Blog posts

How might faculty members use blogs to help their students reach particular learning goals? I use blogs to accomplish two goals in my courses: to facilitate serious communication and cooperation between students on course–related topics and tasks, and to generate efficient and meaningful class discussions.

The difference with blogs, and it is an important difference, is that students take possession of the class blog in ways they never did with these other products.

<p>The bottom line: Organizations can no longer focus strictly on working, while ignoring living and learning. Neither can you, as a knowledge professional. The enterprise of the future must bring all three of those areas into balance.</p><p>Living means loving what you do and finding fulfillment in it. Working means doing what you love, in a way that is both challenging and rewarding. Learning means continually making new discoveries and putting those discoveries to work, both personally and professionally.</p><p>In essence, you and your organization, and your extended network, are now co-dependent. Your ability to grow is limited if your organization and network aren’t growing. Likewise, if you aren’t growing, you are inhibiting the growth of the organizations to which you belong. Think brain trust, as opposed to assembly line.</p>

Results showed that, while instructional designers apparently do make use of process-based ID models, they do not spend the majority of their time working with them nor do they follow them in a rigid fashion. They also engage in a wide variety of other tasks that are not reflected in ID models.

Rowland (1992) reported his results to be congruent with the research on expertise and indicated that expert instructional designers clearly employ a definable problem solving and decision-making process. He suggested that ID tools, unlike procedural design models, should foster a deep understanding of the system of concern and should include such characteristics as flexibility of structures and processes, a workspace for construction of problem representation, and mechanisms for making multiple links between problems and solutions. Rowland suggested that, rather than to be taught procedures or even problem-solving heuristics, novices need to develop experience in the design process and that a case-based method of teaching, providing involvement with real or realistic situations, might be the most appropriate way for new instructional designers to learn the design process.

Design is always about making judgments about design situations that are complex, rich and replete with tensions and contradictions.

People earning over $100,000 a year are almost twice as likely to apologize after an argument or mistake as those earning $25,000 or less, the survey found.

They were also asked whether they would apologize in three situations: when they felt they were entirely to blame for a problem; when they thought they were only partly at fault; and when they believed they were blameless.

In all three cases, "a person's willingness to apologize was an almost perfect predictor of their place on the income ladder," the study says.