Week 5 Historical Timelines

Well I think for the Historical Timeline project, I'm going to focus on training in the business/corporate workplace, if that will work....for example, what did businesses do to train employees throughout the decades.
I only decided today as I've been going back and forth and I kept coming back to it, so I will begin....

Week 4 P3 Model

Great article this week, as some of the other classmates have stated in their blogs, Khan's model helps break the process into an easy to understand visual, which can help when you are having to justify decisions to the high ups.
On the first page, Kahn states "When an e-Learning course is completely desinged, developed, and taught, and managed by a single individual, it is clear that the same individual has performed the role of content expert, instructional designer, programmer, graphic artist, project manager, etc..." I immediately thought of the first online course I developed for the department I was working for - they handed me the content and that was it, it was a great learning experience and there are things that I know now that I definitely could have improved upon, but it was also one of the reasons why I became interested in instructional design and eLearning.
I know that a lot goes into developing a good online course, but seeing that Table of roles and responsibilities was almost jaw dropping (for me at least) because although I know the processes are there, to break it down was quite eye opening.

Week 3

I have set up my Diigo account and joined the IT 5650 group, I think it will be similar to the del.ici.ous account.

This week's reading was titled, "Reflections from the Introduction of Blogs and RSS Feeds into a Preservice Instructional Technology Course." I found this article very interesting since of course we have had to keep a blog for some of the previous courses as well as the two this semester and I have enjoyed the blogging activity in the past. In fact, I enjoyed so much that I decided to start my own personal blog.

I loved the suggestion that was stated about using blogging as a way for teachers to promote literacy as a parent I worry that will all the technological advances that sometimes we will lose so the human interactions. For example, a friend's 14-year old came over and we were talking about school and I asked her what books she reads to which she replied oh, we don't read a lot of texts in school, most is all online and I really don't like books. So I think the blogging practice in a school is a great idea as I think it could promote some of the outcomes the article mentioned as well as give parents the ability to feel connected (if it was for middle/high schoolers).

I thought it was important that the article stated how even though they thought their students was on the same page, it is important to still try to explain "how to" - I found that with some of our users in my previous job, that they may be tech savy, but if we were using something new, we needed to do some "how to" explaining.

In reading the article, I also found that I really had no idea what an RSS feed was, so it was helpful to read about that as well.

This week we are also to be reading 4 other blogs, plus Laura's. I read Marilyn's blog and really like her point about the Chapter 6 that provided a solid background on Design and Development strategies and wishing it was available last semester, I completely agree. I found that chapter very useful, which I felt all the Chapters were relevant, so I printed it to have on hand. Phil made a great point in his blog regarding that reading the other blogs is time consuming, but I have found it interesting to read what others are thinking, it seems I have been able to find something different that I may have missed the first time around, so even though it is time consuming, it is valuable.

I also read Chad's blog and found his post about the RSS feed update video useful, so thanks Chad for posting that, it was a helpful reminder and easy to understand. I also agreed with Jodi's blog when she mentioned something from the article, point 3 - Minimize the number of websites students need to visit to gather information. Keeping these simple will keep the task manageable for students. (p. 58) I am not a teacher, but as a student, I think this is important.

I definitely think my post is probably longer than it maybe should and it is getting late, so I'm going to finish for now.