Sunday, September 23, 2007

A Surprising Treasure Trove of ID Whitepapers

What a week! Craziness just seemed to abound . . . and now we're on to the next one . . .

One of the highlights from the previous week was an hour-long conversation with Ken Thomas, the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Alchemy, an instructional design firm based here in Denver. Having spent 20+ years in the field of instructional design, Ken has an informative and very real perspective on the challenges and opportunities involved with eLearning. You can read more about our interview on my practitioner profile page.

Prior to this conversation, I spent some time on the Rocky Mountain Alchemy website and ran across a treasure trove of whitepapers in Ken's Laboratory. In my search for instructional design ideas, I've spent numerous hours reviewing academic papers, blogs and online communities, but have avoided the consultants' websites. Why? Most of their whitepapers are designed to showcase their services and to sell you on their approach to instructional design.

Ken's collection is a welcome change. He's not trying to sell the reader on anything in particular. Instead, he sees himself not only as an instructional designer, but also as a coach whose role is to mentor fledgling designers. Consequently, his papers are concise, deliberate and readable.

I highly recommend that you check these whitepapers out. They're worth the time!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Thanks so much for the resource. This would be a good source to take a paper per week and discuss them in our blogs. I've felt like I've been bouncing around between topics and was looking for some kind of organized "list". This is great!
Debra

Anonymous said...

Ken sounds very passionate about his work. That is so inspiring. Although all the comments were interesting, I liked his final thought "If you find nobody around you is mentoring, then you are probably the mentor." I love it!

Michelle

Margi said...

These white pages are invaluable! I'll mark them in my del.icio.us account for future reference! And how interesting that some of them are several years old, yet still applicable.

Thanks!

erin noseworthy said...

This is a great resource Betsy - thank you. I concept web is a great visual.

I really enjoyed your report on Ken and am interested to read more about his companies work and philosophy.

Thanks again