Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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 ...
Blog Entry
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.
Blog Entry
The work of a reviewer is wonderful in a lot of ways—with plenty of access to fresh ideas and opportunities to shape journals in terms of contents, voices, and directions. These works help one see what colleagues are doing around the country and world. The reviewer work also encourages one to stay on top of the field and to make efforts to enhance it.
While journals get what is cutting-edge (sometimes), it’s rare to get anything bleeding-edge. For ...
Blog Entry
In pretty much every conference that I have attended, there have been some presentations or workshops on the legal and policy environment in which instructional designers and IT folks work. The affordances and constraints of a litigious environment mean that we have to proceed defensively.
Word is that “anonymity” (which has never truly existed online, no?) also is no defense against libel. People are realizing that there are limits to free speech, just as there are with every legal right ...
Blog Entry
In the span of a few days, I had gone online to download open-source free imagery for use in a newspaper article for a for-profit newspaper. I have contacted professionals using free email systems for freelance work. I have visited commercial news with stock images that are alt-texted in a way that shows that they’re stock images—either as freeware or as sold objects.
It used to be that placeholder images would be selected lightly for representations, but I ...
Continue reading For-Profit Reliance on Open-Source Contents and Freebies
Blog Entry
At the recent SIDLIT conference, I attended Tracy Newman’s “Digital Storytelling: How to Bring your Stories to Life,” and the presenter offered a helpful concept in the assigning of video storytelling and creation to students.
Newman cited research that showed that student creations of digital stories may address a range of skills: research, writing, organization, technology, presentation, interview, interpersonal, problem-solving, and assessment skills. The secret, though, is to incrementalize the work ...
Continue reading A "Seemingly Simple" Assignment (in Digital Storytelling)
Blog Entry
http://scholarspace.jccc.edu/sidlit/15
Blog Entry
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
Blog Entry
Check out the trailer for an educational webisode series ("Suzy's Strategies") on doing well in college.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UobRqWGZNK8
for a college student well-being site located at
www.universitylifecafe.org
This webisode series will launch this Fall 2009.