Instructional Design

As best I can determine my university has entered into an agreement with a private company to produce and market online programs and perhaps individual courses. As described to me by a colleague, a professor will tape a semester's worth of lectures, using PowerPoint to create main points. Once these lectures are recorded the company takes over. A company person with a higher degree in the field, will serve as go-between for students and the professor. The professor will never be in direct contact with the students. The success of the venture lies in marketing by the company; create very high enrollments in order to produce impressive income for the institution and the company.

I wonder how many universities have signed on the dotted line with such companies. I also wonder how many such companies are out there.

 

Sex, commerce and stalking.  In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns.  Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS!  It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses.  And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life.  In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

Most discussions of games in education focus on their utility as course components.  Educators rarely take a step back to look at gaming as a design discipline.  Taken together, game design and instructional design might perhaps both be considered sub-fields of engagement design - the design of engaging structured experiences.  The scope of engagement design would include interface design, graphic design, maybe even advertising and merchandizing... theme park design...  and theoretically each of these fields could cross-pollinate the others.  But for now I'm just going to look at one classic work in game design that offers an interesting framework for instructional design.

In _Rules of Play_, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman introduce an analytical framework for thinking about game design that could be transposed to the instructional design field, supporting the creation of better courses revealing a new way of thinking about instructional design that could be used to make courses more engaging.  They suggest three cognitive schemas for understanding games:

The Internet and a variety of emerging communication, visualization, and simulation technologies now make it possible to offer students authentic learning experiences ranging from experimentation to real-world problem solving. Explore authentic learning, what it is, how technology can support it, what makes it effective, and why it is important in Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, by Marilyn M. Lombardi, ELI scholar-in-residence and director of the RENCI Center and senior IT strategist at Duke University. This piece is part of the ELI white paper series.

From the LearningTimes Network, learningtimes.org on blogging in an educational setting:

"The "blog phenomenon" seems to have been growing to a frenzy over the last few months. Everyone has a blog, reads a blog, or wants a blog. At a fundamental level, blogs are the true promise of the Internet encapsulated in a new four letter word. Blogs give everyone a soapbox, a place to state or shout their mind, whether it be about the tedium of their own lives, politics, or eLearning. Author David Weinberger has recently paraphrased Andy Warhol and said that 'on the web, everyone is famous to fifteen people.' Blogs are exactly the kind of tool that make this possible, and increasingly accurate. They are the first foolproof tool of the Internet's "me" generation.

 

In the eLearning world, blogs represent the pendulum swinging the other way. Their growing popularity is a reaction against the bulky nature of most course management systems -- Who needs a $60,000 LMS to announce that donuts will not be served at next week's training session? It's the 'dumbing down' of technology to the point that truly anyone can "post their say, and read it, too".

In October of 2005, I emailed about forty individuals who have expertise in faculty development as it pertains to instructional technologies. In my email, I asked them this question: in a workshop or training program that's designed to help instructors learn to use online technologies in ways that promote active, student-centered learning, at what point should those instructors actually be introduced to the technology? That is, should one discuss the technology before discussing the pedagogy, or should one discuss the technology after discussing the pedagogy, or should one blend together the discussions of technology and pedagogy in an iterative manner? As it turned out, there was a clear consensus among the 37 individuals who responded to my query; I discuss that consensus in the attached PDF, which comprises a synthesis of the responses as well as an appendix that includes all of the responses in their entirety. -- Mark
PS I've replaced the original PDF, which wasn't opening in all versions of Acrobat. It now should open in any version. -m

This 51 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Building an Online Learning Community for "Blended" Librarians.

Joan Lippincott's comments about the growing need for interaction between librarians and instructional technologies, dovetail nicely with this interview conducted by Allan Carrington about the unique role of a Instructional Design Librarian at Penn State University.

Becta, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, has released a practical guide of issues to consider when planning to purchase (and use!) interactive whiteboards.

The guide simplifies procurement of whiteboards for educational institutions, featuring the OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) -compliant Whiteboards Catalogue. Becta itself has moved to set standards in this area, ensuring that all suppliers featured in the catalogue meet the Becta functional specification and service requirements. This should really help teaching staff and tech support people navigate the piles of PR guff from commercial providers.

But, having got your hands on one, how are you going to use it in the classroom?

Becta admits that "There is no specific funding for training and support for interactive whiteboards." Hmmm. Support is available, but (like most of Becta's programmes) it is heavily targeted towards primary and secondary schools. This includes training already provided by suppliers, plus dedicated training from city learning centres, not forgetting the National Whiteboard Network (designed to support primary schools).

Pedagogical training? More, please. Becta offers a tantalising extra snippet of news on that front. In addition to the programme managed by city learning centres, a new element - Hands on Support (HOS), Teachernet FAQ available here - has "been included in next year's (2004-05) ICT in Schools Standards Fund Grant 31a". That's a promising start. Now, how about some training for HE?

Andrew Middleton recently posted a call for comments on issues surrounding the adoption of blogs as an e-portfolio tool. Some quick comments below.

Why do it? The usual suspects: person-centred, formative approach, promotes narrative/writing skills, promotes regular engagement/activity, encourages peer interaction, promotes sharing of personal digital narratives.

Why not? Persistence, Identity, Representation.

Persistence: the persistence of blogs (via permalinks, trackbacks etc, to say nothing of the recently-sued Wayback Machine) is at odds with the desire to create a personal repository that can be selectively shared and edited, over time.

Identity: persistence creates the illusion of fixed identity, whereas higher education explicitly conceptualises its mission as formative and processual: we believe that students are shaped, and we want them to be so shaped, by their experience of participating in a learning community (Helen Barrett recently posted on this issue).

Representation: the accessibility of information via blogs / the Internet creates a kind of equivalence between individual snippets of information. Information is de-historicised. Yes, the information that comes via electronic communications is time/date stamped... But that is not the point, because users' temporal focus shifts from archiving towards access. We care about the date on which we access the information, not the date it was first archived. So it becomes harder to see what is current for an individual, and what belongs to his/her "past". Any given piece of accessible information has the potential to "represent" the individual, and sometimes, we create representations that we'd rather forget :-)

There are legal implications to creating persistent representations of identity, and these legal points are the ones that tend to get focused on in this context (see the recurrent UK debates around the introduction of identity cards). But there are cultural issues, too. For educators, these are just as important, maybe even more important. Students care obsessively about identity and peer relationships. They are extremely protective of the ways they choose to present themselves to others. They want to retain control over publicly-accessible representations of themselves. That's why they may be reluctant to invest in (course-related) blogs, because the status of the blog is ambiguous: official? for credit? part of course participation? for informal learning? for private reflection? For a blog that is explicitly conceived as an e-portfolio tool, all these problems of representation and ownership are magnified.

It's tempting to suggest that the ambiguous identity of the blog is precisely what attracts professionals to it. We can indulge in the pleasures of ambiguity, because our individual (private) identities are relatively secure. In a personal, private context, online journals (like Livejournal) attract adolescents and young adults because they can provide a secure space for exploration. But associating such private and personal exploration with a "public" space is especially problematic for a young person, for whom identity is always/already in question.

Thanks to Andrew for raising the issue -- I think it's exceptionally important that we, as a community, collectively question our own pieties and pet technologies on a regular basis.