the riches of e-learning research has led to a fascinating article. Here, the researcher cleverly examined the popularity of particular researchers based on a number of factors (their links to other professionals, their visibility, and their professional affiliations) to see if that might lead to any distortions in self-estimation—in terms of estimating how many articles they had published in the past three years (measured against the actual objective number of publications).
People experience ...
Continue reading Network Standing, Attributions for Popularity, and Self Delusions
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The decision in publication has not been about going to an academic print one vs. a Web-based one because so many academic journals either have gone wholly online or archive digitally. Rather, the question now seems more to be about going for high-brow or low-brow, to radically over-simplify.
On the one extreme are the journals that require a half-year to a year of peer review before a decision is made and then rigorous publishing processes to shape an article into ...
Continue reading Going for Elite Academic Journals or More Populist Ones?
Blog Entry
A colleague recently emailed me with an interesting concept—the idea that it takes some 18 months for students to decide to take on a particular course of new learning…and the need for at least about a year before a new degree program or course catches on. The concept is something like having to live with an idea for a while before getting used to it sufficiently to accept it.
At this time when so many departments are working ...
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A good friend of mine was befuddled by the manuscript submittal process for an academic paper. This paper was a culmination of a life’s work in reading and dyslexia, and the manuscript had gone through the process of being a dissertation, a co-authored work, and now finally a revised paper that would optimally fit the standards of the international magazine. She kept getting email reminders that her submission was incomplete and that she needed to submit the work. She ...
Blog Entry
There’s a lot to be said for learning from difficulties and challenges, so as to head off future problems or to improve ways of dealing. It’s even better to learn from a near-miss, or it’s at least less costly. Recently, we had a confluence of events that could have been problematic except for some mad scrambling at the last minute. I’ll leave the details alone here. What was learned from this effort was the importance of ...
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Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
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Instructional designers engage in light datamining now and again. There’s going into the back-end of a course to pull records about student interactions for value-added course redesign. There’s tapping into the stats from the survey instruments to evaluate the hardiness of an assessment. There are small overlaps with PI work when they evaluate information from their own research databases.
And then there’s watching others mix and match databases to try to surface hidden information.
Computing ...
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The implications of the future internet are that it will have a kind of machine knowledge of the individual user, so searches for information may be customized, and services (and advertising) may be tailored to the particular users. In a ubiquitous setting (with wifi and mobile devices and ambient intelligence), people could have their needs (digital and beyond) met in a variety of ways.
If that sounds claustrophobic to some (as it does to M. Andrejevic in his insightful book ...
Continue reading The Future Internet and its Implications for E-Learning
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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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Dr. Sam Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight, presented on “Open Learning: The Convergence of Collaboration-Based Learning and Social Network Learning” (June 24, 2009) via a free webinar.
He explained his role in surveilling various customer segments—consumer; PreK-12; higher education; corporations and businesses; the federal government; state and local government; associations, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and nonprofits; and healthcare—in terms of their use of online learning products.
Their model tracks ...
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A recent project has had me exploring the ethics of the instructional design profession. As far as I can tell, there is not a professional organization that spells out the ethics. The research literature has a fair amount on information technology (IT) ethics, borrowed to a degree from business and engineering ethics. Instructional design (ID), though, still requires collaborative reflection and analysis to surface practical values of right and wrong.
In the absence of a professional society, the ...