Conversations on Learning Online
The following quote, along with its many variants, is usually (but perhaps mistakenly) attributed to Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. — Henry Ford Regardless of whether Henry Ford ever actually said...
Posted on Apr 11, 2019
One of my most formative television/film experiences was the television miniseries adaptation of Anne of Green Gables (Sullivan Entertainment, 1985), based on the book of the same name (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Set on Prince Edward Island in the first decade of the 1900s, Anne of Green Gables...
Posted on Mar 29, 2019
Although opinions differ about the role of hanging indents in the post-print digital era, from time to time you may need to add hanging indents for things like APA references in your online course materials. Unfortunately, the WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editors in many Learning...
Posted on Mar 20, 2019
Anyone old enough to remember the mid-1990s internet browsing experience will remember largely text-based web pages with some number of hyperlinks to other web pages. As I have described in a previous article, Rediscovering the Power of the Link, the ability to hyperlink to other pages has an almost...
An important part of maintaining online course materials is keeping them up to date. Over time, an online course can become out of date as textbooks are updated, current events change, or new research occurs within a particular field of study. Sometimes the motivation for updating online course materials...
Posted on Feb 26, 2019
Throughout my career as an instructional designer, author, and developer of online course materials, I have been privileged to collaborate with top-notch graphic designers and illustrators who have helped me bring my creative vision for how to teach topics and concepts to life visually through illustrations and animations. I...
Posted on Feb 19, 2019
Having spent over a decade training and mentoring educational content developers and instructional designers, I have come to the conclusion that there are two qualities (or perhaps personality traits) that are nearly impossible to teach to someone who doesn’t already possess them: precision and creativity, both of which are...
Posted on Feb 04, 2019
Sometimes I am struck by how much the world has changed within the scope of my own meager lifespan, whether in the world of education, in the world of technology, or in the realm of day-to-day life. There are many features of the contemporary everyday educational experience that were...
Posted on Jan 15, 2019
In higher education there is a cultural and psychological trend toward standardization and normalization. Certain ideas about education become socially reinforced and codified as norms and standards. This is, to some extent, to be expected. After all, educators and instructional designers should rightly be concerned with student performance and...
Posted on Jan 07, 2019
Many of the people who ushered in the personal computer revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, and subsequently internet culture in the 1990s and beyond, had ties to counterculture movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. For example, Steve Jobs was a reader of the Whole Earth Catalog, a print...
