I recently came across a blog-post by Susan Weinschenk which provides a quick overview of ideal user experience guidelines from a psychologist’s point of view.

The article addresses a diverse set of user experience guidelines and standards and consists of some really practical and useful tips which can and ought to be implemented right away.

Here’s a quick summary of the points which I found to be relevant to eLearning and Instructional Design.

I’ve been working on some learning related material for children. Designing for children is a totally different ballgame from the workplace learning we are typically involved in. To put it mildly, designing for children is tough; to design for today’s children even tougher. The more I look at this demographic they call ‘digital natives’, I find individuals who take the digital world the internet enables for granted. To these individuals, the internet and its data services are just as mundane as electricity and phones were to us in older generations. I wrote about this group of people couple of years back.

We have said this before and are saying it again; informal learning is the new ‘learning’. This is not to say that informal learning would act as a replacement to the formal mode of learning, but it is the synergy between these both that produces effective growth. Based on this premise, we have debunked some of the common myths of informal learning. Also, we help you assess this new form of learning in a new light.

From informal learning, we go on to talk about learning as the new work, eLearning testing, novice and expert thinking, tablets and more.

Read it all here in our Weekly Digest – a collection of our top 9 links from the week gone by, each accompanied by a quick brief.

Need to quench your thirst for the latest in learning, technology and media links further? You can dig into our previous lists here

The second generation of the iPad is here. iPad 2, with its multitude of features and functionalities (a notch higher than its parent), is a boon for tech-hungry classrooms. 3 days away from the official ‘in stores’ date, it is already poised to revolutionize the education industry. But before you jump on the iPad bandwagon, it is imperative to lay the foundation for effective implementation at your school. Get the entire lowdown right here.

For all of you who have worn your ears out listening to all things iPad, the past week, there’s a something on eLearning skills, digital storytelling, TED videos, instructional design , game-based learning and more.

Find it all here in our Weekly Digest – a collection of our top 15 links from the week gone by, each accompanied by a quick brief.

Need to quench your thirst for the latest in learning, technology and media links further? You can dig into our previous lists here.

Learning design is not just a science, it is an art. When the team works and generates effective learning designs, they are a result of a deep rooted instructional design philosophy. We like to look at instructional design in two clear veins, the first is the philosophy of learning design – the beliefs and faith in models that underly everything we do in design. The second is the methodology, the method and process based on these models that allow us to consistently generate good designs for all our clients and their unique situation. The philosophy is what we imbibe, methodology is what we practice.

Most rookie Instructional Designers have a misconception that Instructional Design is quite academic in nature. I was a part of the vast majority up until a few months ago. Over time, I realized that most Instructional Design theories are rooted in common sense.

However, as Instructional Design beginners, we are so overawed by these theories that we fail to understand the simple principles behind them.

The objective of this blog-post is to demystify one such theory which every beginner Instructional Designer should know – John Keller’s ARCS model of Motivational Design.

iPad takes centre stage once again as it gains increasing foothold in education, with educators touting it as one of the must-have technologies and students preferring it over hardcover books. For all you Apple fan boys, this post is manna from heaven!

And for those of you who love to hate the pad, fret not, there’s something beyond the big Apple too. Learn how you can stay on top of current events, eLearning market stats, the future of education, the evolving role of an Instructional Designer and more. Find it all here in our Weekly Digest – a collection of our top 18 links from the week gone by, each accompanied by a quick brief.

Need to quench your thirst for the latest in learning, technology and media links further? You can dig into our previous lists here.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught. ~ Winston Churchill

Many of my friends and ex-colleagues usually dislike training. They dread entering the training room, the way they would dread entering a torture chamber. In most cases, Training is reduced to an exercise in futility and the prevailing emotion is “Let’s just get this over with!”

I joined Upside Learning as an Instructional Designer in April 2010. I had four years of training delivery experience, but Instructional Design was a completely new ball game! My first few weeks at Upside Learning were overwhelming and also intimidating to an extent. Almost everything that was discussed in team meetings and training sessions was akin to Greek and Latin.

I spent most of my free time over the last few weeks reading Edward de Bono’s book, Six Thinking Hats, and thinking about how this thinking process can be applied to Instructional Design. Before I get to that, I’d like to give a brief overview of what the Six Thinking Hats are all about.

Six Thinking Hats is a flexible and easy-to-use thinking process that leads to amazing results with innovative thinking, improved communication, and reduced meeting time. The Six Thinking Hats method encourages Parallel Thinking, where everyone explores all sides of an issue at the same time.

I came across an interesting blog-post by veteran LucasArts and Telltale Games designer Dave Grossman describing how gaming’s limited appeal could come down to some very basic assumptions we make about the audience versus the actual thought processes of that audience. You can view the blog-post here.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. – Rudyard Kipling

Mr. Kipling was spot on when he said that. For thousands of years, the human race has relied on stories to pass on facts, concepts, information and wisdom from one generation to the next. You can see examples of this everywhere — from cave paintings, Aesop’s fables, Jataka Tales to the works of fifth-century Chinese philosophers. They have all made use of parables/stories and their pictorial representations to pass on whatever they had learnt.