On 11/8/06, Sathish . . . wrote:
Hello Sir, I have been working as an Instructional Designer for the past one and half years. Could you please share with the e-learning sites or blogs that impressed you the most? I will be grateful if you could suggest useful tips to become an excellent Instructional Designer.
Regards,
Sathish
Sathish,
To become an excellent instructional designer, you will need the initiative to do research before asking for help. Over the last eight years, I have posted thousands of entries on these topics. Read some of them. Then come back with more specific questions.
jay
Jay Cross, Internet Time Group
jacking in from Berkeley today
5 comments ↓
To Sathish : Jay Cross is a good resource. Check it out. Oops.
Checking it out does not mean asking for advice that’s already in plain sight. I hope I’ve helped Sathish on his learning journey.
Let’s see, on Tuesday you blogged about how discouraged you were with the Disney Coronado Springs Resort because you couldn’t use your inhouse credit card to buy a beer at the banquet. “Here the cast blew me off because I didn’t know their rules. Sheesh.”
On Thursday, Sathish asks the champion of informal learning to be an impromptu mentor and point him in the right direction and you say: “Over the last eight years, I have posted thousands of entries on these topics. Read some of them. Then come back with more specific questions.”
All I can say is “Sheesh.” I understand informal learning as a networking model in which you learn from cohorts and experts. Sathish may very well be a novice and has no idea where to start and he turned to you for pointers and you blew him off. Then to add insult to injury you publish it to the world.
I respect your ideas and follow your writings closely, but I am ashamed of your response.
It is a long journey to becoming an ‘excellent’ instructional designer…. There is so much of learning to do, so many things to read, so many thoughts, ideas, and work to reflect on….
Like Jay Cross suggested it is all about research…I also believe that it is important to reflect on your own work. Remember, information has to be searched, it doesn’t come to us.
Yes, I agree that any path to excellence is a long journey and on any journey you need to ask directions to get to where you want to be. For example, I just started a new job in an area that I am not familiar with the roads. I plotted my trip from my home to the office using Mapquest. The website gave me what it determined was the quickest route. What its map didn’t tell me is that one of the roads it sent me down was a narrow, windy, unlit road that is difficult to navigate at night.
As soon as I could I asked a coworker familiar with the area to help me find a safer route, which she did by actually taking me in her car and driving me through a new, safer route.
This is what Satish was attempting to do. He knows his destination–he wants to become an excellent instructional designer–but he just stopped along the way to ask directions from someone who knows the territory.
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