for Don: 1951-2008

2008 has probably been one of the toughest years in recent memory, personally and for the rest of the world at the same time. Lots of changes this year: new president, crappy economy, unexpected job changes for my wife. Everything got crazier this year, like life got turned up to 11...

Diana and I lost a good friend of ours over the summer. I haven't been able to really process it yet. Don was a great friend and a great guy who had so much strength.... This is a picture of the bench behind Jan and Don's old home in Kagel Canyon after the big fire in November. Jan came back into town and we checked out the property together. The fire raged all over the place, cooking their back yard, all except for the bench at which he had spent a lot of time looking out over the canyon. I logged some bench time with him there too. That's it I guess...if I can grasp any metaphor to attempt to encompass everything that has happened recently, I guess it would be this one. I just would like to sit at that bench again someday.

photo by caruba on Flickr

I had been meaning to throw up another update here but everything recently has been, as per my done-to-death saying, "all school-work and work-school." I just finished my second to last graduate course in the CTER program at UIUC, Analysis of Advanced Instructional Technologies. If you are interested, the final report is a pbWiki page and we posted our final project preso on Slide.com. We discussed the future of education. Our group tried to tackle the question from a developmental/occupational point of view, from K through higher ed. Comments are welcome.

Found this on Educause Review via Alan Levine's blog (daily reading for me). It really is an excellent piece on how storytelling can evolve using web 2.0 technologies out there. I just posted the entry below, so I will link it up and let the experts speak for themselves.

Check it out: Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre by Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine.

Image by laffy4k (Flickr) under CC license

I wasn't originally going to post this, but after reading Rita's blog entry about her experience in our student-led conversations tonight I had to chime in. Rita commented:

"I truly feel that I interact with my classmates and instructors more often and on a more complex level than I ever have in a face to face environment. I think that our conversations are more carefully planned and thought provoking than face to face conversations. Take a moment to think about all of the times that you have left a conversation and thought “oh I should have said this” or “I wish I would have worded this more clearly, I should have said…”. In an online environment, you have time to construct those complex thoughts and you can always, easily, go back and review the conversations and revisit the conversation, and add to it."

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvORKwmk9Xo
TeacherTube link: http://tinyurl.com/66o9hv
PDF transcript
Quicktime download (57.7 MB)

Following my previously posted rant about content, I spent the evenings at my journey to Educause 2008 working on another content project for school: an instructional video. Since I didn't have much to work with and I didn't have my own machine...only iMovie and Jing, though TechSmith offered to help and tried to sell me a copy of Camtasia Studio on the Educause expo floor. But I got away with a free Camtasia manual for the team at work: SCHWAG! So, I decided to make a video geared toward teachers and the first time ed-tech conference goer.

I have been to many conferences in my career, and I wish someone told me these things a while ago. Educause is especially big, busy, and intimidating the frist time around; but careful prep, comfy shoes, extra business cards, and a willingness to meet people go a long way to making the conference experience a good one.

Wow what a week! First of all, I came face to face with my own digital mortality when the logic board on my trusty year-old MacBook Pro decided to have a campfire. So it's out for a week, thank goodness for the extended AppleCare! I am using the loaned Mac from work at the Educause 2008 conference this week.

Here is my first digital story, at least the first one created outside the confines of my current employ ;). Enjoy... This is dedicated to my Mom who always teased me about the Menehune. Downloadable version in Quicktime format available here or link to it on TeacherTube.

This has been an enlightening past couple of weeks. First, creating the WebQuest and now I am working on a digital story. Digital stories are essentially that: stories created digitally using all sorts of tools. I happen to be using iMovie which is still fairly new to me. The best part of this assignment is that it can be about anything. I happen to be on vacation this week in Kaua'i, so I am doing some investigative reporting into the story of the Menehune.

I am having a lot of fun with this. Somewhere along the line, I forgot about the actual content of what goes into online education, or education in general even. I think what I am grappling with is that I have spent so much time on managing the "container" that we put content into, that I forgot about the content itself. I think I have been in an instructional design rut.

I posted my most recent project, a WebQuest, at http://www.withaq.net/eportfolio/webquest/index.html. It is entitled "Sending Work Overseas: The Outsourcing Debate in Apparel Manufacturing." Yeah pretty heady I know. I love working as instructional designer primarily because I get to learn about so many things just by exposure. Working at FIDM, I have been exposed to an industry that I would not have previously ever encountered. I decided to tackle a topic that is very close to the heart of the fashion industry: outsourcing.

I am usually not one to ruminate on and on about information I get at work. Many schools are run like a business, and being on the IT side of things, you get exposed to a lot of the business-y cross-talk and things that don't necessarily relate to the world of education on the surface. In higher-ed, the two worlds are closer together as we need to prepare our students for the business world and to compete in an economy that ain't what it used to be. But when you look at K-12, the dissociation between the business world and the world of schools seems much further apart. Or is this changing?