iterativelearning

I’ve been working on an collaborative instructional design project for the last few weeks and we’ve been using Google Docs for most of our work as well as a little bit of Zotero for bibliographic stuff. As we’ve been compiling our various bits of information from readings, meetings, email, chats, and video, I’ve been thinking how nice it would be if we had something like Basecamp or DeskAway that’s priced for educational use. While Deskaway has a free option, it limits you to 25MB in storage and as most quickly discover, it doesn’t take long for a big project to exceed that cap. That said, both DeskAway and Basecamp sport slick, intuitive interfaces and do a nice job of creating one central web-based workplace where everyone on the team can store (e.g., docs, images), communicate, and coordinate logistics.

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Basecamp, DeskAway, Instructional Design, Zotero

Very interesting post in the Programmable Web by Daniel Jacobson on Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE). Two big standouts for me are how it foregrounds portability (e.g., to mobile platforms) and feasibility for organizations with limited staff and money (e.g., schools). He also includes a presentation on it.

Was glad to read in Henry Jenkins’ post of a PBS production on New Media and video games that gets away from an old, sky-is-falling perspective, namely one that envisions the relationship between kids and video games as a precipitous downward spiral. I like the way Jenkins puts it in terms of whose power of expression has been the most dominant and how this has reinforced such a belief.

In most cases, a bias towards the adult perspectives offered by parents and teachers over those advanced by young people, who often lacked a language through which to defend experiences which were clearly meaningful to them

I see an an interesting opportunity for instructional designers. Teachers could integrate a writing component where students, perhaps in small groups, draft an argument that lays out the case for the educational benefits they perceive in their interactions with this New Media and/or video game(s). Students could also extend this articulation through oral presentations.

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Henry Jenkins, PBS