From Chapter 28 locate 5 examples of distributed learning. You may pick and choose from the following list.
o Academic distributed learning – Online courses at TAMU-Commerce
o Hybrid classes – Hybrid courses at ACC
o Virtual classes – Virtual Yoga
o Distributed learning via virtual institutions – eBay University Learning Center
o Free distributed learning – Instructables.com (check out the pi day contest)
o Skills-based training – Professional Carpentry
o Knowledge based learning – Six Sigma Online
o Life skills – How to Ride Capital Metro Buses
I love the internet! You can learn anything! It is so empowering (like reading and libraries). This is why I am in education – to empower students to do and learn what they want.
Chapter 29 discusses the concept of reusability. Think back over the courses you've had over your educational career and identify one with poor reusability characteristics. Explain how the course could be redesigned to improve reusability without changing the underlying content.
I love this chapter about reusability. More than whole courses not being re-usable, it’s usually certain aspects that hinder reusability for the instructor, the student, or future students.
Instructor: I recently took an Assembly Language course (twice) at an undisclosed university that was not really re-usable by anyone involved. The instructor did not adequately teach what was tested, the students had to attempt to teach themselves using materials that were not well selected, and the same assignments were given year after year. Better grades were awarded for copying assignments passed down over the years than anything original submitted. The instructor was a lazy teacher, the students punished for attempting to learn, and course evaluations did not seem to make a difference. I honestly believe the best way to re-design this course would be to start with a new instructor who actually cared about teaching and is not solely focused on research.
Current student: I took an online course with videos that could be re-accessed, but the way it was set-up you had to watch a whole video to be able to find what you’re looking for. This is why I think that instructors who use a Flash converter for PowerPoints actually hinder student learning. PowerPoints are searchable, printable, and more user friendly for note taking. Flash movies are not, so I ended up not re-accessing information, and if I didn’t learn it the first time, I didn’t learn it. Studying didn’t happen at all because the only way to do it would be to watch every video over again multiple times. There was no distilling of information – it was just one big lump of a Flash video that was pretty much worthless to me as a student. The instructor should have just left the presentation in PowerPoint.
Future students: One example of this is the list of organizations and journals in chapter 26 of the text. Several of the links had changed and I had to find the correct page on my own. This is great if an author is looking to increase book sales and have a new rev come out every year or two, but not good for long-term use of a book and resale-ability of a text.
Chapter 30 takes a look at using rich media. Find or create a visual for instruction describing its surface and functional features.
This is a rich media diagram to explain the water cycle and the parts of the water cycle not visible to students in realistic settings.
Blue Box Project - http://www.blueboxproject.com/the-project
Website with visuals to help explain how to build a Tardis shed.
Chapter 31 discusses the future of instructional technologies in the near future from metadata to nanotechnology. Describe how nanotechnology could be used to improve a specific job or task you are familiar with.
If you define nanotechnology as “the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale” (Wikipedia), then an RFID (functional system) small enough to be implanted in a human would be nanotechnology. This is similar to Warwick’s capsule worn in his arm to open doors described on page 330 of the text.
The RFID could be used for book checkout and return in the library, account access in the lunch line, attendance tracking at the doors of the building, and student identification when accessing online resources or assessments. Anti-RFID folks suggest this will lead to violations of privacy. If information is stored externally (not on the chip) and only the ID is on the chip, this would make the chip simply another form of ID such as a driver’s license or a photo badge id. Instead of privacy being lost, I believe it is more accurate to say anonymity would be lost.
And finally! Chapter 32 provides two points of view on the direction of the field - the straight and narrow road and the broad and inclusive road. Which point of view do you agree with and why?
I am a “big picture” person, so I would go with the broad and inclusive road, leaving room for the straight and narrow. I can’t help but think of Ben Franklin, and how the diversity of his knowledge helped feed into his other interests and contributions to society. There will always be a place for specialists, but for everyone within a field to be a specialist trained in the same manner seems to be intellectual incest. Diversity within the field of instructional design seems to be much more open to innovation and new solutions. Ideally there would be a team of people working on instructional design, some traditionally trained and formally certified, and some SME’s from within an organization to provide relevant information specific to the instructional task at hand.
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