Month: March 2021
Trend and issues in Instructional technology
How apropos. In last week’s post, I commented on how the chapter I was reading could do with an update to reflect educational changes as a result of the pandemic, and this week there’s a journal article that covers exactly that. Last summer, Curt Bonk wrote an article titled “Pandemic ponderings, 30 years to today:…
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A History of Instructional Design and Technology
The readings for this week covered the history of instructional technology, and my first thought when I saw this on the syllabus was, “Didn’t we already cover this?” Going back through the blog posts, I see one of the readings for Week 2 was “A history of the AECT’s definitions of educational technology.” That reading…
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Moving on up
After being on Second Life again for a few months, I was getting tired of the home I had as a premium member. It wasn’t bad, but it was very basic. A good example of this is the “stairs”, which were basically a ramp with a texture to mimic stairs. This home and others like…
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A comparison of theories of learning
This may come as a surprise to some, but education, instruction, and learning aren’t synonyms of each other. Those concepts have quite a bit of overlap, but they are each a bit different from one another. I believe education is sort of the big umbrella that covers instruction and learning. Instruction is the process of…
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Not All Candy
Are you hungry? Here’s a bowl of candy. Help yourself. Oh, I should probably warn you about them first. I’m not sure how it happened, but some of the candies are poisonous and’ll kill you. Pretty quickly, too. I mean, you’ll probably be fine. It’s a huge bowl and there’s gotta be hundreds of candies…
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Authentic tasks and situated learning
In taking classes about education, I suppose it’s inevitable that I’ll read something that describes the classes I’ve been taking. Sort of a meta-education. Thus is the case with the 2006 article “Authentic E-learning in higher education: Design principles for authentic learning environments and tasks” by Jan Herrington. It started out as a fairly typical…
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Cognitive theory and constructivism
This week’s readings dealt with two different concepts of learning that arrived on the scene some time after behaviorism. These are cognitive theory and constructivism. Both aim to get closer to an understanding of how we learn, but they do so in different ways. Cognitive theory, as discussed in Designing Instructional Strategies: A Cognitive Approach…
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