AI, DEI, Twine: ID Links 4/23/24
Curated links related to AI, DEI and accessibility, Twine, freelancing, storyboarding, visual design, facilitation, and books for IDs.
As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links about once a month here on my blog. This post includes links related to AI, DEI and accessibility, Twine, freelancing, storyboarding, visual design, facilitation, and books for IDs.
I’m experimenting with AI image tools to create images for my blog posts. This was created in Midjourney and edited in Affinity Designer.
AI prompts, tools, and reflections
Anthropic (the makers of Claude AI) have shared a library of prompts. This is a combination of prompts for work and personal tasks. While there are no user-submitted prompts right now, they are accepting submissions and presumably testing them to include in the future.
The Pesky Challenge of Evaluating AI Outputs – Usable Learning
Julie Dirksen observes that lots of people (myself included) talk about the importance of making sure that any content created by AI is reviewed by a person. The task of evaluating the outputs of AI is a challenging one though, and it’s one worth paying attention to as we continue to explore the possibilities of AI.
First of all, you need the expertise to judge an output, and second you need the discipline to exert the effort required to assess an output.
More thoughts to come on this, but for now, I think there are a few questions we should be asking:
-Julie Dirksen
- Does this person have the knowledge and expertise to judge this output?
- Is it reasonable to expect this person has the discipline to evaluate the outputs in detail?
- What is the risk if output errors are not caught?
Beginner’s Guide to Midjourney Consistent Characters.
Tips from Rory Flynn on how to use Midjourney to create consistent characters. This shows how to use CREF in your prompts, with sample prompts and a few tips to improve your results
AI Story Generator (Free, No Signup & Unlimited)
This seems like something that could be done with a combination of other tools (an LLM plus an image generator), but this is a tool that creates stories plus images to accompany them. It would be interesting to experiment with as inspiration for training scenarios. However, note that the site claims copyright of all stories created, so don’t plan to use this for commercial purposes. Use it for inspiration rather than as the actual content of a story.
DEI and accessibility
Clark Quinn reflects on why DEI is important, including some review of research supporting DEI work.
Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino wrote about learning organization dimensions, and one of the four aspects of a supportive learning environment was “appreciation of differences”. I want to emphasize it’s not ‘tolerating diversity’, it’s valuing it! In exploring that space of solutions, the more diversity in the group, the more likely we are to cover a big range. (There’re caveats, of course, particularly that all have to share a commitment to finding an answer.) Homogeneity is the enemy here!
-Clark Quinn
10 Rules You Need to Create Great Captioned Videos – Meryl.net home
Meryl Evans shares rules for creating great closed captions. While these are described as rules for videos, this applies to other elearning too.
10 guidelines for accessible captions: Readable, accurate, synchronized, length, position, sound, credits, voice changes, speaker identification, and motion with one or two sentences describing each one.
-Meryl Evans
Twine
GitHub – danieltalsky/twine-css-template
A CSS template for customizing Twine games. I used this as the starting point for my project management simulation.
Twine2 is a great tool for beginners to make games, but there aren’t customization options out of the box, and the way to use CSS is not well documented. This template is a well-commented basic reset that allows you to make your game look unique without knowing too much about CSS.
Twine exports stories to HTML, so in theory the content should be reasonably accessible to screen readers (as long as you add alt text for images etc.). In practice, some of the Twine-specific HTML elements don’t always work well with screen readers. This paper discusses how the authors created a screen reader browser extension to improve the accessibility of Twine stories built with Harlowe and Sugarcube (the two most common story formats).
Freelancing
My 25 favorite freelancing tips
From the “Double Your Freelancing” newsletter, this is a bunch of tips about how to improve your freelancing business. Some of this is the same advice I have given to others–track your time, spend time working ON your business and not just IN your business, etc. Solid tips if you’re a one-person company or small agency, regardless of what industry you work in.
Storyboarding and scenarios
StoryTribe: Effortless Storyboarding for Everyone
This tool isn’t designed for elearning storyboarding, but it has customizable illustrated characters plus props and backgrounds that make it an possible choice for branching scenarios.
Visual design
A grid system for visual design. While this is typically used for web design, Jerson Campos shared how he uses this for designing slides in Storyline and PowerPoint. Using this grid can help you create better looking visual designs.
Live facilitation
Facilitation Techniques and Workshop Activities | Library | SessionLab
Looking for ideas for planning a workshop or instructor-led training? Check out this library of facilitation techniques. There’s a category for remote facilitation, but some techniques not tagged that could potentially be used or adapted for vILT too.
Books for IDs
12 Books for Instructional Designers to Read This Year
Connie Malamed shares 12 books for instructional designers, all recent publications. I’ve only read 3 of these (although I have the previous edition of one), so it looks like I have some new selections for my “to read” list.
