Synthesis reflections
ETEC 565 – Final Reflections
The best journeys start with a map …
At the start of this course, I had three goals. I wanted to increase my knowledge about what kind of tools work for teachers and students, regardless of the platform or space they are built in. I wanted to learn to move my thinking about instructional design from two-dimensions (linear, like a book) to three-dimensions (multisensory/multimedia, like digital space). Finally, I was keen to explore some of the inner workings of LMSs, as that is a context I wanted to learn to design for. These three goals were set against the backdrop of my continuing quest to learn more about how changing the delivery mechanism of education from lecture-and-print based to digital in all its forms can help people learn.
…but are flexible enough to recognize that sometimes you’ll see an alley with an intriguing building that you just have to take a detour to see.
Toolkit participation:
The Toolkit was an excellent opportunity to get hands-on experience with a huge variety of programs and techniques, all of which are useful skills in the life of an instructional designer or an instructor who uses CMSs or any kind of digital instructional material. My job requires me to think all the time about the design of learning materials and until I started the MET program, I really worked only on books. Publishing’s biggest stumbling block – and the reason I’m in the MET program – is that the design of digital instructional material in textbook companies lies mainly in the hands of the IT folks. There is a big generational gap right now, because the content designers, like me, by and large haven’t had the exposure to things like CMSs – they arrived on campuses long after we’d gone.
I worked through four of the Toolkit sections thoroughly and three more sections in less depth. It is the one section of the course that I felt I didn’t give the time it deserved. Possibly because it sat off to the side, or because it wasn’t deadline driven, there were always other parts of the course that felt more pressing to me. I love the inquiry-based learning and the discussions – I always find discussions one of the most valuable parts of a course. It may be that for me, the Toolkit felt less useful because blogging feels like I’m talking to myself rather than participating in a conversation even when I know some of my colleagues (and my instructor!) will be reading them. Nevertheless, the push to overcome what I suspect is a fairly common reluctance to try out new software and to just play around with different tools is a valuable opportunity. And as John pointed out to us on a couple of occasions, having the confidence in one’s ability to roll up one’s sleeves and just jump in is an important skill in and of itself!
Finally, assignments like the Toolkit and the digital story helped me realize that I’m happiest learning when I can just poke around and try things rather than reading the manual. This insight into my own learning preferences was as surprising to me as it is important and if I were to take nothing else away from the course, I feel like that bit of self-knowledge is critical.
SECTIONS e-portfolio self-assessment:
S – Students. In this context, S and E are closely connected. All the students in the MET program are expected to have a reasonable comfort level with technology. ETEC 565 tests the limits of that comfort zone for many of us, I suspect, but that’s part of the purpose of the course. In that respect, using WordPress to encourage students to continually reflect on their experience is an appropriate and useful tool to help them confront and – eventually – move beyond their comfort level with new types of technology.
E – Ease of use and reliability. For students in ETEC 565, WordPress is an excellent choice. WordPress’s simple and intuitive interface allows even those of us on the ‘less comfortable’ end of the spectrum to spend the majority of our time concentrating on content rather than format, which is important.
T – Teaching and learning. Because ETEC 565 is a hands-on course, where the acquisition of theoretical knowledge is paired with the new skills, WordPress (to some extent) and the discussion boards (to a larger extent) encourage a ‘try it- talk about it’ orientation. The conversation amongst the group, and the opportunity to think about our own evolving skills, are well-supported both by the use of the Vista discussion board and our blogs.
I – Interactivity. This is the one place where I feel the e-portfolio project isn’t living up to its promise. Blogging feels more like a presentation than a conversation – there isn’t enough interactivity in that particular space for me. That said, more conversation in this course might have moved it from overwhelming to deadly overwhelming. Having discussions in a wide variety of separate places – the discussion boards, plus commenting on other students blogs – would have been very difficult to manage. Clustering all our discussion in the discussion boards was both logical and practical.
N – Novelty. The experience of pulling together everything I’ve done for a single course in one place has been a unique experience for me. While blogging itself is not novel, using it for this purpose, and in this way, is. The iterative process of reading and re-reading entries is a very useful way of deepening and enriching the things I’ve learned.
I’ve left off C-for-cost, O-for-organization, and S-for-speed, because I don’t think they are relevant or useful in this assessment.
Next steps:
Every course in the MET program has been stimulating and useful, and this one has been no exception. I’ve thoroughly stretched my technical competencies and feel like I’ve notched my computer literacy up a couple of levels at least. I feel like I’ve been very lucky in that everything I’ve done in the MET program has fed directly into my daily work. ‘Next steps’ seem like something I need to do Monday, not in the vague and misty future.
It was particularly useful to take 565 right on the heels of 510, as the two mesh well together. Already I’ve been able to use knowledge gained in this course in my work. If 510 helped me better understand what kind of a context instructors in higher education are increasingly working in, 565 has helped me understand how to think about designing for that context at the level of content and form. What parts of books would translate best into a digital context? What will help the students learn best? What helps makes the lives of instructors easier? If I want to produce digital learning objects that are the equivalent of peer-reviewed textbooks, what kinds of criteria do I need to apply? Pedagogy needs to be embedded at a deeper level in digital – how do I do that? 565 has helped clarify the questions and give me the tools to start answering some of these questions. The biggest benefit of 565 is that is has given me the knowledge and the vocabulary to talk with our IT specialists and act as a bridge between what they can do and what my group can do. It is almost like being give a Star Trek universal translator!
One of the projects I’ve been working on this spring and summer that is about to start in earnest is a new quality control program for our higher education teaching resources. I’m particularly excited because I got to help choose who we would invite to advise us. And so on Tuesday, I’ll be meeting Gary Poole (of Bates and Poole) and Dan Pratt (of the Teaching Perspectives Inventory) along with a distinguished group of devoted teachers and we’ll spend the day talking about practical measures to create better tools for teachers – both technological and non-technological.
After this course, I take a short break, then I’m back in January to finish off the certificate. The fall will be partly devoted to figuring out if I’m going to ‘ladder up’ – the four courses I’ve taken this year have been a lot of work, but incredibly rewarding and very useful in a real, practical, this-might-just-get-me-a-raise way. I want to take the time this fall to try and integrate more of what I’ve learned into the text(books) I’m designing – it is definitely time to let some of the material sink in. I think I’ll need to drop the ‘book’ part as too restrictive!
Laura
References
Bates, & Poole (2003) A framework for selecting and using technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology. San Franciso: Jossey-Bass.