WRITING

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

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

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

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

Week 3 · Blog Post 4 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT SAFETY IS DEMONSTRATED, NOT DECLARED Here's the thing about psychological safety that took me a while to sit with: it cannot be designed as a feature. You can't add a "safe space" toggle to your platform settings and call it done. Trust is built through accumulated behavior — through how established members respond when someone gets the norms wrong, through the rec

Week 2 · Blog Post 3 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026 AI-Generated Image | ChatGPT THE PASSIVE MAJORITY IS THE PRIMARY AUDIENCE I read a study recently that put a number on something I'd long assumed but never measured. Dennen and colleagues surveyed 350 college students about how they look for information online, and the breakdown stopped me: more than half identified as consumers — people who look for content more than they produce it — and alm

The platform I'm building needs both the gatewatcher's humility (Bruns) and the strategist's intentionality (Asuncion); and it needs to hold those in creative tension with the specific ethical demands of mental health content. That's a more complicated design challenge than I originally thought. I'm here for it.

The most effective educational design doesn't start with content — it starts with a real problem and a real person who has it. The produsage framework just gave me better language for why the community layer isn't optional.