AJB CREATIVE LEARNING

It’s the week of July 4 Th and I still don’t know what I plan to do for the weekend! It seems that this week will be one in which I leave the planning to the day of! Typically, I would venture to a cookout with family, where we would have barbecue chicken, ribs, potato salad, fruit salad, pound cake and maybe something green & healthy. Then, watch fireworks in the evening. But, this year, most of my family has decided to travel up to Augusta, GA so I will be alone, which means, I will likely have whatever is available at my local Fresh Market! I thought I would blog about food today because it is a common element that we all share, regardless of our race, gender, or ethnicity, we all must eat. I think food is a way to bridge communities and build relationships with others who may be different than you. I have traveled as far away as Moscow Russia and people still delight in being able to provide ‘good’ food for their family. We had a guest speaker this week in class, one of ...

My impetus for taking Web 2.0 was to learn the latest in learning technologies and innovation. Corporations are always challenging us to be innovative. And, recently I saw a job posting with the word “Innovation” in the job title and I wonder if this term will start to trend.   As newer technologies continue to emerge, we, as learning professionals, will be constantly asked to be innovative. Every year, we will have to outdo the last and keep re-inventing the wheel. But, how can we do this effectively, without being exhausted once we realize that every year, we have to change. I really wanted to understand what “Innovation” meant. So, I searched the Internet and found a great handbook by the Center on Innovation in Learning, which you can find here: http://www.centeril.org/handbook/resources/fullchapter/What_is_an_Innovation_SA.pdf . What’s great is that Redding et. al mentions that an innovation in learning does not necessarily have to involve technology. In fact, all we hav...

This week I read an excerpt from Dr. Dennen’s manuscript in progress on Instructional Design and Development for Social Media. As I stated in a previous blog post, in my corporate learning environment, we don’t use the Big 6 Social Media giants. However, we do use a social collaboration tool, mainly as performance support post a classroom training event, so this chapter was meaningful to me. One of the challenges in corporate environments revolves around a common belief that “if we build it, they will come.” Unfortunately, this isn’t always true and online initiatives that are often seen as ‘fun and engaging’ fall flat with relatively little to no participation from the audiences they are supposed to engage. After reading this chapter, I was able to see how I could correct some of the flawed thinking in my approach to engaging with my online corporate community. While I won’t be able to use direct quotes from Dennen’s manuscript in progress, I will cover a general theme that ...

So, if you are following this blog, you will notice that there is no Week 5 Reflections blog. I had to take a breather. This week, I learned the term “technostress” and now know how to describe the overwhelm I sometimes feel. But, now I am back at it.  Every week, it is interesting to see the abundance of tools available on the market. And, this week I learned about two tools that I can use for my part-time hobbies. I enjoy reading and writing creative stories and have always wanted to join GoodReads. So, this week, I signed up for a GoodReads account and found it was pretty easy to navigate. Why did I wait so long to join… I don’t have a good answer. The more I participate in this course, the less resistance I feel to setting up accounts and commenting online. I also set up an account with TinyLetter, which allows users to send emails/newsletters to their own community. I think this would be a great feature to add to my freelance website. I am half way through the course,...

I have mixed feelings about using social media in the workplace. Partly, because I haven’t seen it successfully implemented in our learning programs at work. Most recently, I attempted to use our internal enterprise social networking site, Chatter to engage senior female leaders. We have quarterly leadership events and we thought Chatter would be a great vehicle to reinforce the learning concepts from the event. To engage the leaders, I posted materials from the event, questions and polls but, in hindsight, I really didn’t have an overarching strategy. And, I received low to no responses from my target audience. Unfortunately, at our company, the senior leaders are overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive and respond to, and Chatter is seen as just another task to add to their To Do list. As Dennen’s article, “Social Media and Instructional Design” describes, I need to find a way to minimize the technostress associated with using the tool and integrate it into their wo...

On a daily basis, I log into LinkedIn to get my daily dose of what is going on in the world of Instructional Design. There are about 5 key players in my network that post a few times a week. I work on a small team so LinkedIn is my extended network, a window into what other instructional designers are doing, who may work on larger teams. This week I happened upon #IDIODC, which is the first time that I have seen this tag. But, what’s interesting is that the tag is also the name of a podcast. It’s sort of interesting, right? Well, even though it looks like it is attention-seeking, it still caught my attention. Or rather, the person who posted the podcast, Carla Torgerson, is someone that I admire in the eLearning community and so I was compelled to learn more. #IDIODC actually stands for “Instructional Designers In Offices Drinking Coffee”.   The podcast is recorded by the company dominKnow ( https://www.dominknow.com/idiodc ) and their model appears to be to interview instruc...

