Is a little nostalgia appropriate?

I've been visiting several blogs and starting to feel a little sad about the course drawing to an end. while I am as tired as the next person with the usual end of course crunch, I will miss the interaction and Dr. D's "tool of the week" roll-out. Like so many have commented in their blogs, I have come unbelievably far over the last 12 weeks. I no longer feel like "technically impaired" as my family fondly daubed me prior to this class. In all honesty, I don't know how many of the tools I will use in the future. What matters is that I now know they are out there with a whole lot more. If I'm working on a paper, a lesson or whatever and think, "It would be great if there were a tool that could....[fill in the blank]" I know chances are there probably is and I Google it. Before I would never have thought of such a thing. At times it was truly challenging and even frustrating but I'm glad I stuck with it and thank you, Dr. Dennen, for your limitless patience and encouragement.

"Instructional Designer wanted: No experience necessary"

That's the title of Alan Reid's 2012 article which was published in Inside Higher Ed, Both the article itself and the responses it evoked were very honest, passionate and thought-provoking. I quote: "Interactive, customized and adaptive text should be the next educational technological milestone but not like this........we continue to build an increasingly accessible virtual world where we can act as professional instructional designers, physicians and stock traders; with no experience necessary.....Technology doesn't make us experts (Reid, 2012). He makes a good point about technology being so ubiquitous and how anyone can acquire information on pretty much any topic which, therefore, makes them an expert...not really. In the article Reid expresses concern over Apple's iBooks Author which invites every Tom, Dick and Harry to publish textbooks on any subject of their choosing. While he received some responses expressing sympathetic support, the majority of respondents basically communicated a sentiment that went something like: Get out of the way, buddy, or the Mack Truck of Technology will roll right over you and crush you. Reid believes education should be utilizing newer technologies to enhance and benefit faculty and students alike and I think we all pretty much agree on that in this class. If I were to undergo any kind of surgery or treatment, I would want the best surgeon using the latest technology available. The point is that the latest and greatest advancements of our time are only as good as the abilities and skills of the person utilizing them. The wide-spread availability of new tech tools and toys will, no doubt, result in some unfortunate casualties. It will also encourage us to more carefully investigate what and how we eventually choose. However, it will also allow for innovative, "non-expert" ideas and approaches to be easily introduced which, in turn, can be streamlined or redesigned by others with more formal training in the field to the benefit of all concerned. As Reid himself notes, current technology is encouraging everyone to become experts on everything but that does not actually make us experts. It just makes us more knowledgeable on any subject we choose to research. So despite the "pantheon of tools available out there", I believe trained experts will always be necessary to ensure that a quality product or service is delivered. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/02/13/essay-do-apples-design-tools-make-it-too-easy-create-textbooks-and-courses#.TzmQB3r2zRM.mailto

Flourishing Teams

Please take a few minutes to visit my wiki on creating successful teams. http://teamworksuccess.wikispaces.com/

YouTube Video by successful international IDer

"Cognition and Technology: Mutual drivers in a symbiotic relationship" Yep! That's the title of my almost final paper in my other online course. There's still another one due next week in that course as well plus an end of term quiz Total of four (yes, 4) papers and a quiz in two weeks. Sleep anyone? I'm trying to quit(hardly). If it were just school work, I think it would be alright but since the middle of last week, life has gotten very complicated due to a series of poorly-timed events. Each event individually would rate an "OK" to "Excellent" but string them all together and it is beyond stressful since I haven't quite figured out how to be in two counties at one time while trying to oversee construction in our new townhouse and pack and move by next Tuesday/Wednesday. Thank you Dr. Dennen for the extension and reprieve from articles! Maybe one day we'll all publish something astonishing that reshapes mankind for the better. In the meantime, I'm extending an invitation to anyone who visits my blog to take a look at my sister-in-law, Diane's YouTube video (link below). She owns her own ISD company in Milan, Italy and works all over Europe. Talk about networking. She's got her finger in so many pies, it's fattening just to think about it. She asked me to share it with some people before she posts it to LinkedIn. You're people. So if you have comments for her, post them here and I'll pass them on. Thanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82XPCZd3FYU&feature=em-uploademail

Are online relationships easier?

