Comment Challenge Catch-Up

I’m slowly catching up on the comment challenge. I’d planned to do a bit more over the weekend. My husband and I went to the bookstore after lunch Saturday, then spent the rest of the afternoon in bed reading. I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the time offline.

Day 13: Write a Blog Post Using Comments

Although the Telecommute Instructional Design Jobs
post wasn’t actually from a standard public comment, I still think it counts. (This came from my Ask A Question page, where readers can submit questions privately, but give me the right to republish.) After all, the point of this seems to be about interacting with the readers. The Ask A Question just gives them another way to do so.

Community Size & Connection Strength is another post based on comments.

Day 14: Turn Your Blog Over to Your Readers

I just did this one today, asking for help answering a reader question in Instructional Design Training Programs. This probably isn’t the most compelling question; maybe I’ll try this one again sometime. Usually when I post a really deep question to readers, it’s after I’ve already written a full post. I do ask questions for tips and help sometimes, and I’ve been very happy with the wonderful responses from the community. I don’t usually let go of control enough to let my readers write the post in the comments though, not at the level of Chris Brogan anyway.

Day 15: Give a Comment Award

I’m copping out of this one. I just can’t imagine picking one person out of all the wonderful commenters I have here. Thank you to everyone who has ever left a non-spammy comment on my blog.

Day 16: Go Back and Catch Up on Something

I’m only three days late on my catch-up day. Not bad, huh?

Day 17: Five in Five

I’m putting this one off for tonight; I’ll come back to it later.

Day 18: Analyze the Comments on Your Own Blog

I wrote up this task partly because I was interested in doing it myself.

Which of your posts have generated the most comments?

I’ve had nine posts which generated 10 comments or more:

# of Comments	Post	Date
18	Do Instructional Designers Really Need Technology Skills?	06/05/07
16	Social Networking as LMS: Problems and Opportunities	08/18/07
13	Technology Skills for Instructional Designers	06/04/07
12	Diigo or Delicious for Beginners?	03/29/08
12	Is instructional design the right career?	06/20/07
11	Facebook as LMS?	08/16/07
11	Atmosphere for Commenting	05/17/08
11	First Experience with Usability Testing	03/11/08
10	Firefox Extensions	08/21/07

Dates in the table above are American style (MM/DD/YY).

Which has generated the best conversation? (The last question is about quantity; this one is about quality.)

I loved the debate about whether instructional designers need technology skills or not. I am so happy that Cammy Bean came here and disagreed with me. First of all, it meant that I found another instructional designer and blogger who I’ve learned lots from over the last year. But the conversation was great because she was able to share a perspective and experience that were quite different from my own. Her initial comments led me to write two other posts, one of which is at the top of the list above. I’ve had other good conversations, but I still think this one was the best. It certainly was very eye-opening for me.

Are there any patterns to the commenting on your own blog? Do certain types of posts generate more comments than others?

I see a couple of trends:

• Three of these posts were from my series on instructional design careers in June 2007.
• My two posts about Facebook and other social networking sites as LMS (Learning Management Systems) were also popular.
• Two are about the tools I use: Diigo and Firefox.
• Posts that have gotten the most views aren’t necessarily the ones with the most discussion. For example, the post with the most comments has only gotten 500 views total. My all-time top post, Instructional Design Skills, is approaching 2000 views, but doesn’t have a single comment. That post gets lots of search engine traffic, hence a high number of views, but has never started a discussion.

Information about instructional design careers does seem to be a popular topic. In fact, that’s part of why I chose to do the posts on telecommute jobs and training programs; people are looking for this information.

The best discussions were posts where I took a stand on something a bit controversial: the need for technology skills and Facebook/social networking as LMS. When I can find that balance where I make a statement that not everyone agrees with but still make it open for people to discuss and debate, I get great conversations.

If you do see a pattern or commonality between posts that generate good comments, what can you do to increase those qualities in other posts?

Even after doing all this analysis, I’m not sure what to do to increase these qualities in other posts. Certainly, I’ll continue to write more about instructional design careers and just about instructional design in general. The topics that I’m passionate about are more likely to be interesting reads and therefore generate more comments.

Do you see a pattern in what generates good conversation, either on your own blog or here? What makes you not just comment once, but come back to comment again?

Technorati Tags: comment08, comment+challenge, Cammy+Bean

Observations on If, When, & How Much Instructional Design

Image citation
Really Random? from
Dan Morelle’s photostream.

