Participating in Professional Communities

Participate Actively in the Profession

• Identifies and participates in communities of practice within the field of Educational Technology

Artifact

NX12 – Animation Designer Product

Narrative

I started Purdue’s Learning Design and Technology program during my third year of technical writing at Siemens PLM. I chose the program specifically to round out my pre-existing education in systems and electrical engineer and passion for writing. The disconnect of various high-level pedagogical techniques proved to be difficult for me to overcome.

However, my previous and current experience with Siemens PLM has had a mutually beneficial relationship with my education at Purdue. As a member of the Documentation and Process Application team, I participate with my coworkers and managers in a corporate, educational environment specifically catered towards engineering. Even before starting at Purdue, I was doing similar customer analysis and design documents in the pursuit of developing content. The LDT program has aided me in understanding the purposes and intentions behind the various components of our processes and how they all contribute to learning.

While I had developed content for Siemens PLM before, my first foray into Animation Designer (a new product that I developed concurrently with my graduate program) benefitted greatly from this deeper understanding of instructional design and educational technology. I was able to requisition resources for developing videos with a deeper understanding of multimedia principles and schema theory.

Going forward, I hope to continue to hone my skills within the corporate environment, but also extend it to the other communities I participate in, whether it’s doing additional contract work for Button Poetry and their digital distribution of spoken word, or working with other individuals or organizations to utilize the wide range of educational technologies for whatever purpose they have.