On Merrill + Wilson, Blue Beanies, and Wiley

I guess I have some sort of built-in bias, because when I read the "debate" between Merrill and Wilson, I sided with Merrill. Maybe the bias is that I naturally want to side with someone who I've seen speak before, and someone who's well-respected in BYU's IPT department—or maybe I just agree that there ought to be standardization in our field (maybe we could have...ORANGE beanies!). I think Merrill's "proper study of instructional design" is very interesting. The same way web developers and computer science people have now made it so that anyone can publish a website, or even build their own computer programs, Merrill says that instructional designers should be building similar tools and frameworks to empower others to teach better. Now that would be open education, eh, Dr. Wiley?

In other news, Merrill may have given me guidance on what kind of project I could do for my Master's Degree. And in a way, it's kinda cool that many corporate instructional design jobs overlap heavily with project management and business stuff. Maybe I'd enjoy that?

Skinner and Khan

For those of you who don't know a thing about B.F. Skinner's teaching machines, click to learn more. For those of you that don't know about Khan Academy, click to learn more.

For those of you that, through whatever means, do know about Skinner and Khan, aren't the parallels crazy? Very structured presentation, order and hierarchy of knowledge, teachers acting as facilitators and oversight instead of being in the trenches. Pandemonium.

I'm a Hypocrite — or I'm gonna be one....

So after just finishing reading Wineburg's (2004) comment about 10 rules for presenting (to make it palatable), I realize that I'm gonna eventually break some of those rules. In two of my classes this semester, we end with a big group presentation, using (you guessed it) Powerpoint. I tried to convince my group members to at least use Prezi, and in one case I succeeded! But I know that with the other ones, and probably with Prezi too, I'm gonna end up reading off the screen, giving way too much detail and not having enough time for questions. Although, I do admit I'm not eager to hear questions about our projects, since they're already flimsy enough without giving an audience of 30+ people the time to find and/or poke holes in our work.
So I guess I'm glad there won't be much time for questions, but I still feel bad about the rest of the presentation. It's like I have some sort of "conscience of craft" (Osguthorpe, 2003) or something. Weird.