AERA SIG Instructional Technology Newsletter

“Hi everyone,

First and foremost, it has been a pleasure serving as the AERA SIG Instructional Technology Program Chair. Huge thanks to everyone who submitted proposals to our SIG. It was very exciting to see the range of topics covered in the proposals submitted. I was also deeply impressed with the quality of the proposal submitted, which made for a difficult peer review process for our reviewers. Speaking of reviewers! I am profoundly grateful for our 94 reviewers who took on the very meaningful tasks of providing feedback and recommending proposals for our SIG Instructional Technology program. Huge thanks to all that have volunteered as Session Chairs, you are a critical component for a smooth conference session! Gratitude!

I can humbly say that we have an amazing AERA 2024 program for the SIG! Each session was carefully designed to ideally create a cohesive line up of presentations. I look forward to meeting you in Philadelphia and to your presentations! I am excited for all of us to engage in academic discourse, professional development, and informal social conversations. See you soon! Go Vols!
Enilda Romero-Hall, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Tennessee Knoxville

These quote is a section of the AERA Special Interest Group Instructional Technology Spring 2024 Newsletter recently shared with our members. Below is a copy of the complete AERA Special Interest Group Instructional Technology Spring 2024 Newsletter compiled, formatted, & organized by the 2023-2024 board members of the SIG Instructional Technology:

24-spring-aera-sig-it-newsletter Download

The FPTO Editors First In-Person Meeting!

Last year, I received an invitation from my colleague, Clare Daniel, to present in a panel to discuss the Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online digital guide and other scholarly efforts related to the digital guide in person at Tulane University. The invitation to travel to New Orleans was extended to Niya Bond and myself (Clare, Jacque, and Liv live in New Orleans). The goal was for all the five editors of the digital guide to join in the panel.

Fast forward to February 2024, Niya and I travelled to New Orleans for the in-person panel. Meeting my colleagues in-person for the very first time was a joyous occasion. I have been personally interacting and collaborating with the FTPO editors for the last 3 years and we had only met through Zoom. It was so nice to fully interact outside the Zoom software and engage in informal convos that allowed us to learn more about each other personally and professionally.

“We want to acknowledge that this panel discussion is part of a lecture series dedicated to Adele Ramos Salzer (NC ’40). Her interest in academic programs focusing on women’s experiences led to the establishment of the Salzer lecture series. Her donation endowing the series has been generously strengthened through gifts in her memory from her family, friends, and classmates.”
Clare Daniel

During our visit to Tulane, we all got to have an short meeting to discuss panel, have dinner to talk about every under the sun (also, celebrate Clare’s new promotion at Tulane University), and have the panel at the Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute for students, faculty, and staff.

The editors of the FPTO after the panel presentation

During the panel we:

Provided a brief explanation of the origins of the digital guide and the idea for the forthcoming book
Shared why and how we expanded our team of editors
Shared a brief description of the forthcoming book
Discussed how and why we expanded the guide to include annotated assignments
Shared an explanation of the blog and the collaborative editing process
Allowed for Q & A

It was really nice to have such a strong presence of students during the panel session. The students were very curious about of opinions on online learning, now past the COVID-19 pandemic. We also had some good questions and conversations with faculty who attended the event. I am very thankful for the invite to participate in this panel. I am also grateful for the opportunity to meet my colleagues in-person for the first-time. Online environments, synchronous and asynchronous, have allowed is the opportunity to genuinely connect and communicate. However, it is always nice to further engage in-person to deeper our understanding of each other (personally & professionally), converse about the future of the digital guide, and discuss upcoming projects.

Learning Designers in Context: Examining Practices Across the Global South [Book in Progress]

I guess it is time for me to write a blogs post about my forthcoming book 😊

It has been a while since I first announced that I was working on my next book and sadly due to various reasons I had to rescheduled my submission of the book to the publisher twice! But over the last two months I have moved full steam ahead with this book project.

I love how it is taking shape and that I get to work on it. Today, I was working on chapter 12 (in a coffee shop) and I was just smiling thinking that someone else would get to read this work.

