Multilitteratus Incognitus

This particular post has been in my drafts folder for a while now.  The post started off as some ponderings, based on tweets from fellow instructional designers (over the summer), that lamented the fact that faculty members really didn't attend professional development opportunities that they had worked so hard to put together. With the start of the new academic year just ahead of us (at least for my campus) it seemed like a good opportunity to return to this post.  This is my local view, framed chiefly from my experiences where I work, but also from chatting about this with local colleagues at other institutions nearby over the last 15 years.  Yes...the problem ain't new! One thing I've seen over the years is the reliance on bad metrics and other various bad indicators like foot traffic through the ID offices, the number of workshops offered, and butts in seats at the workshops. This isn't new.  Even as far back as when I was a training manager for our academic lib...

In my last blog post I was responding to the academy that isn't - or, perhaps, as some comments indicated, the academy that never actually was .  This past week I was at MIT's LINC conference.  It was a good opportunity to attend (since it was local), listen into some interesting panel discussions, and meet some folks from all over the world doing interesting things.  It was also a good opportunity to connect with folks (via twitter mostly for me) to think about academia (and the role it has) from a systems point of view.  I was rather happy to have been there to see Peter Senge speak at the end of LINC 2019 as he is a systems person, and someone whose work was foundational in my instructional design learning. Now, I wasn't really planning a follow up to my last post.  I sort of wrote it in order to contribute my 2-cents to the discussion, as a response to @Harmonygritz (George), and also point people to it when they ask me if I want to pursue a tenur...

My apologies, in advance, if I seem rude.  One of my teachers in high school (maybe a few of them, in fact!) said that there is no such thing as a stupid question.  Perhaps this is true in the context of a classroom where if a learner (or group of learners) don't get a concept and they wish to ask a question to disambiguate.  Sometimes the questions we pose also demonstrate our understanding of the basic component that build up our question and hence our question can shine a light on things we've misunderstood and give an opportunity for more knowledgeable others to help us correct misconceptions. However, this is not the case.  Will MOOCs replace the LMS is a really stupid question. I was reading a post over at YourTrainingEdge that was titled Will MOOCs replace the LMS . I actually came to it thinking that it was a bait-and-switch type of situation because the two aren't comparable. a MOOC is a course (and in the corporate sector I would say that the most ...

Last week I was reading this article about abandoned campuses on Second Life - you know the virtual world that took the educational world by storm back in 2008(ish) and is now more or less synonymous with major flops and misdirects in educational technology. For the past few days I've been looking like a madman through old backups of screenshots I had taken when I was more active in second life; to be able to showcase my tall, skiny, blasé, goth avatar with black wings (specifically sitting with his feet on a conference room table).  After looking through my computers, and through some backup hard drives, I ended up with nothing.  There probably is something there, but I didn't really want to invest too much time in finding that specific picture of Milo Vuckovic (the avatar). Luckily I had one photo of my Flickr account with his name tagged.  For a brief moment  I did entertain the thought of downloading the SL client and seeing if my university's Island is s...

One of my resolutions, just before this new semester starts, is to not neglect periodicals that come in from time to time and at least thumb through them.  Don't let too much work, of any sort, detract from the professional development of looking through work related periodicals (sounds oxymoronic, doesn't it?).  Well, at least this way they won't pile up in the office ;-). Anyway, in keepting with this goal (let's see how long I last), I went through the July/August issue of Training Magazine.  This is something I signed up for last year when I wanted to keep more abreast of what was happening in the corporate instructional designing sector.  One of the things that caught my eye was this tidbit at the beginning titled Conflicting Perceptions on Education , which reported on a University of Phoenix and EdAssist report titled Are we playing the same game?: Employee vs. Manager Perception of Education and Career Development . From the report itself: Nearly ha...

The end is nigh! The end is nigh! This is the last week of #Rhizo14. Of course, the end is probably just a beginning, but we'll cross that bridge later on.  In any case, the topic for this week is Planned Obsolescence , or as I would frame it: the culminating step of the metamorphosis of our learners from guided to self-guided life-long learners. Dave asks How do we teach ourselves into uselessness?  While this is probably meant to be provocative, I don't think that we can ever teach ourselves into uselessness, both from a teacher perspective and a learner perspective.  From a teacher perspective, it is quite possible (and I would say desirable), to teach our students to be on their own, and to continue to learn on their own, and pass on that knowledge and gusto for learning to others.  Just because we've enabled others, doesn't mean that we are useless or obsolete.  It just means that we've added to the world.  This isn't a zero-sum game.  Yes, i...

OK, this one goes back a while (back to September as a matter of fact!) It's been sitting in my RSS starred items folder for a while waiting for me to do something with it. For the longest period of time I did not know what to do with it. The reason for this is that what the author writes seems so bleeping obvious (with the exception of the made up term "we-learning"). I remember back in the day, when I was a wee MBA student taking a course in Knowledge Management (sidebar: just looked at my transcript - wow, that was Spring of 2006! it seems so long ago), we spoke of these issues of capturing knowledge within the company and how we can capitalize on it, either through formal or informal means. The books and cases we used were anywhere from less than a year old to things that went back a decade (or more). The key thing here is that the idea of using informal learning, looking to your fellow coworker for knowledge, is an old thing and I am surprised that learning speci...

I was recently reading Jay Cross's article on the Chief Learning Officer on Getting Rid of the Training Department , followed by his post on New Roles for former trainers . The following quote summarizes the whole thing quite nicely: When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes, we don’t suggest firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors, and performance consultants. I agree that training, old style training, is mostly dead. Old style training was based on the fact that all learners come in with the same basic knowledge. This may still be true when new products are deployed and people need training on those new products, however most types of training that I've seen have been more along the lines of boutique-style-training (I think I invented the term a few years back when I started as a formal trainer). Most people don't start from point A in their knowledge of ...

I saw this article over at the NEA journal. ( click here for the full PDF ) Having recently visited my dad, a person who is very intelligent but, who like the dad in the article, didn't go to college (heck my dad didn't even go to middle school). This story reminded me of a conversation I had with him about his work and salary versus mine (i.e. being the same) despite my education. I've heard a lot of banter over at blogs like the brazen careerist about not learning concrete skills in college. My undergrad experience has been more of a "learn how to think" lesson. Learn to be critical, and analytical, and calculating, and have that rounded learning that everyone covets. When I first graduated I felt like the early-20-somethings on brazen careerist, like my college education was almost a waste of time because I did not learn concrete skills. I kinda learned java, and kinda learned C, but I wouldn't be readily employable by a company. In recent years though my u...