• What have you learned about the various learning theories and learning styles over the past weeks that can further explain your own personal learning preferences?

I have learned that under different settings and subject matter I would likely learn better from utilizing different learning theories.  The more hands on the tasks are, the more I would learn from a behaviorist type of instant feedback and repetition. Maybe I should get a golf club that shocks me when I swing wrong. As the learning becomes more complex, I need to tie my new understanding to knowledge I have already attained. I need to bypass my own predisposition  to  want a quick answer, to build deeper understanding , meaning, and find relevance where none seems to exist initially.  Finally if the knowledge is only useful for a short amount of time, critical, and ever changing, I need to further develop resources that allow me to network more effectively. I need to practice better connectivism.

• What role does technology play in your learning (i.e., as a way to search for information, to record information, to create, etc.)?

Technology plays a key role in the way I learn. I utilize it to gather resources, organize those resources, and check my own understanding of the subject matter.  I would have a difficult time returning to the library with a note pad. Technology allows me to in essence open ten books at once, create references for all of the materials I may utilize, and bring my own perspective to play in a new creation within minutes and hours instead of days and weeks.  I can then choose a myriad of ways to share this knowledge with others around the world even faster than I could gather the resources.  It is truly amazing how technology has changed the way information can be found and disseminated.

I did not find any broken links as I navigated the resources.  What I did find was a very broad range of resources that covered everything from web design to a “road map to multimedia design”.  I especially liked the following resource. http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper80/paper80.htm It contains questions one might ask as they look to develop a course.

Even though the site is not as update as I would like, I think it is very useful. Sometimes knowing what types of resources are available is key to finding what you are looking for or even better finding something you were totally unaware of.  If one person wrote about a subject a few years ago that piques your interest, it is very likely you will be able to use the terminology found there to find more up to date resources.

 http://instructionaldesign.org/

This site is very clean and has resources that go straight to the heart of creating quality learning experiences.  The video on the home page was very insightful. It spoke to how learning is best done in a community and how online learning can stray from collaborative learning. I liked how he spoke of content overload. It would be “easy” to create a site with mountains of content that overwhelms or bores rather than educates.

http://www.iddblog.org/

This blog looks to be a great resource for insights into the working lives of those already involved in instructional design. As an example, you should take a look at the following post http://www.iddblog.org/?p=371

It gives a narrative on this instructor’s history of PowerPoint use and how it can still be a useful tool.  She gives some great tips and the reasoning behind them.

http://learninginbits.com/

This site is has a great deal of relevant posting regarding corporate instructional design.  The author seems to have a great deal of experience and her articles are very interesting.