Instructional Designers Community of India - FAQs

This post is written by Rupa Rajagopalan

Hello All,

This post has answers to frequently asked questions about the Instructional Designers Community of India. This is relevant to all those who want to be a part of the Instructional Designers Community of India.

Please take time to read through the questions and answers.

Now here are the FAQs:

What is the Instructional Designers Community of India?

The Instructional Designers Community of India is a non-profit community for learning professionals or anyone interested in the field of Instructional Designing.

What is the goal of the community?

The goal of the community is to:

• Actively promote Instructional Design in India


• Create a vibrant platform for collaborative learning on Instructional Designing


• Build a thriving community of learning professionals

Who can be a member?

Anyone who is interested and involved in design, development, and delivery of learning programs is welcome.

Is there a member registration fee?

No. There is no fee currently. However there will be a nominal fee once the community is registered.

How often will the community conduct meetups?

There will be a meetup once in a month only in Bangalore. The community will cover other locations in future.

How do members in other locations participate and learn what is happening in the community?

After every meetup, the minutes of the meeting will be published. If possible, video recordings will also be made available. Webex online meeting is also being considered as a possible solution.

What activities would the community undertake?

The community would primarily focus on sharing information about Instructional Designing.There would be expert talks, workshops, reviews, discussions on blog posts and articles.

How can I contribute to the community?

You can share your knowledge in Instructional Designing by conducting a session or delivering a talk. Everyone and anyone interested can send proposals to the volunteers.

The topic could be anything related to Instructional Designing or any other aspect of learning and development.

Here are some clues:

• You read an interesting blog post and want to talk about it


• You saw an interesting e-learning course and want to discuss it


• You are very good at using an e-learning tool and want to introduce the tool


• You want to conduct a short workshop on a particular topic in Instructional Designing


• You are an expert learning professional and want to share your experiences

Will there be online activities?

Yes. The community is planning to conduct free webinars, online forums and discussions.

Does the community have a website?

This is in progress. Please expect an announcement soon.

Does the community have a mailing list?

The group in Linkedin would be the mailing list for the moment.

Where do I get news and updates about the community?

Watch out the blog: The Writers Gateway.

How do I join the community?

Please join the group in Linkedin.

Who do I contact for any queries?

Please contact any one of the following people:

• Ram - ramarao.simhadri@gmail.com


• Rupa - ruparajgo19@gmail.com


• Vijeesh - vijeesh.shankar@gmail.com

Where will I get announcements about the meetups?

Please check the group in Linkedin and the blog: The Writers Gateway.

In case you have a question that is not in the list, please feel free to leave a comment or mail me.

What color pen are you?

This post is written by Taruna Goel

What color pen are you? This is a question that Dan Roam asks each of us. His book "The Back of the Napkin -Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures " offers a refreshing view about visual thinking skills. If it helps, this book is ranked as the number 5 in the business book of 2008 category by Amazon. To get a teaser of what's in the book, click on the napkin for some engaging nuggets on visual thinking. Learn about how to solve any problem with a picture, the 4 steps of visual thinking, the 5 focusing questions, and the 6 ways we see (and show).

And as Dan puts it, “Solving problems with pictures has nothing to do with artistic training or talent….” “Welcome to the whole new world of looking at business.”
To catch a glimpse of Dan, what's inside his book, and his plans for the next book, check out Dan's blog. This blog contains a link to the video capture of Dan’s session with Microsoft. I saw it and its quite inspiring.

I have been doing visualization skills training for instructional designers for years and have definitely improvised it from where we were…but there’s lots to do. After this video, I want to apply some of the stuff shared by Dan and maybe include the video/elements from his blog/book as self-learning and include some of the concepts and examples/techniques during the classroom session…. As you can note…. I am meandering right now… but I am clearly inspired :)

BTW, what color pen are you – the black pen, the yellow pen, or the red pen?
I keep oscillating between black and yellow...
Watch the video to find out!

7 Tips to Write in Plain English

This is a guest post by Cynthia Rankin. Cynthia Rankin is an American who lives in Chennai. She is married to an Englishman, Stephen Rankin. While in England, Cynthia qualified as a TESL instructor and learned to teach English with a British accent. Coming back to America, she helped develop a TEFL teacher training program where her students taught Vietnamese boat refugees in Massachusetts. She became a Fulbright Scholarship candidate: her proposal was to analyze Business Indian English. At Towson University in Maryland, she got her Master's in Professional Writing and began publishing articles on Indians in America. She taught various English courses at Harford Community College.

