Instructional Innovation through Leadership, Support and Agency
As a former Learning Designer, Learning Technologist and present instructor, I'm always interested to look at the relationships between how innovative educational institutions are, both in terms of their culture of innovation, as well as technical capability. In the...
Online Courses are not textbooks
Coffee and A Book by @sincerelymedia (Unsplash) As many of us move towards the reality of teaching online, potentially for a longer duration than we ever expected to, it's important to consider what an online course actually is. In the 1990s when online learning was...
Using Reddit in Higher Education
This story highlights a use case for using Reddit for an online educational technology course at a large university in Canada. Why use reddit? The first question that some may ask, is ‘Why are you using Reddit?’ In the support of the course in question, the instructor...
The Science of Locomotion in VR
Cyberith’s Virtualizer VR Treadmill http://cyberith.com/product/ For anyone who’s ever tried a VR experience, whether it be using an HTC Vive, an Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR or just Google Cardboard, it’s possible you’ve experienced what many people don’t have a word...
Screen Real Estate for Online Learning
What is Screen Real Estate? Whenever you visit a website, either on your phone, tablet or PC, there are certain things you’ll see first that grab your attention. Screen Real Estate refers to the space you as the designer have have to work in, especially related...
Direct v. Indirect Manipulation in VR
LeapMotion (https://www.leapmotion.com/product/vr#113) The ways in which we interact with objects in the virtual world and the real world has always been an interesting point of discussion when it comes to design of both hardware and software. Indirect Manipulation...
Toward User Interface and Experience Guidelines for Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Realities
In the last few weeks I’ve been trying to find evidence of why we use certain Virtual and Mixed Reality gestures. The taxonomy we have for Multi-touch gestures came out of R&D at Microsoft in the mid 2000s and you can easily read about the studies conducted there....
The Rocky Romance between EdTech and IT
Having worked in Ed Tech for almost 20 years, there is one thing that keeps coming up on an almost daily basis, a fundamental challenge in the way EdTech is approached and managed, and the philosophy of what technology means in higher education. Daisy Wedding Cake by...
Primary Design: User Experience and Product Design based on Evolutionary Psychology
hand modelling by https://www.flickr.com/photos/nate/ As someone who studies cognitive science, reading every day about theories of memory, sensory input, and how our bodies and brains work together to formulate meaning in the world, I’ve had this nagging feeling over...
The Role of Education in a post-truth world
A round earth, not a flat one. It’s scary to think that with the rise of what has now become a household word, ‘fake news’ is officially a threat to the future of humanity. More so in the United States, but also a growing concern in many other countries, ‘news...