This is not a book in which I tell someone else’s stories or tell you how to be a learning designer. The book is about learning designers telling their stories. It is about conversations, experiences, and journeys.

Reflections on #OER23

This past week I attend the Open Education Conference! Going to a conference you have never attended before and in a different continent is actually very intimidating. But, I made the travel arrangements and (despite some frustrations with airlines) made the journey to Inverness, Scotland to attend #OER23.

First, a shoutout to my co-authors: Josh Rosenberg and George Veletsianos. Our team has been working on a project related to self-archiving practices amongst scholars in higher education. This work has been inspired by similar work that both Josh (see blog post) and George have done in the past. The purpose of my travel to #OER23 was in part to present some of our initial findings and to get the conversation started on this topic. Here are the slides from the presentation: tiny.utk.edu/OER23

Back to the conference experience! Arriving at the conference venue (The UHI Inverness Campus so serene, accessible, and full with natural beauty) I did not know what to expect from from the conference. But I was immediately welcomed. A colleague sitting next to me an at the opening keynote introduce herself and she, just like me, was attending for the first time and had made her way to Inverness from Sri Lanka. I quickly realized that the #OER23 conference was an event with a global representation.

There were so many wonderful and insightful sessions, starting with the keynote by Rikke Toft Nørgård: “HYPER-HYBRID FUTURES? Re-imagining open education & educational resources: Places // Persons // Planets“. I also really enjoyed learning about the FEE project: https://www.feecolombia.org and organization that uses Open Education Resources to support rural education in Colombia. I ended my first day in a workshop lead by colleagues Tom Farrelly and Eamon Costello who are exploring the value place by higher education on open access publishing (very much related the work that Josh, George, and I are doing). In any case I highly recommend checking out their information letter (bit.ly/43c084q) and their survey (bit.ly/40z1OD3).

The second day of the conference was full of inspiration:

I learned about an upcoming book edited by Catherine Croning and Laura Czerniewicz. Very much looking forward to reading this book: bit.ly/HE4Good_updates
Helen DeWaard, Serena Roberts, and Leo Havermann discussed their lived experiences in opening their doctorate journey! This is a practice that I I hope to foster amongst the graduate students in the Learning, Design, and technology program at UTK.
Frances Bell and Lou Mycroft shared “Using feminist posthuman storytelling to promote activism in FemEdTech/Open Education“, which also let me to learn more about the digital quilt and the stories shared by all the #FEMEDTECH quilt contributors.

There are many other sessions that I could mention. I am still gathering links and resources from the conference. Thankful for all the presenters who shared their slides via Discord and other online platforms. I love that I got to meet so many online connections that I have in one way or another linked with in the past (likely in the bird app). Also, grateful for the opportunity to met colleagues who I did not know before and who share a passion for openness! It was also great to learn more about OER practices and policies in Scotland. Looking forward to future OER conferences!

I almost forgot! How could I forget? The OER GASTA was epic (also just in case you are wondering what is a GASTA?)! I do not have links to all of the GASTA presentations but here is the one presented by Eamon “Beyond the pedagogies of perpetual panic“. All of them were pretty epic!

Travel Preparations

I think for the most part when we think of preparing for work travel we think of getting work done that need to completed before we travel and preparing for the work that will be done during the work travel trip. In my case the work that will be done is normally a presentation.

But I know many of us also have to think of what is going on in our personal lives and what we need to prepare so that when we come back from work travel we are not to discombobulated to be involved and participate in activities in our personal lives (with family and friends). This all takes some serious project management skills!

