I ignored ChatGPT for months. I had multiple excuses: “I have a 3-year-old! I’m too busy.” “I’m never the first to adopt a new technology!” (A family trait – we didn’t get our first CD player until the mid-90s.) “I’m not giving it my email and phone number!” But last week, my interest piqued by the New York Times’ five-part series on AI, I gave in. The NYT’s first assignment was to ask the chatbot of your choice to create a cover letter for your dream job. Since I already have my dream job, I asked ChatGPT to write a cover letter for an instructional designer role. I was impressed with the spe ..read more

At the start of January 2021, I resolved to make a new recipe every week for a year. My son was 15 months old at the time and becoming quite the little foodie. Rather than resorting to the same recipes over and over, I decided to make new dishes for our family to try. My first new recipe was homemade rosemary cheddar crackers. On December 30, 2021, I made my last new recipe – sheet pan sausages and pineapple. In total, I made 71 new recipes, as some weeks I tried two or three new ones. Like many people, my past is littered with unkept New Year’s resolutions. I made other resolutions last year ..read more

I’m currently developing e-learning for a client using Articulate Storyline – this is an achievement! I first learned about Articulate in 2015 when I transitioned to a career in learning and development. From what I could tell, Articulate was the dominant player in e-learning authoring tools. If you called yourself an e-learning developer, you had to know Articulate and its suite of tools. I decided I should learn how to use Articulate – specifically, Storyline. But, well, work happened. I had lots and lots of work designing traditional classroom training. That left little time to teach mysel ..read more

We’re one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. You likely haven’t participated in face-to-face (F2F) training in a long time. By now let’s hope all of us are experiencing (or creating) online training experiences that are more than poor substitutes for F2F training. When done well, live online training – also known as “virtual instructor-led training” (VILT) – can be as good as, if not better than, classroom training.  Good instructional design matters even more to VILT than it does to classroom training. A seasoned, charismatic trainer can cover up all kinds of sins in the classroom. A clas ..read more