In my culture, food has always been of tantamount importance. Some of my best memories growing up were of my grandmother, aunt and mom working into the wee hours preparing mountains of food for someone's wedding, birthday or a special holiday. Our house was fairly centrally-located and since my mom was the eldest of 7 siblings and my grandmother lived with us, aunts, uncles and cousins stopped by every evening and on Sundays to visit or share a meal with us. Even family outings to the beach never involved sandwiches. There was always delicious and abundant food. When I got married, I carried on the tradition. We've moved several times within the state of Florida and wherever we've moved, I've tried to make our home a center of hospitality. I enjoy cooking and feeding people....until recently. We moved to Tallahassee three years ago and I immediately had neighbors and church friends over for dinner...almost every weekend for the first several months and then on a more intermittent basis but still fairly regularly. At work, if I knew of a co-worker who did not have family or anywhere to go for Christmas or Thanksgiving, I would invite them over. My husband did the same for people on his bowling league. For the first time in my life, I experienced people who would either refuse the invitation to be alone during the holidays or who accepted the invitation but did not call and did not show for dinner. Aside from being inconsiderate and just plain rude, I found this unexplainable lack of social grace, discouraging. Gradually, my entertaining tapered and once I started grad school, it came to a screeching halt due to lack of time and disposable energy. I saw one of my neighbors tonight and she said, "I miss your cooking". I told her I was trying to quit. Maybe its just Tallahassee or that people are becoming more withdrawn and less social in general for whatever reason. Personally, I no longer feel the need to connect as much in a face-to-face environment. My coursework, husband, kids, occasional neighborly exchange and online interaction seem satisfying enough. I was emailing someone this weekend and wrote, "Online interaction is so much easier and requires so little energy". Especially when it's casual and NOT required for working on a graded project! Kind of sad though, don't you think?

Supporting Performance and Learning

Since so many bloggers in our class do not visit the DB much, I'm going to solicit help via my blog as well as the DB. From the past semester of online classes which required we work in groups or teams of 4, I realized that there should be a course offered to students to help us acquire the skills and abilities necessary to work successfully in groups. Since most online students do not know each other, trust (or lack of)is a major problem. After working on everything individually in a competitive arena, the gears have switched and now we've discovered the sum is better than the individual parts. It takes some getting used to. Conflict resolution, communication, distribution of roles and responsibilities, facilitation and tactful, sensitive leadership are all requirements in addition to humility (there's a word we don't hear often anymore, knowledge on some aspect of project and appreciation of what others are contributing to the team. In articles I've read, many companies are asking universities to focus more on preparing students to work effectively in teams when they hit the "real working world". Hence, I would like to set up a wiki (??), generate a Twitter thread (??) or use some other tool to provide support for the learning of the much sought-after skill or ability of group work and solicit others to share their ideas on how to facilitate the process, their success stories, nightmare team, etc. What do you think about the topic? Do you think it would draw interest and be helpful? Especially, do you have any platform(s)or tools you think would be particularly to use? My creativity is at a super low point and I crave your input!!!! Thanks.

Trivia

I've granted myself permission to occasionally post something of a trivial nature. Since the past couple of weeks have been rather draining due to a series of unforeseeable events and the next two weeks don't hold much promise of a change in tone, tonight's the "occasional" night. Have you noticed that the CAPTCHAS have changed? Every time I post a comment to a blog, I'm prompted to interpret a CAPTCHA, which is supposedly dual-purposed: 1) It proves I'm not a robot/spammer 2)It aides in the task of translating old, almost illegible manuscripts into readable text (sounds like a small packet of bologna to me but, who knows?) They used to irritate me no end. Then I almost began to enjoy them. And then they changed. Instead of challenging, barely legible squiggles, I am now seeing 3 or 4 numbers. What happened? Did the bots get smarter or did we run out of old manuscripts?