This past weekend, it was Easter Sunday. I knew that after a week of travel I would come home to a special holiday for my little one and I wanted to make sure he knew I had not forgotten. So, my pre-travel preparations involved getting Easter goodies (thank you Party City!) and planning activities prior to leaving for my work trip. I also manage to get a chocolate bunny at the airport in one of my layovers on the way home 😊 🐰

ChatGPT SWOT Assignment

As part of my course this semester, I asked my students to conduct a SWOT analysis of Chat GPT. Here is the assignment:

Visit the website: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/Links to an external site.
Explore the website and use AI interface (ask the AI to write an essay on the topic of your choice)
Ask yourself the following questions (Source: Dr. Torrey Trust “Teacher and Student Guide to Analyzing AI Writing Tools”) and write your answers down to as many in a Google Document (we will discuss your responses to these questions in the following synchronous class):
- Why was this tool created?
- What are the objectives, aims, and values of the tool designer?
- What does the tool designer gain from your use of this tool?
- Who is the target audience for this tool? How do you know this?
- Who is harmed and who benefits from this tool?
As you are using chatGPT think about the Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) of this tool in teaching and learning
Create a figure (using Canva) that helps illustrate your SWOT analysis

I was pretty excited to see the outcome of the exercise but also to hear the stories during our discussion. Here are some examples of the SWOT analysis created by the students, shared in this post with their permission.

SWOT analysis of the ChatGPT application. — Designed by Keiko Eda

DICE Conference Workshop on Digital Literacy

This past week I joined the DICE Conference to host a workshop on Digital Literacy. The aim was not to enhance the digital literacy of the participants but to discuss how we can organize, collect data, and execute a digital literacy plan. The workshop was hosted at 3 am local Knoxville time. I really did not know how responsive I was going to be, but it is amazing how you feed from the energy of others. The participants of the workshop were energetic, open, and engaged, they made the three-hour session go by so fast. Grateful to the organizers of the DICE conference for the invitation to join the conference and organize this workshop. Here are some of the resources I used during the workshop:

Workshop slides: tiny.utk.edu/DICEDigLiteracy
Workshop Worksheet: tiny.utk.edu/DICEDigLiteracyWorksheet

Tenured. Again.

A few weeks ago, I found out that the Tenured Upon Appointment process at The University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) was completed. I am grateful to the UTK community for honoring my work and contributions as an Associate Professor with tenure. I look forward to continuing my work as researcher, instructor, and member of my professional community. Also, thankful to the many collaborators so much of the work that I do is a join effort with colleagues and students.

UTK STEM Education Seminar

This past week, I was invited to speak as part of the STEM education seminar sponsored by the Theory and Practice in Teacher Preparation (TPTE) Department STEM team. I am part of the STEM Education team in the department and this semester a group of colleagues are organizing this seminar with presentations for faculty and graduate students every two weeks. I have really enjoyed all of the presentations this semester. Our STEM Education team is doing really amazing work and I love learning about it.

For my presentation, I was a bit nervous because I was not sure how my work would relate to STEM education. I know educational technology is consider part of STEM education. However, I think of my work as more than just educational technology. I actually see Learning, Design, and Technology as the umbrella term under which educational technology, instructional design, instructional technology, learning engineering, and others similar terms come together. Perhaps one of my main concerns is that under the term STEM, learning design is primarily associated with the “technology” term which I really see as just one aspects of the far more complex ecosystems of the learning, design, and technology field.

The presentation focused on how it is okay to have many areas of research interest. We are often encouraged to stay very narrowly focused on a topic. But, what if you are curious about other topics and want to explore them? So, basically, I used myself as an example of an eclectic research agenda. My research has evolved so much and in part it due to my curiosity to explore other topics. This has also been true in my life, curiosity to try new things or study programs outside my focus has helped me evolve and grow. Here is the link to the slides, in case you are curious.

Everyone needs a “thank you card wall“

This week has been a week of cleaning. How do we possible accumulate so much crap?

Today I cleared my office at The University of Tampa. The pile of crap that I had in my office is so irresponsible. The funny part is that now I pretty much do all of my work using only digital files and a MacBook Air. Why on earth did I have all of that stuff? I don’t know.

Let’s talk about the phone. I never learned my office phone number and I would lie if I tell you I know how to check my voicemail. If you left me a voicemail here what I have to say to you: why?

Probably the best part of clearing my office was my “thank you card wall.” That wall and the messages I received at some moment helped me get through a difficult moment. So thank you to everyone that at some moment in the last few year has giving me a thank you card because hey you probably made a deeper impact in my life in another way.