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The creative learning designer's defence kit Introduction: why "defence kit"? This site is all about legitimising creativity and design thinking in the practice of learning design. One of its basic assumptions is that creativity is not highly valued in learning design processes, or in learning designers. There are increasing pressures on learning designers to prioritise efficiency and cost, rather than effectiveness and benefit. hand.jpg But the design of learning experiences is an extraordinarily creative process. Indeed, it presents an array of design challenges that many other design disciplines do not face. This brief "kit" is intended as a starting point for learning designers who feel that they need to be more creative. Of course, you can't learn how to change your working practice, your organisation or yourself from a few pages of text. (You knew that already). But hopefully it will gain your interest, and give you some signposts about where to go next, either on this site or elsewhere.

"It's no secret that web design is a fast-growing industry. Virtually every type of business is in need of a quality website. There are opportunities at the large agency level down to freelancers developing small-business websites from home. So how do you break into this exciting field? With little or no experience creating websites, getting yourself up to speed can be a daunting task. There are so many different avenues of design and development to explore. Which way should you go first? Which skill sets suit you the best? We aim to give you an overview of a few things things that are essential to a well-rounded knowledge of web design. These are starting-points, if you will. Below each item, we've listed additional resources for you to continue on in your learning process. Before we get into it, heed one important lesson: You can't become a professional web designer overnight. It takes years to reach an expert level in any aspect of the field. But everybody starts somewhere, and there's no better time than the present begin your web design education."

"The helpful advice from designer and executive director John McWade from Before & After is one of the most useful websites out there. I'm a huge fan of John's simple, straight forward approach to graphic design and teaching. His advice is always very practical and he has helped thousands and thousands of people over the years communicate more clearly by learning the essentials of graphic design. John even contributed a lovely four-page spread about using images in presentations which appears in the Presentation Zen Design book."

Designing Spaces for Effective Learning was launched at the JISC Conference 2006. A visually-rich publication, it is designed to promote better understanding of what makes an effective design for the 21st century and to summarise the key points to consider when approaching a refurbishment or new-build project.  This publication takes the reader on a 'walk through' of an educational institution, exploring the relationship between learning technologies and innovative examples of physical space design at each stage of the journey. Discussion of the key points is illustrated by 10 case studies from further and higher education, and floor plans from AMA Alexi Marmot Associates, architects and space planners, which provide up-to-date guidelines on the integration of technologies into teaching and learning accommodation.

"Before & After magazine has been sharing its practical approach to graphic design since 1990. Because our modern world has made designers of us all (ready or not), Before & After is dedicated to making graphic design understandable, useful and even fun for everyone."

"Institutional approaches to curriculum design Curriculum design blog JISC Curriculum Design & Delivery1 * The Future of QA & QE2 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:25:50 +0000 Various group discussions and the panel session at the QA & QE in e-Learning conference at the Unive... * QA QE Toolkit3 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:03:22 +0000 A toolkit created by the QAQE SIG was the subject of discussion & consultation at the QA & QE in e-L... * Review of QAA Code of Practice4 Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:41:27 +0000 Brief notes from the QA & QE in e-Learning conference at the University of Hertfordshire on 2nd July... The aim of the JISC e-Learning programme is to enable UK further and higher education to create a better learning environment for all learners, wherever and however they study. Its vision is of a world where learners, teachers, researchers and wider institutional stakeholders use technology to enhance the overall educational experience by improving flexibility and creativity and by encouraging comprehensive and diverse personal, high quality learning, teaching and research."

"This evolving consumer mentality might be called "the templated mind." The templated mind searches for text fields, metatags and rankings like the handles on a suitcase. Data entry and customization options are the way prosumers grip this new generation of products. The templated mind hungers for customization and the opportunity to add their input - in essence to do-it-themselves. The templated mind trusts the result of social production more than the crafted messages of designers and copywriters. And this mentality is changing the design of products. "

PETlab is a joint project of Games for Change and Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. It is a place for testing prototyping methods and the process of collaborative design with organizations interested in using games as a form of public interest engagement. Through our work, we connect with scholars and designers in the field of digital media, practitioners working in the spheres of education and social issues, and people of all ages at play. In the first year, we are working on a number of gaming platforms including Flash, Xbox XNA, and mobile phones. We are also working with a wide range of partners such as MTV, Microsoft, Boys and Girls Clubs, and New York Public Library. Support for PETLab comes from the John D. Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative.

