In Response to “Langevin Blog” January 18, 2010

Making it effective

There are internal and external factors that influence the productivity of an organization.  One such external influence is the federal government who requires each resident in nursing homes must have a health assessment.  Each nursing home designates staff to complete these assessments.  The people designated receive training in several ways.  1)  On the job, from a person who is currently or was previously in the position, 2)  On the job, by reading a 500+ page manual or 3)  Attending their State sponsored training. 

When I took over as the State Assessment Training Coordinator, I read the 500+ page manual.  The information is comprehensive and dry.  The question I began asking myself was how to make this boring but important information appealing.  What information do I include and what information is just nice to know?  Because the training attendees are a mixture of experiences working with the assessment tool, it must appeal to the novice assessment coordinator and to the coordinator that have been coding assessments for years.   

 After a few trials and errors of presenting three-day training on the entire manual, I learned few tricks:

1)      I spiced up the powerpoint presentations by incorporating short films of residents performing actions.  The participants are asked how they would code that action.

2)      After each section, scenarios are presented and the participants are asked how they would code the action.

3)      Matching and true and false games questions were incorporated into the presentation

4)      To help the learners find information in the manual, I devised a scavenger hunt exercise.

5)      Finally, social sharing is used where homes talk about how things are done in their facility as a problem solving technique for another home.

I am in the beginning stages of learning about instruction design and technology.  My goal is to keep it simple but effective.

http://www.langevin.com/blog/2009/08/27/walk-in-the-shoes-of-the-learners/

The Learning Process January 18, 2010

The objective for week 2 application is to relate brain research and brain function to the learning process.  To accomplish this objective, I reviewed two articles.  The first article is entitled “The Ghost of Brain States Past: Remembering Reactivates the Brain Regions Engaged during Encoding” from the Walden Library at http://web.ebsohost.com.eap.waldenulibrary.org/ehost/pdf?vid=26&hid=3&sid=734feb33-d234-42 .  This was an interesting article in that it was a review of several previous studies conducted on measuring brain activity during the encoding and retrieval of information.  Danker & Anderson divided the studies into two major groups.  The first group were of empirical studies “indicating when people retrieve an episode or association of memory, the regions of the brain involved in originally processing that episode or association are reactivated.”  The second group  demonstrated “that which regions are activated at test is influenced by what strategic processes were engaged during study.  These studies investigated the retrieval of material encoded through several strategies, including enactment, verbal mnemonic, and the mnemonic used of mental imagery (2010).”  Lastly, Danker & Anderson questioned then answered their questions about the  reactivation process from the studies they reviewed. 

 

Although great advances in medical technology have occurred over the past decade or so, there is still very little known about the brain and how learning occurs.  The technology used to measure brain activity in the studies  included: an event-related potential (ERP) which measures electrical activity at the scalp, a positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which measure blood flow in the brain.  These tests were not without their limitations and had explicit encoding manipulations.  The methodology used in each study was described in detail. 

 

In conclusion, Danker & Anderson concluded 1) There was substantial evidence in the literature to support that sensory regions are reactivated during the retrieval of sensory associations.  2) Different processing modules within the visual system are reactivated during the retrieval of specific kinds of visual associations and 3) Emotional regions of the brain are activated during the retrieval of emotional associations (2010).  They answered questions such as “How is reactivation affected by the accessibility of retrieved information?  They found no answer to this question but suggested future research should be directed toward determining what factors influence reactivation of encoded regions during retrieval more generally and not just during the retrieval of visual information.

 

The information presented in this article is complex and very technical.  Reading it can be a little difficult;  for example, reading through multiple citations in one sentence to get to the important details.  However, reviewing the different methods used in the studies to determine how information is retrieved will help an instructional designer develop a training program that will enhance a learner’s ability.

 

The second article entitled “The Information Processing Approach to Cognition” can be found at http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/infoproc.html.  This resource simplifies chapter 3 in our course text.  What I liked about the article is that it provided additional theory models and informational web links. What I learned new was that according to the author (Huitt, 2003), “a created memory is very short (less than ½ second for vision; about 3 seconds for hearing).” 

January 11, 2010

Blogging is a concept that is new to me.  I heard about chat rooms but had not embraced the ideal of talking on the internet to a lot of different people. In researching what a blog is, I learned that it is a personal online journal or dairy.  Dairies were books where one wrote their inner most thoughts.  These thoughts were usually kept private under a lock on the book.  Now, blogs have taken sharing thoughts from the privacy of a journal to a public knowledge sharing communication tool.  Blogging is ever evolving.  They serve as an educational tool for reflection and knowledge building. It includes a collection of two-way communication editorials on specific topics with links to more sites.

There were over two million internet blog and resource sites related to Instructional Design and Technology.  The three sites I chose that have relevant content related to work as an instructional design professional are (1) Instructional Design – 252 Resources, (2) Instructional Design – The Real Projects blog and (3) 35 More Qualities of the Ideal Instructional Designer: The eLearning Coach.

The first site: Instructional Design – 252 Resources has four areas of knowledge sharing.  The “Overview” tab is a table of content of the information you can find at this site.  The “Publications” tab includes a full range of research, reports and other publications that EDUCAUSE and its members have written about Instructional Design.  Under the “Presentation” tab are Powerpoint or Adobe PDF presentations EDUCAUSE and its members tagged with Instructional Design.  This area also includes bookmarks/search this page with symbols. The “Podcasts” tab includes a list of podcasts presentation that can be downloaded.  Each presentation includes notes that let you know additional information such as if video streaming of the podcast is available.  EDUCAUSE hosts a number of blogs for its members which can be found under the “Blogs” tab.  This site will be helpful resource for “how to” instructions related to instructional design.  The link to this site is: http://www.educause.edu/node/645/tid/17352?times=1263091557.

The second site is “The Real Projects Blog.”  This site is another knowledge sharing site that includes using games designers on e-learning projects to help the instructional designer understand what is happening in other development areas.  It is their belief instructional designers need to be able to work on a range of media taking a little bit from game design, graphic design, instructional design and learning design.  The site exchanges websites, articles and videos.  Some of the categories listed at this site are “Interactive design,”  “Learning management systems,” “Handheld learning,” and “Touchscreens.” This site will be a useful resource for using implementing games and graphics in instructional design.  The link to this site is: http://blog.realprojects.co.uk/tag/instructional-design/.

The third site: “The eLearning Coach” is a guidance and advice site for creating online learning.  It includes articles and resources with related website links on topics such as design, elearning 2.0, cognition, media, business and books review.  One article of interest listed the “10 Qualities of the Ideal Instructional Designer.”  Through contributions from the eLearning community, the list of qualities expanded to 35.  This site will be a beneficial resource for sharing knowledge related to training needs assessment.  The link to this site is: http://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/35-more-qualities-of-the-ideal-instructional-designer/.

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