March 2009 Archives

I've tried to post at least once a week in this space, but last week was a bust. My Father-in-law was in the hospital for a post-op infection - pretty serious - and I just didn't have the mental bandwidth for much beyond the basics. As I write this my wife is accompanying my FIL and his wife to the hospital again - he's white, can't eat, and mentally foggy. So this week doesn't promise much more for me mentally.

I've been working on transitioning one of our Instructional Designer's job responsibilities over to others in our unit. She's accepted a post at a new location, and I couldn't be happier for her. As we are not replacing her due to the economic realities of the moment, this means some tough decisions. I can't absorb her work; I'm struggling with my own projects at the moment. I have enough for several people to do, but there's not enough people to do it, so I'm making hard choices, scaling back, and I'm sure being frowned at. Oh well.

One fun thing I did last weekend was to build the EGC Follies, a gift application via Facebook. It was easy to do, and looks to be a great viral marketing tool. It's an app that allows you to send a simple picture and saying to up to 20 of your FB friends. You can set the app so others that use it can only initially see a few of the total possible gifts they, in turn, can send. As they send more gifts, more open up to them. This give the app a little bit of a game feel. I put things in it like "Games spark the imagination," and "Who sez girls don't play games," the latter with a pic of a girl really getting into an MMO. I can see this extended into other areas for ETS, such as Symposium marketing.

I'm also about finished playing Dungeons and Dragons:Tiny Adventures on FB. This game is worth a post in and of itself, so look for one soon over on the Gaming Hub. Mafia Wars is still going strong. While the subject of this game is very questionable, the mechanics and play of it has great potential for a higher ed game.

I'm also finally travelling to vist my Electronic Learning Support Specialists (eLSS). I'll be travelling to Fayette tomorrow, York in a couple of week, and Lehigh Valley as soon as I can hook a ride there with the Digital Commons folks. The eLSS are doing an amazing job. I have an impact report on them; I'll have to find a way to share it with all.

Finally, I have to share this video on the future of 3D development with you. It's beyond amazing. I wonder how we'll interface with reality when the lines become so blurred? I can't see most of us jacking in ala The Matrix, yet external interfaces will only take us so far. Will we Borginize ourselves in our attempts to meld with the machine? What will we do as the technological singularity approaches?

I am a diehard Mac user, since the 128K Mac. Yet I'm typing this on a spanking brand new Dell XPS M1530. I need a PC for the Educational Gaming Commons. I was using Mac's BootCamp for PC show and tells, but now PSU mandated security software will kill BootCamp - thus the new machine. After our tech support folks finished with it, I spent less than two hours installing my various "must have" apps, preferences, etc.

What I discovered doing this is that I'm living in the cloud far more than I realized, and the main apps I use are the same on both the Mac and PC:

• Many things I do are via a web browser. I use Firefox with various extensions - all available on multiple platforms. FF looks the same on both platforms.
• My email client is Thunderbird, and I use PSU's iMAP service - basically it keeps all my mail in the cloud, so I can move from machine to machine easily. TBird looks the same on both platforms.
• I do use Microsoft Office, and the interface differences between the Mac and PC versions are, shall we say, a bit frustrating. But I could use OpenOffice if I wanted to!
• I don't do much multimedia any more, so platform-specific tools here don't matter to me.
• Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. look the same on both platforms.

So this started me to think - does the platform you're on really matter that much any more? For me, the answer is no. I love my Mac for the sleek integration of function and form and will never give one up willingly, but I can live with a PC running XP.

I wonder if Apple is scared? They should be, in this area. The "ease of use" factor that use to make Macs far superior to the PC is rapidly vanishing. Many mainstream apps look and feel nearly the same on both platforms. More and more work is being done in the cloud.

In the future, will most folks care what platform they use?

(Yes my Mac-addicted colleagues, I've now set myself up for a barrage of rationales why I'm wrong about the Mac. Fire away!)

I've been involved with instructional design at PSU since 1984. More recently, I've become involved in Learning Design. It's a superset of ID, encompassing not only ID, but instructional technology, systemic change, administration, and (IMO) just about anything else that impacts on the educational experience, such as the physical learning environment.

We have over 100 Instructional Designers at Penn State, but no one, to the best of my knowledge, is listed as a Learning Designer. So I wonder if it would benefit the entire Penn State Community to start thinking about Learning Design? We already have taken steps in that direction via the Learning Design Summer Camp [http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wiki/Learning_Design_Summer_Camp_2009], but we've not looked at Learning Design per se. We've not examined what Learning Design is, how it can and should affect how we plan instruction, how we work together in teams, and how it affects our career paths.

So what is Learning Design? Clark Quinn views it as the intersection of instructional design, information design and experience design. Earlier I alluded it's a superset of instructional design. I think if you step back from the doing and look from the balcony on what's involved in creating educational materials and experiences, you'll be closer to what LD is.

How does it affect instruction? How doesn't it? For an instructional designer, it means taking into account many things we simply ignore. Take the typical prerequisite skills diagram. In this type of analytical diagram, one lists the skills needed to perform the task at hand. At some point you draw a dotted line separating the skills into two sets. The skills that fall below the dotted line are considered already mastered - you don't need to worry about teaching them.



Now imagine vertical dotted lines on each side of the listed skills. Anything that lies outside those vertical dotted lines is not dealt with by instructional design, but rather by learning design. I've only included a few LD things in this illustration - hope you get the point I'm trying to make. Instructional Designers need to not only dig deep, they need to look wide to see what else impacts their tiny portion of the entire learning experience.


So how do we at PSU go about learning more about this tremendous challenge and opportunity? What does this mean for career advancement? I know many IDs at PSU feel their upward mobility is curtailed. Is a move into Learning Design a way to foster a stronger career path?

I'm asking these questions in the hopes of sparking a true dialog with anyone that works to develop instruction - what can/should we be doing and exploring in this space?