Response to Michael Goodwin on the loss of the freedom to fail

The two dichotomies, failure and success, illustrate that individuals have a choice in selecting the state of being in which they will be content. As a child, my parents embedded the cliché “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again” in my mind. The lesson they were trying to instill is to not give up on goals. At the moment of failure, individuals have the ability to redirect “the lack of” mentality into positive strategies to eliminate chances of repeating the processes/steps that lead to a failed outcome. Based on the law of attraction theory, an affirmative thought is 100 times more productive than a negative thought. With the premise that there are steps or processes that lead to an event, it is often an anomaly in the process and not the actual end result that fails. For instance in 1961 during the Bay of Pigs invasion, President J.F. Kennedy acted on the advice of one group of experts (the CIA) without evaluating alternate advice from other agencies. As a result, the U.S. was unsuccessful in the attempt to overthrow the Castro regime. However, President Kennedy did not let that failed attempt deter other efforts. Instead, he re-evaluated his strategies and incorporated the use of cabinet members as “devil’s advocates” to probe for gaps and weaknesses in warfare plans. Taking a step back from a failed event offers an opportunity to identify areas of improvement that can make future attempts more successful. In the same instance, parents must allow babies to go through the process of learning to walk. Without the experience of stumbles and tumbles, a baby would not be stable and confident in their ability to properly balance themselves and progress in forward movement. Therefore, we must allow failures to take place in order to grow into self sufficient individuals as part of life’s journey.

Instructional Technology discussion boards and forums

I did a Google search on Instructional Technology forums and ran across the site for Instructional Design Central (http://www.instructionaldesigncentral.com/idforum/) . This site is a discussion forum and blog for instructional designers. I noticed a discussion posting regarding an instructional design course in India. The course description lists tons of course topics to be covered in a 30 day period. The topics range from ADDIE model, Rapid Prototype Modeling, Instructional Design types and modes, Captivate, Camtasia, Dreamweaver, and the list goes on. Being fairly new to the instructional design world, this course seems to be pretty exhaustive, but I question the level of thoroughness of each topic. It seems to me that this course would be better suited for a more advanced instructional designer looking for a refresher or exposure to new types of technology available for instructional design. It would be interesting to see how much a class like this would be and the number of past learners that have attended this course. The deeper I explore instructional technology, the broader the concept ranges, which means endless possibilities for future careers.

LinkedIN responses...

I’ve been a member of the Instructional Designer & E-Learning Professionals’ Group on the LinkedIN social networking site for a couple of years and decided to post the exact same question that I posted to the IT Forum group to see what sort of responses I would receive. I expected to receive a large number of responses in LinkedIN because the community is set up to allow people to join the group AND mostly every member of the group is not just a name, but also has a picture displayed. It seemed fair to me that a community would be more willing to communicate and collaborate when they can associate a face with a question. However, either my assumption may be wrong or my question was beyond the experience of the group. With that said, I only received TWO responses from community members....

Remove me from this mailing group...

It is so interesting to see the number of people on ITForum that will respond with the response of "remove me from this mailing group". It is obvious that they going banana-nuts with all the emails that they receive in their email box. I would like to see ITforum with a modified site that stores the different questions/comments of the community instead of getting tons of emails daily, but maybe they designed this site in this simplistic form so that they do not have to maintain a database of responses.

Wonder if they thought about using some of the blog creators that are more user friendly....like www.weebly.com/ or many other free sites? Something that makes you go hmmmmm...

ITForum update....Theory of forgetting

Since my last post, I have received feedback from members of the ITForum community.  At first I was thinking that the lack of response was due to me being a new comer needing to gain acceptance into the community.  However, I was wrong.  The community is notified via email so sometimes it takes longer for them to check and respond.  About 3 people so far have shared some new perspectives.  Researching theories of forgetting was a suggestion from one member as awareness of the data relating to how people forget could be helpful in planning instructional events.  I've never thought of considering "forgetting" as a component in instructional design.  Definitely opening my eyes to new things....

