Author: grabe

My university starts the Fall semester today. I love this time of year. People who are lucky enough to have jobs doing what I do have something uniquely positive – we are allowed to experience an annual return to youthful enthusiasm. No matter what the age of your body, each year brings the opportunity take on new challenges and to do so in the company of many others on similar journeys.

I find myself caught between what I think are some of true benefits of the “college experience” and trends that may be moving us in a different direction. The ideal for me is a full-time face-to-face experience. I regret that tuition costs require that some students must water down the experience with a heavy work schedule or attend part time. Despite my commitment to instructional technology, I am not willing to argue the equivalence of distance education. I think what students or parents pay for is an environment. The environment is as much a function of the diversity and capabilities of the other students as it is of the instructors. Class time is a small part of the experience and the curriculum is much broader than those topics listed by instructors.

If you are lucky enough to be “full time” and “live”, I hope you appreciate the experience. I do.

Welcome back!

I came across an article in techLearning (Mary Burns) arguing that teacher technology inservice should be based on a “just use it” rather than a skills training approach. The article was an argument against lengthy experiences in which educators learn the features of PowerPoint, BlackBoard (or whatever) even when an attempt is made to link this training to practical classroom applications.

The author lists several arguments explaining the limitations of a skills training approach:

technology rather than the curriculum becomes the focus

in order to meet the needs of each individual too many features are presented overloading everyone

skills approaches unintentionally focus on the expertise of the trainer rather than the skills of the learners

The author advocates minimal training, projects involving groups of teachers, and training individual teachers in skills that they pass on to group members (kind of cooperative learning for teachers).

As I read this article, I was evaluating some of the premises by way of personalization (Note: I hope other people do this. If not, I must be very egocentric.) Anyway, my institution has made a massive change in the way techology works on our campus by integrating all kinds of things through PeopleSoft software. I have heard all kinds of very negative things about this new system and was probably prepared to become frustrated, angry, etc. I decided to ignore the request that all faculty members attend a training session and just log on (I hope the connection to the Burns article now makes some sense). I did have some difficulty initially – I had thrown away the email providing my password. I tried the old trick of having the system send you your password by email but this did not work and I did become frustrated for a little while (it turned out the department secretary included the wrong email for me when enrolling department members – the “old trick” assumes the system has your email address). However, I eventually was able to connect and seemed to find a way to do lots of interesting things. Poking around to see what worked was fun. I must admit I was doing this without any pressure to get a specific task accomplished and not everyone would be willing to spend time in this fashion.

Promoting “Don’t Read the Manual” – My version of “Just Do It” (Note – I am just making this up so evaluate my reasoning carefully).

Playing is an active form of learning. If you are willing to play with technology, you create your own understanding. Good technology does not break. If it does, blame the technology!

Experience generalizes. Developers are allowed to use good ideas they have observed elsewhere and do. What worked before or what should be the case often is!

When I run into a wall, I do use the manual. This is inefficient in the specific case, but being inefficient in a few cases may be better than being efficient more times than necessary!

I sometimes do try to learn everything. I sometimes read the manual after I already know how software works. I did say sometimes. Thoroughness may be applied after I am convinced an application is really cool and I want to explore what more I might do with it. The details make more sense when I already know how something works and have experience doing productive things (a way to avoid working memory overload and a way to provide a context for learning).

I am having a professional identity crisis. So, in the spirit of being helpful, I am going to write about my uncertainty. I imagine this to be something like the approach psychology instructors take when they bring individuals who have suffered from various psychopathologies into class. Perhaps everyone learns and everyone benefits when brave individuals explain their uncertainties.

I think this issue developed when my institution initiated a graduate program called Instructional Design and Technology. I was involved in getting this program started because of my interest in the application of technology in education. The program prepares individuals for a variety of roles in education and industry including those individuals taking positions as K-12 coordinators/facilitators ??? an area of personal interest. As the program developed, individuals hired, and courses developed, I became more and more aware of the importance of ???instructional design??? in instructional design and technology programs. I was not completely na??ve when beginning this venture. I had books by Dick and Carey and Gagne on my shelf. I had friends who worked at Florida State and Indiana. However, I must admit I could not force my way through these books or imagine myself teaching what these folks taught – the nuances of competing design models bored me to death and attempts to prescribe/establish learning conditions seemed very basic in relationship to the research topics I studied and taught about as an educational psychologist. Despite my long-term interest in research on the applications of technology and commitment to the development of K-12 teachers??? capacity to use technology in classrooms, such things were not what I knew or was interested in knowing. So – I have been thinking about what various individuals who work in programs associated with educational applications of technology do – what topics interest them, what topics are emphasized in their teaching, etc.

