Perform a blog search on “Instructional Design” and several hundred related blogs fill the screen for your reading pleasure. Closer investigation reveals scores of these blogs are from past instructional design students and are no longer active. Additionally, countless more are commercial, irreverent, or just not very active or interesting. However, there is still a plethora of interesting blogs, especially if you expand your search criteria to include educational technology. I chose to monitor four blogs, two dedicated to instructional design and two devoted to provoking stimulated thinking regarding various educational topics, kind of like mind candy.
Maintained by DePaul University Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS), the contributors to this blog consist of about a dozen faculty and staff from the university. The blog averages 2-3 posts per month but has an extremely low instance of comments. The site contains an assortment of posts on topics from the mundane to some being extremely interesting and useful. For an instructional designer the post Constructing Effective Online-Learning Environments via the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework was particularly engaging with its collaborative process framework. Some of the posts explain ready to use techniques that can be useful in the classroom or for general technology usage. A number of the posts refer to the Desire 2 Learn or D2L initiative and are informational in nature or provide functional tips. While following this blog might provide some interesting topics, it is doubtful that it will entail much collaborative dialog.
Dianne Rees a practicing instructional designer maintains this blog, which is, chocked full of interesting posts related to instructional design and elearning. Interestingly, one of the more recent posts was an overview of Community of Inquiry (CoI) which is similar to a post in the Instructional Design & Development Blog. The frequency of posts in this blog is 2-3 times a week and there is quite a bit more comments activity, post backs and cross posting. One of the posts was an introduction to Compendium, an open source mind mapping and organizational tool. The Compendium post also included links to several other similar tools for exploration by the reader. For an instructional designer or anyone interested in educational technology following the posts of this blog could pay nice dividends.
Dangerously Irrelevant is an extremely popular blog touching on some of the most controversial topics. Scott McLeod, Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, is the author of this blog. The blog averages 2-3 posts per week and receives many comments and cross posting. I like this blog because it challenges the status quo and sparks conversation on contentious issues. Ferriter (2009) writes,” Public articulation is essential for educators interested in refining and revising their thinking about teaching and learning” (p. 37). This blog provides content, stimulation and a forum for some of this expression. Dr. McLeod maintains another exciting blog called Mind Dump, which you may enjoy if you find Dangerously Irrelevant an interesting read. The usefulness of this blog resides not just from the opinions of the author but also from the responses and corresponding discussions, whether in agreement or dissent.
The Fischbowl, maintained by Karl Fisch, administrator and teacher in Littleton, CO. is another interesting and sometimes controversial blog. Karl Fisch was a contributor to the highly popular presentation Shift Happens that later was expanded into the equally popular video Did You Know which, by the way, was also contributed too by Dr. Scott McLeod. The latest version of the video, Iowa, Did You Know, was released last week at the School Administrators of Iowa Conference. The Fischbowl receives several posts per month and several comments for each post. If you are interested in getting into the fray of educational debate this could be a stimulating blog to follow and contribute too.
Ferriter (2009) is emphatic about the usefulness of educational blogs for collaboration and improving teacher knowledge and instructional practice. Ferriter suggests, “Over time, you'll start to see a real change in the quality of the conversations that you're having with your peers. Instead of simply chatting about your weekend, you'll find yourself debating the merits of the new practices that you've stumbled across online” (p. 37). According to Ferriter, this can happen by investing as little as ten minutes a day into following a few well chosen blogs and spending some time in related conversation with your coworkers.
References
Ferriter, B. (2009). Learning with Blogs and Wikis. Educational Leadership, 66(5), 34-38. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
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