The Future of Instructional Technology

I really liked this topic. It's always interesting to try to predict the future. People have been trying to do it for years. Even more interesting than trying to predict the future is to look at previous predictions and see how close they've come to reality. Some have taken centuries to come about, others only decades.

Instructional Technology is going to continue to develop at a break-neck pace is my prediction. How can you predict the future when technology is developing so rapidly. I remember talking with a fellow trainer just a few months ago. He had a 512K thumb drive built into his watch. I was so impressed he could carry his handouts with him instead of relying on carrying a disk, although we commiserated that 512K wasn't much space. Just six months later, I have a 4Gb thumb drive sitting on my desk! I noticed the other day at MicroCenter, they have 16Gb thumb drives available! that's just over a few months. The way technology is moving, you don't have to wait long to see if your predictions are coming true, just wait a couple months!

My prediction doesn't have to do with any specific technology. I think we're on the edge of a complete revolution in education itself. With the availability of technology, I think education is going to become education for each student, taking into consideration his or her likes, dislikes, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Learning will be geared to the individual rather than to a class. Technology makes it possible for one teacher to customize the curriculum for each student. The Internet provides information in a number of modalities, allowing learners to access information in their preferred learning style. Students will no longer to forced to learn in a way that doesn't match their preferences. The flip side of that coin is that other students will no longer excel because teachers use their preferred learning style.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes to embrace this way of teaching. We may have to wait until the old guard teachers retire and new ones come on board before we see the sweeping changes that need to take place in education.

Professional Development

As Instructional Technology continues to progress with newer and different technologies, the need for professional development becomes more and more important. At one time, teachers could get by with 2 or 3 in-service days to pick up any new information that would impact the way they teach.

those days are gone. As we're read, the students are more advanced at using some new technologies that the teachers are. Students are frustrated by having to "leave their brains at the door" and use printed materials and lectures to learn. As Marc Prensky has argued (Do They Really Think Differently? Prensky, 2001), students today aren't just more comfortable with technology. Because they have grown up with technology, they think differently. This impacts how they learn in the classroom. The methods of teaching the last generation won't work with the next generation.

All of this means that teachers have to become much more open to changing and growing as learners as well as teachers. Professional development is no longer a tow or three times a year option. Teachers and Instructional Technologists have to learn sid-by-side with the students. The most important thing is that teachers lose the fear of needing to be the smartest person in the room. The Internet has become the great leveler in terms of access to knowledge.

The idea of using hypermedia in the classroom almost seems like an argument that's over before it starts. Everyone is already using hypermedia. surveys show that the majority of students use the Internet to begin researching a topic they know nothing about. What is the Internet if not a collection of hyperlinks.

To me the real issue is not whether to use hypermedia or not, but how to teach students to use hypermedia most effectively. In our discussions online, I found it interesting that so many people in class wrote that they sometimes have difficulty keeping track of where they go once they start following links. I know I have a real issue of following a hyperlinked trail that doesn't always take me back to where I started. Sometimes, the links that interest me take me in an entirely different direction than where I needed to go. If that's the case for adults, what's a kid going to do.

Learning to use hypermedia needs to be a gradual process in a controlled environment. You can't just throw a kid out in cyberspace. The learning experience needs scaffolding to teach students how to use links in a way that builds information, rather than just randomly clicking to see where it goes. Teachers need to build a hypermediated experience for their students that walks them through how to orgasnize information in a structured framework. In order to build that structure, teachers:

1. Provide the framework and allow students to fit information into the structure
2. Work with students to create the framework based on the knowledge they currently have, and showing how to build on that knowledge.
3. Allow students to create the framework themselves based on previous knowledge and experience.

Learning to use hypermedia in the classroom provides an excellent opportunity for constructivist based learning experiences. With hypermedia, there is no one "right" way to learn information. It's based entirely on the student. However, providing guidance to younger students, allowing them to develop a framework for using hypermedia will greatly increase a students' use of the information available.

Copyright or Copywrong?

I found the discussion and research on copyrights fascinating. I had been familiar with the concept of fair use for quite some time, however, I had no idea that copyrights were held so tightly for movies or television programs. I guess I thought that materials used in the classroom had a lot more leeway for use than they actually do. For example, I didn't know that a teacher could ony use a recording of a television show for 10 days after the show was broadcast or for up to 45 days for review purposes.

Being in the corporate world, our general rule of thumb is, "If we didn't buy it, we can't use it." Even so, we use the materials of others as a blueprint of what we do. We borrow tables of contents, use the examples from a book to develop examples of our own. Depending on the topic, there's only so much originality in your work. What keeps us honest, however, is that even though we may base our information on the work of someone else, by the time it's reviewed and edited by others in the company, it is truly our own work.

