Preventing Violence

Poster highlighting domestic violence conference.

With all the talk on this blog about violence in sports and video games, I wanted to take a moment to talk about preventing violence. The past few weeks, I have had the privilege to work with wonderful people at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence (PCADV).

This wonderful organization works tirelessly to help prevent domestic violence and they do a lot of training. The PCADV trainers are away from home frequently. On these trips, they provide education and awareness to health care workers, law enforcement personnel, welfare caseworkers and others about domestic violence and how to recognize and prevent it. They are beginning to place some of the instruction and information online and that is where I was able to provide some insights.

Karl teaching about instructional design to members from of the PCADV.

Through a grant, Bloomsburg University is helping to create online learning for PCADV and to provide the trainers with knowledge and ideas on how to place some of their information online. Obviously a topic like domestic violence requires face-to-face instruction and information but there is some room for online learning opportunities as well. I am helping them to figure out what goes online and what should be face-to-face.

I want to thank Nancy, Tracy and everyone else for such a delightful learning opportunity working with the group and helping to make them better designers, developers and deliverers of instruction.

As a fun little side note: I learned not to use the phrase "rule of thumb." I had used the phrase in class and then Laurie jokingly said, "who wants to tell him about the origin of the phrase?"

It turns out that rule of thumb, in some circles, was thought to refer to a rule in the 1800s that stated it was permissible for a man to beat his wife with a stick as long as the thickness of the stick was smaller than the thickness of his thumb. While this origin for the phrase is up for some debate. (see Wikipedia "rule of thumb"), it is still a good idea to always remember that domestic violence is a horrible crime and we all need to be involved to prevent it.

Hopefully my conducting the classes will help in some small way and soon, I am sure, they will be putting some great information into online learning events.

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