Professional Interests...

The Basics
The obvious starting point is to indicate that I have been a professor of educational psychology for 30+ years. I have been on the faculty of Florida A&M University, Florida State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I teach courses in educational psychology, especially learning theory, instructional design and technology applications. I remain keenly interested in applying technology to instruction. In the past several years this has taken me into teaching online as well as studying distance learning.

Professional Interests
This fall I will teach a course on learning theory for graduate students in education. Naturally I will have several online components to this course including narrated PowerPoint slides to convey course content, a discussion forum to discuss the different learning theories, and links to other resources. Having these components frees me during class time to help them better understand the theories and their applications through dialogue and discussions. My current research interests include examining distance learning in rural schools. I am working with others to complete a survey of distance learning using a national sample of rural school districts to understand how they are using distance learning, what technology they use, the barriers they see, and their perception of success.

What I Am Writing
At the moment I am working of a chapter about the theoretical basis of learning objects for an edited book. I just completed a major article tracing the history of Instructional Systems Development that was published in Educational Technology in July. This article is available here if you wish to read it. Along with others, I am completing a review of the literature on distance learning with an emphasis on rural schools. I am working on an article describing an inter-institutional collaboration in teaching a graduate instructional design course online that was designed around problem-based learning and activity theory.