Fair use doesn't really exist in the corporate world. Perhaps because I work for a for-profit company, those in the company also recognize that someone is entitled to fair compensation for their own work. Or perhaps I should say that fair use doesn't exist our our company. We may use a quote from someone's work, but it has to be appropriately attributed. Other companies may not be quite as ethical with the work of others. I have known other people that borrow freely from training classes that the company doesn't own the rights to.

I think copyright infringement and how not to it it are something that everyone should be much more aware of. I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn more about it.

Textbooks or Notebooks?

It's funny, until writing about whether to replace textbooks with notebooks, I would have thought it was a no-brainer. Why wouldn't you replace textbooks with notebooks? Textbooks get outdated, ripped, torn, lost, and rarely opened. Replacing an obsolete techonolgy with a notebook computer should seem simple.

After spending more time looking at both sides of the issue, it's not the no-brainer I thought it was. I still believe in computers in the schools and I still think we should provide a computer for every student. However, along with those beliefs, is the belief that it takes more than just throwing computers at kids.

The more I look at this question, the more I realize that what's really outdated and obsolete are not the books, but the schools. We're working with a system that has had minor changes in centuries. We still use a model created when books were too expensive for everyone to buy, hence the lecture method.

Gary Stager, the author of an outstanding article on computers in the schools wrote, "While it is valuable to use the web to access information, the real learning power of computing is in the act of constructing something. Somewhere along the way the learner needs access to a computer and constructionist software environments in order for this to be possible. . . . If the goal is to maximize learning opportunities, then kids should be [using] computers for making things, collaborating with others and contributing to the body of knowledge — not passively surfing the web."

In the instances where laptops in the schools have failed, its because the laptops were used as passive learning devices, a replacement for books. The incredible power of the technology was never really tapped. To the kids it was just the same old, same old.

We need to go back to the drawing board where schools are concerned and take a good, hard look at what we're trying to accomplish. Have schools become a cattle call? Just herding kids from one room to another? If we're trying to give our kids skills for tomorrow, shouldn't we figure out what those skills are? The Partnership for 21st Century Skills listed the skills needed in the future. To learn how to use those skills requires a huge paradigm shift in how we teach.

Constructivism is a topic that makes a lot of people, me included, nervous. Superficially, it implies anarchy in the classroom, people wandering around with nothing to do, and a lack of control.

Once I got into the research I discovered that there are many facets of constructivism, which makes sense. Everything exists on a spectrum and you find extremists on every topic. Oddly enough, my experience with constructivism in the classroom was one of my most enjoyable learning experiences and was for the class Criterion-Referenced Instruction (CRI) developed by Robert Mager, a big proponent of behaviorism!

Before going to the class, you have to identify the class you are developing. Your own class is used in all of the exercises. When you first get to class, you're in an auditorium with all of the other people taking the course. The course managers explain that you'll be working on your own, explain how to use the course map to determine the order you want to take the modules, and how to find resources to use. They then point out that you are responsible for your own learning and for finishing the class.

To complete each module you:

1. Review the objectives of the module
2. Review the resources available, which might include videos, books, articles, or interviewing your fellow students.
3. Complete the practice for acquiring the skill. Practice might include finding the errors in the examples, developing an example on your own, etc. You can practice as much as you want to feel comfortable with the skill.
4. Complete the assessment for the skill. A worksheet gave you the parameters for the assessment.
5. Review the feedback form. This worksheet asked a series of questions to check your work against.
6. Review by the course manager. The course manager checked your assessment, asked questions, and provided feedback.

The reason I loved this class is because I could work at my own pace. I didn't compare myself to faster or slower students. I could ask the course managers for individual time. If I didn't understand something, I didn't feel like an idiot for asking a question that might be obvoius to everyone else. I could explore the topics on my own. I could spend as much or as little time on a topic, depending on my level of interest, but everyone had the same minimum skill level. I could choose the order of completing the topics. Some topics had prerequisites, other didn't, but I could choose which I wanted to study and the order to go through them.

While it probably isn't a pure constructivist model, the class had many elements of constructivism; learner-centered, non-linear, building on learner's experiences and knowledge, integrating the learning with the learner's life experience.

It's a model that brings constructivism into organizations that are used to a much more structured instructional approach.

Introduction

Hello everyone!
Welcome to my blog. I'll be talking about the issues that impact education in general and corporate training specifically.

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