My Life in Video Games, Now that I’m an Instructional Designer and Developer

When I was a kid, there were few things that made me happier than playing video games. From even my very first gaming experiences, where I remember sticking cassette tapes into my grandparents’ Commodore to play something very similar to PONG, I was amazed at the thought of being able to interact with digital images on a TV screen. I …

EJ’s Voice Over Sound Board

Just about every day I do voice over work for my projects. Because I’m a full project/full life cycle instructional designer and developer, I tend to do my own voice over work. I’ve worked with more than a few projects where I haven’t done my own voice over work. I’ve provided direction to other narrators and voice over artists. But …

Providing Branding and a Website for a Friend: Michele’s Maids

I made a new friend on the way to school. I met Richard DeMocker when he was taking his grandson to school. My children attend the same school, and I saw him on a pretty regular basis when dropping off my own children. One day, we struck up a conversation. As tends to be the case, the subject of our …

Bringing a Forensic Training System Online

Introduction For the last two years of my life, the vast majority of my waking hours – nay, the vast majority of my hours – have been devoted to this project. I remove “waking” from hours for reasons that will be obvious by the time you finish reading this. A great quantity of my sleep has been sacrificed for it. …

Identifying Performance Needs and Changing Performance Assessment in an Aviation Community

I was a performance analyst working with my first instructional design mentor. I had just joined Harkcon and was working for a military aviation training center in Mobile, Alabama. My mentor was an amazing man who had spent the majority of his life either in training programs (as a student, a pilot, or an instructor pilot) or designing them from the ground up. …

Inspector Training for a Government Client

A government client needed a series of Web-Based Training modules to provide inspectors annual recurrent training. Inspectors once had to come back every year to the training site to receive this training. Rather than provide this expensive training in the classroom for all of its chemical inspectors every year, the client decided to provide this instructor-led training only to new inspectors and asked Harkcon to …