Conversations on Learning Online
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...
Posted on Jan 02, 2019
As any current or former math student knows, “Check your work” has been a constant refrain of teachers through the ages. In fact, “Check your work” is good advice for any project you are working on, educationally, professionally, or personally. Checking your work is an important part of online...
Posted on Dec 13, 2018
My maternal grandfather gave me some of the best life advice I have ever received: “Always have a plan.” Having a plan helps you set your goals and figure out the necessary steps to achieve them. Too often, however, having a plan (or acting on a plan) is confused with...
Posted on Nov 05, 2018
While the pedagogical creativity inherent to creating an engaging online learning experience should not be understated, an equally important aspect of online course design is the production workflow. The creation of any product, whether tangible or intangible, has constraints of time frame, checkpoints, and quality control, all of which...
Posted on Oct 29, 2018
The English language has several easily-confused horizontal-line punctuation symbols: Hyphen: – En Dash: – Em Dash: — Minus Sign: − Underscore: _ Although these punctuation marks look similar at a glance, they are actually distinct punctuation marks with specific intended uses and with distinct unicode character values. Let’s look...
Posted on Oct 05, 2018
There are two approaches you can take to education, a macro approach and a micro approach, although these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. A macro approach, as the name implies, focuses on education at a larger scale, at the level of institutions, accreditation, academic program design, and so...
Posted on Sep 24, 2018
Theories of Consciousness As a philosopher, educator, and instructional designer, I find it worthwhile to explore competing theories about the nature of consciousness and their consequences for education and instructional design. Very quickly, the major categories of theories of consciousness are as follows: Mind-Body Dualism: The mind is nonphysical...
