School update

I have selected the topic I am going to work on for my capstone.

What's the capstone?

In the Education and Instructional Design masters program, you learn about both instruction and design. Makes sense.

There were classes that focused more on learning principles and thinking and motivation, and others that were more about design elements, then they were put together in the last class before the capstone, the Design Lab.

For that you had to come up with an instructional problem and create a complete learning module for it. In previous classes, there were mockups and segments and descriptions of approaches, but the lab was a chance to work out all of the kinks when you are doing the whole thing.

Then you tried other students' modules, giving and receiving feedback.

Now I am creating a learning module, but this time there are going to be actual learners, not other students in the same department. We will also have to research something about the impact on the learners, working with analytics to understand things about the effectiveness of the module from the results and write that up.

The process goes over three classes, but all of the assignments within those classes are related; that's the capstone. 

I am working on an issue with licensed clinical social workers treating clients with intellectual disability.

That's an important part of my progress, but the real update is how long it took me to get here.

I struggled with that lab.

Part of it was the tools, most of which I kind of hate now. As I will need to continue to use them, I am going to keep working with those tools and get better at them. Will I improve enough to like them? 

We'll see.

A big part of it was also life circumstances. You know how so many of those recent posts have focused on the coming death of my mother and trying to come to terms with losing her?

Yeah, there was a period where my concentration was pretty shot. That didn't help.

My transcript has two incompletes on it. They are both passed now, but they took too long. 

For the first one, the technical difficulties were not my fault. 

On the most recent one, I like to think that I can and should have done better, but I also thought I was going to finish my degree six months early when I was starting out. 

Maybe I needed to be taken down a peg.

There have been two parts to finally making headway, both of which are important.

One is that you need to keep showing up, day after day. 

I never made it as far in a single day as I wanted to (maybe on the day I actually finished the lab), but I would get something done, which could not happen if I did not show up.

The other thing is that I needed to work out the emotions. If those songs and blog posts about the songs seemed self-indulgent, they were also helpful for me.

I was able to do better work when the emotions started to resolve. 

When I say you can't ignore those things indefinitely, I really mean that.