The Rankins missed the kaleidoscope of life in India and moved to Bangalore as trainers. They moved to Chennai and shifted into their beach flat on December 23, 2004, three days before the Tsunami hit. Cynthia continues to write and develop training material for business communication, technical writing and cultural orientation, but most of all, she likes to learn from others.



How to Write in Plain English

Some think that the way to show that they are intelligent and educated is to make to the length of their words, sentences, and paragraphs as long as possible. They learned this technique of academies in university when they read badly written text books. It was also a good technique to bulldoze the dozing professor who marked their papers.

In the real world, business people have to say what they mean. Here are some tips to help you in your business communication. Remember, many people to whom you write have English as a second or third language. Even if English is their first language, they may speak a different dialect and live in a different culture where the same words may mean different things. Read these tips before you send that email, that letter, that memo.

1. Less is more. The fewer words you use, the better chance your reader will understand what you are trying to say. There is less chance your reader will misinterpret your message. So before sending your message, play a game. See how many words you can take out of each sentence without loosing the main thought. Remember, you are not writing literature here. Lose the adverbs and adjectives. Fewer the words the readers have to keep up in the air until they get to the end of the sentence, the better they will understand what you are trying to say. They will read faster and find it more enjoyable.
   


2. Before you do anything else, find actors. Even if you are writing the most dry business communication, you are still writing to a human being. Now all people like stories. No matter what you write, remember this concept. In all stories, there are characters. Make sure you don't use passive sentence unless you have to. Think. Who is responsible for the action in that sentence? Be specific.
   


3. If you have good actors in your sentences, then you have a good start for the rest of your sentence. The next stage is to think about the action. What is the actor doing? Be specific. The team did not conduct an investigation. They were not in front of an orchestra. They didn't conduct. What did they do? Look at that nasty -tion word. That will be your clue. Yes, they investigated. When you say that the team conducted, you have an empty verb that your reader has to juggle. This is a word that does not give meaning.
   


4. But if you use the verb "investigated," then you have to say what they investigated. See why people like using language that covers the truth? The verb "investigated" requires you to reveal to the reader what they actually investigated. Imagine if more government bureaucrats were required by law to write like this.
   


5. K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, sweetheart. Now play another game with your message. See how many words you have where you can find a simpler word-usually one with only one or two syllables. Get rid of Latinate words-those ending in -tion. If you have cleaned up your empty verbs, you may not have so many long words left over. English is a special language because it has about 800 Anglo-Saxon one syllable words. That's why pop music works well in English.
   


6. Now see if you can make your sentences shorter. Every sentence is a thought. When the reader gets to the period or full-stop, he breathes a sigh of relief. He can stop the juggling of your words. They should all make sense. Beware of too many prepositional phrases in a sentence which you are writing in your memo for your boss in the afternoon on the computer from the office. Confused yet? That's prepositional phrase overload.
   


7. You guessed it. If shorter sentences are better, then shorter paragraphs are better. Your paragraph should make one point. If you make another point, then you make another paragraph. When the reader looks at your memo and sees one paragraph that is as big as the page, her eyes glaze over. You'd be surprised how many sentences you can murder. Look for sentences where you have repeated yourself. Look for sentences that need to really be in another memo.

I'll stop here, and see if I followed these tips!

My Views on Good Writing...

This post is written by Sonali Malik

Tony’s article took me back to my school days when we used to write essays as part of the English subject. In school, we learned about the basic grammar rules - using correct grammar, not making any grammatical errors, and everything around it. However, I do not remember any of our English teachers teaching us any ground rules about “good writing” or “how to write good English”. While writing, our only focus was to write “correct English”; not necessarily “write well”. In fact, we never formally learned the rules of good writing. I remember that I always used to write very long sentences, though grammatically correct; however, I was never taught about ‘brevity’ or its importance in writing.

I learned new rules about “good writing” while learning about instructional designing at the workplace. Here, I learned more about how to write short yet effective sentences - that which also conveyed the correct meaning and the context. I believe one of the reasons of this change was also because:

• we were now “in business” (i.e. writing for a business purpose),


• writing for an American audience (unlike in school when we only learned British English and simply used to write correct English to pass exams),


• we had competition (with peers) to write better


• we were trained on the rules of how to write better (through various training/workshops in instructional designing)

Our Comfort Zones


I think for “writing good”, one has to constantly be in practice and try to write better. If you stop writing, you lose touch and may not be able to improvise on your writing or do better. One of the reasons we do not strive hard to better our writing is to remain in our comfort zones.

