WRITING

AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE SAME GAP FROM THE OTHER CHAIR Last time I wrote about the distance between the skills a résumé claims and the evidence a person can actually produce. I have been turning that over ever since, because the same gap exists on the other side of the table — and over there it is wider. The shape of it is simple. Ask an organization whether building skills matters and you get near-unanimous agreement. Ask whether they have built anything to do it,

3 PROJECTS, 1 PAGE EACH AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT MOST PORTFOLIOS ANSWER THE WRONG QUESTION I have built portfolio pages I was proud of that did absolutely nothing for me. The work was good. The pages were pretty. They just answered a question nobody had asked — "can you make things?" — when the question on the other side of the table is "can you figure out what to make, and why?" When hiring managers in my field were asked to rank what they look for inside a portfolio,

Week 12 · Blog Post 22 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT WHAT 3 STUDIES AGREE ON I spent this week with three studies on training managers to reduce mental health stigma at work — a one-day workshop at a German metalworking company (Gast et al., 2022), a three-hour seminar tested in two Canadian organizations (Dimoff et al., 2016), and a digital simulation game piloted at a UK site of a global enterprise (Hanisch et al

Week 12 · Blog Post 21 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE ADVICE I GAVE WAS THE BORING HALF A while back I wrote a post that, stripped down, said: get comfortable with the AI tools. Learn them, poke at them, put them in your workflow before someone else puts them in your job description. I still think that's true. I've also been quietly annoyed with myself about it ever since I read TalentLMS's 2026 L&D report, beca

AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE FAILURE MODE ISN'T BAD WRITING. IT'S CONFIDENT INVENTION. I have generated something like 87 résumés with AI this year, and most of that time I was doing it wrong in a way that felt right. Paste the job posting. Paste the résumé. Ask for a tailored version. What came back was always well written. It was also, maybe one time in three, quietly false — a certificate marked "in progress" that I had already earned, a freelance brand promoted to L

AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT STOP POLISHING. START PROVING. There's a version of a job search that isn't a search at all. You find the posting, you tune the résumé, you submit, and then you wait — and somewhere in the waiting, the waiting quietly becomes the strategy. I've done it. I had a two-month gap between contracts and I could tell you the exact number of times I refreshed an inbox. Here's what finally moved me: The people hiring you have already stopped believing the

Week 11 · Blog Post 20 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE GROWTH ISN'T WHERE I WAS STANDING I'm building a mental health education platform — non-clinical, research translated into plain language, made for people who want to understand what's happening to them without a diagnosis attached to it. And for months, without ever deciding to, I've been designing for someone who looks a lot like me. Home broadband. A lapto

Week 11 · Blog Post 19 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE PROBLEM WITH TEACHING SOFTWARE FROM PICTURES OF SOFTWARE I spent last week building software that doesn't work — deliberately. A replica of a modem's configuration screen, rigged to auto-fill the wrong number at exactly the moment the real modem would. All fake. All clickable. And all living inside Articulate Rise — a tool with no native ability to simulate a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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