The Emperor's New Computer: ICT, Teachers and Teaching , 2008
[Excerpts from Intro] Enterprise-wide decisions, by definition, have significant impact on the ov... more [Excerpts from Intro] Enterprise-wide decisions, by definition, have significant impact on the overall well-being of an organization, such as a university. Senior administrators must routinely balance current and future needs, threats, and opportunities. Any significant shift away from the status quo entails many challenges and risks. Unfortunately, the fact that a decision is important and may have far-reaching implications does not mean that university administrators can just unlock the campus crystal ball, peer into the future, and make a decision that will be guaranteed to turn out well. Lower level decision makers, such as department chairs or individual faculty members have even less access to the crystal ball, as they typically have little or no control over the allocation of resources from other areas of the institution, such as centralized technical support services… the technologies involved – computers, the Internet, mobile devices, etc. – are too integrated into our society for universities to be able to back away from them and still claim to be preparing graduates for the future. Instead, the focus has shifted to a change in expectations – to the idea of ICTs augmenting, instead of replacing, traditional methods. Yet as long as both hardware capabilities and software options continue to change rapidly, academic decision makers will continue to be bombarded with opportunities to make influential decisions with respect to the uses of ICTs in education, and they will need to make these decisions without certain knowledge of the outcomes…By looking at research in the field of judgment and decision making (JDM) and considering how it applies to ICT decisions in the academy, this chapter will help administrative and front line decision makers in universities to understand how natural biases in human decision-making processes can influence our “better judgment” and how being aware of these systematic biases can improve the chances of making the decisions that will enable ICTs to have a greater positive influence (and fewer negative impacts) on education in the future.
Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Cognitive Writing Research to Cognitive Psychology, 2012
[Excerpts from Introduction] Distributed cognition (DCog) is a theoretical approach which propose... more [Excerpts from Introduction] Distributed cognition (DCog) is a theoretical approach which proposes that complex human activities integrally include internal minds, external representations, and interactions among individuals (Hutchins, 1995; Zhang & Patel, 2006). Consequently, a distributed analysis identifies the ways in which members of a group use cultural practices to create, transform, and propagate representations during an activity. Distributed cognition came to the attention of social scientists through a series of publications in the early 1990s (e.g., Hutchins, 1995; Salomon, 1993; Zhang & Norman 1995). In this chapter, we will argue that writing can be understood as distributed cognition…External representations are a critically important resource for problem solving. These include maps, written texts, graphs, tables, diagrams and so forth (Donald, 2001; Zhang, 1997). A distributed activity includes both external representations and internal representations, which interact continually…A second important kind of resource for problem solving is the group of people who share a given activity. The members of a group can pool knowledge from their individual long term memories, share cognitive load among their working memories, and check one another’s processing for errors (Zhang & Patel, 2006)…These two kinds of resources (external representations and people) operate in combination. External representations are used to cue individuals to tasks, coordinate their work, record the products of cognitive operations, and trace progress through an activity (Zhang & Patel, 2006). Thus, members of a group may operate face to face; or their individual operations can be distributed across time and space, using external representations to mediate their interactions…Distribution is important because unaided human cognition in the individual mind operates under tight storage, timing, and processing constraints. These include limited working memory capacity, slow encoding of information in long term memory under some circumstances, and largely associative retrieval from long term memory…
This article presents the structure and theoretical foundations of the Learning Object Review Ins... more This article presents the structure and theoretical foundations of the Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI), an evaluation aid available through the E-Learning Research and Assessment Network at http://www.elera.net. A primary goal of LORI is to balance assessment validity with efficiency of the evaluation process. The instrument enables learning object users to create reviews consisting of ratings and comments on nine dimensions of quality: content quality, learning goal alignment, feedback and adaptation, motivation, presentation design, interaction usability, accessibility, reusability, and standards compliance. The article presents research and practices relevant to these dimensions and describes how each dimension can be interpreted to evaluate multimedia learning resources.
PURPOSE – The purpose of this paper is to provide details on Simon Fraser University’s new School... more PURPOSE – The purpose of this paper is to provide details on Simon Fraser University’s new School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) approach to creating a culture that supports rapid development of high-quality e-learning materials, why it has been successful, and what has been learned.
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH – Describes how, over a period of four years SIAT has had the unique opportunity to build an integrated set of graduate and undergraduate degree programs from the ground up. The organization has recognized the importance of its people – both in terms of the knowledge they bring to the organization, and the added value it gains by providing an environment where all employees can continue to learn – from courses, from their own experience, and from each other.
FINDINGS – Because of the organization’s structured, yet flexible, approach to course design and development workflow, each set of courses was ready just as the students became ready to take them.
The organizational culture’s combination of clear structure, openness to new ideas, and commitment to high quality courseware has enabled us to meet the needs of our students and prepare them for careers in today’s high-tech workforce.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE – SIAT have developed best practices for the implementation of organizational e-learning strategies and the approach will be useful in informing the strategies adopted by other
organizations.
