Life Long Learning

[buddyhall]

How do you stay current with Instructional Design and Educational Technologies? Are their communities you like or are blogs still a thing?

[Boekenoogen]

Besides being an active user of Canvas Community, I look at sites from OLC (Online Learning Consortium), and SoftChalk blogs. 

[laurakgibbs]

I am a fan of Twitter for connecting with other teachers.

It's useful to have hashtags that help. I'm into non-traditional grading practices and un-grading, so the #TTOG tag is a great way for me to meet and connect with people engaged in similar experiments:

[kvoyles]

Great Question  @buddyhall ‌!

Currently, I search for online communities of practice for Instructional Design professionals, and Instructional Design Professionals specifically within Higher Ed/Education. 

As others have mentioned, I like using Twitter to keep up. I also belong to a few groups on Facebook(some are more helpful than others...) and Reddit is one of my favorites too. 

I make sure to get newsletters from some groups/companies so I can keep track of innovations and trends, without much initial effort on my part. This is how I find out about webinars and mobile face-to-face events too. 

But my top suggestion would be podcasts. 

Personally, I'm a fan of

TOPCAST (Teaching Online Podcast) and

Dear Instructional Designer. 

I also subscribe to a multitude of Instructional Design & Technology related channels on YouTube. 

[Bobby2]

Great discussion starter  @buddyhall . Some superb ideas already coming in. 

I like sharing articles with colleagues. Quick easy reads from the Global Digital Citizen Foundation are fab.

Here is this weeks installment. Top Stories from the Global Digital Citizen Foundation  

[eduplessis]

Teaching In Higher Ed Podcast - love, love, love

California Community Colleges:

- Online Network of Educators - professional development resources and a great community

- Online Teaching Conference - the only conference I'm able to travel to every year (I attend others online)

- The CCC folks use Twitter to share articles, etc.  I'm @Liz_du_Plessis

[jdick1]

I recently stumbled across Hybrid Pedagogy and now it's a regular read for me. It may be worth noting that the Online Learning Consortium that  @jrboek  mentioned above also has a free journal and they just released a new issue.

[george_hatsidim]

Two items that come to mind.

1. I registered for updates at the New Media Consortium https://www.nmc.org/ 

Lots of horizon reports in terms of where educational technology is taking us.

2. Also my university has recently acquired a site wide license for lynda.com and this helps keep us abreast in terms of new software releases and their application. Also the content is becoming broader in terms of project management courses, business skills, creativity and so on.

[jdick1]

It may be worth noting The New Media Consortium recently folded and their site is now down, but its assets were bought by EDUCAUSE, so their library should be showing up over there (if not already).

[george_hatsidim]

thanks for the update Jen Dick,

George.