With a Q

Image by laffy4k (Flickr) under CC license

I wasn't originally going to post this, but after reading Rita's blog entry about her experience in our student-led conversations tonight I had to chime in. Rita commented:

"I truly feel that I interact with my classmates and instructors more often and on a more complex level than I ever have in a face to face environment. I think that our conversations are more carefully planned and thought provoking than face to face conversations. Take a moment to think about all of the times that you have left a conversation and thought “oh I should have said this” or “I wish I would have worded this more clearly, I should have said…”. In an online environment, you have time to construct those complex thoughts and you can always, easily, go back and review the conversations and revisit the conversation, and add to it."

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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.