Transformational Leadership During COVID-19

I feel like I have been in a state of Flow for the last 25 years. It seems like yesterday when back in 1995 four of us sat around a table discussing how the only way we could get our new Masters in Educational Technology to the teachers who really needed it was to put it on the newly available World Wide Web.

“Tectonic shifts” in society happen when an unexpected event creates widespread innovative experimentation around a new idea. (V Govindarajan & A Srivastava, 2020).

Remote Learning: A New Journey

In the time of Covid-19, we’ve been thrust into The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth. We have to battle villainous foes, make courageous choices, and strike a blow against the evil that threatens the land. This is the best way I know to describe the feeling as we find ourselves in with little to no advanced warning—forced by circumstance to teach all courses online.

From Instructional Design to Learning Design

Student-Centered Design

Back in 1997, I was a member of the Ed Tech faculty at Northern Arizona University. We had decided to move our Masters of Educational Technology online—and did what an inexperienced faculty without support would do.

We took our face-to-face curriculum and put it online.

It went about as well as you would expect.

Building a Skilled eLearning Team

A familiar African proverb says it takes a village to raise a child—it means the entire community must interact with children for them to grow up to be a healthy member of society. Similarly, it takes a village to create a healthy learning environment.

The eLearning Professional

You don’t become a professional by just calling yourself one. One key difference between professionals and non-professionals is this: professionals are bound by ethical codes.

So, what’s the professional code of eLearning?

Are We There Yet? Peter Drucker, 2020 and the BOT

In 1959, Peter Drucker, a well-known and an influential thinker, coined the term “knowledge worker” and predicted the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning. In many ways, his vision of lifelong learning forecast the rise of online learning and instructional design.

New Generation of Learning Design

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has become a buzzword. Many label practically any decision made by machines as AI, and it becomes difficult to discern the difference between true AI innovation based on Deep Learning from the clever relabeling of existing capabilities. Many of these pseudo-AI efforts require massive investments of time and money to simulate an AI-like experience. This makes it vital for us to know how to spot true innovation.

Why Deep Learning Will Change Instructional Design

If you’re like me, you may not have noticed the quantum leaps in technology over the past four years. Technology is so omnipresent in our lives we’re often not aware of some of the profound changes going on around us—until something draws our attention to it.

Shift Doesn’t Just Happen: Breaking Out of Imaginative Gridlock

On occasion I have a problem associated with the firing of the neurons in my brain. Some event triggers my amygdala, releases dopamine stimulating my frontal lobe—and I enter into a state of hyperarousal. My thoughts go into hyperdrive, and I charge over the hill like I am Braveheart leading an uprising against Edward the Longshanks.

Some see this characteristic as me being overzealous. I prefer to think of myself as…enthusiastic. Either way—at some point I see a need to pause, reflect, and not lose a sense of balance.

Imaginative Gridlock

In A Failure of Nerve; Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Edwin H. Friedman tells a fascinating story.

In 1493, the publishers of the Nuremberg Chronicle stood on the brink of a transformation that would profoundly change the way they lived, worked, and related to one other. But they couldn’t see it coming. They were so paralyzed by the emotional bombardments of their time they even left several pages at the end of the book blank so their readers could record “the rest of the events until the end of the world.” Continue reading “Imaginative Gridlock”

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Student-Centered Design

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