Crucial Thought

Mark Wagner is a fantastic guy who I met for the first time at NECC 2007. I’m working on a longer response to his post the other day, but if you’d like the heads-up, go read it first.

I might even see if I can convince Mark to a Skype conversation that I can record and podcast out. It would be interesting to hear him speak more about Walden life in general and how an online Ph.D. compares to a more brick-and-mortar degree.

Either way, check out his masterful post, and await my response, if you dare

Chris

I was asked to answer that question in a Blackboard posting in a graduate class. My response is no doubt influenced by my newfound love for thinking about design, inspired by Dan.

Here is what I said. It’s off the cuff, so give me grace.

***Original post below:

These are prima facie thoughts about Instructional Design:

The word “design” conjures up images of advertising grunts trying to figure out how to best fashion a brand or a new product to make it marketable to the target demographic. Different design styles are employed by different folks with recent techniques bringing forth a more avant-garde form of minimalism and less forceful colors with a touch of existential angst. This design technique seems to reflect the emotions of a younger society writ large.

Instructional design, however, takes a tactic focusing much less on the idea of “selling” a product or marketing a lesson. Instructional Design must take the brain’s cognitive functions as well as solid pedagogical foundation into account. Tragically, the more aesthetic functions of design often take a back seat.

A good marriage of instructional design and marketing design can be created, as they are not mutually exclusive. Appropriate aesthetic design, for example, can decrease the level of cognitive load be reducing distractions and promoting a clean document design.

Instructional Design at its base is about creating a lesson/unit/spoken paragraph that relays the information desired while helping prevent an overwhelmed learner.

I am thinking ahead to the day when I decide to write a book, which will probably come after I finish my doctorate in a few years.

What I want to know is, is there a site that lends itself to the organizing process of writing a lengthy work? I like the idea of online simply because of the sheer convenience.

I will begin with Google Docs, as it’s the obvious choice. Is there something else out there of which I am unaware?

I really wish I could afford RefWorks. I called them yesterday, basic subscription is $100 plus add-on modules. I still like NoodleTools, and wish BibMe had a few more features. I gave up on Zotero, but maybe it’s time to give it another try. I just like that RefWorks has partners that allow direct exporting.

I am spending way too much time inputting my bibliographies for these long papers, there has to be a better way. BibMe’s search is nice except it hasn’t found a single journal article of mine yet. That doesn’t shock me, since I am using my university’s proxy login to get access to these journals.

Ahh well, back to the grind.

So who says higher education isn’t flexible? After a long chat with my prof via AIM chat (his preference, not mine!) we decided that as opposed to creating a bland presentation (read: Powerpoint file) as as response to a text chapter (found here http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/ch16.html) he said I could find someone who was involved in distance education (course designer, instructor, etc) and interview him or her.

Here are the requirements…

1. You’d have to read the chapter.

2. You’d have to let me interview you via Skype, preferrably video skype and record the conversation (with video, I hope!)

3. You’d have to let me publish it in my course and probably blog here just for kicks.

So, any takers?

Somebody?

Anybody?

I’m taking a summer graduate course in pursuit of my Master’s in Ed Tech and it’s all about distance education. To that end, I am looking for courses using one of these platforms…

• WebCT (preferred only because I’ve never used it)
• Sakai (preferred for same reason)
• Blackboard (ick)
• Moodle (yay!)
• DrupalEd (is there anyone out there employing this with students, yet?)

So, got a course me and a couple classmates can access and evaluate? The evaluations will be posted on our wiki, which is really only for folks in the class, but it’s on pbwiki so it can be seen publically.

Let me know! Feel free to use the contact form to email me personally to avoid posting any info publically.

It’s no secret I am interested in managing my citations online. You can read about my previous adventures here and here. I ultimately settled on NoodleTools, which I have now used through hundreds of APA 5th edition citations and my profs made only minor corrections which could have been corrected by my input being better on the front end.

So I took notice when lifehacker mentioned BibMe. I sat up when I saw the interface, very clean and a nice use of graphics. NoodleTools’ interface is just slightly clunky and not terribly web 2.0ey. No sweat, Noodle, you make up for it in functionality.

I played with BibMe and did not like what I found. First, when I entered the name of an article I particularly like, it immediately returned this result…

“ZOMFGWTFBBQ!!!”

I may just be getting more conservative in my old age (just turned 30, remember) or it could be that nagging love for Christ, but this offended me a bit. Was there any need for OMFG or WTF? I imagine they are trying to be funny, and given the silly image of the guy that shows up on the same page it is clear, but the implication of bad language is not needed. I make it a point not to see things at school that I would not want someone to see me looking at, and this falls into that category.

Strike 1.

Strike 2 came at the lackluster results. I end up usually having to use my University’s proxy login to access my journals, because so many require it. So I thought I would try the manual fill-in section. Major problem…

When you enter the authors’ names, it lists them backwards. I made up a completely bogus entry and listed the authors in order that they would be listed on the article. BibMe put them backwards, with the second author ending up first.

Oops.

So fake entry looks like this…

Connely, Joker, and James Flitch. “Ugly in a world where you can choose to be beautiful.” Educational Technology and Research, 54.2(2004): 335-390.

Other than that, I think there are some formatting issues, but I will leave those alone since I have already ruled this out as an effective tool. Research is too important to get messed up by a bad tool.

Sorry, BibMe, I wanted to dig you, but you gotta fix these issues before we can talk any more.

Back on March 1 I concluded that I was planning to use Noodletools for my graduate research (NoodleBib, to be precise).

I did so partly because of an error in trying to sign up for SourceAid.

A few days after that post a gentleman named Ronald Silvia contacted me, and it turns out he’s the president of SourceAid. He gave me a free one year subscription.

Remember, I had already paid for the one year with NoodleTools. So I was able to compare them.

I will admit my reasons are probably picky preference, but I ended up using NoodleTools for my entire graduate semester. I wrote three papers, all more than 10 single spaced pages each. I amassed more than 100 references and NoodleTools didn’t balk. Here is what I liked about them…

1. They provide help at every step, as there is helpful hovering info as well as on-demand help in the form of popup windows with further explanation.

2. They are wonderfully responsive via email. The service is very personal.

3. The references exported nicely into an RTF file that I copied and pasted into my paper.

4. Creation and management of resources is nice, and they really help you ensure you get it right.

All of my papers used APA 5th Ed. so I can’t speak to either service’s capabilities for MLA or Chicago.

I quickly got accostumed to NoodleTools, so probably didn’t give SourceAid a fair shake, but when you compare $20 per year for SourceAid against $8 per year for NoodleTools, it would take a bunch to overcome that difference, which means a lot when you’re me.

So I appreciate SourceAid, they seem like a fine service, and Mr. Silvia is quite a gentleman.

For now, though, I’ll be sticking with NoodleTools.