Helpful Blogs

I’ve followed an assortment of library and technology blogs for quite some time. They range from the personal to the technical, the outrageously funny to the soberly reflective. Among these are several which look at instructional design technologies and theories which can be of some help in teaching library literacy classes. Not all of them are library specific sites, but all are set up to help teachers stay on the cusp of the technological wave. Here are just a few.


The Learning Circuits Blog, created and maintained by the American Society for Training & Development, centers, mainly, on one big question a month. “Does the discussion of "how the brain learns" impact your eLearning design?” and “What tools should we learn?” are just two such questions posted recently. What follows are postings not only of informed and creative responses but resource links as well. While the blog is current and cutting edge the casual reader can stop anywhere in the archives, going back to 2002 (skipping a few years in between), and find a worthwhile discussion. Learning Circuits contains not only an archive but a helpful blog roll, and an indexed topics list. All this makes referencing different ideas or resources a simple click away.

The blog iLibrarian, maintained by professor, speaker and author Ellyssa Kroski, offers a current look at all manner of software and web enabled strategies to inform our teaching. Often technical when speaking about software resources and software functionality, it is nevertheless a very comprehensive guide to newsworthy technology assists for teaching. From Firefox add-ons to a guide to Twitter in Libraries, Kroski often seems to find creative and in-depth presentations to accompany her own observations. Providing an archive, blog roll, category list and a listing of the most popular articles helps make this blog site a great resource for the librarian trying to enhance her teaching skills.

The Instructional Design for Mediated Education is more commonly known as Instructional Design Open Source, or IDOS for short. IDOS is not really a resource center. While many other instructional design blogs point to many other blogs and useful resources IDOS is definitely on the more cerebral side. You can observe this even if you go no further than some of the blog titles. “The Allure of the Anti-Pattern Concept,” “Transcoding Work,” and “Creating Structure from Formlessness,” are just a few titles that indicate the overall direction of this blog. Not satisfied with just the newest technologies, and they do touch on new technologies, these bloggers take us places we might have forgotten in our rush to enhance everything we do with a technological trigger. In “Establishing Grade ‘Floors’ and Higher Grade ‘Ceilings’” our blogger once again established the need for trust and professionalism to be a cornerstone of any of our teaching efforts. The blog, deep in thought while narrow in resource referencing, is a needed anodyne to the technologically enamored among us who focus too much on the next best thing to come along. IDOS makes us pause and do something we don’t often get a chance to do . . . think.