EDTECH 513: Creating My Learning Log

I am an active blogger and so, have some familiarity with blogging as a tool for learning. I co-author the Common Core and Ed Tech blog, which has been in existence since early 2013. I also read a significant number of blogs to gain knowledge about effective ways to integrate educational technology into the academic curriculum, as that is a major component of my current position as Vice Principal. My new position of "Educational Technologist" for a local high school will involve providing professional development of all shapes and sizes to the staff, and so even more, I will need to keep abreast of ed tech.

As I began to understand more  about multimedia principles, particularly contiguity, in the first part of the course, it provided an opportunity to critique the work that I (and my co-author) have created for the blog. For that matter, the readings gave me more context and background to also analyze other blogs that I frequently read. Here are some findings:

1.  Not overwhelming people with text.  I think that, overall, we do a good job of restraining ourselves and including only the most relevant information for people. Other blogs I read vary wildly in how closely they attend to some basic principals regarding how text-heavy they are. I can think of one very popular blog I frequent often. The content, while excellent, is detracted from by the amount of extraneous information also on the page. There is a certain amount of self-promotion done (for upcoming seminars and such) that I do understand. There is also a LOT of additional 'noise' in the way of ads that run down the right side of the page. Very distracting. I can continue to improve my blog's entries by being mindful of the limitations of text. Which leads to finding number 2...
2. Include visuals to augment the learning/text. I think we do an ok job here. We can improve the likelihood of knowledge gain if the visuals - charts, infographics, video clips - are always relevant. Including a piece of clip art occasionally is fine, but being mindful to always have a point to the additional visual information provided is important.
3. Being mindful of chunking the content so readers, in general, are not overwhelmed by what's presented. Underlying the chunking concept is the fact that readers have very limited processing capability and that needs to be at the forefront of thought when creating a new post.

In future weeks of this course, I hope to better understand other aspects of multimedia presentation. I am particularly interested in using Redundancy and Personalization, as well as finding out more about Worked Examples.

This relates to the label 2.3 Computer-Based Technologies, as we are clearly in the realm of using the computer (web pages via a blog  in this case) to augment learning. Practicing with a blog - a computer-based technology - is a very relevant way to better understand the importance of how technology can impact - positively OR negatively - learning.