instructional design
Developments in Instructional Design
https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2015/5/eli7120-pdf.pdf
Mobile computing, cloud computing, and data-rich repositories have altered ideas about where and how learning takes place.
designers can find themselves filling a variety of roles. They might design large, complex systems or work with faculty and departments to develop courses and curricula. They might migrate traditional resources to mobile or adaptive platforms. They might help administrators understand the value and potential of new learning strategies and tools. Today’s instructional designer might work with subject-matter experts, coders, graphic designers, and others. Moreover, the work of an instructional designer increasingly continues throughout the duration of a course rather than taking place upfront
Given the expanding role and landscape of technology—as well as the growing body of knowledge about learning and about educational activities and assessments—dedicated instructional designers are increasingly common and often take a stronger role.
Competency based learning allows students to progress at their own pace and finish assignments, courses, and degree plans as time and skills permit. Data provided by analytics systems can help instructional designers predict which pedagogical approaches might be most effective and tailor learning experiences accordingly. The use of mobile learning continues to grow, enabling new kinds of learning experiences.
In some contexts, instructional designers might work more directly with students, teaching them lifelong learning skills. Students might begin coursework by choosing from a menu of options, creating their own path through content, making choices about learning options, being more hands-on, and selecting best approaches for demonstrating mastery. Educational models that feature adaptive and personalized learning will increasingly be a focus of instructional design.
Instructional designers bring a cross-disciplinary approach to their work, showing faculty how learning activities used in particular subject areas might be effective in others. In this way, instructional designers can cultivate a measure of consistency across courses and disciplines in how educational strategies and techniques are incorporated.
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more on instructional design in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=instructional+design
more on instructional design in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=instructional+design
VR AR MR in education
7 Things You Should Know About AR/VR/MR
Augmented reality can be described as experiencing the real world with an overlay of additional computer generated content. In contrast, virtual reality immerses a user in an entirely simulated environment, while mixed or merged reality blends real and virtual worlds in ways through which the physical and the digital can interact. AR, VR, and MR offer new opportunities to create a psychological sense of immersive presence in an environment that feels real enough to be viewed, experienced, explored, and manipulated. These technologies have the potential to democratize learning by giving everyone access to immersive experiences that were once restricted to relatively few learners.
In Grinnell College’s Immersive Experiences Lab http://gciel.sites.grinnell.edu/, teams of faculty, staff, and students collaborate on research projects, then use 3D, VR, and MR technologies as a platform to synthesize and present their findings.
In terms of equity, AR, VR, and MR have the potential to democratize learning by giving all learners access to immersive experiences
downsides :
relatively little research about the most effective ways to use these technologies as instructional tools. Combined, these factors can be disincentives for institutions to invest in the equipment, facilities, and staffing that can be required to support these systems. AR, VR, and MR technologies raise concerns about personal privacy and data security. Further, at least some of these tools and applications currently fail to meet accessibility standards. The user experience in some AR, VR, and MR applications can be intensely emotional and even disturbing (my note: but can be also used for empathy literacy),
immersing users in recreated, remote, or even hypothetical environments as small as a molecule or as large as a universe, allowing learners to experience “reality” from multiple perspectives.
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more on VR, AR, MX in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality
students entitlement and disruptiveness
Student Entitlement: Key Questions and Short Answers
What is student entitlement?
“tendency to possess an expectation of academic success without taking personal responsibility for achieving that success.”
How widespread is it?
The research (and there’s not a lot) reports finding less student entitlement than faculty do.
Can a student be entitled without being rude and disruptive?
Yes. Students can have beliefs like those mentioned above and only discuss them with other students or not discuss them at all. Part of what makes entitlement challenging for teachers are those students who do verbally express the attitudes, often aggressively.
Are millennial students more entitled than previous generations? That’s another widely held assumption in the academic community, but support from research is indirect and inconsistent.
Is entitlement something that only happens in the academic environment? No, it has been studied, written about, and observed in other contexts (like work environments
What’s causing it?
A number think it’s the result of previous educational experiences and/or grade inflation. Some blame technology that gives students greater access to teachers and the expectation of immediate responses. Fairly regularly, student evaluations are blamed for the anonymous power and control they give students. And finally, there’s the rise in consumerism that’s now associated with education. Students (and their parents) pay (usually a lot) for college and the sense that those tuition dollars entitle them to certain things, is generally not what teachers think education entitles learners to receive.
How should teachers respond?
