Strategizing Project Management in Academic Settings

Getting stuck is a project's worst enemy. Academic settings have a knack for producing the endless project that never comes to fruition. Research groups and design groups a particularly prone to this. Graduate students, and those setting out to do research in groups, can get bogged down and tripped up at dozens of spots in …

Deficit Model versus the Bolster Perspective

There is this perspective in education called the deficit model, deficit view, deficit perspective, or some other combination of deficit and some visually oriented term. What learners cannot yet do, or where they fail. It appears in practitioner publications like Edutiopia as well as in scholarly journals. Essentially, the notion frames learners in terms of …

An Interview Protocol for Instructional Design Cases

We need more instructional design cases written by those who did not actually do the design, but where to start? I suggest interviewing the designer. Elizabeth Boling did the same in her case about the Alcatraz cell-house audio walking tour. I have done interviews twice now to begin design cases about designs I did not …

Designing Instruction for Identity

Identity is the learning outcome that changes everything. There is process to attain identity everywhere. Even the simplest experiences can turn children into functioning adults. "Are you a big boy or a baby?" (Notice parents have no ethical qualms about shaping identity with or without the learner's conscious will to do so.) We teach identity …

The Nutshell Studies: An audio instructional design case

Frances Glessner Lee, Parlor (detail), about 1946-48. Collection of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, courtesy of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Baltimore, MD. Photograph by Susan Marks, Courtesy of Murder in a Nutshell documentary. I believe this is how my students feel during the academic crunch time in November, but …

Misconceptions about how research works

This post is an opportunity to work out my thought on a couple issues. It is inspired by a dialogue that came about organically from a posted comment by a reader. The misconceptions I address here are loaded with feelings about what is right and what is wrong. These cannot be avoided because scholars and …

Information literacy and the predatory publisher

Pay-for-publication and self-publishing are the same. It is a dangerous proposition for pre-tenure faculty to take part in these venues as neither counts for tenure, and neither should count for tenure. It's been just over a year since I posted about this and new predatory publishers are still soliciting me and trying to get me …

Design Research, Design-based research, Design & Development Research and Research on or about Design

I learned the differences among these different research types while I was an Assistant Editor at IJDL. Yesterday, I received an invitation to join the advisory board of the International Journal of Designs for Learning (IJDL). IJDL started in 2010 with the purpose to fill a very specific niche in scholarship in instructional design, Design …

A vision statement

I was recently asked to write a vision statement about how I saw the field of instructional technology and where I feel it is headed. So, I wrote one. I will share it here because it will act as a time capsule on how I saw the field of IDT in 2012.