Bean, C. (2012, January 9). The Accidental Instructional Designer by Cammy Bean : Learning Solutions Magazine. Retrieved May 5, 2015, from http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/816/the-accidental-instructional-designer
"The Accidental Instructional Designer" article was written by Cammy Bean to express her "accidental" landing in her profession. The introduction of this article reflects the authors childhood memories of what she dreamt she'd become; a writer or a teacher. She presents much credit to, "how she got here" from a natural aptitude. She worked as part of an internal team, designing call center applications (dated back when GUI interfaces were commonly used). That experience, granted her exceptional knowledge about the program and she then became a classroom trainer in which she later took it a step further to type up "How-to articles" to over a hundred company mailboxes. This experience led her to "multimedia production" where she landed a position as an Instructional Designer.
As a graduate student majoring in Educational Technology- Leadership, her journey was quite interesting to me. It's amazing at how times have changed and the impact technology has on developing new career opportunities. Likewise, this position wasn't very popular when I was a child either, so I can only imagine what further positions technology will lead to. The second half of her article was very informative in which she presented ways to maximize your instructional designing techniques and provided outside sources that would be beneficial for one's growth in this field.
Making Connections
She suggests connecting with other eLearning professionals via blogs and twitter.
Examples include: Tony Karrer'r eLearning Learning Blog feed aggregator (http://www.elearninglearning.com/) and Jane Hart's compilation of edu-tweeters ( http://c4pt.co.uk/social-learning-handbook/workplace-learning-professionals-who-blog-andor-tweet/). The Learning guild has an active group on LinkedIn, too (http://linkedin.com/groups?gid=102144).
Read Books
The books that she suggests reading are, eLearning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Clark and and Richard Mayer as well ass Julie Dirksen's book, Design for How People Learn.
Webinars
Monthly e-webinars and online forums are offered on eLearning Guild. ASTD and Training network has regular offerings as well.
Conferences
She speaks importance on gaining face to face training. eLearning Guild Learning Solutions and DevLearn are both great conferences to attend.
Degree
This section brought me a sense of excitement, considering this is the career/educational path that I am presently taking. She spoke positively about pursuing a degree in instuctional design or educational technology. She views it as a kick start or way to gain deeper expertise in this field.
This article was very informative & I look forward to exploring all informational avenues so that I may gain as much knowledge as possible about my field. I haven't used twitter since an undergrad in college and I solely used it for social networking then. She's inspired me to venture out and create a twitter because it is a great marketing tool for business and I have definitely deprived myself from this technological tool.
It is amazing to me how technology has evolved. I can clearly remember GUI and many other things that clearly reflect my age. As so much has change and developed over the last 20 years, I can only dream of what the future has for us and for women and teachers.
ReplyDelete