Instructional Design Blog

Blog Post 3

2005-11-01T11:06:00.000-05:00

My learning experience during the design phase of the instructional design process had many ups and downs. When I started instructional design I had many expectations on what the class would be and what I would learn. As I started to work on the first half of the design document and I read the materials for constructivism and the chapters of TSDI my perceptions of the class began to shift. The first thing I realized is that this class focuses a lot on language. During class I noticed that there were a lot of conversations on specific wording in regards to the design document. I learned that there are very specific things that must be included in a design document. Thing like performance objectives and the instructional goal and sub-skills must be worded a certain way. The importance is that these things must be very specific so that when the learning materials are designed there is no question as to how the learning experience should go.

The most confusing thing for me so far in the design process has been learning the bulk of the terminology and the resulting acronyms. During the readings and during class I have learned to pay special attention to the new vocabulary that we are using. I find that almost all the time the key items like Instructional Goal Analysis are shortened to IGA, I throwback from the Roosevelt era of his "Alphabet Soup Government". I typically find these shortenings annoying and frustrating as a new learner of this topic. But I realize that once I am more familiar with the terminology and the processes of instructional design I will be more comfortable, even approve of these abbreviations.

At first the process of the design document was extremely confusing. I could not find the examples in the book to help ensure that I was including all the information I needed for each part of the design document. By the end of design document 2 I had become familiar enough with the process and the book that I was able successfully complete parts of the design document correctly.

I also appreciated the extra readings on constructivism, active learning, and androgogy. I found them to be very helpful while considering strategies to use in my learning objectives and instructional strategies.

Reflection 2

2005-10-05T12:01:00.000-05:00

This is my blog post on my learning experience for the analysis phase of the instructional design process.

From the beginning of the process i knew i wanted to use my recently gained knowledge of podcasting as a part of this project. The information is fresh in my head and the technology and resources i needed for the project are readily available to me. The first problem that i ran into during the course of the process was my target audience. who would want to podcast? i first had to ask myself why did i learn podcasting? when i was in college for my undergraduate work, i wanted to be a dj. my coursework however, did not afford me the spare time to invest in having my own radio show. this summer when i started reading blogs about podcasting i became very interested in the idea. one of my coworkers suggested a few podcasts for me to subscribe to. i listened to them and i really liked the idea of having a limitless platform to spread the music that i like to anyone else on the internet who was interested. i started researching and eventual was able to post my very first podcast.

in looking for my target audience i went back to what i felt was the root of my desire to podcast: i wanted to be a dj. so i asked myself why would a dj want to podcast if they already have a radio show? most radio stations already have some form of streaming. why would a radio station dj want to use podcasting if the radio station already streams their signal to the internet? well what if a person owning an iPod wanted to take a particular dj's show on a trip with their iPod. with just an internet streaming radio, that takes a lot of extra work. but with a podcast putting a radio show on an iPod is easy as pie. so my target audience would be djs at a radio station in order to increase their listening audience. and in philadelphia i had met a couple djs who could be test subjects.

next up was creating the rest of the process. i first analyzed my personal journey to my first podcast. i read a lot of articles, downloaded some software, and applied some previous experience in making songs and webpages to come up with the etherealnation.net podcast. but i needed to be able to translate that into a testable set of goals. this was my goal analysis phase. in the subskill analysis my biggest hurdle was figuring out what acceptable entry skills would be. i had to recognize that not everyone would know computers, the internet or recording as well as i do. i had to anticipate the detail that would be needed in teaching a person how to use xml and rss if they had never heard of it before. in this process i relied heavily in assuming certain expected entry behaviours. group feedback was extremely helpful in coming up with what i felt was an accurate view of behaviors a radio dj might have.

finally i needed to analyze my intended learners. i contacted a dj here on campus and a couple of friends in philadelphia who were djs when i went to school there. they were all very helpful in answering the questions i had created for class. i felt that with the help of my group, i had come up with a very feasible process for leaning how to create a podcast.

when i analyzed the differences between the learning and the performance environment, i realized that podcasting can be done a million different ways. the way that i intended to teach podcasting could be radically different from the many different ways someone might podcast. this wasn't a bad thing and i noted the possible various options in my contextual analysis.

Reflection 1

2005-09-06T11:05:00.000-05:00

I would like to start out by saying that I have no teaching background. Infact, I think that’s one of the biggest reasons that I decided to pursue this instructional design degree. I think the background of this is important, so here it is. A little more than a year ago, after I graduated, my dad gave me a phone number of a professor in this program. He knew that I planned on doing graduate work for a masters degree, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do or when I wanted to do it. So I got a job after finishing my undergraduate work and worked for about a year. While I was working, I became involved with a local community center tutoring children. After doing that for the winter I was asked to use my skills as a graphic designer to teach a small class of three how to use Adobe Photoshop. In my excitement I never considered that actually teaching a class required a large deal of preparation. In addition to having to be able to prepare lesson plans for children that had never seen photoshop before and have rarely used a computer, I needed to allow for the children's unique differences. In a class of three, one could barely read and the other, one was extremely emotionally sensitive and the other liked to pick on the others because computers came easily to him. The class wasn't a complete disaster. In fact from many perspectives it was very successful. However, it did make me realize that I want to be able to teach people, and that despite my own shortcomings, I want to make my profession a part of teaching people.

So a couple months later here I am. In a masters degree program for instructional design. Sitting in your class i realize that this is the only class this semester that will cause me to do any work and that will provoke any thought. My other classes and teachers are good, but most of the material I have already learned either formally or informally. I look at the syllabus and I look at the packet of information you gave me and my heart began to sink. Everything seemed to be in a different language and I couldn't distinguish between assignments. I couldn't tell what would be due the next week or what the entire semester would look like in a broad sense. My insecurities about teaching came to the forefront and despite my sinking feelings, I forced myself to focus and work through the lesson and the handouts as you went over them. By the time we had seperated into groups, I had a good understanding of how this class would shape my semester. I understood the major goals of the semester and I was excited to begin.