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Ellen ReederIT 6750Futures ReflectionIntroduction
The use of communication technology (besides word processing) as a means of making aliving runs in my family. My grandparents gave up teaching school to become movietheater owners in the 1940s through the early 1960s. My dad ran the projector at their drive-in theater to put himself through college. Before she gave it all up to have kids, mymother worked for the NBC affiliate in Tulsa during the 1950s as a weather girl and talk show host (her show was called “Look in with Lee”). My brother has owned a sign making business, and my sister is marketing manager, creating news promos, for a local network station in Oklahoma City. And, my husband is a videographer, director/editor. So, it onlyseems natural that I’m pursuing a Master’s Degree in Instructional Design andTechnology.
Current Employment
It’s 2009, and I’m working for the Association of Perioperative Nurses (AORN) in theCenter for Perioperative Education. I currently manage the review and approval of nursingeducation for contact hours. I work with a dedicated, expert team of reviewers helpingAORN members, health-care providers, and industry clients obtain contact hour approvalfor their education activities. When I began working at this position, the educationdepartment along with our IT department and other IT contractors, were in the process of developing a web-based application, similar to Turbo Tax. During this process, I wasresponsible for writing the schema, a 50-page demonstration of the criteria for approval of educational activities that must be included in the application. I learned how to work withour software developers and also about design and how it must relate to instruction andlearning in application form. I really loved what I was doing.In addition to working for AORN, I spent the last few years researching and writing anovel.
The Peach Basket League
is about the true adventures of a group of farm-girl basketball players during the 1930s and their determined coach, Sam Babb, who was mygreat uncle. Writing a novel was easy compared to selling it, which requires diligence,thick skin, and dedication to the story.I love to write, and used to work as a copywriter/editor in the natural foods industry. Butnow, I’m hoping to combine my writing skills with a knack for systems design and becomean instructional designer.
 
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Five years from now …
After working as a freelance instructional designer for the past year, I’m employed fulltime again in health care! Two nurse educators with over 20 years of experience eachwhom I’ve worked with in the past decided to start their own company called EduHealthInternational. They asked me to be part of their education and training design team, whichincludes three IDs, who also work as project managers, a developer/systems expert,audio/video experts, and a graphic designer (Chen, 2008, p. 3). We work with volunteer  beta testers who test our programs in exchange for free CE credit. We all work from our homes with daily synchronous meetings.We just received our accreditation from the American Nurses Credential Center to providenursing education, and have applied for credentialing for providing Continuing MedicalEducation for physicians, too. We work with subject matter experts to develop web-basedand in-person continuing education for health care facilities, including ambulatory carecenters. Over the past few years, the growth in ambulatory surgery, with its fast turnaroundfor minor to intermediate surgeries, has skyrocketed. We predict continued growth in thissector for continuing education because of new regulations regarding patient safetydeveloped by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in conjunction with TheJoint Commission. Ambulatory care centers must now meet the same standards hashospitals for quality and safety in the delivery of health care.We provide CEs that help nurses and health-care facilities meet new required health-carecodes the government just enacted to prevent surgical site infections, malignanthyperthermia, and other preventable deaths that the new Medicare for All refuses toreimburse. We develop cutting edge and hot-topic education using our own web-basedauthoring tool that includes using a continuous review/revision cycle between subjectmatter experts and instructional designers, akin to the Rapid Prototyping model of instructional design (www.thiagi.com/article-rid.html). Our adult learners bring rich,varied, and relevant experiences with them, so we developed an evaluation and feedback method that can incorporate enthusiastic and knowledgeable learners as subject matter experts in future presentations – all organized through our authoring tool. The hierarchythat used to exist between learner and teacher, at least in some of the adult learning coursesthat we build, has almost disappeared(http://thiagi.com/pfp/IE4H/april2004.html#Editorial).In addition to the authoring tool, we also create guided Personal Learning Environments(PLE) that provide tools that support continuous, learner-focused learning environments(Attwell, 2006, p. 1). A product of Web 2.0, PLEs facilitate connections between peopleand software applications, providing tools for creating knowledge as well as consuming it(Attwell, 2006, p. 3). After an evaluation of specific work areas, we design thework/learning space for facility employees. The tools include desktop applications andsocial software; communities of practice; wikis; a diary for managing work; blogs for sharing work; audio/video editor; photo editing/sharing program; bookmark sharing;Skype; instant messaging; synchronous communication; access to latest research; access toCE web learning; a dynamic feedback/evaluation tool; and email. Our design incorporates
 
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an interactive learning system that includes Dynamic Information Generation (DIG)(Barker, 2009, pp. 9-13). Our criteria also incorporates several design features andstrategies such as sharing psychological and pedagogical values, problem-basedapproaches, and scaffolding (Hannafin, 1999, pp. 121-122).“An organization’s ability to innovate becomes the competitive edge in the globaleconomy (Clark, 2008, p. 7).” PLEs help healthcare facilities stay viable and innovative by building fluid intelligence, giving rise to adaptive expertise (Clark, 2008, p. 13).Challenging problems require diverse expertise. Open-ended learning environments suchas our guided PLE “employ tools, resources, and activities that augment or extend thinking…. OLEs embed learning activities in contexts that foster thinking” that originate from personal practical experiences (Hannafin, 1999, p. 120). We place a greater emphasis onactive learning that cultivates critical thinking, vital to a high functioning health carefacility.Fortunately, web interaction has become as common as using the telephone. Five yearsago, hospitals provided limited number of computers for nurses and other health care professionals to use. Nurses were just beginning to use email, web browsers, and onlinelearning. They had to either schedule limited time at work for the required CE, or take thecourse at home if they owned computers. There was little flexibility.With the advent of rechargeable zinc-air batteries a couple of years ago, laptops and other mobile learning devices such as E-books, Tablet PC, Personal Digital Assistant, and evenmobile phones and Smart Phones, last much longer without a need to recharge. Thistechnology, along with greater access to computers, gives nurses and health-care professionals more learning options. Of course, hospitals were slow to accept the idea of student-centered learning, but the flexibility allowed to busy health-care professionalseventually convinced these staid professionals that a more fluid style of continuingeducations works best.On the next page is a diagram showing the relationships among OLE foundations andvalues (Hannafin, 1999, p. 122)
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