I have spent most of my career as an instructional technologist. When I accepted my first job at a university in this role, I was not entirely certain of what instructional technology was, but I was able to answer all the important questions.
In short, Instructional Design is the important work of integrating technology in a teaching and learning environment, and all that goes with that process: research, troubleshooting, experimentation, problem-solving, system administration, programming, design, and being creative. It is, without a doubt, the best job in the world for someone who loves this list of job attributes.
As it turned out, I was perfectly suited for instructional technology, also often called academic technology, educational technology, or instructional technology & design, because I am a versatilist (I know a little bit about a lot of things in my expertise), media producer, technologist, and teacher, and am passionate about these attributes.
From supporting teachers to teaching
In the last few years, I have been fortunate enough to experience the faculty side of this process as a professor in the graduate program I graduated from, the MA in Organizational Leadership at Rider University. I teach students in this program about change management, communication, media creation, media transliteracy, convergence, and effective use of social media. I was recently invited back to teach my third class in the program, and have been working on the syllabus. I like to think of success in course development as making a class that I would be very excited to take. I have done at least that here. I’m sharing the core topics from the course below, and if you have any thoughts about the lineup, feel free to share in the comments!
Weekly topics:
- Getting started. Introduction to the class, WordPress account setup, and first posts.
- WordPress best practices | WordPress Getting started codex | WordPress demo
- Personal and Organizational Branding | Seth Godin lit review | Facebook Demo
- Convergence, mobile technologies, and platforms | Google Glass lit review | Google Plus App demo
- Creating, gathering, and sharing visuals | 3 tutorials for Inkscape | Inkscape demo
- Effective Social Media presence for leaders | case studies for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest
- Virality, ethics, and balance | Kony 2012 | Basic concepts of headlines/Case study for American Apparel marketing methods
- Basic web creation literacy and development | Codecademy assignment | Codecademy assignment review and discussion on practical use of code as literacy
- Staying aware of trends, ideas, news, and contacts with social media platforms |social media dashboard lit review | Hootsuite demo
- Legal issues for individuals, organizations, and society regarding new media | articles on firings, etc, Organizational Social Media policy | best practices document from Princeton
- Creating, gathering, and sharing audio via podcasting and other platforms | Stitcher assignments | Audacity Demo
- Communicating, embracing, and navigating change with a comprehensive organizational communication plan | case studies | Google Drive demo
- Creating, gathering, and sharing motion visuals | YouTube assignments | editing video
- Critical literacy, Transliteracy project | presentations
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