Post date: Jan 30, 2009 4:13:40 AM
I just listened to the recording of this week's office hour. I'm finding the office hour more and more valuable every week as we seem to be shifting from more of a "how does this all work" mentality to a "here's how we can apply this" mentality. That's really exciting to me. The constructivist theory of learning that is so practiced in this course has some drawbacks -- but the interactivity where I'm learning by conversation with my fellow students, as well as learning through the increasingly vivid and thought-provoking feedback from the instructor, is fantastic and exciting.
This week's research is on instructional design. It wasn't easy finding appropriate articles for this week that weren't just replications of our textbook readings. I think I may actually end up using the text more heavily in this week's guidebook chapter than the past several.
Ironically, the "knowledge base" I'm proposing for Fithian, our fictional company, has also ended up being what I've proposed as part of a job I am applying for. I'm proposing a knowledge base be created for all of our information, and I am already working on a project that will start having people post and pull data from a location rather than people pushing the data to other people. A knowledge base wraps around that kind of theory very nicely, I think.