The Doorway to Professional Learning Communities

Hello!  Welcome to JCB's blog.  My inaugural post will focus on several useful web sites, blogs, and tools on the Internet that instructional designers can use to sharpen their skills, learn from other designers, and bookmark for future use. 

In my Links of Interest section off to the right-hand side of the page, I've called out a total of seven different different instructional design resource sites.  In this post, I'm going to describe the four that most caught my attention.  They are: 

• Instructional Design Central
• The Rapid eLearning Blog
• Making change: Ideas for lively eLearning
• Color Blender

What follows is a brief overview of the type of content found on each site, the usefulness of its content, as well as a reflection an ongoing resource:

RESOURCE SITE #1: INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN CENTRAL

Here's a brief description of Instructional Design Central by the owners of the site:

Instructional Design Central (IDC) is dedicated towards providing instructional design professionals, educators, and students access to instructional designer resources, information, learning opportunities, and community services. Instructional Design Central provides instructional designers with the following instructional designer resources: instructional design jobs, instructional design degrees, instructional design conferences, instructional design sites, instructional design definitions, instructional design history, instructional design models, and instructional design forums.

In an organized, succinct, and easy to understand way, this site serves as a foundational platform for all instructional design essentials... including defintions, history, design models, as well as links to related sites, design conferences, etc.  I would use this site the same way a medical professional would use a medical terminology dictionary.  In other words, it's probably not something a trained designer needs on a daily basis, but it's a necessary resource that's always nice to have nearby. 

RESOURCE SITE #2: THE RAPID E-LEARNING BLOG

The Rapid E-Learning Blog is a blog that is run by Tom Kuhlmann, an instructional designer with experience developing eLearning for several top corporations.  His posts are very insightful, well thought out, and put together in easily digestible chunks.  The site as a whole is very appealing from a visual perspective, which makes exploring the site further very inviting.  The insights he provides seem to focus on bringing simple (and often overlooked) topics to life, such as font usage, color usage, project planning, template creation, etc. 

The other nice thing about this site is the liveliness of the community as a whole.  He seems to have quite a following with many enthusiastic commenters. 

RESOURCE SITE #3: MAKING CHANGE: IDEAS FOR LIVELY ELEARNING

Making change: Ideas for lively elearning is a blog that's similar to The Rapid E-Learning Blog.  According to Cathy Moore, the site's primary writer, its goal is to provide "practical ideas that will help you create lively, powerful elearning for adults in the business world." 

Making Change seems to focus on providing its readers with ideas not only about what the adult learner will respond to, but insightful information about why they will respond to it.  Like the Rapid E-Learning Blog, this blog also has a large and lively community of commenters. 


RESOURCE SITE #4: COLOR BLENDER

This is actually one of my favorite sites.  ColorBlender provides designers with an easy to use (and free!) tool that allows you to select a color in the RGB spectrum.  As soon as you have selected a color, the visual display automatically (and instantly) provides you with all of that color's complimentary colors.  For those of us who want to effectively use color but don't have the trained or intuitive eye to mix and match, this site makes it extremely easy to come up with a visually appealing color scheme. 

Best of all, "blends can be saved for future use, and will be available whenever you return to this site from the same workstation, given that your browser accepts cookies."

I hope you found these sites as interesting as I do.  Please let me know if you have any comments or questions. 

JCB