Teng Learning Technology

Reflect on the outcome of Project B. How did it go? What did it learn? What would you do differently next time? What went well and what was a struggle? How will you use what you learned in the future as a professional? Project B, Things to Do for Dallas for the organization City Year was far more difficult than my first project, Logging in to the CFBISD Network .  First and foremost, working with an organization I don’t see every day was an added challenge.  It wasn’t like I could just drive downtown anytime I wanted to talk to my contact at the organization. While I admire how some people were able to do a project with the same organization twice, I am glad I got to do see how different organizations did stuff. Another difference between Project B and my first one was the vague set of objectives. I could spend several days talking about the different things people could do in Dallas and not be complete. Considering the fact that Google already does a good job of that, i...

What have you learned this semester about instructional design and development? What about process? What else? To quote the book, “instructional design stripped to its basics is simply a process for helping you to create effective training in an efficient manner.” (Piskuck, 1) When following the process, it allows designers to “ask the right questions, make the right decisions, and produce a product that is as useful and useable.” (Piskuck, 1) It seems so simple from this definition. When actually doing instructional design, I learned that the process requires a lot of patience.  You have to do things in a way that goes around the client’s schedule rather than your own. I have learned how iterative the process is. It is amazing how many times you have to test your product before it is ready for prime time.  Feedback usually is pretty good. But sometimes you get contradictory feedback from different people. Sometimes the feedback is well beyond the scope of your project. I...

Coming into this semester you had thoughts about what instructional design was.  Through this semester you have learned a lot and participated in a lot of different activities.  What has been your largest take away this semester?  What topics do you wish had been covered that weren't?   I know a lot of this entry is repeats some of my thoughts of some of the earlier entries.  Coming into this class, my vague conception of instructional design was that it was a carrier where people work as trainers for corporations. I knew that photoshop/illustrator was a major part of it, and so was programming. And yes, those were true statements. This class taught me the depth of the profession and how systematic the profession really is. I really enjoyed the Romiszowski paper where it discussed how education is about trying to give people a broad view of learning.  However, training requires people to be very focused. As a teacher, I do feel like I can go down ...

What does it mean to manage/regulate yourself (self-regulate) and others? How does it bring you towards goals? How important is communication in this process and what helps/impedes it? I first must answer this question like a science teacher.  Of all the traits that humans have, the ability to plan and organize is probably the thing that distinguishes us the most amongst the animal kingdom.  We aren’t the fastest or the strongest animals. But our ability to plan and to work in groups is far ahead, even of our closest evolutionary relatives.  As such, managing and regulating ourselves and others and communicating with each other is a fundamental part of what makes us human. Self-regulation and the regulation of others remains a crucial part of the 21st-century human. With the advent of mass media, the personal computer, smartphone and the internet, the ability to set goals and to prioritize is paramount. To write this blog entry, I had to set aside time in my day to w...

Reflect on your experiences creating Project A from start to finish. What worked and what did not? What do you think was the strongest aspect of the design process? The weakest? How do you think the experience will affect you on Project B? Project A, Logons for Newman Smith High School, was certainly a positive learning experience. The fact that is was a real organization that I worked for, and that I had a real client to work was the most exciting part of it and the most difficult. First off, as mentioned in earlier entries, I had a lot of difficulties actually getting a correct project. I tried going to the library looking for a project, but it didn’t seem like they had something I could use. When I came up with the idea of doing student logins, it took a week getting permission to use a survey before moving on.  I would expect that most instructional designers would find similar problems in the “real world”. Next time I will learn to word what I want better. As for the impl...