Section 7: New Directions for Instructional Design and Technology

The last section of your textbook discusses the concepts of distributed learning, reusability, rich media and the future of instructional design. Focus on the following for your post:

• From Chapter 28 locate 5 examples of distributed learning.
• Academic distributed learning
• A Spanish class in North Texas cooperating with an ESL class in a Texas/Mexico border town to help each other reach their respective learning goals
• Distributed learning based at physical locations
• Wal-Mart Associate training – mainly computerized, but also some hands-on, some videos, and some hard-copy text; though from corporate headquarters, all information is downloaded saved to local servers from which learners access the courses as needed
• Skills-based training
• The Biology Project: Biochemistry, Bill Grimes and Rick Hallick, University of Arizona
  Offers tutorials and interactive quizzes covering basic chemistry, metabolism, enzymes, and molecular structure (part of The Biology Project)
• The Work Ethic Site, Professor Hill, The University of Georgia
  Designed for educators and human resource professionals, this Web site provides a central resource for materials related to the work ethic, work competencies, and employability skills.
• Leisure time distributed learning
• Online gaming, especially multiplayer games and virtual reality worlds like Second Life

• Chapter 29 discusses the concept of reusability. Think back over the courses you've had over your educational career and identify one with poor reusability characteristics. Explain how the course could be redesigned to improve reusability without changing the underlying content.
• There was a “research” class that I took many years ago. It was billed as the perfect research design class for liberal arts and fine arts majors. However, once I was in the class, it turned out to be focused only on researching Mexican and South American literature in Spanish. This did not bother me because that was what I wanted to study, anyway. But, there were several students in the class who were looking for research theory and research design techniques. Because that was what the course was supposed to have been, and was the basis of what we were doing, it seems to me it would have been a lot better to have used the research design curriculum with emphasis on the designing of research projects and just had the literature as one option for a research choice. If the course had been set up with such a design, nearly all the materials and resources that would have been used could have been re-used by other professors teaching similar courses in other departments or even at other universities without having to make major changes to those materials and resources. As it was set up, this particular professor could not even re-use the materials and resources for a different semester without having to make major revisions and changes to nearly all materials and finding different resources.

• Chapter 30 takes a look at using rich media. Find or create a visual for instruction describing its surface and functional features.

 

• This visual from Florida’s Driver Handbook use simplified images, and basic colors to represent vehicles in the process of parallel parking. Functionally, the arrows and the directions of the wheels of the parking vehicle at various stages in the parallel parking process demonstrate very well the things that a driver needs to do at different points in the process.
• Chapter 31 discusses the future of instructional technologies in the near future from metadata to nanotechnology. Describe how nanotechnology could be used to improve a specific job or task you are familiar with.  
• One thing I think is not far in the future and would be a great improvement over several current options is a wrist-worn computer/video player. I was recently reading about a prototype of just such a device that is planned to be the equivalent or superior of current smart phones. If this device becomes a viable, marketed product, it would be a very great benefit in helping to make many everyday activities more convenient, and easier to accomplish. One example: this device was touted as having the ability to connect to any email system and display messages in a 3-D projected display above your wrist, or read messages to the user. Because this device can be voice-controlled and is locked and unlocked via fingerprint recognition, it would make it possible to “read” emails while commuting because the user could have the device read the subject lines and senders, then give voice commands to tell the device to read desired messages aloud so that there would be no need to remove attention from driving.

• And finally! Chapter 32 provides two points of view on the direction of the field - the straight and narrow road and the broad and inclusive road. Which point of view do you agree with and why?

Broad and Inclusive: While the tried and true might sound like a sure-bet, being open to new ideas and new directions is what allows for real innovation. Like the old adage says, “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.” So, I lean more toward the “Broad and Inclusive” view of the direction of technology and instructional development. After all, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did not follow established and tested methods in creating their empires, yet they have each produced some of the most definitive and iconic advances in computer technology and software within the last 30 years.

For the Future