I’m on a perpetual quest for resources to help me improve my writing. Back in 2006 on this very blog, I linked to Cutts, M. (1995). The plain English guide. Oxford: The Oxford University Press. A week ago, I wrote a blog post about how I didn’t find benefit in Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct […]

While this post has NOTHING to do with instructional design, we can loosely affiliate it with education – namely, mine! For many years, I have purchased “paperwhite” bulbs for family and friends at Christmas. The bulbs grow into flowers within about 6 weeks after the holidays and become the first glimmer of spring during the

I love when I post about my process and request input from others … and get responses! Following my post yesterday about Tidy HTML, I received a tip from Matthew Schmidt on Twitter sharing his solution to use Atom editor with plugins like atom-beautify and tidy-html5. Thank you, Matthew! Downloading now …  

If you ever have to do any editing to a webpage or learning management system, you’ve probably found you need to take a peek “under the hood” at the HTML code. I do nearly every day, but I know next to nothing beyond the handful of edits I do when I need to embed a

Here are a couple of thoughtful posts related to instructional design: Amy Lomellini shared with us her experiment to try tools that offer an accessible webinar and recording. If you’re on LinkedIn, she’d like to hear your suggestions to streamline the process. Nice job, but it shouldn’t be this hard! Enilda Romero-Hall shared with us the

I attended today’s Confab hosted by the Chicago Literacy Alliance at the Literacenter, the coworking space we share with other organizations with missions to support literacy. This winter, the Confabs explored the theme of Equity Issues associated with literacy with a final focus on Diversity or “providing students with opportunities to understand and empathize with experiences

I found out tonight that my mom’s close friend, Mary Jean Goeres, died this week. Mary Jean and her husband raised their kids at the same time my parents were raising their “first” kids, and then they traveled with my mom and dad through the 1990s and early 2000s. This picture includes my mom and dad

I was thrilled today when I read this post by Tonia Dousay on project management for academics. Tonia and I have been chewing on a concept we’ve come to call “Designing in the Open” for a bit. She graciously agreed to participate in an interview for our Design in the Open Challenge last year, and we

Chicago mayoral and aldermanic elections are scheduled for February 26, 2019. As a Chicagoan, I can vote early and (this year most likely) vote often. Polls opened in January and we can vote throughout the week, so we popped into our neighborhood polling place on Sunday. However, we’ll probably be back to vote again. With over

I was excited to open my copy of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style on my Kindle app last night. Billed as a guide: “Chockful of advice, insider wisdom, and fun facts, this book will prove to be invaluable to everyone who wants to shore up their writing skills, mandatory for people who