IT Forum Posting Update

Well, I must say that I was expecting a large number of responses from the ITForum listserv group, but instead I received one email from one of the forum controllers that called my question "nebulous", Yea...that's right, meaning vague. To me a lot of the other questions that I've seen from ITForum users were vague and lacking definite form, however, there seemed to always be at least 5-10 responses. It appears to me that this Professional Learning Community is one where new comers have to gain acceptance into the group before the knowledge sharing begins.

The ITForum Control person did suggest that I search the ERIC (Education Resource Information Center) database for content related to my question. I would have expected to see at least 2-5 of the forum members to have suggestions on how they have determined the duration of web based training modules, since this is suppose to be a group of novice to experienced instructional designers.

Now I plan to ask the same question within another professional learning community and see what response(s) I receive.

Stay Tuned....

ITForum Question Posted...Analysis phase for Web based training question

I finally decided to post a question to the ITForum community to see how many responses I receive and the quality of the responses. I'm excited to see the experiences shared from others that I can actually put to some good use on my current project at work. I'm finding that these Professional Learning Communities are social networking groups that promotes knowledge sharing. Let's see what happens....

Email contents:
IT Forum Family,

I am a PhD student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and also work as a consultant where I recently joined a project as an Instructional Designer. We are in analysis phase for developing training modules (web based) for approximately 1200 employees. For those of you that have experience in this area, what has been the rule of thumb for an acceptable time duration for a module that the learner will retain the material? Do any of you have any sites you can direct me to research more on this phase?

Any input would be appreciated.

LinkedIN topic: Remote work for Instructional Designers

On the discussion board in LinkedIN, the question was asked: "Why oppose remote workers for Instructional Design?"

In my opinion, Instructional Design is ideal for remote working because once you get access to the design tool and the clients requirements, then the designer can work from home without the client having to supply a desk or phone, which is cost effective for the company. I think it is hard for many clients/employers to be convinced that a designer is actually working when they say "work from home". I personally feel that I accomplish more in a quick setting opposed to in an office setting with frequent cube visitors, numerous phone rings around you, and the amount of time it takes to travel to and fro home. My thought is this, just because someone is 'on the clock' does NOT mean they are being PRODUCTIVE. This is a new day and clients/employers should recognize the cost benefit and employee work/life balance of remote work.

EduTech Wiki review

I decided to see what material the EduTech Wiki had on Adult Learning and found the information to be scarce. I was expecting tons of material that discusses the intelligence types and methods that engage the different types. It seems that when designing courses for distance education and traditional classrooms, the adult learner's learning style is overlooked. However, I was happy to see a link to the International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning (iJAC) that has focus group papers related to developing learning centered environments.

Another topic that I looked up on EduTech was Behaviorism, which had tons of information, examples, and references. I actually wasn't expecting there to be some much material related to the behavorial pedagogy. Glad I kept search this Wiki!

IT Forum

One thing I must say is that once a question is asked on the IT Forum site, just sit back and watch out for the rush of responses. A recent topic that was interesting to me was regarding estimations of online courses. There are several responders that mention FrontEnd as an estimation tool which I would like to see how it is used and the accuracy on the estimations.

I know it would take much more time initially to develop a course for a novice designer but is it taken into consideration on whether the designer has a development background versus not? For instance, someone that understands the logic behind development would have a quicker learning curve than someone without those skills. I would expect that there be a buffer percentage to allow for situations like this so that the estimations will be closer to accurate.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Distance Learning...

I heard today, September 16, 2009, on Fox News that Google was acquired the company reCAPTCHA. This appears to be a good move for Google because reCAPTCHA provides services that provide Optical character recognition (OCR). This means that searching and deciphering a users input will be less tedious especially when using the Digital Libraries. I must admit, I do enjoy the auto spell feature on the Google site when I’m searching different topics. It makes me wonder if reCAPTCHA can be used as an added feature for online classes in such a way as to search the class contents for particular information. Does the OCR functionality have the capability to allow for a quick search throughout the online class for related text? I’m sure Google will explore every avenue possible to utilize this new product. I wonder how could the OCR benefit the distance education….

Read more at: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/09/google-boosts-book-digitization-by-capturing-recaptcha.ars