My Reflections on the Tutorials

First let me start by saying that I am a big fan of blogs. I have always encouraged instructors to use in their courses. Blogging tools like Blogger and Muzy are great alternatives for discussion boards. In addition to blogging for academic purposes, I developed a blog to post my journey to earning my doctorate. Not only did I find it helpful as means to really state what was on my mind (similar to a journal), but I believe my blog would help others who are on the road to earning their doctorate. Here is the URL for my doctoral blog: http://bostonirishdave.blogspot.com/ 

The tutorials I have found most useful were Jing, Google Bookmarks, and Wikis. These tools have usefulness in both higher education and private industry. Google Bookmark is a great way to build a list of URLs/references for an online course. Then the exporting feature allows the user to save it as a webpage. From this webpage, you can view the source code and 'copy and paste' it to the HTML editor within a learning management system or Dreamweaver.

Jing is great! Its Camtasia without all the 'bells and whistles'. Also, I found Jing excellent for recording screen shots and recording step-by-step procedures. I have used Camtasia for years in developing online courses. Though to be honest, I have a preference for Camtasia's competitor, Adobe Captivate. I have been using Wikis for several years. I like wikis they allow users to work together in groups. Also, wikis have a history fucntion so you can see what group members have been contributiing to the wiki and who has not.

As far as the other tutorials, I really do not see how they could be used in an online course. Muzy is a great blogging tool for K-12 teachers and maybe for first year college students. However, I do not see how effective this tool is for adult learners. In addition, this tool would too much time and it would be too specific for use in private industry. I found aMap to be difficult to use from the view of instructor and instructional designer. Also, one can accomplish the same thing using shapes feature in Word and PowerPoint or by using Visio. Fotobable is nice for sharing photos for being personal use. With the exception of Art History and History/Archeology classes, I do not see this tool being used on a larger scale for online learning.The one question I have is when do we focus too much on the technology and not enough on the instructional design of an online or hybrid course? That question has been posed to me by private industry instructional designers when they are talking about higher education instructional design. That is, higher education is allegedlly too focused on the technology and not enough on the the instructional design process of developing an online or hybrid course.