Weekly Link Roundup #66
Leaving...on a jet plane......
Upcoming Mark IRL: Got a couple instances where I’m actually coming out from my bunker and leaving the gorgeous view of Qualtrics tower in Seattle for some excursions.
Creativity & Innovation to Drive Change in L&D: Mark Sheppard and I will be leading a workshop at the Canadian eLearning Conference. What I mean is that I will be watching the brilliant Mark S hold forth while I chip in occasionally…maybe get him some water. June 12, 2025
Qualtrics X4 & Basecamp - London: As part of Qualtrics’ global user conference, X4, will be doing a full day of Basecamp Live. Can’t wait.
Don't Confuse Your Value For Your Activity, or Why L&D teams must be Relentlessly Curious and Deeply Engaged (Virtual): The RTA Chapter was kind enough to invite me to talk on a topic near and dear to my heart > > AI is coming for your To Do list. If it can be automated, it will be. How do you lean in to create value in ways that AI can't? There are two skills that anyone working in L&D needs to have - curiosity and engagement. Let's talk through the forces in this rapidly changing time and how to not just survive but thrive.
Love this from Conor Grennan - AI JUST EXPLAINED ITS OWN FAILURES: This is just a fabulous and simple explanation of why Claude can fail at what we think of as easy tasks. Like counting the number of Rs in strawberry. It’s the difference between pattern recognition and sequential processing.
Expert Learning Instructor: OK so this one kinda blew my hair back this week. Just drop the prompt into your fav AI - I did it on both Gemini and ChatGPT and watch what happens. I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this. I’ve been saying for a while that GenAI could produce content good enough to replace most of compliance training but dang - this goes a step further. One thing that I love to do with GenAI and image generation is play with tweaks in the prompt and see how the image changes. This is the real power of this prompt - its a great base that we can tweak and see how the output changes - I’m going to build mine with the persona of a game designer who just recently switched to L&D and see what it produces.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wants to build the everything app: Why? Just why? Rhetorical - we all know why and its not money - its ego. AirBnB created an industry, an industry not without its significant, negative externalities but a whole new industry. Can’t leave it there though can we? The robber barons of old come off as humble and self-effacing these days.
I Summarized Mary Meeker's Incredible 340 Page 2025 AI Trends Deck—Here's Mary's Take, My Response, and What You Can Learn: As great as it was to see Mary Meeker return to cranking out her insanely data-rich decks, this summary is where you should start. The best part is when we get to Nate’s own take - “TLDR: Mary is right that Generative AI adoption is exploding, but value accrues only where organizations align real-world problems AI’s actual strengths in workflows; every bigger claim demands commensurately bigger evidence.” Love this bit for folks in #LearningAndDevelopment - “Map the tacit gap. Ask: Which decisions in this workflow rely on political context, unwritten norms or pure taste? Flag them for human review up-front; don’t trick yourself into thinking a giant context window will erase them.”
MetaHuman just broke free from Unreal Engine 5 – why everyone can now create lifelike characters: IF AND ONLY IF, creating lifelike characters is important to your business and you have done some work on the ROI, THEN this is big news. “At Unreal State of Unreal 2025 Epic Games revealed its impressive MetaHumans tech is no longer Unreal Engine-exclusive and tethered to Unreal Engine 5. A new licensing update announced at Unreal Fest in Orlando has opened the door to use MetaHumans in other 3D modelling software or creative apps, including Blender and Maya.”
Google’s NotebookLM now lets you share your notebook — and AI podcasts — publicly: Don’t sleep on this. As a recent new hire myself, it would have been so cool and helpful to be handed access to a Google Notebook trained on all the sources of knowledge that have come before me and basically just present me with a buddy that has all the institutional knowledge of my team and project and of course, the company itself could build out and maintain a module that would also be dropped into this notebook. Want a high value target for L&D? What if L&D becomes the center of curation for specific built and trained, individual LLMs? Tough to replicate….just saying…
The Myth of Instant Knowledge: Maybe this goes with the story just below and maybe it points to both another way to define “incubation” but also a value-add for L&D - become the protectors of time to think and the ability to ask better questions > >
"One of the greatest threats AI poses is not just its speed but also the loss of time that questions need to ripen. British social psychologist Graham Wallas once described the stages of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The second stage—incubation—is when a question or problem rests quietly in the dark. It grows beneath the surface unconsciously. But we live in a culture where everything must happen now, and patience has vanished. AI gives us answers but doesn’t teach us to ask better questions, to live with uncertainty, or to trust the unknown.”
