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This speech by the late, great David Foster Wallace speaks to the matter of "awareness" discussed in the course reading, "What Everybody Ought to Know About Instructional Design."

Since 1948 we have helped millions of students who are blind, dyslexic or have other learning disabilities achieve confidence and independence in the classroom and in life. More about our mission We work with our partners to raise awareness of learning differences.

When I was a graduate student, I volunteered with this organization (formerly known as Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic). I read fiction books and textbooks, recording in a booth on my own or with a director. Volunteers completed training to learn how to cue the audio reader to turn book pages, to transition between text and pictures or figures, and to indicate punctuations (ellipsis, quotations, subscript/superscripts, etc.). The experience helped me to improve the use of my voice in communicating to learners and the ways to chunk the information appropriate for visually impaired and dyslexic learners. As Learning Ally, the organization now offers professional development for teachers to help them with utilizing the wide range of audiobooks in their collection.

Introduces IoT as defined in the 2012 Horizon Report as "the latest evolution of network-aware smart objects that connect the physical world with information" (p. 30). References 4 YouTube videos as good introductions to IoT and relates IoT to educational innovation.

Interesting piece about the disadvantages of online learning for the visually impaired. Certainly makes me more aware of this dimension.

Yes, yes, I know, the title suggests that this webtext is only relevant for a few people, perhaps only Jane and myself. However, if you browse this webtext - it is indeed not an article, but like all work published in Kairos, a multimedia artifact or well, a webtext - you will find a lot of important insights on student-professor-staff interactions in an online environment. The webtext highlights, for example, the importance of the lack of physical cues in an online class, a facet of online instruction that may necessitate a higher awareness of the effect our formulations, terms, and even typed characters can have in any written communication such as blog posts, emails, chats, and messages. We thus learn quite a bit about communicative techniques and etiquette in an online class (and in a virtual environment more generally). Another webtext in the same Kairos issue reflects upon teaching graduate students how to teach online: http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/20.1/praxis/bourelle-et-al/pedagogycourse.html. Leah, this webtext might be interesting for you - but it should be interesting for others as well because it also addresses questions about assignments and exercises in online classes. By the way, Kairos is an important open-access online journal that has existed since 1996. It publishes scholarship that "examines digital and multimodal composing practices, promoting work that enacts its scholarly argument through rhetorical and innovative uses of new media." ("The Kairos Style Guide", n.d.)