KEYWORDS - Learning, Organizational culture, Project management, Universities
PAPER TYPE - Case study
The emergence of large repositories of web-based learning resources has increased the need for va... more The emergence of large repositories of web-based learning resources has increased the need for valid and usable evaluation tools. This paper reviews current approaches to learning object evaluation and introduces eLera, a set of web-based tools we have developed for communities of teachers, learners, instructional designers and developers. Compatible with current metadata standards, eLera provides a learning object review instrument (LORI) and other features supporting collaborative evaluation. eLera provides limited translation of evaluations and subject taxonomies across communities using different languages and terminology. eLera is designed to assist researchers to gather data on evaluation processes and has been used to teach educators how to assess the quality of multimedia learning resources.
Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications, and Technologies , 2009
The Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI) is an evaluation framework designed to support colla... more The Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI) is an evaluation framework designed to support collaborative critique of multimedia learning resources. In this chapter, the interactions among reviewers using LORI are framed as a form of collaborative argumentation. Research on collaborative evaluation of learning resources has found that reviewers’ quality ratings tend to converge as a result of their interactions. Also, novice instructional designers have reported that collaborative evaluation is valuable
preparation for undertaking resource design projects. The authors reason that collaborative evaluation is effective as a professional development method to the degree that it sustains argumentation about the application of evidence-based design principles.
The Emperor's New Computer: ICT, Teachers and Teaching , 2008
[Excerpts from Intro] Enterprise-wide decisions, by definition, have significant impact on the ov... more [Excerpts from Intro] Enterprise-wide decisions, by definition, have significant impact on the overall well-being of an organization, such as a university. Senior administrators must routinely balance current and future needs, threats, and opportunities. Any significant shift away from the status quo entails many challenges and risks. Unfortunately, the fact that a decision is important and may have far-reaching implications does not mean that university administrators can just unlock the campus crystal ball, peer into the future, and make a decision that will be guaranteed to turn out well. Lower level decision makers, such as department chairs or individual faculty members have even less access to the crystal ball, as they typically have little or no control over the allocation of resources from other areas of the institution, such as centralized technical support services… the technologies involved – computers, the Internet, mobile devices, etc. – are too integrated into our society for universities to be able to back away from them and still claim to be preparing graduates for the future. Instead, the focus has shifted to a change in expectations – to the idea of ICTs augmenting, instead of replacing, traditional methods. Yet as long as both hardware capabilities and software options continue to change rapidly, academic decision makers will continue to be bombarded with opportunities to make influential decisions with respect to the uses of ICTs in education, and they will need to make these decisions without certain knowledge of the outcomes…By looking at research in the field of judgment and decision making (JDM) and considering how it applies to ICT decisions in the academy, this chapter will help administrative and front line decision makers in universities to understand how natural biases in human decision-making processes can influence our “better judgment” and how being aware of these systematic biases can improve the chances of making the decisions that will enable ICTs to have a greater positive influence (and fewer negative impacts) on education in the future.
Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Cognitive Writing Research to Cognitive Psychology, 2012
[Excerpts from Introduction] Distributed cognition (DCog) is a theoretical approach which propose... more [Excerpts from Introduction] Distributed cognition (DCog) is a theoretical approach which proposes that complex human activities integrally include internal minds, external representations, and interactions among individuals (Hutchins, 1995; Zhang & Patel, 2006). Consequently, a distributed analysis identifies the ways in which members of a group use cultural practices to create, transform, and propagate representations during an activity. Distributed cognition came to the attention of social scientists through a series of publications in the early 1990s (e.g., Hutchins, 1995; Salomon, 1993; Zhang & Norman 1995). In this chapter, we will argue that writing can be understood as distributed cognition…External representations are a critically important resource for problem solving. These include maps, written texts, graphs, tables, diagrams and so forth (Donald, 2001; Zhang, 1997). A distributed activity includes both external representations and internal representations, which interact continually…A second important kind of resource for problem solving is the group of people who share a given activity. The members of a group can pool knowledge from their individual long term memories, share cognitive load among their working memories, and check one another’s processing for errors (Zhang & Patel, 2006)…These two kinds of resources (external representations and people) operate in combination. External representations are used to cue individuals to tasks, coordinate their work, record the products of cognitive operations, and trace progress through an activity (Zhang & Patel, 2006). Thus, members of a group may operate face to face; or their individual operations can be distributed across time and space, using external representations to mediate their interactions…Distribution is important because unaided human cognition in the individual mind operates under tight storage, timing, and processing constraints. These include limited working memory capacity, slow encoding of information in long term memory under some circumstances, and largely associative retrieval from long term memory…
This article presents the structure and theoretical foundations of the Learning Object Review Ins... more This article presents the structure and theoretical foundations of the Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI), an evaluation aid available through the E-Learning Research and Assessment Network at http://www.elera.net. A primary goal of LORI is to balance assessment validity with efficiency of the evaluation process. The instrument enables learning object users to create reviews consisting of ratings and comments on nine dimensions of quality: content quality, learning goal alignment, feedback and adaptation, motivation, presentation design, interaction usability, accessibility, reusability, and standards compliance. The article presents research and practices relevant to these dimensions and describes how each dimension can be interpreted to evaluate multimedia learning resources.
