The strategy chosen included a hybrid structure that involved learners to select a traditional classroom course as a focus for activities, and then to build a generalizable knowledgbase based on the experiences of converting it to an online course. This knowledgbase would then become a cumulative resource for the entire ID staff to use for continuous improvement of DL development. Activities included both individual and group activities, with an emphasis on peer review and discussion. Skills development also included exploration of Web 2.0 tools as optimal learning strategies for certain areas of content and for community interaction, and integration of Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction into online lesson activities.

Reflection: Literature in this class included a call to form activities that were closely analogous to the learning topics. This was a particularly resonant idea for me because I feel that authentic experiences are the ones I remembered best in my own learning experiences. Another challenge in this project was to condense the final report within a prescribed length suitable for submission to a client while retaining the essence of the proposal’s message.

The group effort in this project included diverse levels of ID experience – from nearly none to MS students in their second year. As the team leader, I felt responsible for supporting and facilitating each person’s ability to use remote collaboration tools (Skype), and to establish a baseline knowledge of ID principles among the less-experienced in the group. Of the former task, I found that sharing my online knowledgebase that I had created in IDE-621 Principles of Learning and Instructional Theory was very helpful.

The Appendix of this report included a matrix I created of synchronous and asynchronous media cross-indexed against Types of Learning for the purpose of exploring Supportive Instructional Strategies. A project for future exploration would be to go through this matrix and report findings.

This project was selected because of my ongoing professional relationship with Mark Schappert, a Career Counselor at LeMoyne College, for whom I designed the front-end appearance of the C2C Advantage system itself, as well as the promotional and marketing website.

Reflection: Even simple evaluation studies can be enormously complicated because of contextual factors, political agendas, and limited access to the people or resources needed to collect meaningful data. The most important impact this project has had on my ID studies (though I do not plan to pursue evaluation in my career) is that it highlighted factors in design and development that will be examined in great detail in the future. From a creative development perspective, I realize that a good idea must also have a backend value, or else it will be perceive as wasteful.

Having had previous experience with the C2C Advantage program and with Mr. Schappert, I felt I was able to ask better evaluation questions and serve as a leader for project partners Ryan Villar and Lu Chen in discussions with Mr. Schappert about how the program operates.

On the other hand, my previous involvement introduced elements of perceived conflict of interest in the evaluation, which had to be accounted for in the methods of the plan – even though I had no financial interest in the product itself.

Project Description: The assignment was to create a PowerPoint presentation utilizing message design and presentation development techniques. The goal was to create a document that was complementary with the presenter, rather than redundant. The challenge was to maintain visual interest and present a sequence of information about a topic so that the message will unfold clearly for the audience.

I chose to present User-based Design for this assignment because I was in the midst of developing a rationale for the use of UBD in my Design-based Research project. In order to do this, I had to present my case for UBD to my research team members. This PPT was not available in time for the DBR presentation, so a less refined version was presented instead. The feedback and discussion that followed helped to inform creating a better message for this PPT project.

Reflection: As much as dislike PowerPoint, I was surprised to discover that it is actually possible to create a visually interesting PPT presentation. The visual interest, however, places more of a burden on the presenter (as it should) to help the audience make sense of the topic through his or her verbal skills. I hope to use this project as a basis for a conference presentation at a future date.

Normally, this kind of learning situation is best conducted in-person since the resolution of feedback needed to comprehend the lesson content is very refined. However, I felt challenged to present this lesson in an online format – especially with the benefit of repeatable video clips for the user to explore.

Reflection: Creating the right video media for a high-resolution form of feedback requires great attention to detail. The videos I found were shot with excellent cameras, and the camera work was good (not referring to my own introduction video, of course!). If I were to re-do this, I would replace the still images in the Adjustment Options to video content for better representation of cause-effect.

Reflection: This project was the “second half of my revenge” (the first half being the original IMD analysis of the textbook, also in this portfolio) from having been subjected to the actual CIW course in basic JavaScript as part of my CIW Web Design certification in 2008. It was from having struggled through that course that I was introduced to the principles of Instructional Design by my instructor, Carlos Villalba. I would later explore the IDD&E MS program at SU and apply.

What I’ve discovered from this project was that visualizing ideas for a technical subject requires a number of trail and error attempts to come up with the right metaphors, and careful writing. The “box of donuts” metaphor was a third attempt to visually express the concept of a variable, mainly because it was a familiar “container” that was capable of having a variety of things in it. Second, the translation from the visual icon to the text representation of “myDonuts” felt like an easily retained relationship.

