Category Archives: Instructional Design

Minecraft in Education

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Check out the minecraftinschool wiki created by Lucas Gillispie (a former student in the MIT program at UNCW). This blog discusses how to set up minecraft for your classroom, provides sample projects, lessons plans, and even has sample student projects. This is very well done and I encourage you to check it out: http://minecraftinschool.pbworks.com/w/page/37244189/FrontPage

Here is just one of the many videos Lucas has created for minecraft in his classroom (many more on the page above)

For those that are new to minecraft, check out this video:

Learning styles: The good, the bad, and the ugly

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Learning styles. I hear about them from my students, we teach them in our classes, and I see them as a variable in many research studies. So are they good? bad? What are they useful for?

Lets start out with the good. During a learner analysis it is good to know as much as possible about your learners. So a learning style inventory can be one of many pieces to the puzzle. However, I would never use it as the only piece and I would probably hold it as least important.

Now lets move to the bad. Designing curriculum based on learning styles has not been shown to improve learning. For instance, look at this study:

http://www.voced.edu.au/content/ngv13692

Why are learning styles not good? Well lets say that 60% of my learners are visual (this is a common stat I see in the literature). What does that tell me to do with my instruction? Honestly, it does not tell me anything. There are a number of much more important things I need to consider and think about when developing instruction. First of all is information processing – how many concepts can a learner work with at one time in short term memory? Then I think about dual coding theory. I know that learners minds of comprised to two channels for learning: visual and auditory. Each has a certain capacity in working memory. Another concept in cognitive load. If I give a learner too much information they will start to forget because their working memory is overloaded. Then I think about the multimedia theories – learning (problem solving objectives) is greater when learners view a combination of visual and auditory content rather than just one of those individually. All of these theories, which have much positive research backing do not support learning styles. If 60% of my learners are visual, showing them only visuals will not increase their learning. In fact, only visuals would hurt their learning whereas a combination of visuals and auditory learning (such as video) has been shown to increase their learning. I realize I spoke very briefly about several theories which require a much deeper understanding but if you are interested about them, please feel free to look them up on my blog as I have written about all of them.

File sizes and download speeds of 56k, 3G, 4G, and High speed wireless internet

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Here is a chart I made comparing speeds of various internet connections and showing how fast/slow one would expect their files to download. Remember that these are really hypothetical and depend so much on where you are, what kind of device you have, etc. You should also remember that equipment you are using should be regularly maintained (visit BoostPoorSignal.com for more info). Theoretically 4G and high speed internet should be nearly the same but realistically this is not the case. So please do not take these as fact, rather, use this chart as a guide to consider when developing for both web and mobile devices.

100kb 250kb 500kb 1mb 1gb
56k Modem 15 seconds 36 seconds 1 minute 2.5 minutes 1 day 18 hours
3G <1 second 6 seconds 12 seconds 25 seconds 7 hours
High Speed/Wireless/4G <1 second 1 second 3 seconds 5 seconds 1.5 hours

*note – these speeds assume best case scenario. More than likely all speeds will be
Slower. Both 3G and 4G speeds will probably be significantly slower, especially as 4G max.

Your PC behaving strangely? Is it very slow? Does it crash very often? Doesn’t it boot at all? Well, these are common problems, that everybody have met in their life – to be honest, I’ve got these problems several times – and this comes from several reasons, but the first is: tech devices ages very fast. Xtra-PC is a small USB device that you plug into an old, slow or dead computer (Windows or Mac) to give it new life. Basically, it’s a custom operating system, based on the proven foundation of Linux, that runs directly from the Xtra-PC USB device, and it even works on computers with a missing or crashed hard drive. Find xtra pc reviews on privacycritic.com.

Speeds are not even available yet.

If you

What is usability?

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If I had to describe HCI is one word, it would be usability. Usability refers to the ease of use for the software/hardware.

