Professional Dispositions in Instructional Design and Technology

Instructional design and technology is a professional field with common values and professional ethics that influence the way professionals interact. Clients, peers, and mentors depend on a candidate's professional disposition. During a learner’s time in the Instructional Technology, (IT Online) Learning, Design and Technology (LDT) or the Online Teaching and Learning Graduate Certificate (OTL) Programs, …

Scaffolding the five finger filet

There is a game called the Five Finger Filet. One holds a knife and stabs between thine outstretched fingers, risking a dangerous errant stab. Personally, I never had any attraction to games like this. I would surely chop off a finger and regret my own stupidity in a matter of moments. This however doesn't dissuade …

Deconstructing the Quality Matters Rubric

I recently completed a wonderful two-part peer teaching observation with Dr Sara Lawrence. But, unlike the teaching observations I have done in the past, this one was for an online class. I had never done a teaching observation for an online class before. We had a standard checklist for peer review, but the questions in …

Supporting healthy failure in online education

Teachers are told to make learning fun. Yeah! However, there is a fair percentage of learning that includes rejection and supporting that online is hard. Educational psychologists manage to gloss over the emotional side of things and come up with statements in research jargon that a learner is adjusting mental schema according to new information. …

Design Tensions

I am writing this blog post after a failed online search for a clear, concise, yet sufficient explanation of design tensions in instructional design. Deborah Tater's 2007 definition is here, but it's a fair bit longer than mine. Of course, her's is also said more elegantly. Design tensions are relationships between design components or features …

Wikipedia in graduate school

Wait what? I don't want to ever revisit this topic. Here goes. Each faculty member chooses to allow or disallow the citation of Wikipedia for different reasons. Here are my reasons with, of course, my rationale. Wikipedia is a collective understanding of a topic. If a student cites such an understanding, then the citation is …

Forbidden words in Instructional Technology

Expanded title might read, Why I forbid students to use certain words when they describe a design, and the list itself This week a student asked me to explain the differences among discussion boards, discussion forums, and blogs. I paused because I knew my answer was actually a blog post, and not really what a …

Publishing as a graduate student & tips for submitting a manuscript for submission

I have been asked about publishing as a graduate student, and have decided to share that opinion here with some pointers. I chose the blog as opposed to elsewhere because the blog is the venue for these perspectives—not a university website, not in-class materials. These views are not the views of Texas A&M University, nor …

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 …

Explaining the PhD

Matthew Might's Big Picture Illustration seems apropos to me right now. However, a pat answer won't make the inquisitive MA student very happy. They want clear-cut, one-size-fits-all advice. It's a shame such advice does not exist. One-size fits all advice does not exist because no one can know all too much about doctorates other than …