OK, I know I’ve been a slacker. It’s March 6, and I’m finally getting my thoughts together on the February Learning Circuits Big Question. I’d started this a while back and had hoped to spend more time analyzing and trying to bring the trends together, but it just hasn’t happened. Hopefully my observations will still be beneficial even without a complete analysis.

It Depends

One of the most common responses to the question “Instructional Design: If, When, & How Much” was “it depends.” As Benjamin Hamilton noted, that’s the obvious answer. Several people talked about different types of instructional design for different needs.

• Cammy Bean used the great image of ID as a spectrum.
• Mick Leyden differentiated between traditional instructional design and ID consulting
• Clark Quinn separated typical instructional design from the “enlightened” variety.

I think this balance of multiple variables may be part of why however was one of the top 50 words used in the posts, as shown in the tag cloud.

Analysis

One word that didn’t show up in the tag cloud that surprised me was analysis. Several people mentioned the value of instructional designers in analyzing situations, even if the ultimate solution doesn’t involve an ID. For example, Don Clark argued that part of our value as IDs is recognizing when a project is simple enough to pass onto a SME. Tony Karrer’s response to Jay Cross discusses how instructional designers break down learning tasks; I think that’s analysis even if he never uses that exact word. Bill Brandon offered several questions to help analyze whether a project actually needs an ID or whether a less costly solution would be “good enough.” A definition of instructional design from Jeffrey Keefer says we “systematically determine learning needs and create learning interventions to meet them,” which to me sounds like analysis is the first half of the definition.

Focus on the Project

In both of the above themes I saw a focus on the needs of a specific project. By “project” here, I’m including the content, audience, and the instructional designers as variables.

• Looking at the content, Karl Kapp said “The real value of an instructional designer is knowing when to apply what instructional strategies to what type of content.”
• Tony Karrer described a situation where the audience is already familiar with the content but hasn’t changed their behavior, looking at that angle of a project.
• Cammy Bean mentions the specific experience of the ID as one of the variables in a project.

Does any of this help clarify your thoughts about March’s question, the scope of our responsibility as learning professionals, or does it just muddy the waters?

Technorati Tags: learning+circuits, lcbq, analysis

Patterns in Instructional Design Responses

I’ve been reviewing the responses to February’s Learning Circuits Big Question: “Instructional Design: If, When, and How Much?” Because this has generated so many responses, there’s just a lot of content to absorb. To help me see the patterns, I created this tag cloud using TagCrowd. I excluded the words instructional, designer, design, learning, and e-learning, which were very common but I felt didn’t help me see the trends in the responses.

I’m still processing all this information myself, but I thought I’d share the tag cloud now. What stands out to you in the patterns? Are there any surprises?

Technorati Tags: tbq, lcbq, learning+circuits, tags, visualization

ADDIE, Rapid E-Learning, and Generational Differences

I just started reading Karl Kapp’s book Games, Gadgets, and Gizmos for Learning. Much of the book is about the differences in how different generations learn. Specifically, he compares the “boomers” to the “gamers.” One of the characteristics of “gamers” (called by others the net generation, or digital immigrants, or millenials, or probably some other names I’m forgetting) is that they learn by trial and error. They don’t want to be led by the hand through each step or to be told exactly what to do.

This is different from might be typical in previous generations. Natalie told me earlier today about how sometimes when she trained adults they were frustrated when she asked them to solve scenarios that weren’t exactly like their previous experiences. They didn’t want to apply existing skills in a new scenario, they just wanted to be told which button to push in what order. (Anything about generations and age is necessarily a generalization–I’m talking about overall trends. There’s lots of exceptions in any age group.)

I haven’t see any trends related to age in instructional design, but I wonder if there’s a similar structural difference between ID models. The traditional ADDIE model is a structured process; the steps mostly go in order. (OK, it isn’t completely linear; evaluation often happens at multiple points. But you get the idea.) Rapid development for e-learning is often about iterative prototypes. Michael Allen calls it “successive approximation” in his book. In other words, rapid e-learning is a method of trial and error. If a prototype doesn’t do what you want, just scrap it and do something else; it’s like hitting the reset button on a game.