It helps if teachers clarify their expectations with constructive positive language and even more importantly with discussions of the rationales on which those expectations rest. Teacher authority gets most students to follow the rules, but force doesn’t generally change attitudes and those are what need to be fixed in this case.
October 18 for Student Entitlement: Truth, Fiction, or Some of Both and stay tuned for more in-depth information and resources that we’ll make available in Faculty Focus Premium in subsequent weeks.
References: Elias, R. Z. (2017). Academic entitlement and its relationship to cheating ethics. Journal of Education for Business, 92 (4), 194-199.
Greenberger, E., et. al. (2008). Self-entitled college students: Contributions of personality, parenting and motivational factors. Journal of Youth Adolescence, 37, 1193-1204.
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Responding to Disruptive Students
Negative attention doesn’t help difficult students change their ways, but teachers can alter classroom dynamics through this exercise.
Mapping Behavior
Draw a map of your classroom, including doors, windows, desks, blackboards—all significant items and areas. I’m sure you’ve already got a clear idea of where the most challenging students usually sit. Now imagine teaching class on a regular day. Trace the paths you usually take across the room. Do you sometimes speed up for a particular reason?
Now put your breathing on the map. Are you conscious of the way you breathe during class? Use a new color and draw a wavy line on top of the lines and arrows you’ve already sketched. Does the wavy line look even, or have you drawn some chaotic or nervous zigzags? Could it be that you’ve sometimes forgotten to breathe?
Investing time in building physical and emotional familiarity with the learning environment, instead of nervously anticipating disruption, changes the educator’s perspective toward the whole class, their interaction with individual students, and their self-awareness. Negative attention stops being a solution—instead it is seen as a hindrance to the process of understanding students’ needs.
data visualization for librarians
categories: Digital literacy, technology literacy
Eaton, M. E. (2017). Seeing Seeing Library Data: A Prototype Data Visualization Application for Librarians. Journal of Web Librarianship, 11(1), 69–78. Retrieved from http://academicworks.cuny.edu/kb_pubs
Visualization can increase the power of data, by showing the “patterns, trends and exceptions”
Librarians can benefit when they visually leverage data in support of library projects.
Nathan Yau suggests that exploratory learning is a significant benefit of data visualization initiatives (2013). We can learn about our libraries by tinkering with data. In addition, handling data can also challenge librarians to improve their technical skills. Visualization projects allow librarians to not only learn about their libraries, but to also learn programming and data science skills.
The classic voice on data visualization theory is Edward Tufte. In Envisioning Information, Tufte unequivocally advocates for multi-dimensionality in visualizations. He praises some incredibly complex paper-based visualizations (1990). This discussion suggests that the principles of data visualization are strongly contested. Although Yau’s even-handed approach and Cairo’s willingness to find common ground are laudable, their positions are not authoritative or the only approach to data visualization.
a web application that visualizes the library’s holdings of books and e-books according to certain facets and keywords. Users can visualize whatever topics they want, by selecting keywords and facets that interest them.
Primo X-Services API. JSON, Flask, a very flexible Python web micro-framework. In addition to creating the visualization, SeeCollections also makes this data available on the web. JavaScript is the front-end technology that ultimately presents data to the SeeCollections user. JavaScript is a cornerstone of contemporary web development; a great deal of today’s interactive web content relies upon it. Many popular code libraries have been written for JavaScript. This project draws upon jQuery, Bootstrap and d3.js.
To give SeeCollections a unified visual theme, I have used Bootstrap. Bootstrap is most commonly used to make webpages responsive to different devices
D3.js facilitates the binding of data to the content of a web page, which allows manipulation of the web content based on the underlying data.
digital badges in academic libraries
David Demaine, S., Lemmer, C. A., Keele, B. J., & Alcasid, H. (2015). Using Digital Badges to Enhance Research Instruction in Academic Libraries. In B. L. Eden (Ed.), Enhancing Teaching and Learning in the 21st-Century Academic Library: Successful Innovations That Make a Difference (2015th ed.). Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2882671
At their best, badges can create a sort of interactive e-resume.
the librarian may be invited into the classroom, or the students may be sent to the Iibrary for a single research lesson on databases and search tem1s- not enough for truly high-quality research. A better alternative may be that the professor require the students to complete a series of badges- designed, implemented, and managed by the librarian- that build thorough research skills and ultimately produce a better paper.
Meta- badges are s impl y badges that indicate comp letion o f multiple related badges.
