Follow the links on this one to read about the "anonymous" student who blogged about his law professor and was uncovered.
Face it folks, there is no such thing as true anonymity on the net, so be prepared to stand by what you say, even if it is from behind a thinly veiled curtain of secrecy.
See the original post here.
It was a bit of conference culture shock to go from AERA to ISPI on opposite sides of Canada within a couple of days but I managed to adjust.
AERA is much more academic and research-focused while ISPI is business and performance-focused. At ISPI, my presentation was an encore session of one I did last year with my colleague James Lane on partnering to improve sales training performance (very different from my session on learning object ISD!). It was the first time I had given this session without James, who has moved on to other things, and 90 minutes is a long time for one person to speak! But, I kept people engaged by having them do things rather than just sit and listen to me carry on the whole time. What ensued was some great discussion about issues related to working as a designer in large organizations. It appears that many people in the room have to support training organizations that are made up of non-training professionals (gasp!).
One question from the audience created a bit of discussion, "If you are mixing people who come from the ‘business side’ rather than a ‘training background’ in your training department, how do you get respect for the training people?" I hear this quite often and it is an important concern to consider. First, if you ask this question, you already have a problem! We (training people) tend to think that we are somehow different, or have a different set of special knowledge that sets us apart. In one sense, we have different approaches because of the language we speak and our background. However, any performance or learning professional in a business setting must realize that they are business people first, and learning professionals second.
This need to be a business person first does not mean abandoning good design principles in favor of flavor of the month business trends, in fact, good design (not just instructional but organizational too) predicates innovative, survival-oriented businesses. We must not, however, get so enamored with exotic designs of our learning or performance solutions that we lose site of the fact that we are in business. Most businesses are not in business to create and deliver training. They are in business to do some other function. The goal of training and performance support is to enable success in the core mission of the company.
This means that as learning professionals, we gain respect in by helping make the business more successful and we gain respect by making those around us more successful. We can only do this by recognizing the strengths that everyone on the team and making our "unique" knowledge accessible and understandable by others around the table.
I have returned from my trip to Canada after quick stops at two conferences. At AERA in Montreal, I was part of an interesting symposium on Advanced Learning Technologies and Learning Objects. It was truly a global group presenting at the symposium. I will not detail all of the talks in the post but will note a couple of interesting distinctions that emerged.
There appears to be two schools of thought to OOID. The difference in perspectives seems to be evident between the folks who are working from an ITS perspective and those coming from a more design-focused perspective. The intelligent tutoring systems folks are much more focused on the computer science and systems (as is required by their tasks). Designers are more interested in learning objects to enable reuse and access, rather than automated instruction for learners.
I do not believe the two perspectives are mutually exclusive, as Wayne Hodgins as noted many times, but there are distinct differences in these approaches to object-oriented instructional design. If we have to assign labels (of course we do, right?), I fall more on the side of the by-hand approach to LOs. I see a place in the future for greater automation of some tasks but near-term there are many limitations. My fear in most of the current research on automated systems approaches is that we tend to lose sight of the most important aspect of learning – the learners. Some of what I saw was excellent for teaching skill- or procedure-based learning such as algebra or computer programming but I would be less comfortable teaching interpretive literature, philosophy, or interpersonal selling skills through such adaptive techniques. (A brief footnote here, there are some fantastic simulations being built that do provide some ability to begin to address broader learning goals but these types of technologies were not the focus of the discussion in Montreal).
Another divisive issue is a deceptively simple one: language. Instructional designers and computer science folks just talk different. Sometimes, I think we are trying to do the same things but much gets lost in weak attempts at translation. My simple talk followed several brilliant presentations outlining systems and standards that are groundbreaking and need to be shared. But, as Joe Scandura and I discussed at dinner after the session, we need more communication between those who are making advances in systems and those making advances in instruction and learning.
An update on thoughts from ISPI in Vancouver will appear soon!
After 24 hours of continuous spam assault on trackbacks (and subsequently shutting down most open comments trackbacks) I have installed the latest version of SpamLookUp. Install was easy and I like that I can now moderate trackback as well as comments. We'll see how well it works over the next few hours!
It has been quiet on this blog for a bit. There is a lot going on. I plan to post come comments about my trip this coming week. I am presenting at the TCIL SIG at AERA in Montréal on Tuesday and then it is out to Vancouver to present Thursday at ISPI.
Should be good fun and I hope to have some pictures too!
Wired News: Second Life Teaches Life Lessons
Another story on Wired about how Second Life is being increasingly used to teach real life skills. (Note a similar article on Wired from September).
MMOGs have gained attentionfor real-world monetary exchanges (people are buying and selling virtual money with real money) so, it seems to make sense that there is great opportunity for business schools to use these worlds as learning labs.
Wow! Now Google has now gone too far.
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Thanks Will for sharing!