I recall one of the effective workshops on instructional designing that I attended in my initial days at the workplace. The workshop was conducted by one of our senior instructional analysts. She gave us a small piece of writing and asked us to rewrite it using the instructional designing principles. When the participants got back with their work, about 90% of them had not done many changes to it except making it “slightly” better or change the way it was organized. This is simply because everyone wanted to remain in their comfort zones of not making too many changes to the given writing.

“I write this way, it’s understandable, so its fine!” one may think. But this doesn’t work too well. We need to constantly learn and practice ways of writing better.

Writing for Skimming

I liked Tony’s ideas about writing for skimming; however, I am not completely sure about whether or not we, as writers, should always write for skimming. Not all reading is “Skim, dive, skim” type. There is information that sometimes needs to be read at length. We should be clearly able to demarcate “when” and “when not” to write for skimming. And when we are writing for skimming, the pointers that Tony mentioned in his writing are worth pondering over.

Rubrics for Good Writing

Now the bigger question is, “what are the rubrics of good writing”. The rubrics for good writing are not easy to define. Every writer has his or her own style. The way one writer writes may be liked by many people while the writing of some other writer may not be liked even though both the writings are grammatically correct. There are no set rules to say “yes, this is good writing”. In my view, while writing, if we at least take care of the following points, we’ll be close to writing well:

• Be clear about the objective of your writing


• Organize your ideas before you start writing


• Write one idea per paragraph; do not clutter too many ideas in one paragraph


• Brevity: see if you can make your sentences short while still conveying the meaning


• Take care of grammatical issues (missing commas, subject verb agreement, pronouns, punctuation, and so on)


• Most important: proof read your work before finalizing

Am sure there would be several other rubrics that could be identified and defined for writing better; here I have presented what I thought were one of the most important ones.

What is Good Writing? - My View...

This post is written by Taruna Goel

This is my response to Manish's question posted on e3cube ponder.

Question:

Tony Karrer talks about Good Writing in his post http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/02/good-writing.html. Would you like to share your experiences on eCube about this?

You can also find this response on my blog.

-----------------------------------

Tony Karrer blogs about Good Writing here. Tony has interesting views on the topic and I agree with many points. The question, 'What is good writing?' often comes up in many of my discussions with budding writers and seasoned instructional designers. There are multiple rubrics that are used to grade writing. I designed one in my current organization and used it to assess and calibrate the writing skills of all authors and designers. Automated systems are also making their presence felt. And we have rolled out a certain application too. However, if you notice the criteria across writing rubrics - many items in the list don't match. Sometimes, items contradict. Therefore, there are no fixed 'rules' about good writing. But we all recognize good writing when we see it!

In this situation, how do I define 'good writing’? I say that a piece is well-written if it meets its objective. For example, if I need to write an essay about the role of media in the world today – it should have an introduction, a few body paragraphs, and a conclusion to do justice to the nature of content. But if I need to write an ad copy about the same thing – shorter is always better!

I agree with Tony on writing for skimming. But skimming is nothing new. Since the inception of web, editors and reviewers have been stressing about brevity. And not only the web, we almost always skim through much of other material including newspapers, journals, books, and manuals. Do you remember the last time you read the manual that came with your digital camera, word-by-word? Guess not.

Therefore, if your writing is aligned to its purpose, to meet the objective, it is good. I would just look at some of the traditional principles of instructional design and use those as factors to be considered when writing anything! Two things that help me define how I want to write include:

1. who is my audience (audience analysis)
2. why should they read the piece of information/what do they want to achieve out of it? (task analysis)

When I align my writing to the specifics received by answering the questions above, I am likely to write well. Applying principles and rules of grammar and punctuation and an ability to write using Global English are things that further add clarity to my writing. But I don't believe that a grammatically-correct piece of writing is 'good' until it helps the reader achieve what it meant to! So there's my story.

But if you are interested in more...here’s an interesting link to explore on what makes good writing. This is by ‘Teaching That Makes Sense’.
What is good writing (HTML)?
What is good writing (PDF)?