I have read through the sites in the class of my colleagues and found two sites that were of interest to me and I have added them to my feed reader as well. After looking at Nathaniel’s webpage the rjaquez blog seemed very interesting. I especially enjoyed the information about moving from the elearning to the (mobile) mlearning format. After looking at Joan’S Blog the iddblog Instructional Design was also of interest to me.

   

Evaluating and Identifying Online Resources

Educational Journals

Metacognition Learning (2012) 7:151–173 DOI 10.1007/s11409-012-9089-9

Executive functioning, metacognition, and self-perceived competence in elementary school children: an explorative

study on their interrelations and their role for school achievement

      This article talks about a study that was done on 209 1^st grade children that were pre-assessed “in terms of their executive functioning and academic self-concept”.  They were then tested again after a year to test their brain functions in mathematics and reading. The test looked at several factors such as emotion, self-regulation, and functions within the memory of the brain. The conclusion was that the students had more executive functioning properties when dealing with Mathematics and Metacognitive control when dealing with Language Arts. I thing this study validates the studies that argue the different functions of the brain that are used to carry out certain tasks. It also validates the presence of more self-control in children as they grow older.

Learning, Memory & Cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology

 Nov2013, Vol. 39 Issue 6, p1726-1741. 16p. DOI: 10.1037/a0033671.

Examining the Causes of Memory Strength Variability: Recollection, Attention Failure, or  Encoding Variability?

     This article talks about the findings in recognition memory. Although Encoding , Retrival, and Metacognition are the cognitive processes of memory there are others aspects that have been studied, such as the strength of each step in the memory process. This study pretty states that the more old items are viewed with new items the more likely that the new items will become stored in the memory with the old items. This reinforces the idea of recollection through association

My Threads

On this blog there will be threads from several Instructional Design blogs such as:

eLearning Solutions Magazine http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/rssfeed/lsm.xml  

 eLearning Guild http://www.elearningguild.com/rssfeed/elearningguild.rss

 Our Blog  http://www.elearningguild.com/rssfeed/elearningguild.rss.

Training Stone http://trainingstone.wordpress.com/  

Learning Circuits Archives

http://www.astd.org/rss/syndication.ashx?sources=7756364010F64FBD9553DFFF54E3B7C0.  

The type of content that can be found will be found useful to me in my pursuit of my Master’s Degree in Instructional Design as well as my future career as a Instructural Designer or Online Instructor. The eLearning Solutions Magazine, eLearning Guild, and Our Blog all tie in together. The Guild offers courses regarding blended learning theories, learning environments by design, and elearning design. It also gives information about salaries in the Instructional Design profession, ebooks about strategies for Instructional Designers, and other Best Practices Strategies. The magazine offers news about learning technology and articles from professionals in the learning and training environment. It includes information about conferences that are offered for Instructional Designers. I also like that it covers topics like design strategies, Performance Support, and Training Strategies.

The Training Stone offers examples of web graphics that have been used as tools by Jackie Van Nice, a professional of the Instructional Design industry. She shows samples that she has used and gives a narrative about the process she used to develop the concept. It is a very helpful source that I plan to refer to often. The other blog resource is by the American Society for Training and Development. It gives information about the elearning technologies being developed and utilized in the corporate training setting. I believe that it is used as a resource by several professionals and will become a resource of mine as well.