Just a quick note to everyone wishing you a very happy holidays! Too much to think about as we race into Christmas tomorrow to sit down and write … as I type my little lady is in the other room yelling that it is Christmas Eve. Have a wonderful holiday!
My friend Brad beat me to this one … last night we took Madeline to get her picture taken with Santa at the Nittany Mall. Let’s just say it was an interesting experience. Not only was the big guy 45 minutes late coming back from the “feeding the reindeer” break, but the whole thing was a bit unsettling.
As we were standing in line, Madeline asked “do I really need to sit on that guy’s lap” Let me remind you that she is turning 5 in a couple of days, so she could see right through this “Santa’s” makeup. The thing that blew my mind was the poster shown below that offered not only the picture of the photo shoot, but the ability to purchase the copyright of said photo for a mere $22.00 dollars. As my friend Brad asked today during the latest ETS Talk Podcast, “do we all need personal IP attorneys walking around with us?” Something tells me that we are on the verge of a major societal collapse when Santa wants to own the images of children all over the World.
So I’ve been writing about designing a course in the open over the last few weeks … well, I have actually been designing a new residentcourse that I hope to next Fall. I didn’t do it in a wiki, but did use Drupal 5 to post the initial design. It isn’t 100% complete, but the schedule is well rounded and there are a handful of solid assignments that are both new and from the IST 110 days. I would love to get your feedback on the whole thing … it is over at the Course Design Site. I did a quick podcast today explaining a little of the philosophy behind the whole thing, so that is available to listen to as well. I am still trying to figure out the login and account stuff in Drupal 5, so that may be a little flaky for the moment — I am basically terrified of spam and have it locked down until I have some time in the next few days to really work with that.
The real idea is to expose the course in this format for the community to comment on and help shape … I will then use the same site to teach the course from, give students blogs there, and continue to build on this foundation over time. If you have ideas, thoughts, or anything else just leave a comment here, or there. Thanks!
I am trying out WordPress.com as an alternative for hosting the Learning and Innovation blog. I am just flat out tired of dealing with my wordpress problems on my host and I may just find life easier with a hosted solution (did I mention it is free). Check out how it looks and works for me.
The thing I need to know is what are pros and cons of this move? Anyone have insight for me?
After my post over the weekend about designing learning experiences in wikis I spent some more time thinking about the whole thing. Much of it seemed to crystallize yesterday as I sat and talked with Chris and Scott over a pint. I thought I would try to capture a little of what is playing in my head at the moment about this …
Let’s start with an assumption or two as they relate to the learning design process … first of all I am assuming a team approach to design and development. That means there are people like instructional designers (maybe more than one), subject matter experts (maybe faculty), graphics and media developers, Q & A people, copyright folks, and so on. What this means is that the learning experience should be a rich media tool that enables students to gain a real appreciation for the content through appropriately designed learning activities and exceptional contextual examples. I am also assuming that a majority of the course readings, activities, and assessments happen via the web. This does not assume a distance learning model. In fact it could be a standard 15 week lecture-based course with the real difference being that the core materials have been designed specifically for the course. The course could be delivered completely at a distance, but that isn’t my bag.
OK, on to the thoughts that are driving me crazy and begging me to put a team together to investigate them. First a screen shot of the D3 interface that only the design team got to see … the output was much different and in my mind’s eye, much less engaging then the screen below.
Again I will return to the Digital Design Document example from the other day … my wife was our Manager of Instructional Design back at the Solutions Institute and she had this crazy idea to release the entire CMS content basis as the learning environment, not just the polished html output of the course content. In other words, she wanted to let students and faculty to see not only the content, but all the instructional design and media notes that we managed along side the content in the repository. At the time I thought it was interesting, but crazy. I was always saying to the design team that great ePages consisted of content, context, and activity … we spent thousands of hours making sure as many screens in courses contained those three elements. It was obviously not always possible and now that I think back on it, exposing more of the design and the conversation that went into the design would have gotten us closer to that goal.