These are definitely “thoughts under construction” here, but it seems like there is a pattern of moving from more rigid structures to more flexible ones. It’s more than just these two areas of course; it’s Britannica to Wikipedia, broadcast news to blogs, Dewey decimal to folksonomies. I haven’t seen anything that connects differences in ID models to generational differences though. Does anyone have anything about age and ID model preferences? Do you think successive approximation could be part of this broader trend towards the flexible and decentralized?

Technorati Tags: addie, instructional design, e-learning, Karl Kapp, Michael Allen, netgeneration

Sensemaking through Networks

Will Richardson writes that much of the chatter about changes in education due to technology is missing the point. Getting students and teachers and everyone to publish and write–yes, that’s a good start. Improving communication between schools and the community–yep, that’s good too. But Will argues that those are really just ways of doing the same thing we’ve been doing for a while, just with a nicer set of tools.

But here is the bigger question, I think. Through teaching them to use these tools to publish, are we also teaching them how to use these tools to continue the learning once that project is over? Can they continue to explore and reflect on the ideas that those artifacts represent regardless of who is teaching the next class? Can they connect with that audience not simply in the ways that books connect to readers (read but no write) but in the ways that allow them to engage and explore more deeply with an ongoing, growing community of learners? Isn’t that the real literacy here?

Part of what I think Will’s talking about here is connectivism: the idea that learning is about creating connections, both between people and between ideas. When I first heard of connectivism, I didn’t really get it. Actually, I’m not sure that I get it now. However, I think I might have figured out one piece of it.

My initial reaction to connectivism was that it was just about using people in your network basically as sources of information. Instead of looking something up in a search engine or encyclopedia, you ask a person. Will quotes Jay Cross in calling this the “outboard brain.” That didn’t seem very revolutionary to me though; it just seemed like more of the same stuff, just with different tools.

But I don’t think that’s what Will’s really talking about. The network isn’t just a source of information; our connections actually help us make sense of that information. We see patterns in what people talk about and how they discuss it, and that helps us in our sensemaking. We weigh information from trusted sources more heavily than those we don’t trust, and that becomes part of our understanding too. Our networks are part of our filters keeping some information out, but networks also help us connect ideas and dig deeper. We get feedback from others, and hopefully we learn to improve because of that.

What do we want students to be able to do? If I understand Will correctly, he’s hoping we can teach students to use the network as a way to make sense of the vast amounts of information now available to us. What the technology lets us do is connect with people so we can understand more and keep learning. We don’t have to stop learning when a course is finished; we can keep interacting with our network and learning together. Really, that shouldn’t just be a goal for students; lifelong learning should be a goal for everyone.

Technorati Tags: lifelonglearning, connectivism, will richardson, learning, community, patterns, web2.0

Visualizing Del.icio.us Networks

Courtesy of NSWLearnscope, here’s a way to visualize how del.icio.us networks are interconnected. The tool is called del.icio.us network explorer. Enter your del.icio.us username (or someone else’s) as a starting point, and you see your network. Click on anyone in your network to see their network. Mutual connections are in red, one way connections are in blue.

In this screenshot, Vicki Davis (brightideasguru) is at the top, Wes Fryer (wfryer) is in the lower left, and Will Richardson (willrich) is in the lower right. My network (christyinsdesign) is in the center with the colored lines. Looking at this image, I can see that Wes and Will have several people in common, but Vicki only has one network connection shared with Wes and none in common with Will. I was a little surprised by that; I would have expected a bit more overlap there.

I wish this had some way to directly link to the del.icio.us accounts of people in the network. When I explore and see that several people in my network have a connection to someone that I don’t, I’d like to see what links that person has. However, since the usernames are there, it’s not that hard to find people. It’s just an extra step.

Overall, I thought it was fun to explore and to see the connections. George Siemens has written numerous times about visualization as a way to deal with the information overload and to help understand patterns. I definitely think I was able to see patterns more quickly using this tool than just working through the del.icio.us interface, even though I could get the same information in text form there.

Technorati Tags: delicious, visualization, network, Vicki Davis, Wes Fryer, Will Richardson, George Siemens

Ubiquitous Learning Ideas from TCC 2007

“Technology, Colleges, and Community.” The theme for this year’s conference was “Blending Community and Multimedia in Ubiquitous Learning.” I have to admit that not too many people explicitly talked about “ubiquitous” learning; there were presentations on Web 2.0 tools and Second Life, some on accessibility and learning theories, and a few on working and teaching virtually. Now that I’m looking back and trying to sum up what I’ve learned, I can see some pattern in it though.