Tonight’s blog will be short and sweet. It’s 11 PM on a Sunday night and I am running out of steam. This week was an adventure into Social Media. I said I was going to dig into social media and make sure that I get up and running on a few platforms. I am after all in a Web 2.0 class, so I want to make sure that I get some participation time in social media :-).   So, on Saturday, I carved out a few hours in the day to do just that. I tweeted and responded to a few posts on Twitter. I played around in Pinterest, Reddit, and watched a few videos from our class Youtube channel. On YouTube, I found out about two cool tools that I can use in my courses, Doodly (a chalkboard animation tool) and Viko (a character simulation tool), so of course I had to venture onto their websites. I had thought of incorporating a video using Viko, but I didn’t have time this week. But, I should be able to incorporate at least one this summer. On Twitter, I found a few interesting posts. A fe...

I participated in a Pinterest challenge this week for my online Graduate writing class. I never expected to use Pinterest in an educational setting. I’ve mainly used it for my hobbies, such as writing, cooking, and fashion. It a great place to exchange ideas with people all over the world. I like Pinterest because it is an engaging platform and visually appealing. You can easily search the web for resources and then post them to your board. You can keep some boards public and some boards can be private, privy to your eyes alone. I like that you can easily identify which ‘pins’ resonate with others based on what they ‘like.’ I have discovered that people still like ‘pins’ that I have posted over 3 years ago! So, when my professor gave us a Pinterest challenge, I decided to jump right in. Our mission was to find a social media-related infographic. And, Pinterest is good for this as its searchable engine allows you to search for images. I decided to search on ‘social media t...

As an instructional designer in the HR space, I’m often been asked to develop diversity training. However, I recently read the eLearning Guild's  Training for Diversity report by Pamela Hogle and she asserts that   traditional training rarely works because it alienates certain groups in the workplace and can have an authoritarian tone to it. So, what if we crowdsourced content to make sure that it appealed to our learners? According to Wilson (2018), crowdsourcing is the “practice of acquiring information or task inputs from a large number of people,” and “can be used to encourage self-instruction through the creation of innovative teaching materials” (page 400). In Wilson’s article, students generate and shape the learning content. This approach could do well in an organizational setting as well. In the workplace, the HR team could create an online portal with various diversity topics and pose questions to engage with the learner population. The learners wou...

With the abundance of information coming from LinkedIn, Twitter, and my email, it can be hard to determine what messages to listen to and which ones to skip. It is impossible to be well-versed in every topic within our field and so I know it is better for me to focus on a few areas of interest. This is a story of how I determine which topics to delve further into. A few weeks ago the eLearning Guild had an online Summit focused on Micro-Learning They have a few Summits a year and I’d like to attend them all, but depending on my workload, sometimes I just don’t have the time. Well, this past week, I saw a string of messages related to Carla Torgerson’s presentation at the ATD national conference. And, Carla actually posted about her presentation and asked if anyone wanted a copy. I responded and she sent me a copy. When I reviewed the material, I immediately thought of the online Summit and when I looked at the Summit materials, they were quite similar. I immediately...

This is Week 3 of Blogging. When I visited my blog, I was pleasantly surprised that I had 3 replies and multiple views. For some reason, I didn’t expect it but it actually felt great that someone took the time to not only read my post but leave a reply (even though it is apart of the assignment). It gives me hope that I can potentially do this in a more public forum as well.   I’ve been paying particular attention to LinkedIn and have gotten some great insight from my connections. One of my connections, Tameka J Harris, recently started doing live streaming as well as created a hashtag to engage with her network. I didn’t even realize that live streaming was an option of LinkedIn! I’ve seen it in SnapChat and Instagram, which I consider more informal ways of communication. So, I’m still getting adjusted to seeing it in LinkedIn, which I consider to be a more formal channel of communication. Additionally, one of my connections, Dana Kocalis, recently obtained a new job as a...

As an instructional designer, I have seen the importance of establishing a web presence to establish credibility and to connect with others in my industry. In my previous position as a training manager at a telecommunications company, I sat in the same cubicle row as the HR team. Everyday, I would see the recruiter at their desk constantly scrolling through LinkedIn profiles. In the back of mind, I had always known that LinkedIn was an important component of one’s professional success. But, that is when the lightbulb went off for me that it was going to be imperative for me to have a web presence to maintain and grow my career.   This week, I decided to assess my web presence based on the criteria set forth in “Creating an Intentional Web Presence: Strategies for Everyday Educational Technology Professional.”  I've identified the highlights below. Creating a personally controlled website - I do have a website that I can control at www.aliciabrownpor...