January 2019

I’m always on the hunt for global, national, or local data to give context a topic. Recently, I’ve had on my to-do list finding data to provide context to the various accessibility projects we have under development. I came across the Disability Statistics website, an online resource for U.S. disability statistics managed by the Institute on Employment […]

In one of my first research classes, our professor was big on asking if the paper passed the “so what?” test. Of course, most of the papers we were reviewing were published so there was a good chance that someone along the way felt the author was making a worthwhile contribution. However, this notion of

There are many days when I have unexpected convergences. Today was one. For the past several months, I’ve been working to jump-start projects associated with accessibility. It started when we surveyed our Designers for Learning network last year about the topics designers were interested in learning more about and accessibility was the #1 topic on the list. I

Mind the gap. From our early days in school, we’re told of the importance of conducting literature reviews as a means of finding “the gap” in the literature that will guide our work. However, most of us ignored this advice and launched into our early projects doing things backward. Instead of starting with a literature

The AECT annual convention call for proposals is fast approaching and participants on our various projects are getting ready to submit SEVEN Designers for Learning related proposals. There are a couple that I could cut as they aren’t directly reporting on our work, but instead focus on topics that are near and dear to our mission.

Instructional design is all about choices. Well … and constraints. Oh, and requirements. And, let’s not forget preferences. Pretty soon our choices feel limited. I’ve been told my designs are too text heavy. However, there are reasons: Openness: David Wiley notes in his overview of the 5R permissions (i.e., retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) that

As we all know, you learn the most when you teach. The same is true when you design educational experiences. This semester is no exception. Here is something I’m learning about the role of external impact. As a student, I wrote countless papers, but I always felt I was first a consumer of work done by others. When

Throughout my graduate program, we read study after study examining the effects on learning outcomes. Even my own dissertation considered the relationship between students’ perceptions of community in an online environment and learning outcomes (spoiler: no relationship was suggested in my data). However, the students’ perceptions of community within the class were significantly positively correlated with

The first 17 years after college, I followed a traditional career path for a person graduating with a Finance major. I worked for large corporations, came to work early, stayed out late several times a month entertaining clients, dropped everything for last minute out-of-town work trips, picked up an MBA along the way, made enough

This photo popped up on Facebook today reminding me of a daunting project I undertook in 2017 to scan, identify, and share family photos I inherited from my parents. They accumulated or inherited the photos over decades, and I hadn’t touched the box since my mom died in 2011 making the identification part kind of