Ten commandments of e-learning (content design) Cath Ellis recently set out her ten commandments of e-learning and this prompted me to try and articulate my own. Now e-learning's a big subject if you include all its many variants - formal and informal, synchronous and asynchronous and so on - and if you take into account all the issues relating to its management and marketing. So, what I've done is restrict my thoughts to the design of interactive, e-learning content, drawing heavily from the 60-minute masters:

Engagement Streams As Course Portals April 18th, 2009 This podcast comes from a presentation Chip German and I did at the ELI 2009 Annual Meeting earlier this year. Here's the session abstract: What if course portals, typically little more than gateways to course activities and materials, became instead course catalysts: open, dynamic representations of "engagement streams" that demonstrate and encourage deep learning? The session will begin with case studies in enabling and designing such course portals, from both administrative and faculty perspectives. Participants will then form groups to imagine and design their own catalytic course portals. Finally, the presenters will discuss action steps that can lead to effective innovation at participants' home institutions. Presentation resources, including a record of the participants' design work, will be posted to an online collaborative space for continued discussion after the session.

Design your best elearning yet Fun guide helps you create powerful elearning every time The Elearning Blueprint™ guides you through a streamlined approach to instructional design that helps you turn even the most boring content into lean, lively materials. Practical advice and lots of examples make it easy to choose the most powerful activities, organization, media, and writing style.

OpenZine is a publishing platform with web browser based tools that provides an easy way for anyone to make their own magazine, for free. The best way to describe what OpenZine provides is by understanding how magazines work. Magazines have a staff of writers, photographers, designers, illustrators and editors that create & contribute. Here at OpenZine you create & contribute on those same principles but your resources are other OpenZine users! To preserving the design experience of print we've created amazingly powerful one click layouts. You can even change them as you go! Create your magazine cover online with the OhhZee Image Editor. In just a few clicks, you can add shapes, text and effects the OhhZee way!

Learning space design and development is a hot topic as our colleges and universities not only seek to provide 21st-century learning facilities, but look to optimise space to best effect and respond to learner expectations. Technology has a vital role to play in this.

15 Impressive and Beautiful Uses of WordPress WordPress is no longer just used to power blogs. It has become the CMS of choice for many web designers. It's always interesting to see how it's flexibility provides web designers with the freedom to design sites with no limitations. Here are 15 beautiful web sites all powered by WordPress.

Perpetual Beta Posted on March 27th, 2009 by Harold Jarche It hadn't really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the 'iterate and refine' concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it's fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they're not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance. So says Ross Dawson in pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world. If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practice. There are no good or best practices that will work for your context in a changing complex environment, so probing (AKA: piloting or Beta releases) is necessary to see what works. However, changing from a highly designed approach to an agile method is difficult. I previously recommended that instructional design adopt agile methods but even in the programming world, letting go of old ways is difficult as Sara Ford at Microsoft explains in how I learned to program manage an agile team after six years of waterfall.

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Thesis Theme for WordPress Solving the fundamental problems of Website development and design

Planning & Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces Virtual Campus To supplement our Flickr Photo Library of technology-rich learning spaces we've also created a Virtual Campus composed of spaces we find inspiring from a range of different places. You can take a walk through the campus and see 360° images of a variety of types of learning space. The floor plan indicates which places you can visit. To take the tour you will need to download some free software onto your PC. The tour is quite intuitive once you've used it but we've provided some instructions to get you started.

"Abstract Purpose - This paper investigates the specialist learning undertaken in graphic design classrooms and its relationship to industry practices. It considers how well students are prepared for work and the nature of this vocational preparation. "

A theme framework is a theme that is designed to be a flexible foundation that can serve as a parent theme for building child themes. The use of WordPress theme frameworks may ease theme development by reducing the volume of work which may be needed in creating a backbone for your theme (usually by using PHP and WordPress Template Tags). Theme frameworks also make theme development more accessible, removing the need for programming knowledge. I listed here the best Wordpress theme frameworks available as well as several child themes and related articles to help get Your foot with Wordpress theme developing.

"As promised, I am presenting a step-by-step approach to a low-cost knowledge management (KM) program using social computing, and will focus on the functionality that has been touted but rarely delivered by communities of practice (CoPs). The name brings to mind Etienne Wenger's pioneering work in observing naturally occurring use of virtual environments by engineers. The problem was that when people went from a researcher's description of what had grown naturally in the past to a prescriptive recipe, things went wrong. People never accurately report all the factors that lead to the success or failure of a project; retrospective coherence clicks in. Also, the fact that something worked once in a specific context does not mean that it will work again even in the same conditions, or that you can accurately replicate the starting conditions. The other big problem was that people built over structured, formal top-down systems that replicated the design methodologies for enterprisewide systems like SAP. So, let's look at a bottom-up, naturalizing approach to building communities for knowledge flow using blogs:"