Monthly Archives: July 2009

Vancouver and OpenED conference

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Next week I am off on a trip to Vancouver to the Open Education conference, and I am presenting a small paper on Personalization and Contextualization of resources as often being a problem in their further use.
After that I am taking part in the Future of Learning in a Networked World event. Yesterday I discovered we would be in Seattle at the same time as Gnomedex and I am just wondering about whether to make an effort to attend this. It is a little outside my usual activities but it looks like quite a remarkable gathering.

The plan:

7-11th August: interviews, cycling, Simon Fraser University, University of Britich Columbia
12-15th Conference
15-20th visits to sum sustainability education inititives
21-22nd, Seattle, then home.  Maybe Gnomedex.

TYPE 1 “Oh, I hear you are going away, enjoy yourself . .   (followed by random comments like Vancouver is great, Good conference, coffee when you get back, keep in touch, stay well etc etc)”
TYPE 2 “Oh I hear you are going away, I’ve been meaning to ask you to do this, can you do it now or before you go away?  Will you be on e-mail?  Who do I go to for problems?”
“This little job won’t take too long” (We have a saying “Yeah Right”)

And as I said elsewhere.  I’m interested in particular to meet up with Educational Designers.

Educational Design: inside the black box

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I’ve pinched this title from some of the work on formative assessment.  It is quite expressive of what I want to say.

I remain interested at the role commonly referred to as Educational Design with the two alternative titles:

  • instructional designer (more behavourist overtones maybe)
  • learning designer (a recent term)

I spent some time earlier in 2009 interviewing some educational designers on the processes they used in their work.

What happens between getting the brief (or the design specification) and producing a design/conceptual design?

Blackbox

I also asked them to describe some of their successful projects.

It has been very interesting to see the common features that have been emerging.

I would like to do a few more interviews: so if you are interested, please get in touch with me. Usually 20-25 minutes in a cafe, or we could meet via Skype.