Week 5 Reflections

Part 1 (Photosharing)--

Personally I believe that photosharing is a pretty cool idea. Most people have used them in some shape or forum. At a bare minimum, most people have at least browsed through someone elses pictures. It seems that this tool could easily be used in an educational setting, particularly for a photography class, or module within. In fact I’m currently taking a course now (EDT 5500—Digital Photography) which is quite intense in turning in require digital photos. This tool could easily replace the burdon of having to upload your assignment via MS Word, or having to import your pictures into another program, just for the purpose of showing your instructor. The instructor could required everyone to have a photosharing account, and submit your assignment pictures via that method. This would likely make the process much easier for both the instructor, and individual students. Another benefit of photosharing sites, are some of the tools that are available within the individual services. Flickr.com for instance offers the ability to organize your photos into ablums/groups, tag and label your photos, store contacts, add descriptions, edit, crop, and even fix photos with a photo editing element. I was really impressed with this service. On the down side, photosharing, if not carefully managed can be somewhat dangerous, however most photosharing sites have built-in ability to limit who can view your uploaded photos. This would be a major area of concern to me. Privacy concerns these days are very important. This is one reason why this type of educational tool may not be quite appropriate for certain ages, without proper supervision.

Part 2 (Trends / Issues in ID and Technology)—

Although I’ve been teaching in my industry for nearly eight years (both in the Classroom environment, and in the Aircraft), I have to admit that I’ve never really thought through the entire processes described in Chapter 2 of the text. None of the concepts within are surprising, however I am still a bit shocked at its complexity. Even after reading about the ADDIE process, it still seemed somewhat foreign to me, which I was initially beginning to be concerned. Fortunately,, now that I’ve had a chance to read the rest of the chapter, and reflect back a bit, I realized that I have actually used parts of the characteristics of instructional design. Another thing that I’ve come to realize is that even though I’ve been teaching for some time, much of the curricula that I’m teaching has been developed by others prior to my arrival at WMU. This gives me a unique view of our curriculum, whereas now I can evaluate its strengths, and weaknesses from what I am now learning.

While reading chapter 2, much of the early part seemed quite confusing to me, however once getting to its core characteristics of instructional design, this brought much more meaning to a lot of the earlier terms, and definitions. It became much easier to correlate the fundamental concepts of ADDIE with the characteristic of ID, and moreover I’m actually beginning to see how those characteristics are formed into many of the curricula which I teach today at the College of Aviation. Particularly, Goal Orientedness, Meaningful performance, and team effort. Those come to light fairly easily. On another note, several of my colleagues are in the process of developing a curriculum, which I’m very interested to see if, and how these concepts are playing a roll!