Back in 2004, I graduated from Penn State with a Master degree in Instructional Systems Design. With the steady increase of educational technology and technology tools in F2F and online learning, the College of Education has re-branded the department as Learning and Performance Systems. I’m really glad they kept the “Systems” piece in the title as this is such a key part of systems thinking and the classic “systematic approach” to design (i.e., the ADDIE model and others). On Friday, I’ll be teaching an “introduction to instructional design” online module. It’s a primer for the instructional technology student apprentices and program (ITAP), an initiative of the NY6 Consortium. Here is the reading list I put together for this short-class: RequiredReadingsTheoryandPractice Below are two video clips I created last week with yours truly starring in a one-man show, a cheerful talking head. You can also check out one of our student technology assistants and apprentice’s site here. Please make this budding blogger’s day by posting a comment!
It was a real treat for me was see that my design prototype is still “live” on an quiet test server at Penn State… Very cool and kudos to my IT pals in the College of Agricultural Sciences for maintaining it over the years. You can check out the Invasive Species website and the ISD primer videos below.
While classic instructional design approaches provide an important and critical lens through which to view any design or re-design of instruction (I think of Carol Twigg’s work in particular when it comes to redesign) constructivist theories continue to influence and energize my thinking and work in academic technology as it did back in 2004 as a graduate student and webmaster at Penn State. What a fun refresher to revisit this old stuff… gets me thinking in new ways that hopefully benefits others, not to me mention me. I guess it’s not that old after all! It might also be time to think about how I could be using this for work to further my research and even studies… à la MOOC or more formally back in grad school?
Overview of Operation Invasive Species (Master’s thesis based on this prototype I designed and built)
An instructional design primer