One thing we do well within the field of education is confuse everyone by either calling similar things different names (e.g., instructional designer/learning experience designer/educational technologist, etc.) or to call different things the same name (e.g., online learning). Today, I learned from a journal editor that “Service Learning” is “out” and “Community Engaged Learning” is…
As I’ve been doing deep dives into accessibility-related design issues, universal design has been something I haven’t been able to get my head around. While I have an appreciation for the general intent, much like other terms we use in education (e.g., interaction, engagement, etc.), the definitions and applications in practice are variously described making…
We frame the work we do at Designers for Learning around service learning. I’ve been working on several conference proposals where I’ve pulled (ok … self-plagiarized) a definition of service-learning from the same tired citations I’ve relied on for years: “Service learning is an educational approach that combines community service, academic coursework, and work-based experience (Bringle…
As I scanned through social media today, I came across a couple of things that are routinely posted related to instructional design. The first was an article proclaiming that online learning was found to be less effective than face-to-face instructional for a particular population of learners. As they say, if I had a dollar ……
We all have blind spots (e.g., being unable to understand something or to see how important something is) when we are learning about something new. For instructional designers, blind spots come with the territory as we’re always learning something new. One of the biggest challenges is how do we start something new when we don’t know what we don’t…
I was supposed to be in Virginia this weekend working with a team of collaborators figuring out “What’s next?” for Designers for Learning. At the last minute, we had to postpone the face-to-face trip, but the momentum will continue in the interim with online conversations until we reschedule. This question of “What’s next?” runs through…
Today, I connected in a series of small group meetings with people from Virginia to Oregon and dozens of points in between. I connected to them using Zoom, Webex, and Hangouts, but never managed to leave the condo with back-to-back web conferences from 10:30 to 4:00. The weird part is it doesn’t feel weird.
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…