PURPOSE – The purpose of this paper is to provide details on Simon Fraser University’s new School... more PURPOSE – The purpose of this paper is to provide details on Simon Fraser University’s new School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) approach to creating a culture that supports rapid development of high-quality e-learning materials, why it has been successful, and what has been learned.
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH – Describes how, over a period of four years SIAT has had the unique opportunity to build an integrated set of graduate and undergraduate degree programs from the ground up. The organization has recognized the importance of its people – both in terms of the knowledge they bring to the organization, and the added value it gains by providing an environment where all employees can continue to learn – from courses, from their own experience, and from each other.
FINDINGS – Because of the organization’s structured, yet flexible, approach to course design and development workflow, each set of courses was ready just as the students became ready to take them.
The organizational culture’s combination of clear structure, openness to new ideas, and commitment to high quality courseware has enabled us to meet the needs of our students and prepare them for careers in today’s high-tech workforce.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE – SIAT have developed best practices for the implementation of organizational e-learning strategies and the approach will be useful in informing the strategies adopted by other
organizations.
KEYWORDS - Learning, Organizational culture, Project management, Universities
PAPER TYPE - Case study
The emergence of large repositories of web-based learning resources has increased the need for va... more The emergence of large repositories of web-based learning resources has increased the need for valid and usable evaluation tools. This paper reviews current approaches to learning object evaluation and introduces eLera, a set of web-based tools we have developed for communities of teachers, learners, instructional designers and developers. Compatible with current metadata standards, eLera provides a learning object review instrument (LORI) and other features supporting collaborative evaluation. eLera provides limited translation of evaluations and subject taxonomies across communities using different languages and terminology. eLera is designed to assist researchers to gather data on evaluation processes and has been used to teach educators how to assess the quality of multimedia learning resources.
Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications, and Technologies , 2009
The Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI) is an evaluation framework designed to support colla... more The Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI) is an evaluation framework designed to support collaborative critique of multimedia learning resources. In this chapter, the interactions among reviewers using LORI are framed as a form of collaborative argumentation. Research on collaborative evaluation of learning resources has found that reviewers’ quality ratings tend to converge as a result of their interactions. Also, novice instructional designers have reported that collaborative evaluation is valuable
preparation for undertaking resource design projects. The authors reason that collaborative evaluation is effective as a professional development method to the degree that it sustains argumentation about the application of evidence-based design principles.
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Papers by Tracey Leacock
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH – Describes how, over a period of four years SIAT has had the unique opportunity to build an integrated set of graduate and undergraduate degree programs from the ground up. The organization has recognized the importance of its people – both in terms of the knowledge they bring to the organization, and the added value it gains by providing an environment where all employees can continue to learn – from courses, from their own experience, and from each other.
FINDINGS – Because of the organization’s structured, yet flexible, approach to course design and development workflow, each set of courses was ready just as the students became ready to take them.
The organizational culture’s combination of clear structure, openness to new ideas, and commitment to high quality courseware has enabled us to meet the needs of our students and prepare them for careers in today’s high-tech workforce.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE – SIAT have developed best practices for the implementation of organizational e-learning strategies and the approach will be useful in informing the strategies adopted by other
organizations.
KEYWORDS - Learning, Organizational culture, Project management, Universities
PAPER TYPE - Case study
preparation for undertaking resource design projects. The authors reason that collaborative evaluation is effective as a professional development method to the degree that it sustains argumentation about the application of evidence-based design principles.
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH – Describes how, over a period of four years SIAT has had the unique opportunity to build an integrated set of graduate and undergraduate degree programs from the ground up. The organization has recognized the importance of its people – both in terms of the knowledge they bring to the organization, and the added value it gains by providing an environment where all employees can continue to learn – from courses, from their own experience, and from each other.
FINDINGS – Because of the organization’s structured, yet flexible, approach to course design and development workflow, each set of courses was ready just as the students became ready to take them.
The organizational culture’s combination of clear structure, openness to new ideas, and commitment to high quality courseware has enabled us to meet the needs of our students and prepare them for careers in today’s high-tech workforce.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE – SIAT have developed best practices for the implementation of organizational e-learning strategies and the approach will be useful in informing the strategies adopted by other
organizations.
KEYWORDS - Learning, Organizational culture, Project management, Universities
PAPER TYPE - Case study
preparation for undertaking resource design projects. The authors reason that collaborative evaluation is effective as a professional development method to the degree that it sustains argumentation about the application of evidence-based design principles.