With a Q

Wow what a week! First of all, I came face to face with my own digital mortality when the logic board on my trusty year-old MacBook Pro decided to have a campfire. So it’s out for a week, thank goodness for the extended AppleCare! I am using the loaned Mac from work at the Educause 2008 conference this week.

This has been an enlightening past couple of weeks. First, creating the WebQuest and now I am working on a digital story. Digital stories are essentially that: stories created digitally using all sorts of tools. I happen to be using iMovie which is still fairly new to me. The best part of this assignment is that it can be about anything. I happen to be on vacation this week in Kaua’i, so I am doing some investigative reporting into the story of the Menehune.

I am having a lot of fun with this. Somewhere along the line, I forgot about the actual content of what goes into online education, or education in general even. I think what I am grappling with is that I have spent so much time on managing the "container" that we put content into, that I forgot about the content itself. I think I have been in an instructional design rut.
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I am usually not one to ruminate on and on about information I get at work. Many schools are run like a business, and being on the IT side of things, you get exposed to a lot of the business-y cross-talk and things that don’t necessarily relate to the world of education on the surface. In higher-ed, the two worlds are closer together as we need to prepare our students for the business world and to compete in an economy that ain’t what it used to be. But when you look at K-12, the dissociation between the business world and the world of schools seems much further apart. Or is this changing?

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Just a quickie post to rebroadcast a link floating around recently: Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies from Curtis Bonk, one of the lead collaborators along with many students around the world.  (Really, who authors anything in a vacuum anymore?)  Anyway, I saw him speak at Educause a few years back and he was great.

So I recently finished up my most recent course “Issues & Developments in Educational Psychology: Learning and Classroom Management” and it kicked my ass. I was sort of waiting for this opportunity though as I had originally intended on going to get an M.Ed. in order to get more into the “educational” aspect of my career in eLearning. Previous courses had focused on introductions to using technology in curriculum, this was my first real immersion in theories of learning above what I had casually read in the past. My final project was a wiki page on the University of Illinois’ web space: WikEd. More specifically it is a shortish theoretical analysis of the ed-psych and practical impacts of social networking technologies on teaching and learning. It is here if you are interested. Much props to George Seimens, Stephen Downes, and many other resources who had thoughtfully shared their thoughts and theories online for all of us newbies from which to remix and develop our own learning connections. These helped shape my thoughts on it…comments and criticisms welcome.