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Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I’m an instructional designer developing online learning, so that’s primarily what I write about. Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I’m always trying to learn how to do it better. Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I’m interested in higher education. K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I’m interested in what’s important to my audience too. Corporate E-Learning: Even though I’m in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I’m employed by a for-profit company. Lifelong Learning: It didn’t start out to be a goal for my blog, but I’ve discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn’t, what I’m thinking. Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I’ve collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading. If you want to learn more about me, check out my bio.

Social media was all over the map this week, but there was one theme that ran through many of this week’s stories: security. From Twitter’s meltdown to a gaping vulnerability Firefox 3.5, users saw the importance of security first-hand. Security’s also a huge issue with Internet Explorer 6, which we highlight in this week’s most popular story. There were a lot of useful resources published this week as well. Funny viral videos, social media business models, and iPhone apps that can save lives are just a few of the great things this week’s stories taught us. Here are most popular social media stories of the week.

JISC infoNet aims to be the UK's leading advisory service for managers in the post-compulsory education sector promoting the effective strategic planning, implementation and management of information and learning technology. Whether you are a senior manager leading institutional strategy or you are working in the field of systems, processes or e-learning, we have resources that can help you improve the support for, and quality of, learning and teaching in your institution. Our resources are freely available to institutions and individuals in the UK further and higher education sectors via this website.

Like many, I have been inspired and excited by the spectacular case studies. Yet when I interview children, or in my survey, I was far more struck by how many use the internet in a far more mundane manner, underusing its potential hugely, and often unexcited by what it could do. It was this that led me to urge that we see children's literacy in the context of technological affordances and legibilities. But it also shows to me the value of combining and contrasting insights from qualitative and quantitative work. The spectacular cases, of course, point out what could be the future for many children. The mundane realities, however, force the question - whose fault is it that many children don't use the internet in ways that we, or they, consider very exciting or demanding? It also forces the question, what can be done, something I attend to throughout the book, as I'm keen that we don't fall back into a disappointment that blames children themselves.

There's been a fair amount of adult dismay at how young people disclose personal, even intimate information online. In the book, I suggest there are several reasons for this. First, adolescence is a time of experimentation with identity and relationships, and not only is the internet admirably well suited to this but the offline environment is increasingly restrictive, with supervising teachers and worried parents constantly looking over their shoulders. Second, some of this disclosure is inadvertent - despite their pleasure in social networking, for instance, I found teenagers to struggle with the intricacies of privacy settings, partly because they are fearful of getting it wrong and partly because they are clumsily designed and ill-explained, with categories (e.g. top friends, everyone) that don't match the subtlety of youthful friendship categories. Third, adults are dismayed because they don't share the same sensibilities as young people. I haven't interviewed anyone who doesn't care who knows what about them, but I've interviewed many who think no-one will be interested and so they worry less about what they post, or who take care over what parents or friends can see but are not interested in the responses of perfect strangers. In other words, young people are operating with some slightly different conceptions of privacy, but certainly they want control over who knows what about them; it's just that they don't wish to hide everything, they can't always figure out how to reveal what to whom, and anyway they wish to experiment and take a few risks.

contrary to the popular discourses that blame young people for their apathy, lack of motivation or interest, I suggest that young people learn early that they are not listened to. Hoping that the internet can enable young people to 'have their say' thus misses the point, for they are not themselves listened to. This is a failure both of effective communication between young people and those who aim to engage them, and a failure of civic or political structures - of the social structures that sustain relations between established power and the polity.