Just Getting Started

Just Getting Started – April 17, 2010

On Thursday last week a cohort --about eleven of us-- from CCTS began our second course (INTC 5100) in pursuit of learning more about instructional design and applications as part of a Masters Degree program at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Our professor Dr. Amy Ackerman got us started with visual introductions (pre-assesing what we knew and could do already), a tour of the course syllabus, requirements and expectations, and assignments for our next session. This Blog is part of the course expectations.

Today, I recreated the Introductory Wordle I had “dropped” during our first class and shared its embed link and a screenshot with my two groupmates. Hopefully, we’ll be able to use this one in our ePortfolio.

Then I went into my Google Alerts and set it up for “IT and instructional design.” I had also taken this step with our previous course, requesting alerts for “Web 2.0 Tools.” This strategy alone is quite helpful in directing my own informal day-to-day learning. I had also set up my Google Reader to feed me a manageable number of the blogs, wikis and so on that I had discovered to be helpful.

Today, in just seconds, I had 10 places to look. Within those 10, I quickly learned about Sreya Dutta, currently a senior curriculum developer at Oracle. Her blog is called “Instructional Design: On the Road to Learning.” Her Sunday, April 18, 2010 posting caught my attention because Dr. Ackerman had been talking in class about the balance between design and application. I’ll try to paraphrase Dr. Ackerman’s thinking: Applications change and evolve quickly but a strong and growing understanding of learners and how they best learn must under gird the entire eLearning process. Ms Dutta’s post is entitled “ID Research vs Application.”

I expect I'll soon discover how to publish and share this blog, the first I've ever written. That should illustrate why I call this place Instructional Design Infancy. Like Sreya Dutta, I'm a self-described "digital immigrant."