Author: Michael Hawkes
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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Behaviorism
Over the past several decades, from the post-World War 2 era until now, three major theories or concepts have been applied to education. This week we’ll look at behaviorism, and we’ll look at the other theories in the coming weeks. As applied to education, behaviorism hit its stride with famed psychologist B.F. Skinner. In the…
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Instructional development process
As the title says, this week’s readings covered the instructional development process, but I’m not sure if the phrase fully captures what was written. “Designing Instructional Systems” by Molenda, Pershing, and Reigeluth is a chapter from The ASTD Training and Development Handbook introduces the “Business Impact ISD model” which fills in some perceived gaps I’ll…
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Muddying the waters
I had hoped to write this third R511 blog this past weekend, but life intervened. The heat went out in my house on Saturday, so I spent most of the day dealing with getting that fixed. Then while I was studying on Sunday, my mother called to say the apartment next to hers caught fire.…
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Defining a field
It’s time for the second blog of the semester for EDUC-R511, and I guess I’m still getting into the swing of things. Last semester, when we had a bunch of readings, there were some questions posted for us to think about and answer in discussion forums on Canvas. For this class, however, I haven’t found…
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John Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed
When I saw that the journal article we’d been assigned to read, My Pedagogic Creed by John Dewey, was published in 1897, I knew it would be interesting. Would it be very different than the journal articles of today? Would it be hopelessly out of date, or is it still relevant? It turns out, that…
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