The conference home page says this:

E-Learning is passé. U-learning is the new wave globally in higher education. Ubiquitous learning encompasses e-learning and emphasizes learning anytime, anywhere and anyway in both formal and informal lifelong learning environments.

Of course, my first thought was “D’oh! I hope I don’t have to change the name of my blog!” I don’t really agree with the statement though. E-learning may change and transform, and we may use new terms to identify it, but it certainly isn’t going away. And really, they are certainly saying that e-learning is part of what learning is becoming; it just isn’t all there is. I see many of the Web 2.0 tools as potentially being part of the e-learning experience. Wikis can be great for group work in online courses. New synchronous and asynchronous tools pop up nearly every day, and we can integrate some of these into the rest of what we do. I can certainly see value in having a more traditional e-learning course at the center of a formal learning program, but supported, enhanced, applied, and reinforced through blogs and a peer learning network.

At it’s heart, perhaps “ubiquitous learning” is about all the myriad ways we learn. It can’t be just one thing; it has to be the formal and the informal, the virtual and the face-to-face, the synchronous and the asynchronous. It’s about reaching as many learners as we can, bringing the content to them in whatever format we can provide it, plus providing the opportunities for the learners to create their own content to share. All of it will interact and interlock to build something bigger and better–hence the “interlocking” image.

This conference provided 1 to 4 speakers every hour for 8 hours a day for the last 3 days, so there were plenty of choices. I attended 17 different presentations. My brain feels quite full right now! I’m sorting through pages and pages of notes and trying to collect a few things that I learned and ideas I found interesting.

Snippets and ideas

From Amy Bruckman in “Constructionist Online Learning Goes Mainstream”: I loved the image of “Technological Samba Schools.” In Brazil, communities form samba schools where everyone learns, everyone teaches, and everyone participates in preparation for the Rio Carnaval. Technology can help us create environments where we can all learn and teach each other.

From Melinda Roberts in “Promoting Active Learning in the Online Classroom through Innovative Course Design”: When designing course activities, think about whether you could do the activity just fine if no students were present. If the activity would work without them, don’t do it! Students should be active participants.

From Bobbe Baggio in “The Implications of Anonymity in Cyber Education”: Where is the balance between accountability and anonymity? Americans equate privacy with freedom; this is not always the case in other cultures.

From Nancy White in “New Horizons for Online Interaction: the Individual and the Group”: A great presentation with very effective use of images. A few quotes stand out:

• “The positive development of a society in the absence of creative, independently thinking, critical individuals, is as inconceivable as the development of an individual in the absence of the stimulus of the community.”–Einstein
• “All groups are networks, but not all networks are groups.” –Nancy White (although I think she may have been quoting someone else)
• “Networks are magnificent containers for groups.” –Nancy

How do we learn how to shift from individual –> group –> network? How do we even know when to shift?

Nancy also touched on the concept of “Community Technology Stewardship”: leaders with experience who help others make good technology choices.

From Karl Soehnlein in “Effectively Using Technology to Increase Interaction and Collaboration in the Online Asynchronous Classroom”: An environment conducive to collaboration has familiarity, openness, trust, and respect. Work to move from adversarial discussion to collaborative dialog. As an instructional designer, I can work to include some discussion boards where students are joint problem solvers with a single goal to achieve rather than only using discussion board assignments where the individual opinions are the main focus. One way is to have students define the problems and goals mutually while they discuss rather than defining the problems for them before they have a chance to start.

What I have learned about Second Life will have to be another post; this is already getting quite long. Kudos to anyone who actually read to the end of the post!

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Image citation
interlock from pianoforte’s photostream.

Technorati Tags: tcc2007, asynchronous learning, instructionaldesign, interactivity, e-learning, collaboration, anonymity

Tag Cloud Added

I’ve added a tag cloud for my site. I’m not sure how useful it actually is, as I have clearly had many more bookmarks posts than anything else. I suppose that’s just a reminder that I should be posting more actual content and writing.

If you’re a more visual/spatial person and want the cloud, you can access it through the sidebar at any time. The tag cloud is based on my WordPress categories and not my Technorati tags. I tend to use the WordPress categories as more of the high level organization with Technorati tags as subdivisions within that.

Thanks to engtech for making this available. WordPress.com users didn’t have a way to do a tag cloud before this (at least not that I had found).

Technorati Tags: tagcloud, wordpress, patterns