Desinging To Learn

In practice of my first webinar I forgot to do some basic things prior to running the event in order to make things run more smoothly. Because of this, I created a checklist of things to do prior to launching the webinar.  Here’s my most ridiculous preflight checklist prior to running the short webinar: Give The Dog A Bone If you run webinars at home and have pets, keep them happy and quiet for the duration of the webinar by making them as comfortable as possible. Take your dog for a walk, give her dinner, or give her a bone. Turn on some calm television programming in the background in your house that may drown out some other neighborly sounds your dog may bark at. For me, giving Bella a bone usually keeps her quiet for 30 minutes or more. Turn Off Your Cell Phone Notification tones are really annoying during a webinar. Turn your phone on silent or off. Also remember to move the phone away from the microphone or anything it may vibrate against if you leave it on vibrate. Sh...

Last week I presented my first webinar for INTE 5670 Plan and Facilitate Live Events . Overall I think it went well and I would like to share some things that I learned from the experience. Admittedly, I sort of took the idea of the “webinar course” for granted because I often have conferences with clients and co-workers. I typically run these meetings on GoTo Meeting and mostly screen share and run through documents and images or 3D files. However those experiences seemingly helped very little in comparison to running a well designed webinar with ample Absorb-Do-Connect activities . Overall, as a presenter the space feels “cold” to me. Where as in face to face or more informal web conferences there is more dialogue style of engagement that creates opportunity for more informalities that I gravitate towards. Popular webinar types of interaction such as polls, group chat, and whiteboard are silent dialogues. So as a presenter, it feels more like I’m lecturing the whole time and ca...

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/2187718-181/some-fishermen-complain-that-carp CARP, not referring to a fish, but rather it’s an acronym for Contrast, Alignment, Repetition, Proximity. Sometimes referred as CRAP! Or so I have found by doing a brief search for CARP on Google. There are already so many great resources out there describing CARP, however I first learned about it in Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery by Garr Reynolds  (2008). Check out the .pdf describing CARP from pages in “Presentation Zen.” Somehow I managed 5 years of design school in the early 2000’s without hearing about this acronym. It’s likely the acronym did not reach the height of popularity until after I graduated. Nevertheless, I entered design school for ILT grad studies in the twenty-teens and picked up where I left off in Joni Dunlap’s “ Creative Designs” course . These CARP principles were already burned into my brain but one has always stuck out for m...

Why You Should Quit Social Media A new year, and another semester at University of Colorado Denver. I can’t believe it’s been almost exactly two years since my last blog post! I started blogging more heavily when I enrolled in UCD back in 2015 in the master’s program for Instructional Design, Information and Learning Technologies. There’s been moments where I’ve seemingly been wrapped up in social networks in conjunction with the assignments. However during the last year to two years I’ve focused on instructional production outside of blogging and social learning networks. During that time I’ve definitely learned the value of being able to step away from media. The greatest take-away: I have the right to enjoy life and choose to what I do with my time. I much prefer a good hike or social gathering in physical space over virtual.  Media doesn’t own me. I don’t have to respond to tweets, blog posts, Facebook or other social networks, even emails if I chose not to. For a...