Hi. I'm Alex. Here's Why I'm Here.
- May 18
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Week 1 · Blog Post 1 · Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance · Summer 2026
Thirteen Years In, and I'm Back in a Classroom
My name is Alex, and I'll be upfront about something: I've been doing instructional design for thirteen years. Enterprise clients — pharmaceuticals, healthcare, tech, retail. I've built courses that checked compliance boxes and immediately exited people's brains. I've sat through slide decks so statistically rigorous and so completely inert that I started questioning whether information and education are actually the same thing.
They're not. I am now very sure of that.
I'm a graduate student in Florida State University's Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies program, and this blog is part of my coursework for EME 6414: Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance. That sentence makes it sound like an obligation. It isn't — or at least, it won't be by the end.
The Thing I'm Building
I'm in the early stages of designing a mental health education platform. Not clinical care. Not a crisis line. Something more like a translator: a resource that takes the research on anxiety, depression, nervous system regulation, and related topics and makes it genuinely accessible — through storytelling, visuals, audio, and multimedia that actually engages people rather than overwhelming them.
The core purposes are education, hope, community, and stigma reduction. In that order, because I believe they're downstream of each other. When people understand mental illness — actually understand it, not just encounter a statistic — and when they see it reflected in honest human voices, the shame starts to lose its grip. That's the hypothesis. The platform is the test.
The Word I Didn't Have for the Thing I Was Already Doing
Axel Bruns coined the term produsage to describe what happens when the traditional producer-to-consumer value chain collapses in Web 2.0 environments — when participants simultaneously use and contribute to content, blurring the line between audience and author (Bruns, 2007). Produsers don't just receive information. They extend it, annotate it, co-develop it, and leave a trace.
I've been designing for that distinction for years without having a precise word for it. The courses I'm proudest of are the ones where learners didn't just receive content but started contributing to it — debating in forums, sharing their own cases, remixing frameworks for their specific contexts. The courses I regret building are the ones that treated people as endpoints in a delivery chain. One of those models produces learning. The other produces compliance training.
A mental health education platform built around community isn't just a nice feature — it's a design requirement. Bruns (2008) argues that user-led environments are producing peer-based knowledge that increasingly rivals formal expertise, and more importantly, they create the conditions for people to see themselves in that knowledge. That's exactly what stigma reduction requires. You can't get there with a PDF and a quiz.
What This Blog Is Going to Be
Part course journal. Part design sketchpad. Occasionally a rant. The platform is my case study; the coursework is the R&D. These posts will be me thinking out loud, in real time, about how to build something that actually works — and about what it means to design learning in spaces where the learner is also, increasingly, the producer.
Fair warning: I have opinions. Reasonably well-substantiated ones, mostly. This is where they live now.
🔑 Lesson Learned: 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.
Resources
📄 Bruns, A. (2007). The future is user-led: The path towards widespread produsage. In Proceedings of Perth DAC 2007. Queensland University of Technology.
📄 Bruns, A. (2008). Beyond difference: Reconfiguring education for the user-led age. In Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
END OF WEEK 1 · BLOG POST 1
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