Multilitteratus Incognitus

A number of threads converged last week for me, and all of the threads exist in a continuum.  The first thread was one that began in the class that I am teaching this summer, INSDSG 601: Foundations of Instructional Design & Learning Technology . One of the things that we circle back to as a class (every couple of weeks) are the notions of instructor and designer.  Where does one end and the other begin in this process?  It's a good question, and like many questions, the answer is "it depends".  The metaphor that I use is the one that calls back to two sides of the same coin.  In order for instruction to ultimately be successful you need both sides to work together.  An excellent design will fail in the hands of a bad instructor, and a bad design will severely hold back a good instructor (assuming that there is an instructor and it's not self-paced learning). There is the other side too: as instructional design students we were told that we would be w...

I came across this article a while back on Open Source Exile about the deficiencies of the MARC format. For those of you not in the library world, MARC is essentially a digital version of the information you found in the card catalog. The article echoes a lot of my thoughts on the subject from when I was reading about information organization and cataloging a few years back when I first started working for a library. It's nice to see that I am not the only one who's thought of the issue lol :-)