What does an instructional designer do? As someone with a PhD in the field, it’s distressing how often I’m asked this question. I have a degree in a field most people don’t know exists. However, I’m far from alone. Christy Tucker has blogged for over a decade about her professional practice as a designer and…
As I mentioned in my post yesterday, we’re trying out different accessibility tools for our presentation at the IACEA conference next week. In my call out on social media, I received suggestions for color contrast checkers. We tested our Google Slides using Grackle Docs and WebAIM Color Contrast Checker and realized we had to change dozens…
As I mentioned yesterday, Jeff and I are preparing two conference presentations on accessibility for the IACEA conference next week and the COABE conference in April. I’ve immersed myself in the topic for the past several months, and today was no exception. From our early days at the Literacenter in 2017, we’ve sketched out many…
Historically, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and its annual Horizon Report was a good source of information about “what’s next” and “what’s on the minds of educators”. Now that the NMC has been acquired by EDUCAUSE, I’ve started using their surveys as ways to frame perceived need (in papers and presentations) and to consider projects…
I’m on a perpetual quest for resources to help me improve my writing. Back in 2006 on this very blog, I linked to Cutts, M. (1995). The plain English guide. Oxford: The Oxford University Press. A week ago, I wrote a blog post about how I didn’t find benefit in Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct…
While this post has NOTHING to do with instructional design, we can loosely affiliate it with education – namely, mine! For many years, I have purchased “paperwhite” bulbs for family and friends at Christmas. The bulbs grow into flowers within about 6 weeks after the holidays and become the first glimmer of spring during the…
I love when I post about my process and request input from others … and get responses! Following my post yesterday about Tidy HTML, I received a tip from Matthew Schmidt on Twitter sharing his solution to use Atom editor with plugins like atom-beautify and tidy-html5. Thank you, Matthew! Downloading now …
If you ever have to do any editing to a webpage or learning management system, you’ve probably found you need to take a peek “under the hood” at the HTML code. I do nearly every day, but I know next to nothing beyond the handful of edits I do when I need to embed a…
Here are a couple of thoughtful posts related to instructional design: Amy Lomellini shared with us her experiment to try tools that offer an accessible webinar and recording. If you’re on LinkedIn, she’d like to hear your suggestions to streamline the process. Nice job, but it shouldn’t be this hard! Enilda Romero-Hall shared with us the…
I found out tonight that my mom’s close friend, Mary Jean Goeres, died this week. Mary Jean and her husband raised their kids at the same time my parents were raising their “first” kids, and then they traveled with my mom and dad through the 1990s and early 2000s. This picture includes my mom and dad…