Vivian Neal

Fellow Dance Partners,

The first week of this seminar has been a great learning experience for me both in what I've learned about instructional design and my experience of facilitating online. I'm especially glad to be meeting all of you and hearing your experiences - sharing references and examples of your work has been truely amazing! Several people have participated who are new to instructional design or are not instructional designers - please keep asking questions and sharing - we can all learn from each other and your perspectives are important.

Themes
I've seen three main themes arising from the discussion and you'll see a new discussion open for each theme. In my first post within each, I've summarize some of your ideas and pointed to possible further inquiry and I'm hoping that this will allow deeper discussion in these particular areas. The themes are:

• Evaluation and Instructional Design
• Designing Generative Exchanges
• Building Relationships

A housekeeping item...there was a bit of confusing about the date that this seminar ends. I will keep this seminar open for a total of three weeks, ending on November 20.

Bruce, Marsha and Berel,

We are doing the DANCE! And I'm having so much fun!!

We are doing instructional design by thinking about our audience, discussing needs with the client, trying to understand the client, giving advice, asking questions...

The Skype square dance - Marsha, you can dial in a third person the same way you dial in a second person. They can dial you or you can dial them.

Berel: sorry, I'm not sure about participants using a "yes, no, multiple choice", but I do know that this SCoPE system has a pole that can be used as such - I'm not sure if it's your best bet.

Bruce: SCoPE is in Moodle, and this forum is in SCoPE. It can be threaded (see the little box at the top middle), and I'm guessing that it can highlight new posts, but I'm not sure how. I have it set to send me each new posting by email, and it can be set to not send emails. Posts are searchable also (see the box at the top right).

I hope this helps answer some of your questions.

Berel and Bruce,

The questions that Bruce asked could lead to many creative outcomes! And Berel, your seminar doesn't sound to me like a poor imitation when you use the phone and an online Powerpoint presentation. Depending on your audience and your learning objectives, these might be the perfect technologies.

This is part of the dance - to balance the budget, learning objectives, available technology and expertise, etc.

As Bruce point out, there are many free or affordable technologies. One instructor I know delivers her lectures over Skype www.skype.com which is free. Also, moodle http://moodle.com, which we are using in this "community" is also free - and interactive as we are seeing!

Do not dispair Berel, there are good solutions - keep looking, keep asking questions!

Alan,

Actually, it sounds like you know quite a few dance steps!!

You point out how the short time lines of so many projects don't allow us to "work around a table" with the development team. This seems unfortunate when so much of quality design, in my experiecne, depends on building trust and respect among team members - which takes time.

You also mention the many hats that instructional designers or instructional technologists wear. This is an interesting point, as I find it more and more difficult to describe what I do.

One little point - Rick's Cafe Canadien spells Canadien with an "e", which is the French way to do it. But the blog is in English.... hmmm.

Welcome Peter Loney from Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) and Marsha West from Forks, Washington (USA)!

Peter: I hope you learn lots! Please share your experiences and ask lots of questions!

Marsha - a question for you... In the VHS project, did you work with instructional designers, and if so, did they do anything in particular that helped you find that sense of place that you describe so eloquently?