Category: Education
MSEd
As of 12:00 AM on May 5, 2023, I officially graduated with a Master of Science in Education degree in Instructional Systems Technology, or MSEd in IST for the sake of brevity. I began working on the degree at the height of the pandemic lockdowns in August 2020, and by taking two classes a semester…
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Taking notes with Obsidian
For a few years now, I’ve been using Obsidian to keep a daily journal, and it’s been great. It has a lot of options that I’ve never explored or needed but something came up recently and I wanted to find out how to connect Obsidian to Zotero. An online search using DuckDuckGo returned an unexpected…
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The End is Near!
A recent email from a former classmate reminded me I should update my academic portfolio. It also made me want to figure out how many classes I’ve taken, how many more I need to take, and when I might graduate. A quick perusal of the unofficial transcript enabled me to update my academic portfolio. In…
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Studying
Last week was the second week of classes and the first real week of the semester. Both classes I’m taking are online and asynchronous, so the first week was mainly about introducing ourselves, while the second week was when the real work of the classes began. When I was in grade school, I hated doing…
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Vacation and school
Last week I took a week off from work to mentally prepare myself for going back to school, which started this week. I didn’t do anything spectacular for vacation, other than staying home and doing a bit of cleaning. The heat wave we’ve been having kept me inside most days, where I would plop down…
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She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
Like many people who enjoy reading, I have lots of books in my to-be-read pile. It seems like it’s rare that I get a chance sit down and enjoy a good read. On the other hand, the time I spend going to and from work is sort of dead. A few months ago, it dawned…
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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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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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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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