Instructional Technology and Instructional Design Conferences

Posted on January 19, 2012January 19, 2012 by admin

Many of my Master’s students ask me which conferences they should be attending so I have made a list to help them out. I have only put a few of the bigger conferences, so remember there are many more. Also I have organized them by career choice as my students go into corporate, higher ed, and K-12 fields.

Corporate

–ASTD (http://www.astd.org/)

–ISPI (http://www.ispi.org/)

–SALT (http://www.saltconference.com/)

K-12

–ISTE (http://www.iste.org/conference/ISTE-2012.aspx)

–SITE (http://site.aace.org/conf/)

Higher Education/Research

–AECT (http://www.aect.org/newsite/)

–AERA (http://www.aera.net/)

–SITE

What is SOPA?

Posted on January 18, 2012November 28, 2019 by admin

What is SOPA?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), otherwise known as H.R. 3261, was started by Lamar Smith (R-TX) and other representatives (bipartisan group with their company sponsors) to the house of representatives (more info on SOPA at Google).

Here are the dangerous parts to this bill (from Mashable):

– Any site accused of supporting copyright violations can be shut down – felony to post copywritten material (without a trial)

– Attorney general has a right to take action against these sites (again without a trial)

– Once accused to copyright violations, no company is allowed to do business with this company and their site needs to be shut down

What does this do? This gives companies and the government the right to stop and shut down an internet site without due process, no court or trial involved, just being accused. So if you post something on Facebook, like a picture that is copyright protected, Facebook could be shut down. That is the extent of this law, and there are lawyers that can help with this, although if you have other issues like immigration problems, lawyers from sites as nationalpardon.org can help with this.

Many from the silicon valley are protesting SOPA, today January 18th 2012. These sites are going dark. Here is a small list of companies doing it (many more are as well and the list can found at the bottom of this post):

Google
Tor Project
iSchool at Syracuse University
Oreilly.com
Wikipedia
Reddit
Mozilla
WordPress.org
Minecraft

If you go to wikipedia today this is the message you will find:

“Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge – For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history, history is shared by people travelling and sharing these knowledge across borders but immigration laws prevent this right now, so there are legal resources to work on this now a days, click site to learn more about this. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”

FYI – my site could be shut down after my post today because much of my information was paraphrased and/or taken from other internet sites…even though I am citing them here:

Websites going dark

Why sopa is dangerous

What is SOPA

Well stopping privacy doesn’t sound too bad?

No it doesn’t, however, given my example above, sites like facebook and youtube could be shut down because you or I post a picture or video that is copyright protected. Under current law, the Digital Millennium Act, when copyright material is found on a site, the site owner is notified they have a copyright protected image posted on their site and they have to remove it immediately. Well that sounds reasonable, right? I mean we need to protect copyright, but SOPA takes it a step too far.

Technology standards for students, teachers, and administrators

Posted on January 16, 2012January 16, 2012 by admin

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has put forth national standards for students, teachers, and administrators on the use of technology in the K-12 classroom. This week in my instructional technology for educators classes we will be going through these standards.

Here is a link to all the standards: http://www.iste.org/standards.aspx

Students

Teachers

Administrators

One interesting thing to take note of – the standards were published in 2007, 2008, 2009. Doesn’t ISTE think they need to be updated? Education and Technology changes a lot each year and these standards should at least be updated every 2-3 years but at this point we just have to live with 2007 standards for students.

What do hashtags # and other symbols on twitter and facebook mean?

Posted on January 15, 2012January 15, 2012 by admin

What is twitterspeak? Well it’s how we communicate on twitter and other social media sites of course:)

The hashtag (#) is simply a way to search. This was designed for twitter and is used as a way to search. So if I were discussing mobile learning in a post I could say #mobilelearning and then anyone searching twitter for mobile learning posts could more easily find mine. Now people are using this on facebook, however, facebook does not currently use these to search but that could be changed in the future.

Another symbol used on twitter is the @ symbol. This is used to refer to someone. So if someone were speaking about me, their post might include @raypastore which would then link to my profile. Again this is being used on facebook but does not actually link to the referenced person.

