Class BloggingWeek 8:1
Like some others in class, I too missed the reading assignments for class. I kept checking the READINGS section on WebCT as a follow up on Aaron's comments in class but somehow missed the links on the CLASS SCHEUDLE page.
I really liked the Patricia Deubel article for its comprehensiveness and its level of detail. As an overview of the theoretical work in the field, I found the article to be very informative. It has a couple of great checklists to consider in putting together educational multimedia and I will return to them in my work.
I was not very taken with the use of the behaviorist vs constructivist framework for discussing the theoretical work. Although I understand how disciplinary battles emerge, I do not find it very helpful to appraoch learning all of these new theories within a broader, dualistic framework. It would be like being a political novice and learning about US politics as if we could talk about stable groups like liberal and conservative, right and left . . . what does one do with all those authoritarian environmentalists or those free loving libertarians . . . Maybe I will feel differently when I run into similar discussions in other ID courses.
I did like the overview of the ID field in the RWID book - the historical overview that discussed how ID belongs to a corporate/military past, how ID became more central to education in the 1980sand 1990s with the spread of the personal computer, and how today we are dealing with these different historical, institutional influences.