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Welcome to my blog -- a living record of my field notes and evolving thinking at the intersection of learning design, human performance, and the technologies reshaping how we teach and connect.
If you're a fellow practitioner, educator, or curious thinker, pull up a chair. This is a thinking-out-loud space, not a finished product — and it's better with your voice in it. Drop a comment, push back on an idea, or share what you're seeing in your own practice.
Let's think through this together!
HAND THEM THE MICROPHONE
Week 10 · Blog Post 18 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE VIDEO THAT DID WHAT THE PRESS CONFERENCE COULDN'T During the early months of COVID-19, while official channels struggled to be heard over the noise, a youth-produced video quietly did the job: it explained the science behind the virus and the protective measures that actually worked, using clear visuals, bilingual captions, and a narrative that sounded like a
15 hours ago3 min read
THE QUIZ IN YOUR FEED: ASSESSING MENTAL HEALTH KNOWLEDGE WHERE PEOPLE ACTUALLY SCROLL
Week 10 · Blog Post 17 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT AN ASSESSMENT THAT DOESN'T FEEL LIKE ONE I read a review by Alonzo and colleagues (2023) about using social media for assessment, and one line rearranged my week: most online assessment platforms are built for one-way interaction, but assessment on social media is primarily formative — dialogic, interactive, feedback flowing in both directions. Several of the stu
2 days ago4 min read
START WITH THE THING YOU'RE GOING TO BUILD
Week 9 · Blog Post 16 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE GROUP I KEEP NOT STARTING There's a conversation I've had maybe a dozen times this year, always with a slightly different person: An instructional designer. An L&D lead. Someone in HR who drew the wellbeing straw. The assignment is always the same: build something about mental health for our managers. And every one of them is building it alone, from scratch, o
4 days ago4 min read
YOUR KNOWLEDGEBASE IS JUST A COMMUNITY WITH GOOD FILING
Week 9 · Blog Post 15 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT The archive builds itself. That's the problem. I have a folder. You have a folder. Every instructional designer I know has some version of it — a bookmarks bar, a Notion page, a Slack channel named #resources where fifteen people have posted and two hundred have scrolled past. We call these knowledgebases. Most of them are landfills with a search bar. What would i
6 days ago4 min read
I PAID TO BE BENCHED
AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT I started a new contract by spending money. Hundreds of dollars out of my own pocket, on business insurance I was required to carry just to be allowed to begin. That was a month ago. I’ve earned none of it back — because I haven’t done a single hour of work. They “assigned” me to ten projects. Not one has started. A full month of silence while I sat available, turning down the chance to line up other work, waiting for a green light that never ca
7 days ago2 min read
START WITH A TAG, NOT A TESTIMONY
Week 7 · Blog Post 14 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT After my last post — where I made the case that a social platform only becomes social learning when people actually make things in it, not just read — I got the obvious follow-up. Okay. But what would you actually do? Fair. Theory is comfortable. Designing the Tuesday-morning activity that a nervous stranger will actually click into is the hard part. So here's the
Jun 253 min read
THE COMMENTS WERE OFF THE WHOLE TIME
Week 7 · Blog Post 13 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT I read a study recently that has been rattling around in my head ever since. Researchers looked at how experienced faculty actually used social media in their courses — blogs, wikis, Twitter, the whole kit — and found something quietly devastating. The professors built the blogs. They set up the wikis. And then, in a lot of cases, they turned the comment features
Jun 244 min read
BUILD A DESK THEY CAN ACTUALLY WORK AT
AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT I spent six years in an office before I figured out that the thing making work so hard wasn't the work. I have depression and anxiety. On the page that sounds tidy. In an open-plan office it looked like a woman who wore headphones all day to drown out the chatter, who flinched every time her desk phone rang, who needed the meeting agenda in advance because surprises — a reorg, a "quick" pitch I had to react to live — could tip me into a panic at
Jun 232 min read
THE TRAINING MANAGERS NEVER GOT
9 RESOURCES FOR PEOPLE WHO DESIGN MENTAL HEALTH TRAINING FOR MANAGERS Week 7 · Blog Post 12 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT Managers are the first people to notice when someone on their team is struggling — and the least likely to have been trained for that moment. This is a small, opinionated collection for the people who build that training: the frameworks, design moves, guardrails, and a few things from my own des
Jun 221 min read
THE ACCIDENTAL CURRICULUM
Week 6 · Blog Post 11 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT Every time someone scrolls past a wellness reel, a "things my therapist told me" carousel, or a stranger's three-paragraph caption about their anxiety, they're learning something. Not because they meant to. Because the feed teaches whether or not anyone designed it to. I read four pieces recently that, stacked together, reshaped how I think about building a mental
Jun 213 min read
THE KNOWLEDGEBASE THAT WON'T SIT STILL
Week 6 · Blog Post 10 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE FILING CABINET PROBLEM I have a confession about corporate knowledgebases: most of them are where good information goes to be politely ignored. You know the type — a shared drive, a wiki nobody edits, a "single source of truth" that's true exactly once, on the day it ships, and then quietly drifts out of date while everyone goes back to asking the one person w
Jun 203 min read
A FLOOR UNDER THE OPEN DOOR: DESIGNING MENTAL HEALTH MICROLEARNING AS OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
Week 5 · Blog Post 9 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT There's a thought experiment I keep coming back to from a chapter I read on sharing microlearning as open educational resources (Word & Dennen, 2021). You tweak a recipe — more almond, the oven dropped to 325 because yours runs hot — and people ask for it. Do you guard it, or hand it over so they can make it their own? The open answer is obvious: hand it over. Free
Jun 143 min read
I NAMED AN INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER MODEL AFTER MYSELF — AND I'D STILL CHANGE IT
Week 5 · Blog Post 8 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE EMBARRASSING PART FIRST Let me get it out of the way: I built my own instructional design model, and the acronym spells my last name. DALEY — Discover, Analyze, Learning Solution, Execute, Yield. I'd love to claim this was a happy accident, five phases that just happened to line up. It wasn't. I backed into it on purpose, which puts me in the distinguished comp
Jun 84 min read
BEING FELT, NOT JUST SEEN: THE QUIET POWER (AND RISK) OF EMOTIONAL HASHTAGS
Week 4 · Blog Post 7 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT I WENT LOOKING FOR A TACTIC I went looking for a growth tactic and came back with an ethics problem. This happens to me more than I'd like to admit. The question I started with was narrow and, frankly, a little mercenary: how do I get more people to actually engage with the mental health platform I'm building — not just scroll past it, but comment, respond, come ba
Jun 53 min read
YOU DON'T GET AUTONOMY BY REMOVING THE GUARDRAILS
Week 4 · Blog Post 6 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE OPTIONAL TRAP There's a finding tucked into a study on embedded microlearning challenges that I haven't been able to shake. Researchers dropped optional, 15-minute, choose-your-own challenges into a higher ed course — make a meme about how the semester's going, design a teacher Bitmoji avatar, research a day in the life of a teacher and turn it into a video. Lo
Jun 34 min read
YOU HAVE TO BUILD THE BELIEF BEFORE YOU CAN BUILD THE SKILL
Week 3 · Blog Post 5 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE DESIGN QUESTION I KEEP CIRCLING I've been sitting with a thorny design problem for a few weeks now: how do you build a platform to teach people something they've been actively avoiding — possibly for years? The context I keep returning to is mental health education. Not a clinical tool. A learning platform where someone struggling with anxiety or depression can
May 263 min read
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