Babette Kraft

ABOUT

ABOUT ME

I graduated from the University of North Texas with a B.A. in Philosophy, minor in Religion and a B.A. in General Studies, minor in Japanese. During my time as an undergraduate student, I participated in a National Science Research Foundation (NSF) summer program for the social sciences and studied abroad for two semesters in Japan at Kansai Gaidai University.

WHAT I'VE DONE

My professional background is in English as a Second Language (ESL) education. I recieved an online, Teaching English as a Foriegn Language (TEFL) certification from Bridge-Linguatec. After teaching for two years as an Assistant Language Teacher in Fukuoka through the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET), I went to China.

There, I worked at an ESL training school for a company that catered to the Japanese ex-pats living abroad in China. In Shangai, I became involved with instructional technology using interactive whiteboards in face-to-face classroom settings as well as blogs, podcasts and online instruction. I returned to the U.S. and worked for LanguagLab.com as a virtual-world English Instructor.

Eventually, I began to make the transition from teaching to instructional design though my position as a Project Assistant for the New Media and Extended Learning Dept. at the University of New Mexico.

WHAT I DO

My professional interests include:

instructional design, multimedia and instructional technologies, knowledge management, eLearning and mLearning.

I am interested in designing and building learning environments that integrate social collaboration, support intuitive and learner-centered interactions and promote a life-long attitude toward learning.

I would like future projects to include:

creating large-scale, collaborative learning environments that are sustainable by the community of learners (I think MOOCs can potentially evolve into this type of learning envrionment);
designing and implementing web-based, interactive eLearning educational and training courses;
building mobile learning that extends the reach of eLearning as well as fully integrates the capabilities of situated learning and inherent mobile functionality;
developing a knowledge management system that is user-friendly and allows for ease of collection, access and transfer of information between departments and subsystems.

Also, I am eager to contribute as a team member to a learning organization, an organization which is capable of continuous learning , adaptation and is driven by a shared focus that nurtures the intrinsic motivation of its members.