After four years

Here is a post after 4 long years. I've quit blogging since I've been keeping up with my website and been active on Facebook. I currently work as an Associate Professor in Instructional Technology at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. I just earned my tenure here :) I love the courses I teach. I have been spending my last few years, researching on Synchronous Virtual Classrooms. I'm slowly getting into the area of Mobile Learning. I taught a summer course on Designing and Developing Mobile Learning. I did learn quite a bit from the experience. I start my Multimedia Design and Development Class tonight. I am excied about the Ebook proejct, and also using Articulate Storyline in this course for the first time. Technology keeps changing and its been fun exploring them! I hope to do periodic updates on this blog. Let's see! Florence

Research /Conferences

One thing that I am passionate about is my research on Instructional Technology :)When you are in academia, research and conferences become part of your life style. With a 3-3 load I just have to find the time to make room for it.

Here are some of the areas that I've been working on,
1. A Web 2.0 Learning and Instructional Design Model
2. Learning Management System Self-Efficacy (LMSES)
3. Adoption of Virtual Classrooms
4. Multimedia Competencies for Instructional Technologists

My article on Process Improvement was just published in PI and my dissertation will be published in JEMH in April. Some of the journals do take a long time, and I'm hoping that some of my other articles in the queue would get published sooner.

I'm travelling end of this week to World Congress 2008 at NY, and then to Society of Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) at Orlando. Two good conferences to look foward to. I'm also attending the UNCTLT conference at Raleigh in March. It will be my first time at UNC TLT and I'm looking forward to it

Spring 2008 @ UNCW

I am excited that my husband has also taken up a job here in Wilmington, NC. He now works for the ITSD group. www.uncw.edu/itsd

As for me, I am teaching Computer-based Instruction and I'm enjoying every bit of it. I've introduced my students to the total training videos. (http://www.totaltraining.com) and they love it. I've been very impressed with the videos myself and they have been such a big help in learning the tool. We've been having fun working with FLASH and I'm waiting to see how their projects turn out.

I've finally transitioned over to Office 2007 and getting used to it.

Fall 2007 Conferences - NSF ATE and AECT 2007

I made two back to back trips in October, one to Washington DC and then to Anaheim, California. Since I've been a co-principal invesitigator on an NSF ATE Grant, we had to present at the conference in DC. We had to set up a booth and we did get creative and used a DVL Wheel which we used last year as well.

Then at AECT, I participated at an NSF Symposium organized by a research group from UGA. It was a neat experience learning on how to write successful grants!

Good Bye to Authorware

Adobe has planned to discontinue Authorware which has been one of the earlier CBT development tools. It will continue selling Authorware 7 and provide support for that version! http://www.adobe.com/products/authorware/productinfo/faq/eod/#a9



However, there are other excellent CBT development tools such as Captivate, Flash, Dreamweaver. Looks like the industry is going in the direction of the demand!

From Adobe:

According to a recent survey by the eLearning Guild, most of the top tools currently used by eLearning professionals come from Adobe. These include Adobe Captivate®, Flash®, Acrobat Connect™ and Dreamweaver® software. As eLearning continues to shift from a static “Web 1.0” style publishing paradigm toward a “Web 2.0” style connected ecosystem, additional Adobe products such as Adobe® Acrobat®, Flex™, Adobe Photoshop® Elements, Director® and Flash® Lite™, as well as rapid eLearning tools such as Adobe Captivate®, Acrobat Connect™, Adobe Presenter™ and Contribute® software will enable learners to engage with ideas and information, anytime, anywhere, and on virtually any device.

University of North Carolina - Wilmington

After 6 years of being in Arizona, finally it is time for me to move. I've accepted a faculty position with University of North Carolina - Wilmington.


More details of the courses I'm teaching is displayed at http://people.uncw.edu/martinf/

North Carolina seems to be beautiful :) and I'm still in the process of settling down.

Process Improvement

Over the last few months I have been researching on Process Improvement - specifically, "A Performance Technologist’s approach to Process Performance Improvement" I'm hoping that the paper will be published soon, but for now here is an outline.




Here is an outline...

Process Performance improvement is the concept of measuring the performance of a particular process, then modifying the process in order to increase the output performance. The concept of performance improvement can be applied to either individual performance or organizational performance.

Process Performance Management provides detailed understanding of how a process can be designed/ redesigned to improve the performance. It starts with identifying an opportunity for improvement and ends with an opportunity for continuous improvement. This can be viewed as an alternate way to the HPT model’s performance improvement approach. It is not very heavy on the analysis front as the HPT model, but focuses more on identifying performance outcome measures.

My New Corolla

Here are few pics of my new Corolla! A cousin of mine wanted to see it, so here it is :)

Summer of 2007

I have been working for University of Phoenix and also for Mesa Community College on the DVL NSF grant. Both the projects have been a good experience for me so far. Work has been relaxed and exciting. The only problem is the Arizona heat. Unbelievably its so hot here these days. Here is the graph showing the average highs and lows for Mesa, Arizona - 85202

My Wedding

Yep, the other exciting event of my holiday was my wedding. The wedding was planned in a short period of time. I married "Suseel" who is also my wonderful friend :) We are now both back in Arizona. But we are thinking about relocating to North Carolina because of a job opportunity that has come through for me. We are happy to be married to each other and I am in the process of learning to be a wife :)