Author: Michael Hawkes
The Only Pirate at the Party
A few years ago, I got some money for my birthday and for some reason I bought a violin and an amplifier from Amazon. I never really did anything with it, but I started looking at YouTube for violin stuff and kept reading references to Lindsey Stirling. “She must be a famous violinist or something,”…
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How To Get Yourself A Second Life: A Guide For Newbies
A few months ago, as I began taking a closer look at Second Life, I started looking for journal articles and books about it. One of the first things I noticed was that there was a clear heyday of Second Life literature from around 2008 to 2012. While there have been articles and books published…
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Read all about it
A few days ago, for some reason, I was looking for news on Czechia. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but had a vague idea that I might collect a list of English language news sources in non-English speaking countries. Turns out it’s already been done. I found a site called NewsNow. It’s basically…
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Human performance technology
When I started taking graduate classes in Instructional Systems Technology (IST) last fall, we were told pretty early on, that IST is a subset of Human Performance Technology (HPT), but we didn’t spend much time delving into HPT until this week, where we were offered several readings on the subject. One of the readings, “Human…
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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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A second look at Second Life
Since starting work on my master’s degree, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about Second Life, the online virtual world that once seemed to hold so much promise. Back in the day, I used to be a member, but eventually left because it was no longer this new, shiny, interesting thing. Last October, I…
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