Sharing our expertise
There has been a lot of talk lately about how academics can use social media to share their emerging research and make more direct recommendations to the practitioners who might benefit from knowing their results.* Too much important research is buried in academic journals that practitioners cannot access (and written in language that isn’t relatable), so it’s quite useful for …
Flavors of design
Today I engaged in a conversation with Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) and others in the #moocmooc stream that has prompted me to ponder the difference between instructional design and learning environment design. And thinking about that has me bouncing between my constructivist heart that tells me I can never really be sure people “meet objectives” and my business/academic heart that …
Celebrating the art of instructional design
In the coming weeks, I’m participating as I can in the latest iteration of #moocmooc which is focused on instructional design. The topic is near to my heart… I engage in instructional design for a living: as a faculty developer, adjunct faculty member, and workshop facilitator – and, in a totally meta twist, the subject of my courses and workshops …
The Biology of Learning Environments
An article in January’s Harvard Business Review has caught my attention because it adds validity and nuance to the broader approach we want to take in supporting learning in organizations. Martin Reeves, Simon Levin, and Daichi Ueda write a nice analysis of businesses as biological ecosystems – more specifically, as complex adaptive systems. They warn that organizations are going extinct …
A Momentous Year
While I have been horribly neglectful of my blog in 2015, it has been a pretty big year for me. My writing and sharing hasn’t been abandoned, it simply hasn’t appeared much in this space. Here’s a quick roundup of my 2015 contributions, appearing elsewhere: Learning Environments by Design It isn’t every year that one publishes a book, and I …
“Birth” Announcement
It’s a book! Learning Environments by Design September 14, 2015 8.8 ounces, 8 inches long, 192 pages Having been lovingly nurtured along for at least seven years, my ideas around designing learning environments have at last been shaped into a real book. I am so excited to announce that Learning Environments by Design was published by ATD Press on September …
Tearing up the syllabus
This is a thinking-out-loud post, and I would welcome comments – on or off line. Over the summer, I’ve been working on revising a course I teach in adult learning theory. I finished my syllabus last weekend, but just as it is now time to start getting the course built in Canvas (it’s 100% online), I am seriously considering tearing …
The best of times and the worst of times
I have woefully neglected this blog this year, for good reasons… I started a new full time job (more about that in a later post) and I started it in the middle of a term when I was working as an adjunct for four (!!) online courses. This was a great idea when I controlled my own time… a bit …
Lessons from the good doctor
This post is titled “Lessons from the Good Doctor,” but these are not lessons from the good Dr. Catherine Lombardozzi, but from the good Dr. Seuss. Let’s take a look at the Dr. Seuss bookshelf. How the Grinch Stole Christmas is one of my favorites. I still get quite choked up every year at the line: “Maybe Christmas, he thought, …
