Reflections on ID Resources

There is a wealth of information on Instructional Design available at one's fingertips.  As I began my exploration this week, I found myself jumping from one great resource to another as the web of connectivity grew larger and larger.  I decided to follow several blogs that I found intriguing and will highlight a few of those here:

For the Love of Teaching:

This blog is written by a teacher, on her journey to her Ph.D. in Instructional Design.  This blog caught my eye because of the relevance to my current situation.  I appreciate having the perspective of a teacher as she explores instructional design concepts and the applications to her teaching practice.  Lisa's blog is easy follow and explore with her categories and tags for her posts.  Of particular interest to me was her combination of posts on new technology tools (which I always find helpful) as well as her discussion about instructional design and its relationship to k12 education.  Many posts highlight helpful resources or articles that she has come across that I found useful, such as this link to an article about different types of educators.  It discusses the similarity of educators from k12, to higher ed, to instructional designers in a corporate setting.   The blog is not flashy, but informative and I think I will found myself heading back often.

eLearning Technology

This blog is written by a blog and e-learning guru, Dr. Tony Karrer.  I came across this blog because his most recent post: How Khan Academy Nike Training Club and Spark People Motivate Users Behavior caught my eye.  It seemed to be on track with our learning this week on behaviorist theory.  I am just starting to think about how designing digital material may enhance or motivate learning.  Two years ago I started a training program sponsored by Adidas called Micoach.  I have been amazingly motivated by it and didn't even realize how much the online component was tied to this motivation.  After reading this article and reflecting on my own motivation, I want to explore more about this as a future instructional designer.

This blog is not as easy to explore initially as others, but what I did find helpful is the Blog Guide that Dr. Karrer includes.  As I wondering around his page, I found this link which is a nice introduction to blogs in general, RSS feeds and an encouraging push for sharing via comments on his blog.   In this section he also organizes his posts into topics (something I think would be better on the front page of the blog).  For me the posts on elearning trends and resources I think will be most useful as I venture further into ID.  It doesn't seem that this blog is updated as often as others, however I still expect to find a lot of new material to explore.

The eLearning Coach

From the minute I landed on this site, I knew I would enjoy this blog.  I think the layout is very appealing to me and something to strive for as I morph my own blog over the next months and years.  I find the organization of topics very easy to read and I can choose articles or links of interest without a lot of searching through the site.  Just in the category of Instructional Design under eLearning Design I found many useful articles, including this one on chunking information.  This seemed quite applicable to our learning theories class in understanding how the brain processes information during learning.  I think I could spend days on this site exploring the resources as this is quickly becoming one of my favorite sites. 

If only I had more of this thing all things devours...