Authentication (determining that the badge has not been altered) and validation/verification (checking that the badge has actually been earned and issued by the stated issuer) are major concerns. lt is also important, particularly in the academic context, to make sure that the badge does not come to replace the learning it represents. A badge is a symbol that other skills and knowledge exist in this individual’s portfolio of skills and talents. Therefore, badges awarded in the educational context must reflect time and effort and be based on vetted standards, or they will become empty symbols
Digital credentialing recognizes “learning of many kinds which are acquired beyond formal education institutions .. . ; it proliferates and disperses author- ity over what learning to recognize; and it provides a means of translation and commensuration across multiple spheres” (Oineck, 2012, p. I)
University digital badge projects are rarely a top-down undertaking. Typi- cally, digital badge programs arise from collaborative efforts “of people agi- tating from the middle” (Raths, 2013).
student success technology
The Swiss Army Knives of Student Success Technology
Drawing largely from a 2017 survey that reached over 2,200 administrators and advisors across 1,400 institutions, as well as interviews with 40 leading suppliers, Tyton Partners is soon to launch Driving Toward a Degree 2017: The Evolution of Academic Advising in Higher Education.
Based on this research, institutions using what they perceive as fully integrated solutions are more likely to feel that technology does not enhance their advising function. This contradicts the advertised benefits of integrated functionality (i.e., it eases the pain of managing multiple products). These negative views have been influenced by these institutions’ experiences with the specific products that they have adopted. Institutions using fully integrated solutions are less likely to report satisfaction with their products.
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more on academic advising and technology in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=advising
digital badging
Learning, Engaging, Enhancing with Digital Badging
Friday, September 29, 2017
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2017/9/learning-engaging-enhancing-with-digital-badging
Motivating busy higher education professionals to learn and engage with one another isn’t always an easy task; there are plenty of logistical hurdles, and often, little recognition of one’s efforts in an initiative.
The Integrated Advising and Planning for Student Success or ‘iPASS’ grant has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; it supports the transformation of advising and student services in higher ed through the redesign of structures, processes, and technologies. To date, this work is ongoing in 26 grantee institutions across the country. The focus is on more than the implementation and use of new and innovative technology
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more on badges and microcredentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredentials
JSON and Structured Data
categories: Digital literacy, instructional technology
JSON and Structured Data
https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_intro.asp
JSON replace XML. lightweight data-interchange format. Often used with AJAX (send data forth back client, server, without refresh)
Data types:
number: no dfference between integer and floats
string: string of unicode characters “”
Boolean: true and false
array: ordered list of 0 and more values
Object: unordered collection of key/value pairs
Null: empty value
JSON Syntax Rules:
uses key/value pairs – {“name”;”brad”} . uses double quotes around Key and value . must use the specific data type . file type is “.json” . MIME type is “application/json”
https://code.google.com/archive/p/json-simple/
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learn-api-documentation-with-json-and-xml/json-basics
strings: text enclosed in single or double quotation marks
numbers: integer or decimal, positive or negative
booleans: true or false, no quot marks
null: means “nothing,” no quot marks
arrays are lists in square brackets, comma separated, can mix data types
objects are JSON dictionaries in curly brackets, keys and values are separated by a colon, pairs are separated by commas. keys and values can be any data type, but string is the most common value for a key
nesting : arrays and objects inside each other
can put arrays inside objects, objects inside
Embedded Librarianship in Online Courses
Embedded Librarianship in Online Courses
Instructor: Mimi O’Malley Dates: October 2nd to 27th, 2017
http://libraryjuiceacademy.com/081-embedded-online.php
Learning outcomes:
- Discuss ways to incorporate library services through the learning management system level.
- Examine bibliographic instruction in the virtual classroom through team teaching, guest lecturing.
- Identify librarian roles during the design and development of online courses.
- Assessing embedded librarianship efforts.
Mimi O’Malley is the learning technology translation strategist at Spalding University. She helps faculty prepare course content for hybrid and fully online courses in addition to incorporating open education resources into courses. She previously wrote and facilitated professional development courses and workshops at the Learning House, Inc. Mimi has presented workshops on online learning topics including assessment, plagiarism, copyright, and curriculum trends at the Learning House, Inc. CONNECT Users Conference, SLOAN-C ALN, Pencils and Pixels and New Horizons Teaching & Learning Conference. Interview with Mimi O’Malley
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more on embedded librarian in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=embedded+librarian