Such issues have been ???working??? in the back of my brain for several years and have again been brought to the surface by a book I have been reading. A friend (Mike Royer) recently edited a book entitled ???The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Psychology??? (2005). What caught my attention was that the book contained a chapter on ???Instructional Design??? (Marcy Driscoll and Kerry Bruner) and a chapter on ???Instructional Technology??? (Wiley, Sanchez & Moher). Just paging through the two chapters was enough to confirm my expectations; I must be an instructional technologist and not an instructional designer. I recognized the topics in the instructional technology chapter and had read nearly all of the primary sources. The ???movement from transmission to active learning???, intelligent tutoring systems, simulation environments, project based learning ??? the topics were things that interested me, I knew about, and I acted on in my own projects and writing. The topics in Marcy???s chapter were also familiar ??? design models, Gagne (Marcy was a long-time collaborator), conditions of learning, etc. However, I could claim nothing more than awareness.

I thought it was interesting that Marcy seemed to recognize the issue I am raising here. In the beginning paragraphs of her chapter, she notes that the book contains two chapters dealing with technology ??? Instructional Design and Instructional Technology. She makes an effort to define the scope of the field she intended to cover, but did not make clear how her definition of what instructional designers do could be differentiated from what instructional technologists do. According to the description, instructional designers do important and practical things. The focus is ???on the application of learning principles in the systematic process for designing instruction??? ??? sounds good to me.

So, I am still confused and searching. There must be folks who study questions of this nature. Maybe there have been attempts to cluster individuals or identify citation probabilities. Maybe individuals should simply be asked to identify their affiliation and explain the basis for this identification. Maybe an instructional designer could do needs analyses and create objectives for various professional roles. What do classroom teachers need to learn in order to become more proficient? What do those who create instructional materials need to know? How do these skills and knowledge overlap with what designers vs. technologists teach?

I was at the “club” attempting to do my cardio for the day and watching CNN. The “breaking news” segment was about a new Internet worm that appears to be specific to Windows 2000. Half an hour devoted to a new worm is a pretty serious commitment for CNN so I assumed this must be a big deal.

I decided to go back to my office and see what was happening. The CNN article online now (see above) does not sound that bad, but CNN has added a new banner to the older post indicating more information will be available soon.

It has now been revealed that this worm shut down large numbers of computers at CNN, the New York Times, and ABC. I guess it makes sense it took CNN some time to update their web site.

Additional information on this MicroSOFT security problem, suggested fixes, and updates on the damage done by the worm can be found at the following sites:
Microsoft
CNN followup.
Slashdot
C|NET News
Washington Post

After several years, I have dropped my subscription to Audible.com. My subscription had provided one audio book and one “periodical/radio” program per month. It was really the daily access to a radio program (“All Things Considered”) that motivated my membership. Out of the blue, the NPR programs were gone. I contacted Audible.Com by email, but did not really receive an understandable explanation.

Today, I discovered a blog entry (Tim Lauer) that provides the information I needed. It seems NPR is exploring providing audible content via podcasts (NPR podcasts). I am not certain how the funding model is supposed to work. I assume that some of the money I paid to Audible.Com went to NPR and the immediate benefit to NPR of offering content without compensation is not obvious. “All Things Considered” is not presently available by podcast (although it is available at no cost from the NPR website), but some other NPR programming can be received via podcast.

It is amazing to me how quickly this option has developed and how many things I listened to via other methods 6 months ago are now available in this way.

File this in the “in case you are interested” category. I watch site statistics generated through log analyses programs. I started doing this with our book site to get a feel for what resources were being used and who was connecting. I purchased an inexpensive program to do the same for the blog site. While such information may not be of interest to the general public, you may find it interesting to learn what a system such as this can learn about you when you connect to their site. If you are a regular on this site, you might attempt to find find your address. Note that I do not log all possible information variables, but the analysis software identifies all information types that can be logged.