LearningTimes Green Room

This show offers a “cutaway view” of the making of a podcast. Dan and Susan review the behind-the-scenes work that goes into putting a podcast together, and reflect on what they have done in the past 5-6 months of the LT Green Room. The hosts also explain how certain episodes came about and what transpired after they were posted.

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Show Notes:

Dan and Susan review what they have done in the past 5-6 months of podcasting. They also explain their production process. Lots of thanks to the many listeners who have shared their insights and ideas by way of discussion and emails! Look for more to come!

• Interact live online with Susan and Dan during the Green Room breaks at the 5th Annual Illinois Online Conference!
• Review the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning episode and its accompanying discussion in LearningTimes.org.
• Check out the LT Green Room show on “lurking” as well as the active discussion that followed inside LearningTimes.org.
• Join in the discussion on “defining instructional design” to which Susan and Dan referred in this episode
• See the blog post about the LT Green Room’s “Inspiration to Action” episode made by Steven Bell on the ACRLog.

Addendum:

In the LearningTimes.org discussion thread for this episode, listener Jim Falvo asked the LT GreenRoom hosts to share “recording techniques including choice of equipment, tips for getting good quality presence, and any other advice that will promote professional podcasts”. Susan recorded a special audio response, walking Jim and other listeners through the technical aspects of how the LT GreenRoom podcast is recorded and produced. (Duration: 4:34)

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Instructional Design is a popular phrase but few really understand what it is. In this show, Dan and Susan tackle the definition and ask why we should bother with instructional design.



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Show notes:

Why bother? Instructional Design is a popular phrase but few really understand what it is.

Dan uses one word: intentionality. The long version: People who are thinking concretely wand with intention about how they are creating learning experiences for an audience, and using their assumptions about how people learn.

Susan offers: The marriage of learning theory to instructional strategies that creates an environment conducive to a particular outcome.

Dan thinks everyone has a theory about how people learn, but not many articulate it. And if you don’t know why you created the learning experience the way you did, you can’t change or measure it.

Context – Who is the audience? What do they know? What are the needs? Curricular – How long will it be? What do I assume about how they’ll learn Evaluation – Did the things I plan for work?

Sorting through whether this happens at a macro level or micro level. K12 do it better at the micro level with lesson planning. Higher education looks at design in both. Corporate planners think in terms of seat time.

Martin Ryder’s site is a rich resource for exploring more models.
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/idmodels.html

The common elements (the ADDIE model) include:

• Audience; who is the learner?
• Design; objectives, scope and sequence, pen to paper
• Development; getting the material into a usable form
• Implement; try it out
• Evaluate; reference to Kirkpatrick’s
  http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/k4levels/index.htm

In higher education with accreditation and the boom in portfolios, evaluation has become more important.

Rapid Prototyping: create a small model of what people will experience and ask the content experts for feedback. Good for self-paced learning and the corporate world.

We’d like to hear additional definitions from those working in the field, and particularly if your title is instructional designer, we want to know if your job responsibilities match your definition!

In this bonus episode, Dan and Susan share the recording of a recent phone forum conversation hosted by The Gen Y Project. The discussion was about communicating with "Gen Y" — the tech-savvy, worldly group of 20-something young adults — in the workplace. Dan and Susan were invited by The Gen Y Project to be featured guests.

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Show Notes:

A bonus episode!

Dan and Susan were asked to join the founders of The Gen Y Project in a discussion about Generation Y employees and communication. On January 9, 2007, they dialed in to a phone-based forum. Jonathan Finkelstein also joined the group. Bea Fields, Rob Newbold and Scott Wilder, Generation Y Principals, facilitated the session. What we offer here is the recording from this seminar. It is longer than a typical LTGR episode (this show is just about an hour), and as recorded phone calls go, there are the typical audio challenges, but it’s worth listening.

In this episode, Susan and Dan tackle the question: What happens when key team members leave and take their knowledge? The show kicks off a conversation on how organizations capture internal knowledge, and on what kinds of things motivate people within your organization to share and document their know-how.

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Show Notes:
What happens when key team members leave and take their knowledge? The legacy of information.

This is becoming a huge issue. Content expertise, know-how of how to get things done, past success and failure, tacit and explicit.

Nick Bontis at McMaster University is studying intellectual capital. Much of a company’s value is knowledge that is not documented.

Susan asks what happens when it is not politically safe to write some of the information down!

Exit interviews are one way of capturing some of that information. Companies are building intranets with Q&As, wikis, and other tools. But people won’t share if there is no incentive. Again, Susan points out risk. Dan explains a point system to compensate employees for sharing information.

Intel’s wiki provided an opportunity for employees to share the company’s history.

Susan says with higher education, focus would be important to address specific problems.

Dan shares horrible story as example of where knowledge sharing would have saved time and money.

http://www.schoolforge.net/ — K12 educators looking at open source applications for schools.

http://www.KM4dev.org — International groups like UNESCO and World Bank discuss implications of intellectual capital. (Nick Bontis says only 20% of intellectual capital is used.)

Susan tells about recent experience with consultant and podcasting to keep her work growing.

Listeners, what to do with your intellectual capital? How are your organizations capturing any type of information? How would people become motivated within your organization to share solutions to problems? What kinds of financial incentives would work? Tell us!

In this short show, Dan and Susan wish members of the community a Happy New Year and share their plans for continuing to learn in 2007. Share your own learning-related resolutions with the LT GreenRoom team (use the “Add a Comment” link).

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