I felt my skills as video editor were also useful in this project because I had to project my work to an imaginary audience of novice web designers. My experience with visualizing ideas and relationships through imagery was useful.

Reflection: This project was, in a sense, “revenge” from having been subjected to the actual CIW course in basic JavaScript as part of my CIW Web Design certification in 2008. It was from having struggled through that course that I was introduced to the principles of Instructional Design by my instructor, Carlos Villalba. I would later explore the IDD&E MS program at SU and apply for admission.

This analysis gave a theoretical voice to the struggle I felt when I originally participated in the JavaScript course. I felt there was something “off” about it that could explain why I felt discouraged, frustrated, and at times depressed that I could not excel in the course. Of course, there were other students who may not have felt as I did about the instructional design of the course. Others may have succeeded without much stress, while I, perhaps, am simply not “wired” to comprehend programming languages.

But I could not accept this as an excuse for my experience in the course. There had to be other ways to communicate principles that made better sense than an avalanche of text and tables. My personal and professional history has always involved sound and visual modes of organizing ideas, and it seemed odd to me that a Web Design course would be devoid of any visualization of its principles. This analysis is an attempt to articulate how such an alternative might be developed.

The result of this analysis informed a subsequent IMD assignment where a wireframe of an online instructional product for this JavaScript section was produced (also in this portfolio).

iAdvocate - Prototype Web App

Project Description: This Design-based Research project involved identifying an area for instructional research, and developing an intervention (a product or method) to use in collaboration with participant/practitioners for whom the intervention is designed. The project involved conducting a cycle of theory development, research questions, product development, implementation, user testing, data collection, analysis, feedback, and research discussion, with the understanding that future cycles would be conducted based on findings.

The research team was comprised of four doctoral students and myself. We selected as our topic the development of an iPhone app to assist parents of children with a disability to improve their advocacy skills, primarily in interactions with school administrators and teachers in Individualized Education Plans (IEP) for their child.

The original development of the iPhone app – named iAdvocate – was begun in 2009 by Dr. Alan Foley, Thomas Bull (director of the Syracuse University Parent Advocacy Center – SUPAC), and Kevin Forgard, a PhD student. Thomas and Kevin collaborated to develop a plan to conduct informal learning on an iPhone via the iAdvocate app, under the rationale that an “anytime/anyplace” method for information access would be beneficial to users. Kevin produced an instructional design plan and the development wireframes for the prototype. Kevin’s final paper and wireframes were used as the starting point for our Design-based Research in September 2010.

An Action x Cognition matrix

The focus of my paper is in the analysis of the first cycle of research, specifically in the area of content analysis and the organization of it within the app. In reviewing the user’s responses to the prototype, a number of issues emerged. On the basis of user responses, and from an analysis of the original content organization, it is proposed that the next iteration of research and development of iAdvocate utilize a User-based Design framework.

It is propose that UbD principles, applied to iAdvocate development, would refine the identification of relevant content through eliciting user-defined criteria, and organizing their responses into steps (an Action x Cognition matrix). This would promote ease of navigation within the information system, offer flexibility for the system to re-organize and assimilate new data, and support users to accept roles in the system’s evolution.

Further, the use of UBD principles would provide the ancillary benefit of furnishing the DBR process with a channel of communication between the researchers and the participants that efficiently facilitates co-orientation in the feedback and formative development process.

A Mockup of a Horizontally Oriented Information System Based on Action x Cognition

Reflection: User-based Design is a radically different approach to ascertain user needs and uses of information. Instructional designers do not intuitively embrace the idea of relinquishing control over content organization from a subject matter expert to, instead, a “subject matter network” where expertise is considered narrow and constraining to growth. There are Constructivist foundations in Dervin’s Sense-making Methodology, upon which much of UbD is based, and this philosophy is not necessarily embraced as canon for ID.

Far from promoting a Constructivist worldview, my goals instead were to seek where the energy was within the user community and identify their mutual goals. As a program of informal learning, I felt that the instructional design of iAdvocate ought to foster communication within the community of parents – whose bonding and support of each other was apparent in user testing – and to place it within a structured, ordinal information environment rather than a simple index of content.

The principles of UbD intend to create a prescribed “problem space” within which users experiences are used to develop ordinal steps in the process of achieving goals. Below each step are accumulations of questions and perspectives associated with each step, the answers to which help the user to understand their “stopping point” better and to help them to move forward. UbD proposes that users should be given the tools to build and refine the content as they see fit, rather than according to a developer or programmer.

