Dear Instructional Designer

This episode, I am talking with JR Dingwall, a higher ed instructional design consultant who I first met through Jennifer Maddrell and Designers 4 Learning. I chatted with JR over email and I’m super excited to have him on the show because he has a really important story that I want to make sure we cover this season. JR went freelance for a while, and then decided that it wasn’t for him. As someone who is sort of always on the crossroads of this, I’m really interested in how this worked for him! GET TO KNOW JR * On twitter @JRDingwall [http://twitter.com/JRDingwall] * jrdingwall.ca [http://jrdingwall.ca/] * Module13.ca [https://module13.ca/] * LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jrdingwall [https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jrdingwall] THINGS JR MENTIONED IN PASSING * Designers for Learning [https://designersforlearning.org/], and their Service Learning MOOC [https://learn.canvas.net/courses/1233] * Pressbooks [https://pressbooks.com/], for OER publishing such as OpenPress [https://openpress.usask.ca/] * Professional Communication Open Curriculum [http://www.procomoer.org/]

This episode we are back with Wes Atkinson, Co-founder and Lead Technical Consultant at Appitierre Ltd, the makers of the Evolve Authoring tool and the Bloom LMS talking about Evolve as a potential tool. Last episode, Wes and I talked about the challenges surrounding instructional design freelancers. This episode, I’d like to shift focus to looking a bit more at Evolve as one tool in our toolbelt to solve some of those problems. I’m always interested in free and low-cost tools for myself as an independent contributor and I know all are too, so, let’s talk a bit more about Evolve and Bloom as tools.

This episode, I’m with Wes Atkinson, Co-founder and Lead Technical Consultant at Appitierre Ltd, the makers of the Evolve Authoring tool and the Bloom LMS. And we are going to keep on theme about the freelancer journey but with a bit of a twist, from the perspective of a vendor. Which is super awesome! Vendors get a lot of our flack when we talk or complain and they’re at all of these conferences and events, so they talk to a lot of IDs, and so I’m really excited to be hearing things from this perspective.

This episode I wanted to talk a bit about how I’ve built and continue to build my network from the perspective of an introvert. I’m going to tackle this in a three-fold answer. First, I want to talk about the impactful things I’ve been able to do in a way that has still allowed me time to think and articulate myself and be generally introvert-y. Second, I want to talk about conferences especially since I’m such a newbie with them. And then, third, I want to talk about the activities I’d like to begin engaging in in the future. RESOURCES * Christy Tucker on LinkedIn: https://christytucker.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/linkedin-connections/ * TLDC Community: http://www.thetldc.com/ * Getting started speaking at conferences: http://twist.elearningguild.net/2018/07/proposaltipsfromtheadvisoryboard/ * Another set of tips for conference proposals: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/submitting-your-conference-speaker-proposal-myra-roldan/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3Bn6HPmdhDSVKQcmjL6f5Agw%3D%3D * Holding the Door open in your own little corner of the web: http://brendandawes.com/blog/holdingthedooropen

We’ve heard in the last couple of episodes with Christy Devlin about some of the things that they have in their freelancing toolbox, things that they feel are worth paying for and using. In this episode, I want to share a bit more about my own toolset, in a few categories. We’ll look at business tools, productivity tools, and professional development. RESOURCES * Bobby App to track subscriptions: http://www.bobbyapp.co/ * Cloudinary Image Hosting: https://cloudinary.com/ * Netlify website hosting: https://www.netlify.com/ * Audible to read books: https://www.audible.com/ * Buffer app to schedule social media posts: http://buffer.com/ * Noun Project icon assets: https://thenounproject.com/ * Elearning Art: https://elearningart.com/ * Trello kanban board: https://trello.com/ * Station for collecting your work apps: https://getstation.com/ * Toby for organizing your bookmarks: https://www.gettoby.com/ * One Tab for cleaning up your browser: https://www.one-tab.com/ * Name Cheap for domain names: https://www.namecheap.com/ * Simplecast for podcast hosting: https://simplecast.com/ * About static site generators: https://davidwalsh.name/introduction-static-site-generators * Stop wasting time as a freelancers: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/07/help-i-cant-stop-wasting-time/?ref=webdesignernews.com