Free Range Learning

We've been doing some presenting as of late — twice at JAM and once a MinIT (a sub-group of GusDay ) — so I've been thinking a bit more about presentations than I normally might — creating, delivering, watching, etc. I ran across this article on presentation structure and was intrigued by how the author used the idea of backwards design. I know that this is a fairly familiar concept when developing a course so was interested to see it applied in a different arena.

Our other presentation at this year's Jenzabar Annual Meeting (JAM) was on our redesign process of MyLutherNet. Here are some of the helpful resources from that presentation:

• A List Apart - A website for people who make websites. We especially found helpful the article In Defense of Eye Candy , by Stephen Anderson
• Designing with Web Standards , by Jeffrey Zeldman
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions , by Simon Collison, Andy Budd, and Cameron Moll
• Practical Guide to Usability Testing …

In our presentation Thursday at the Jenzabar Annual Meeting (JAM), we talked about how we use MyLutherNet to create engaging online courses. We wanted to highlight a few resources that we have found helpful, so here is our (incomplete) list:

• Understanding by Design , by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe
• Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses , by L. Dee Fink
• Multimedia Learning , by Richard Mayer
• Designing for Learners, Designing for Users …

Since its inception, hip-hop has sampled from previously produced music to create something brand new. Using two turntables and a microphone , a disco, rock, or folk song could be transformed into rap. The digital internet culture has made this even easier over the past decade. People don't even need turntables, just a laptop. This took a huge leap forward when DJ Danger Mouse (in)famously remixed The Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album to create the Grey Album .

Until recently I had mostly …

The New York Times ran an excellent article Tuesday on the problem of how PowerPoint is being used in US military briefings. Citing how overly complex slides such as this are creating barriers to understanding and good thinking.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations …

I recently started volunteering with Aeon as a property gardener. Aeon is an organization that provides high-quality affordable housing throughout the Twin Cities. Each of their properties has some sort of garden that needs tending throughout the summer - some small projects, others rather significant ones. The idea behind the property gardener is that you adopt a property and then care for the garden - plant, weed, water - the basics. The property that I've adopted is downtown St. Paul in Wacouta …

With the insurgence of cell phones that allow for quick and easy web browsing , (Apple's iPhone and Verizon's/Google's Android most immediately come to mind) we've been discussing how we might want to design Luther's online course to be a bit more mobile friendly .

Any good design project starts with knowing your audience:

• Who will be using your product?
• How will they be using it?
• Where and when will they use it?

Online courses are no exception to these questions. …

Thanks to Mary Hess for linking us to a fantastic article from First Monday: Insidious Pedagogy: How course management systems impact learning , by Lisa M. Lane.

Lane writes a superb critique of course management systems (CMSs), such as Blackboard , Moodle , and our very own JICS (i.e. MyLutherNet ). Lane's point is not that CMSs are bad, or poorly designed, or even that they should go away. Lane's point is that CMSs are "not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. …Course …

We in Learning Design & Technology are pleased to announce that exciting changes are coming to MyLutherNet !

This January, Luther will be upgrading the basic software that runs MyLutherNet (i.e. Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution ) from version 6.4 to version 7. This upgrade will offer us more powerful tools for running online courses and faster performance from previous versions of MyLutherNet.

Then, in early February, we will roll out a new visual design of MyLutherNet. Our office has been …

A movement that later became the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther began with a simple premise: the Christian church had become overly professional. The Priests were the only ones who had both the education and the access to be able to read and interpret Scripture. The average person had no way of knowing, much less disputing, whether the hierarchy of the church was being faithful to the tradition handed down by the Apostles.

Luther understood that for Scripture to have real power, it needed …