A new year is upon us and thus we should take time to examine some of the potential changes that the year 2010 will bring. Examining potential changes is important because technology is in a constant state of change and so are the lives of those involved with instructional technology. Although this blog post will not attempt to take on all the predicted changes in instructional technology for the year 2010, this post will examine three 2010 predictions I agree with and three that I do not…

These are my Jumptags for January 31st through February 9th: Project Cartoon: How Projects Really Work (version 1.5) – How Projects Really Work (version 1.5) How Projects Really Work (version 1.5) Malcontent Blogger | bLaugh – Source: ReviewMe Domain: MalcontentBlogger.com <img class="comic" title="Malcontent Blogger" alt="Malcontent Blogger" … The Whole Internet Truth | bLaugh – Source: Wikipedia Domain: WikisGoneWild.com <img class="comic" [...]

Instructional designers are familiar with the basics of usability testing to improve the design of an instructional unit even while it is still in development. Watching users work through an instructional unit or navigate a Web site for the first time helps uncover the ambiguities underlying what we thought was quite obvious. Poking around the Web, I came across a [...]

If you are interested in researching Knowledge Management, also referred to as KM, you will certainly find that there is an abundance of literature about this topic. But just what is “knowledge management?”

Sometimes subject-matter experts (SMEs) can be the hardest part of dealing with the development of instruction. The SME is the person who has the content knowledge the instructional designer needs. The process of getting to the knowledge can feel frustrating to a designer. Despite the problems instructional designers might encounter working with SMEs, the bottom line is a SME is a necessary part of the ID process. The SME is critical to the success of your instruction …

The Internet has taken us beyond our wildest dreams. At the beginning of the Information Age there were the select individuals called “Webmasters” that had the skills to publish to the Web. Over the past decade, everyone has had tools at their disposable to create a presence with ease. I admit I was caught up in the rage to try online instruction. My first experience was in 2003 and my intent was to provide a convenient way to provide instruction to a small group of learners. My first mistake was letting the medium be the determining factor rather than focusing on the design of the content (Rovai, 2002) …

Today, from the Adobe Education Technologies blog, Brian Chau mentioned how much he liked trying Adobe BrowserLab …

After teaching for several years, I realized the importance of a strategy the last two years of my profession that completely altered my view of teaching and learning. My experiences have primarily been in a large-urban school district where teaching can be a challenge. But after finding how to repurpose an age- old teaching strategy, helping my students to learn new and complex information became less of a struggle. I learned the power of repetition.

I received the following information about an open session with James Paul Gee, who is one of the leading experts on using video games to support learning. This is courtesy of Steve Hargadon at the Infinite Thinking Machine

I am a visual learner. I would rather look at a chart than read a text. I would rather watch a video than read about its content. However, this is my own learning preference and it is not a general rule for learning. It is nice to entertain the idea of tailoring instruction to all the different styles of learners but, in reality, this is not practical. What is practical is designing instruction that uses a mix of text, audio, video and images, also called multimedia. This has been proven to accommodate the different learning styles of the learners and help them learn better.