PIDT is an annual meeting (or un-conference) where professors, graduate students, and people interested in instructional design gather from around the nation. PIDT is an acronymn for Professors of Instructional Design. It started as a meeting 20 years ago in a spot owned by Indiana University, called Shawnee Bluffs. It has since progressed to meeting on a bi-annual basis at two sites. One is at Smith Mountain Lake 4H Camp in Virginia. The other, where the meeting was held this year, is at the YMCA of the Rockies outside of Estes Park, Colorado.
PIDT is a small conference. There were about 100 people there this year. The best thing about PIDT is the conversations and the sessions. Much collaboration with colleagues comes from these conversations. This has been documented extensively over time.
I talked about how to use blogs as a classroom tool and a research tool. Many faculty and graduate students discussed with me how to use this technology as a part of their teaching. I had some really interesting discussions with people as to how blogs allow better and richer conversations than learning management systems conventionally used by many universities. One of the key points a lot of people felt was important was that with a blog you could carry a discussion over multiple semesters. Many universities' sysadmins force courses placed on conventional LMS systems such as Blackboard to be shut down at the end of a semester. This is a good thing.
Also the instructor is more easily able to post web resources to a website and students are more easily able to track the changes in a website with weblogs.
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