Now after several years and looking at how the tools have transformed the way we think about publishing, managing, and controlling content my mind has moved to the extreme notion that a course would be a hell of a lot more powerful if it were exposed from the ground up. In other words, share the original manuscript for the learning objective, expose the notes that the design team pushed back and forth from one another as they debated how best to meet the objective with the appropriate instructional strategies, show off the story boards the media team uses when creating an embeded interactive exercise, and so on. Then imagine that as a page with multiple semesters of faculty and student notes attached to it as comments. It would reveal quite a bit about what is really going on with the content. For the right fields it would make the ultimate incidental learning tool. Think of how something like that would work for an Instructional Design course … sort of like Dick & Carey for the new millennium.
I am sure this is a rambling mess, but I think that future textbooks would be well served to include not only footnotes for citations, but comments made by readers. This can happen in the online world … I am still figuring this out, but I can see a very rich learning environment emerging from this type of activity that would really alter the notion of eLearning materials. Does this make any sense? Would it be an interesting design experiment? I know I will be working to come up with a way to expose the design for a new course I am working on. Any thoughts?
As I am sitting here in the R-Bar in Chicago for the CIC Learning Technologies meeting (that’s tomorrow …) I just had the opportunity to sit down next to a guy at the bar who made me rethink a bunch of things. Joseph asked me why I was here, so I told him … I then asked him and he told me, “you don’t want to hear my story.” He proceeded to tell me that just a few hours ago his brother died in his arms … his younger brother, by 11 years just passed away in front of him. We spent the next two hours talking — mostly Joe talking to me about life (and life lost). Powerful conversation that made me walk away with very mixed emotions.
I have been thinking lately about how we use wikis for all sorts of document and collaborative design. Back in the day when I was regularly involved in first designing and then managing the design of eLearning courses we used our own custom solutions for storing content and managing teamwork. The big tool we used at IST to build and manage the Online IST courses was the Digital Design Document (D3) … it was a FileMaker Pro application that allowed teams of people to easily create and manage course content, team communication, work-flow, storyboards, and more in one easy to use collaborative environment. It worked well for how we used it and it saved us tons of time when it came to actually delivering a course. One of the nice things about D3 was its ability to publish a 600 screen course in seconds so that it could be coupled with ANGEL or whatever other course management system we were using.
The thing that made it perfect was the collaborative capabilities. What we never attempted to do with D3 was just open the tool to the learners and the faculty — in other words, the design team managed the tool and the content in it. What the learner and ultimately the instructor saw was the output … they only interacted with the static pages. No way to edit, no way to update, and certainly no way to contribute to the knowledge on the page. Today we have come to expect collaborative tools as part of the work flow — wikis, books in Drupal, multi user blogs, Google Docs, and so on have become the norm. What I wondering is if you could use a wiki to not only design your course, but then deliver it in that environment as well. If you have a team of people designing the instruction, would it be prudent to allow students to not only interact with the desired content on screen but also see the design team’s notes on the same pages? Would that lead to great learning opportunities?
I am designing a new course and will be attempting to do just that. I will be putting all of the readings that I create, all the assignments for the students, and everything else in the course (from the syllabus to the final assessment) into a wiki and letting my students edit, tweak, adjust, and add to the course along the way. If I ask them to respond to a reading, I will want them to do it in the wiki so that every student’s response becomes another learning opportunity for the next set of students who take the course. In the back of my head it is almost like creating an Intranet for the course that the whole world can see.
I am wondering who out there has done this and what I need to watch out for? Are there things anyone would recommend? Final question … if I do this would people outside the course contribute content? Sort of a social experiment in course design … if there is a topic in the course I am weak in, could I count on others to come in and contribute to the course design? Am I crazy (don’t answer that one)?
I keep coming to my blog seeing the following error (I changed the username myself):
WordPress database error: [User ‘username’ has exceeded the ‘max_questions’ resource (current value: 50000)]
I know my host, StartLogic restricts the number of MySQL calls in an hour to 50,000 … can I actually be hitting that limit or are there other causes? The other blogs and tools I have installed here at the camplesegroup.com domain continue to run even when this blog goes down. My host tells me I need to go to a dedicated server package, but I really don’t get that much traffic — during the last 8 months, according google analytics, my highest traffic month was November with around 5,000 unique visits … that is when this problem started BTW. Can anyone help me with decoding this? If I do need to change plans/hosts does anyone have a recommendation? If it doesn’t seem like I should need to, does anyone have any advice for me?