Nick's Instructional Design Space

Prompt - Reflect and share how the current situation related with COVID-19 outbreak has been impacting you and your classwork.  What are the challenges? Any positives? Any visions of how the situation may impact your project, classwork, and career? Covid-19 has changed the way I work,  how I interact with friends, and how I spend my leisure time.  My wife and I are both teachers, and this year our spring breaks fell on different weeks.  Mine was two weeks ago (the same as UNT's) and my wife's was this week, so I have been kind of social distancing for about 2 weeks.  This first week back has been all about setting up what online instruction is going to look like for my district.  We have had trainings on google hangouts/meet, google classroom (our LMS of choice) and I have been asked to write some virtual curriculum for a couple of classes I teach so we can have take some pressure off fellow teachers next week when kids come back.  It's bee inter...

Prompt 1: Reflect on the Method of Loci in your blog. What worked? What didn't? How could you use such a cognitive activity, mental or visible to users, to improve the acquisition of knowledge in your designs? Write a blog entry on this.  The first time I heard about the idea of a "mind" palace was watching the hit BBC TV show Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch.  Oftentimes in this show, when Sherlock wanted to remember a minute detail from an encounter, he would go to his "mind palace" and pull the memory from there.  At first I thought this was just a TV plot device that would explain his almost un-human like ability to remember even the smallest of details.  A cleaver trick by the show writers to make the main character more relatable to people who couldn't do what he did. It wasn't until starting this masters program that I thought I found out this was indeed a real method that anyone can use to help them remember certain things.  While the show...