Instructional design – professional development #devlearn and #dplToronto

Last updated on December 28th, 2018 at 06:33 pm

I have felt the need to do some professional development around my work as a Lecturer in instructional design. After my last leave, I am feeling especially disconnected from the industry – so I decided that I should attend the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference. I had been planning to attend back in 2014 before I was diagnosed with cancer and had to cancel everything. I didn’t get my act together enough to present at the conference, but I’m still a student, so this will be one of my last conferences as a student. I do wish more conferences would consider including an “adjunct” rate – however, this conference is very much an industry conference and not an academic one.

Looking at the titles of the various sessions, it looks like I’ll be learning about: xAPI, Virtual Reality, Storytelling, Learning experience design, as well as what’s new in the various technologies that support learning development.

I’m going into the conference with an open mind and no preconceived ideas of what I’ll take out of it. I do hope to meet more people in the industry.

The other conference I’m looking at isn’t really a conference. This is a critical pedagogy lab – help in Toronto. The location matters – in that if it was held elsewhere in Canada I might not have made the effort to attend. Going to Toronto gives me an opportunity to deal with other logistics while I’m in Canada, as well as a chance to visit family. I’d excited that one of the streams is digital storytelling because it is an area of passion for me.

I hope that between the two conferences, I’ll bring some interesting ideas that will transform my teaching (or maybe not transform, so much as tweak my teaching to make it even better).