In one of my classes this week we were talking about Rapid Instructional Design. Tom Kuhlmann has a good post on 3 Ways to define it in the context of e-Learning.
Design an Interactive Look & Feel
Create Exploratory Content
Provide a reason to use the information
He makes a compelling case for each of these three definitions, but one that particularly resonates with me is the emphasis on creating exploratory content. He essentially highlights the disconnect between the way some e-learning modules artificially construct the human learning process (i.e., in neat, linear steps) and the way most people actually learn — through nonlinear exploration (In fact, exploration is a critical part of learning).
I like this link that he makes between interactivity being driven by exploratory discovery rather than being driven by the technology.
When it comes to technology and the classroom, it’s hard not to hear at least one person mention Twitter. Among higher ed faculty, you can find your Twitter aficionados and your detractors. Mashaable Mashable reports on Purdue University’s development of their own customized application (Hotseat) that combines both Twitter and Facebook. After looking at the intro video [scroll to the bottom of the post to see it], they’ve configured it with the same 140-character limit, but have added a voting feature. So, for example, a professor could see how voting patterns identify specific content areas that need further elaboration. In theory, this would help faculty more quickly get a read on confusion. Another possible advantage is that unlike clickers, the language and terms of the communication is being determined directly by the students.
What’s interesting from a research standpoint is how this isn’t a story of one early-adopter faculty who has a techie-fondness for Twitter, but rather one of a school and its broader, more systematic effort to see if this technology actually resonates with students.
I like using ebooks. Among other things, it’s easier to do strategic searches (e.g., CMD-F) and most offer a pretty decent variety of annotation tools. But there’s a difference between using a dedicated hardware device (e.g., Kindle) and one delivered exclusively through the web. For example, in the case of the latter, many universities use netLibrary or some variation on that. At my university’s library, one of the ebook publishers made available through the netlibrary portal is the National Academies Press (NAS). In general, the interface is very usable and intuitive, but one feature I think that would improve its user value would be to add a navigate-by-page option. Many times I know the specific page I want to jump to, and even though NAS has a table of contents positioned on the right side of the screen, it only gives page ranges, so even after you navigate to that range, slow page caches make it more time-consuming than it needs to be move to the intended target page.
The design could perhaps be revised by putting the Go To page box where the Search box currently sits and then moving the Search box to one of its more common locations (e.g., upper-right).
Not a lot of men have to wear neckties these days and so when those special occasions warrant one, it’s easy to forget the 9 variations of knots. Well, fortunately, there is at least one instructional designer out there who sees no task as too trivial and accordingly, has developed a video tutorial, iTie.
This computer-based tutorial capitalizes on the webcam that comes with most laptops so that an animated necktie (produced by the software) is superimposed over the physical necktie (generated via the webcam). One particularly interesting detail is the contrasting colors (blue, yellow) that help to more clearly show which end of the tie to manipulate.