Full circle. We’ve been working to cut down on in-person events and trainings because of the cost but being there with someone will be the only way to verify that they’re real.
The Journal of Applied Instructional Design/May 2025/Proceedings of the Annual AECT Convention, 2024: Just maybe a couple things of interest (Being sarcastic, I could just copy/paste the whole Toc here):
Developing a Generative AI-based Chatbot for Supporting Learners in Open and Distance Learning
Integration of Artificial Intelligence into Instructional Design
This month’s Frame: using W. Brian Arthur’s “adjacent possibility principle” to perfect products: Love this > > “The core idea of Arthur's theory is that technology evolves by combining existing technologies to create new ones. His fundamental insight is deceptively simple: all technologies are built from other technologies…This is what Arthur calls "combinatorial evolution"—as the stock of available technologies grows, the number of possible combinations grows exponentially. Technology doesn't advance through isolated breakthroughs but through an endless process of mixing, matching, and recombining existing elements in novel ways.”
Beyond algorithms: Agentic AI and the behavioral data scientist: Wow, if there were only people anthropologists, sociologists, OD psych folks, etc who could ALSO help > > “Traditionally focused on extracting insights from data, data scientists building advanced agents must increasingly adopt the mindset of a behavioral scientist – observing, understanding, and translating the nuanced logic behind human decision-making into functional AI. This behavioral lens is becoming essential for unlocking agentic AI's true potential.”
Your Learners are Using AI to Redesign Your Courses: From Dr Philippa Hardman comes a really important piece for #instructionaldesigners -the way learners are using AI shows that in essence, they’re (re)designing around you. Hardman says its “a real-time audit of our design decisions.” And that (and I LOVE this term) we’ve been designing for “institutional compliance” not effective learning. I’m old enough to remember the expression the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Seems learners are doing the same with AI and ineffective instructional design.
How Stack Overflow's moderation system led to its own downfall: Wow > > Some critical notes for anyone moderating a community > > “Stack Overflow became notorious for its hostile, condescending responses to newcomers. Questions would be met with snarky comments without helpful information. This culture of mockery and elitism drove away inexperienced programmers who needed guidance. Instead of nurturing the next generation of developers, Stack Overflow's toxic atmosphere made many beginners vow never to return after being publicly shamed for their "stupid questions.”
Gemini will now automatically summarize your long emails unless you opt out: If I could write fiction, I would definitely do a short story about how AI-written emails are being read and summarized by AI and at some point the 2 AI’s decide that they should have an actual meeting. The twist is that they don’t invite the humans - I mean why would they? They’re so slow. The meeting happens - notes and action items are sent out and systems and actions are triggered and the big reveal will be that all this takes place in about 5 seconds.
How Zapier rolled out AI org-wide: Our playbook to driving 89% adoption: It’s a good read but I’ll just include this:
Figure out how you operationalize and make curiosity part of the culture and you’re halfway there.
Perplexity’s new tool can generate spreadsheets, dashboards, and more: Did you think they wouldn’t come for your spreadsheets? > > “Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine gunning for Google, on Thursday released Perplexity Labs, a tool for subscribers to Perplexity’s $20-per-month Pro plan that can craft reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and more.”
Akool Live Camera can translate video calls in real time, swap faces, and get live virtual avatars to mimic human movements: File this under - It Hasn’t Even STARTED to Get Weird Yet - “Our main motivation is to enhance the real-time experience and live experiences. For example, you can use avatars to join meetings, you can use video translation to do real-time meeting translations, and lots of other things,” Lu said. “We want to make it so you can’t tell the avatar from the real person.” > > Also I think I need to add this to my short story.
Microsoft launches Copilot for Gaming in mobile beta: Tell me again if you think that its technically more difficult to provide instruction and training to people using SaaS or people playing FPSs. The tech is there - is your biz model? Instructional model? > > “Microsoft will begin testing its Copilot for Gaming app in a beta version that launches on mobile devices today. The intelligent gaming assistant was announced earlier this year and promised to help make players faster and sharpen their skills. The app that was launched today allows players to ask the gaming assistant questions about in-game strategy and controls using voice or text. Users can also ask for game recommendations and specific questions about their Xbox accounts and subscriptions.”
Listening to Google's CEO talking about what about the future of AI holds just reinforces the fact that nobody can know what the future of AI holds: Nothing to add just 100% agreement.