In the process of developing iAdvocate for this research, I was able to quickly develop a functioning Web app prototype using WordPress and the WPTouch Pro plugin, which adapts a conventional website into a smartphone compatible layout. This helped to put together a low-cost prototype for user testing without involving an Objective-C programmer, while allowing for nearly instantaneous revisions during class discussions. The Web app had its limitations, however, such as the absence of a persistent Home button and no horizontal navigation. But for the needs of the assignment and the relative simplicity of the prototype’s functional requirements, it served its purpose well for the class and for user testing.

This project revealed to me that there is a notable absence of existing Web development that presents ordinal information in horizontal space – which is the conventional way we visualize events over time. Websites do not navigate horizontally, thus imposing (perhaps) a sense of hierarchy in information perception.

Mobile apps and virtual reality systems, however, are able to operate in ways websites cannot. This opens up areas for future research to see how global self-help communities might be able to migrate away from Web-based systems to mobile, tablet, or VR systems. These platforms may afford the ability for information systems designers, interactivity designers, and instructional designers to be free of the functional constraints of the Web.

Reflection: Good video programming can be created using very simple tools, as long as it is known how to use them. This project required that I distill nearly 20 years of professional video production and post-production experience into 1 1/2 pages without sounding didactic, too technical, or overly wrought with high aesthetic visions of a full-blown video production. I had to focus only on the instructional content that mattered to the audience in their context.

The MS program, as it turns out, frequently required tasks and assignments involving online research, blogging, personal learning environment development, online resource aggregation, presentation visuals, image shooting and editing, and other composing skills in order to complete assignments. I had also noticed that many of my colleagues’ skills were somewhat narrow, such as having excellence in MS Word or PowerPoint, but not much else.

This inspired an inquiry into Digital Literacy assessment instruments that might be useful for use in a higher education context. Student assessments, in turn, might inform the need for student (and faculty) support programs within university departments. The research found that DL assessment for higher education often begins in secondary schools, so I included relevant information in that area as well.

Reflection: The most dramatic discovery in this project was the disparity in how Digital Literacy is named and defined. The most difficult part of the project was simply finding the correct research terms: information literacy, ICT competence, web literacy, 21st century skills, new literacy practices, information fluency, tech literacy, information competence, digital competence, computer literacy, media literacy, eCompetence, media competence, and others. Having finally arrived at an umbrella framework called “Digital Literacy”, I was able to more easily locate literature.

From the paper’s Conclusion: Selecting the best assessment instrument for Digital Literacy involves consideration of many factors, including approach, feasibility, implementation, scope, reporting structure, and cost, as well as consideration of output needs and social context. As the population of students and their respective Digital Literacy skills evolve – as will the network systems upon which they operate – we may also expect that Digital Literacy assessment instruments will continue to develop to measure the competences needed to succeed in educational environments.

As an additional note, this paper was published on my blog around May 2010. It has since been downloaded by visitors over 100 times, and appears #1 in a Google search for “digital literacy assessment instrument”. Although the report is admittedly limited in its scope, it appears to be useful to many as a starting point in understanding the topic.

As a graduate assistant, I was given full support by the Office of the Dean to conduct interviews with key administrators, management, and support staff to determine the nature of School policy, procedures, task priorities, organizational structure, skills, attitudes, tools, and other factors. The final report was submitted for review to the Office of the Dean.

My strategy was to view the School of Education as comprised of three interrelated systems: Content Workflow (how did content originate and pass through the system); Personnel (who was doing which tasks); and ICT & CMS Logistics (how was the composing system constructed). These sub-systems were then analyzed based on interviews, website analytics, and CMS analysis, and the results placed into tables for comparison between how the system currently operates versus optimal. A single integrated Master Flowchart of all sub-systems was created, from which the Office of the Dean and support staff could review at a glance to see which areas were in need of attention.

Finally, a number of recommendation were offered to inform policy decisions and staffing.

Reflection: FEA is like investigative reporting, and requires keen acumen in interpersonal relationships to be able to form a true picture of an organization, its systems, and people. I felt that my prior skills in verbal discourse with creative directors (for film production) was useful in helping interviewees to express how they felt about their situation, obligations, and levels of skill.

I felt the best way to understand the macro-system was to break it down into its sub-components, and rely primarily on the Content Workflow sub-system as a way to measure the capabilities and needs of the other two sub-systems. This approach was not explicitly suggested in the textbooks for this class, but it felt like the best way to find optimal operation. From this baseline, the other subsystems could be measured logically for their ability to fulfill the work, or for management to consider policy review or re-organization.