I hope this helps clear up two of the most common ‘symbols’ used on facebook and twitter and help people understand what they mean and how they are used.

Make a shortened ‘tiny’ url

Posted on January 14, 2012January 14, 2012 by admin

Want to post a link to twitter but it’s too large? Ever wonder how people create those tiny urls? Well they are very simple to create. All that you need to do is copy your url, go to a site like bitly.com, which is the most popular, paste the url in the box and it gives you a shortened url. For instance, here is the url for this blog: http://bit.ly/zWTT8l

Here is a video which demonstrates the process:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_OtexpH8JU]

Android Design

Posted on January 13, 2012January 13, 2012 by admin

Found this very cool. Google has released some design tips/guidelines for android developers. While somewhat simple, this is a great start to designing mobile apps. This was created due to differences in their new OS ICS from Gingerbread and Froyo. Now if Google would just release their own developer software so that I wouldnt need to use eclipse:)

http://developer.android.com/design/index.html

Why choose Instructional Technology / Instructional Design as a career?

Posted on January 12, 2012June 18, 2019 by admin

If you are unfamiliar with instructional technology/instructional design I will very briefly describe what our graduates do, however, this post more or less focuses on the ‘why’.

Instructional Design? How did it originate?

Instructional design as a field or job was created during WW1 and WW2. The government realized that ‘nuclear scientists’ while great at their jobs were not the best people to actually develop training materials and to deliver training sessions to new scientists. Essentially what they did is take experts who understood education theory, communication, education psychology, etc. and had them work with the ‘ subject matter experts’ on these sciences to develop sound effective training. Thus instructional design was born.

What does an instructional designer do?

– Can work in corporate, government, K-12, or higher ed settings
– Design curriculum, design training (anything from anti terrorism training, flying helicopters, corporate orientation, to developing curriculum for elementary school students).
– Develop/program training
– Front end analysis – what is wrong, why, how do we fix it? (think of the ‘bobs’ from office space)
– Evaluation – was this implementation effective?
– Recommend technology solutions for training needs with Salesforce blockchain strategies included

So why be an instruction designer?

– Great pay – graduates are starting just above 60k (with no experience). If you go into management from a general ISD position your salary can easily be over 100k in 5 or so years.
– Can have a bachelor degree in any field then get a Masters in ISD – You do need a masters degree to be an instructional designer.
– It’s a Masters degree – very easy to move up the corporate ladder with an MS
– Many jobs available – even during 2007 when the economy tanked our graduates had work. Every company needs trainers and training.
– Get to work in teams – usually always on project teams
– Easy transition into management. Very easy to get into a project management role within a few years. From there you can move up to partner/CEO positions assuming you are a super star employee (and a lot of luck)
– Mobility – instructional designers are needed everywhere. You can move to any state in the US and find a job fairly easily. Many international opportunities as well.
– Future – training is not going away. In fact, with each new technological advancement our field becomes more and more important and needed.

Zoom in and out of Mac Desktop

Posted on January 11, 2012January 11, 2012 by admin

Several of you have asked for this video so here it is. To zoom in/out on the mac you need to go to the apple icon-> Accessibility-> Zoom. Here is a video showing that process:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaTwlZqqBI8]

And so it begins…first day of classes 2012!

Posted on January 11, 2012January 11, 2012 by admin

Very excited to kick off this semester. I will be teaching instructional technology for educators (2 sections to undergraduates), Online course design, development, and teaching, Colloquium, and finally graduate student projects.

The course I am most excited about this semester (I am excited about all of them) is my online course design class. In this course I am going to be doing some very exciting things. Besides going over topics like online best teaching practices and such, students will be designing their own courses using Moodle. I will have each student purchase their own web address and teach them how to install/setup their own Moodle course. Additionally, in this course, the students will form groups and each write a topic paper on online learning. I will then take each groups’ topic paper and put it into a free opensource reference guide or book for all to use.

Well here’s to another good semester!