About

So, Blog-deelah! is my blog about Course Design, Academia, Professional Development, Instructional Technology, Outreach, and Graduate School — all things I’ve been around for about a year now, but which I am daily more involved in, and which will be a large part of my academic and professional careers in the very near future.

At Virginia Tech I’m directly responsible for the training of about a dozen undergraduate students, and it’s my job to make sure that they are proficient in a host of multimedia applications.  This is a formidable task, but one I relish moreso each day as I learn about the process of Instructional Design.

Also at Virginia Tech, in the new School of Visual Arts I’ll be teaching two sections of the Principles of New Media to incoming freshman in the fall.  That’s something I’m REALLY excited about and an amazing opportunity to contribute to the improvements underway to the program I myself went through many years ago.

Lastly, my Masters in Education is now underway (begun May 2008) with a concentration in Instructional Technology and the coursework here is invigorating on the theory side, pretty straightforward on the technical side (a lot of the media stuff is already a function of my current job), and the opportunities for practical experience and immediate deployment are inspiring and highly motivational.

So all of these are things I spend a LOT of time thinking about.  I use this blog to keep track of those thoughts, to document my evolving thinking about instruction and learning, and as a place to invite opinion and commentary from others I wouldn’t otherwise have direct access to.  The name is a mashup up of weblog and a Russian greeting I’ve had rattling around in my head for years.

 

~benc