The logic of design failures in IDT

The unforeseen consequences of a design are often thought to be failures, and sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they become "utilization," as when a product is used for a purpose other than for which it was designed. See the image of the 3-year-old utilizing an old mattress for great trampoline-like jumping! In …

Advertisement

Stochastic designs and stochastic learning objectives

We need more accurate terminology to describe the instructional strategies we employ in our designs. The term learning objective is far too vague to be of much use. This blog post explains how the term fails and offers an additional term, stochastic learning objective, to clarify differences among instructional strategies. Not all learning is stochastic, …

The rhetoric of citations in Learning, Design and Technology

Citations are rhetoric, plain and simple. Each time you cite something, you are employing a rhetorical device. When you employ the device erroneously, you make the case to your reader that you don’t understand what you are trying to say. The most common rhetorical citation device I see is the consensus citation. A consensus citation …

Projects for transformational learning

CATPALS this year focuses on Environmental Issues and all TAMUT registered students can pick up their free copy of Allen's The Good Food Revolution at the Student Success Center-UC330. Go get it and get involved! Universities, colleges and other types of learning institutions often pursue projects that initially start as non-credit bearing activities until they …

Information for Visiting Scholars

I am flattered by the communications I have received over the past couple of years asking for invitation letters to be a visiting scholar under my sponsorship. To expedite the process, please read the following prior to contacting me. This blog post will let you know how i handle the process of a request to …

Campus Pack (CP) addition for Blackboard: A usability review

I was asked to review Campus Pack (CP), a Blackboard overlay that attempts to improve on Blackboard functionality. Here are the issues I found. 1. Campus Pack lacks scent trails, or an intuitive design Intuitive design is the feeling that a device makes sense from the user perspective. Campus Pack seems to challenge the user, …