For the past twelve years, I have worked in academic technology at an institute of higher education (with a brief eight-month corporate stint that taught me that my heart and soul truly is in education). However, my academic background is not instructional design but rather in communication arts and theater. I have to say this pairing of work experience and academic education has served me well, as the two routinely go hand in hand with my job.

Toronto – Wintergarden Theater by Cannon in 2D (http://www.flickr.com/photos/16462767@N00/3286021531/)

In a previous entry, I laid out this scenario:

You want to use some Web 2.0 technology in your course, so you have each student create a blog on Blogger to have them chronicle their work and thoughts through the term. As an instructor, you visit these sites and leave comments on the blog. In order for you to keep track of which student has which blog, you ask them to have their names on the front page of their blog and for them to e-mail you the URL so that you can go through them all, moving from one blog to the next. No grades are shared via the blog, and your final evaluation for the student comes in feedback that you provide within the Gradebook area of Blackboard.

For the Educause Learning Initiative’s annual meeting, I’ve been preparing a workshop about various legal issues to keep in mind when designing assignments for a course. Specifically we’ll look at copyright, Creative Commons, and FERPA.

Most people look at me funny when I mention FERPA. Working at different institutions of higher education, it is always mandated that I know something about FERPA. Usually it’s just that student educational records are private, that they shouldn’t be shared, and that directory information can be shared unless a student opts out. Normally FERPA is seen as the concern of administrative offices that hold what have been traditionally seen as student records (grades, registration dates, etc).

Being an instructional designer requires me to have many tools at my disposal to create exciting and meaningful course content. Often, content needs to be displayed in a “chunked” manner to make navigating through the material easier. And it’s nice to have something that is visually appealing as well. For this, I’ve found myself using Softchalk. As with any product, it has things it excels at, and it has limitations. Recently, Softchalk 5 came out, and I was quite excited.

In working in online education, I find myself trying to keep abreast of not only the new developments in the online world, but also in what technologies students are currently using, both inside the classroom and out. A few years ago, I asked a group of students to teach me about Facebook, since it seemed to be all the rage and I knew nothing. I found that no student wanted to talk with me about it.

Here at DePaul, we have the DePaul Online Teaching Series program (DOTS), where we work with faculty to help prepare them for the unique challenges of teaching online. It’s an intensive program that begins with a crash course in designing an online or hybrid course and goes all the way through working with a design consultant to get the course completed and evaluated.

In order to help the faculty effectively accomplish this, we give them the tools they will need to create their course, including a laptop computer, a webcam, a headset microphone, software, and a portable voice recorder. Doing this ensures that they have all the technology they will need to produce a robust, dynamic, and interesting course.

When my husband and I moved in together, I had no problem sharing a living space and all the items usually shared in cohabitation. Except for one—I couldn’t share my computer. I’ve always been quite attached to the computer I use. I have things set up exactly how I like them, and I don’t like others messing with it. Change, on my system, isn’t always easy for me.

This week, however, I took a leap. No, I’m still not sharing with my husband. But I did do something monumental—I upgraded to Office 2007.

Comcast is the dominant provider of Internet service to households in many markets across America. When I first moved to Chicago, it was the provider we went with as well. Back in Minnesota, we were working to move away from it due to a little glitch they had where households in the Twin Cities were, at times, unable to access the Web sites for the college I worked for.

It took months of conversations and a good number of angry students and parents to get the situation resolved.

When I attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s annual meeting in January of 2008, I was sitting in a general session, and I was thinking to myself about online education and what students ‘do’ in that environment. I then got to thinking about service-learning and how authentic, situational, and service-based assignments can be of great value to students.

All of that led to the thought that, for the most part, online learning and service-learning seem to be mutually exclusive. The question is, do they have to be?

A few years ago at a conference, I had the opportunity to hear Eric Larson speak about faculty use of technology and support. Since then, my colleagues have heard me refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of faculty support, so I thought that it was time that I wrote a blog post about this.

Larson’s premise was basically that faculty use of technology loosely follows the framework of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. In a nutshell, the higher needs on Maslow’s scale cannot be met if the lower needs have not been taken care of first. In Maslow’s hierarchy, the levels are as follows: Biological and Physical, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Cognitive, Aesthetic, Self-actualization, and Transcendence.