So what is usability? Usability asks if the product, webpage, etc. is effective, efficient, and user friendly. Were the goals met? Are the users satisfied? Was cognitive load reduced where possible? Error free experience? Comfortable environment?

Thus usability is extremely important when designing anything. So how do you test usability? Well there are many types of tests that can be performed from experts evals, groups, users, etc. There are also many types of guideline charts out there in the research depending on what type of material you are testing (i.e., a webpage, mobile app, control scheme, etc.).

Classes begin today!

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Summer courses begin today. I will be teaching a graduate course: Computer Interface Design. The course will cover HCI and interface design strategies then move into Adobe Photoshop. Students will develop several interfaces and projects using Photoshop. I am very excited, this is going to be a fun course.

Can a computer detect cognitive load? The latest in HCI

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Well this is very interesting. This computer system can determine when a persons brain activity is being overloaded and in return adjust the computer interface to take that load off of the user. While I am not sure this works (need to see this research peer reviewed and read it), I am very intrigued by the possibilities and promise this holds in both the cognitive load and human computer interaction research.

“Their system, called Brainput, is designed to recognize when a person’s workload is excessive and then automatically modify a computer interface to make it easier. The researchers used a lightweight, portable brain monitoring technology, called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), that determines when a person is multitasking. Analysis of the brain scan data was then fed into a system that adjusted the user’s workload at those times. A computing system with Brainput could, in other words, learn to give you a break.”

More of the article here: http://mashable.com/2012/05/14/brainput/

Replacing ADDIE?

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Well since this is the second time this week I have seen this post, which I addressed on both forums where I saw it posted, I thought I would post it here too:

Here is the article

My take is that the article is wrong – it tells me nothing. No info why ADDIE is ‘bad’ and no info on how they would change it. In fact, the only thing I get from the article is that the people who wrote it are using ADDIE incorrectly and do not understand the process.  Here is my response to this article in a linkedin forum:

“So why use another process? What does it do differently than ADDIE? I have seen many people try to replace it and yet they cannot – for good reason. ADDIE works. While a systematic process, ADDIE is not linear. If you are using it in a linear or limiting way, you are using it wrong. Additionally, these two bullet points in the article contradict one another and show you would be using ADDIE wrong if you developed training that has little impact:

* departments spend too much money and time on training that has little, if any, impact on the performance of the learners.

* is in the constant cycle of allocating ever diminishing budgets which are not adequate to build training that has any return-on-investment.

And this bullet point shows me you are not doing a proper learner analysis or using the right instructional strategies (again not using ADDIE correctly):

* are becoming disillusioned and unmotivated by the boring, lifeless click-through training to which they are subjected.

And to address your points, if your ISDers are not using ADDIE correctly or doing proper instructional design and you are running into these types of issues, why blame ADDIE? It seems that the problem is that you are using it incorrectly. In fact, you are probably cutting corners somewhere. I usually see this when reviewing training which looks like flash cards – boring and not effective. Why? The ISDers did not actually design the instructional strategies to match the learning objectives and then did not asses properly (i.e., they did not use ADDIE correctly).

I guess my question for anyone getting rid of ADDIE for another model is, how are you ensuring quality? Because if you are cutting something out of ADDIE then you are cutting quality somewhere. If you are adding to ADDIE then I could understand because ADDIE by itself is missing a PM and Communication piece but its understood that its not meant to have them either.”

Flash CS6 to HTML5

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The following video demonstrates Adobe Flash’s CS6 to HTML5 conversion tool codenamed Wallaby. The tool converted my file in one second. It worked great in Safari but did not work in Firefox. I am not sure if Flash’s tool is not working or HTML5 is not working. I say this because of the compatibility issues I have with HTML5, especially in Firefox. Also, Adobe’s Wallaby tool was last updated on March 8th, which means that a new version is just around the corner. Overall, I am impressed it worked but need to test this with more advanced Flash files. I was not really surprised there was a compatibility issue as that is HTML5. Here is the video with the demonstration: