Instructional Strategies

Tonight our group did our media presentation on 10 Instructional Strategies: presentation, demonstration, drill-and-practice, tutorial, games, discussion, cooperative learning, simulation, discovery, and problem solving. I hope the class got something out of the presentation. It wells good to have it done, but also it feels good because I learned from the preparation for the presentation.

Being at this point in the semester, I am convinced that education and specifically instruction are like cultivating a garden. It takes a lot of work to get a learner ready to learn. As an instructor, my role is to determine when instruction is needed and when it is to prepare and deliver material in the way where that seed of knowledge will have the greatest chance to take root and grow in the mind of the individual student. The lessons, discussions, readings, and presentation have reinforced this belief.

Olympic Cauldron Park Visit

We visited the Olympic Park at the south end of Rice-Eccles stadium as our first and last class field trip for our EDPS 6430 class. We were looking at the design of the 'Park' to analyze the objectives in the purpose and design of the park. I think the purposes were to be a historical record of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, to remember the efforts of the athletes that competed in the games, to inspire the efforts of aspiring athletes to continue their efforts, and to inspire visitors to the park to incorporate into their life the theme for the games "Light the Fire Within". I enjoyed the whole experience. As far as what was intended in the design and if the objectives were met, I'll leave that for wiser minds to debate. I was able to remember my experiences during the Olympic Games and what a unique and inspiring experience it was to have the world come to Utah and compete. I want to take my family to visit the Olympic Cauldron Park and especially see how my wife remembers her experience as she explores pictures, discriptions, and movies.

Bad Designs

Our assignment to look for bad designs in the world around us was not too difficult, I even found a web site that is dedicated to it: http://www.baddesigns.com/examples.html. It was amusing to see how the bad designs cause us now to go, huh? or why was that done? Hopefully we, as instructional designers, do not stop just with finding bad design. The next step is identifying why the designs are bad and formulate a plan for fixing the design problem, remembering to keep in mind the problems that may result in consequence of the your efforts to fix the first bad design you came across.

Design Document

It feels great to have the design document done. It was a good learning experience; thanks to Josh and Wade for all of their hard work. Going through the analysis and design part of our project helped me to see how important each step of the process is, and how each of these steps leads to a the final project when the first two steps are done correctly.

A brief history of Instructional Development

The article by Sharon Shrock was enjoyable to me for a least two obvious reasons. First, as the name implies it was brief. And second, it is a history. I love the study of history! When I hear people say they can't stand history, I find it hard to believe. Everyone has some part of history that they find fascinating- the history of theatre, baseball, their hometown, their family, a favorite actor/actress, etc.. Part of having an interest in something is (in my opinion) knowing something of its history- what makes it the unique thing that it is.

As Shrock examines the history of instructional development (ID), she touches on hot the government and the military each influenced the emerging field of ID. I thought it was interesting to note the practice of evaluating instruction was being done for 35 years before it was called formative evaluation. It seems that parts of the ID process have been awhile since one person was trying to instruct another person in something. I like how this article gives a brief glimpse into the gathering of the different parts of ID under one umbrella.

Web 2.0

The presentation on Web 2.0 was well done and gave a good glimpse of the massive amount of information on the web and the tools that are being designed to shift through all that information. I was amazed at the various sites for presenting information, networking, and bookmarking web sites a person has visited; many of the sites the group mentioned I had never heard of! It just goes to show how little I know and/or plethora of possibilities Web 2.0 puts at the finger tips of users.