i’m a phd student in instructional technology. yes, we keep blogs. oh yeah, thats what we do. and wikis and del.icio.us accounts and and and and and. and i should be more creative and start this over at my own domain (yes, i have one, have had one for a long time), actually, i should be more of a purist. but anyhow.
the question i’m stuck on today, that i’ve already written about one place, and i’m writing it here, cause this is my official phd weblog, i think is this: by taking a course on OCW and changing it – because that will make it more instructionally effective – can i say that i’m actually studying the effectiveness of OCW? does it have to be in its raw form? because the course in its raw form is NOT instructionally sound. instructionally sound online education is not what this is.. you don’t have pages and pages of scrolling.
now, i am taking it and doing with it what i’m supposed to be doing, but the thing is is that everyone knows that this particular piece of content changes lives, so i don’t need to study that. does it change the lives of young mothers? thats another field, not mine. i’m about the delivery system. thats what all those o’s are in my title.
I'm Brooke, a second year PhD student at Utah State University in Instructional Technology. My interests include digital resources, reuse and localization. Specifically I'm interested in the interplay between culture and reuse of oer's (open educational resources). How can we reuse instructional materials so that they are culturally relevant to users. What is culture? How do we define it in an educational setting? Is making something more culturally relevant more motivating and will that make it more instructionally effective? How can we quantify culture so that we can create processes to more easily adapt instructional resources for the complexities and depth of culture? It's a lifetime of work. 