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eLearning Authoring Tools Comparison: Interactive Data & Rankings | Articulate Alternatives
eLearning Authoring Tools Comparison: Interactive Data & Rankings | Articulate Alternatives
Mike Stein (ID Atlas) completed an immensely valuable project to compare ID authoring tools by building the same course in multiple tools. Their site compares and ranks tools based on a rubric that includes development time, usability, responsiveness, and accessibility.
·idatlas.org·
eLearning Authoring Tools Comparison: Interactive Data & Rankings | Articulate Alternatives
Artificial intelligence and the environment: Putting the numbers into perspective - Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence and the environment: Putting the numbers into perspective - Artificial intelligence
Using AI does use energy, water, and other resources. But when you consider it as part of your decision-making, it's important to put it in perspective. Being on a Zoom call or watching Netflix for an hour uses more electricity and water than prompting ChatGPT numerous times.
·nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org·
Artificial intelligence and the environment: Putting the numbers into perspective - Artificial intelligence
Interactive Activities Done Properly: What the Science Actually Allows Us to Do | Learning Development Accelerator
Interactive Activities Done Properly: What the Science Actually Allows Us to Do | Learning Development Accelerator
Matt Richter dives deep into the science of how to align activities with the goals for learning and what people need to practice or accomplish.
When a metaphorical game succeeds, it succeeds because it creates structurally similar cognitive demands—not because it is fun, novel, or symbolic.
In other words, the brain doesn’t care about your metaphor. It cares about what it has to think about during the activity.
From a cognitive architecture viewpoint, activities are not designed to “create engagement,” “break up the session,” or “get people talking.” Those may be side benefits, but they are never the goal. The purpose of an activity is to create conditions where the learner must activate, retrieve, apply, or integrate the target schema.
When aligned to cognitive architecture, interactive activities can beautifully satisfy SDT’s psychological needs: Autonomy: choosing strategies, making decisions Competence: clear and informational feedback, achievable challenge Relatedness: coordinating, negotiating, helping But motivation is a multiplier, not a substitute
·members.ldaccelerator.com·
Interactive Activities Done Properly: What the Science Actually Allows Us to Do | Learning Development Accelerator
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation | Max Woolf's Blog
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation | Max Woolf's Blog
While I've had reasonably good results from using a similar image prompt structure with Gemini (Nano Banana) that I use with Midjourney and other tools, this article describes more complex prompting strategies like structuring prompts with JSON. There are also some easier tips like adding MUST in all caps to signal importance.
The reason is that information asymmetry between what generative image AI can and can’t do has only grown in recent months: many still think that ChatGPT is the only way to generate images and that all AI-generated images are wavy AI slop with a piss yellow filter.
·minimaxir.com·
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation | Max Woolf's Blog
Whisk AI - Free AI Image Generator
Whisk AI - Free AI Image Generator
Whisk is more about enhancing your image prompts than about the image generation itself. If you give it even a basic, vague prompt, it will suggest enhancements so you get better results faster. This is an experimental tool from Google Labs, so expect that the performance may be uneven and that the tool may disappear in the future without warning.
·whiskailabs.com·
Whisk AI - Free AI Image Generator
PPT AI
PPT AI
I don't know if this is "the world's best AI PPT maker" like they claim, but the idea is interesting. Enter your text or upload a file and set some variables for the audience, tone, etc. It generates slides for you. I'm sure it needs editing and iteration like all AI tools, but this looks like it might help speed up the process of creating slides or give you some inspiration. There's a limited free plan to test it, but unfortunately I'm getting errors and can't sign up right now.
·ppt.ai·
PPT AI
LinkOff - Filter and Customizer for LinkedIn™ - Chrome Web Store
LinkOff - Filter and Customizer for LinkedIn™ - Chrome Web Store
While I've found it helpful to unfollow people on LinkedIn who regularly share content I don't want to see, this browser extension offers much more filtering than is possible in LinkedIn natively. If you want to skip whatever outrage is the flavor of the minute on LinkedIn, this has keyword filtering and other options.
·chromewebstore.google.com·
LinkOff - Filter and Customizer for LinkedIn™ - Chrome Web Store
An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now
An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now

Ethan Mollick's recommendations on which AI models to use depending on your usage. Free LLM models are OK for some uses, but he notes where the limitations mean that you'll get better results with paid models.

For free image generation, I agree that Gemini is probably the best all-purpose free tool.

·oneusefulthing.org·
An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now
Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai
AI-designed templates and slide designs to speed up the process of creating presentations and get more variety in your slide designs.
·beautiful.ai·
Beautiful.ai
Autoppt
Autoppt
Upload your slides or documents and get AI-designed slides based on it. This might be worth trying, at least for inspiration on slides if you're having trouble coming up with something more interesting than bullet points.
·autoppt.com·
Autoppt
In Defense of AI Art — Craig Boehman
In Defense of AI Art — Craig Boehman
Craig Boehman responds to the criticisms of AI art from his perspective as an artist while sharing examples of his work and notes on the tools he used to generate and refine his art.
If you’re an artist and using AI in whole or in part to create your art, do you think someone “off the street” is going to employ AI and create something better than you, a seasoned pro? Consider for a moment the smartphone camera. “Anyone can take pictures these days, photography isn’t art”. A photographer with a smartphone could surely do better, right? The differences between an average smartphone user and what a professional photographer can do with a smartphone are potentially as vast and wide as the Grand Canyon.
“The fear has sometimes been expressed that photography would in time entirely supersede the art of painting. Some people seem to think that when the process of taking photographs in colors has been perfected and made common enough, the painter will have nothing more to do.” — Henrietta Clopath, 1901
·craigboehman.com·
In Defense of AI Art — Craig Boehman
Reve: Reimagine Reality
Reve: Reimagine Reality
AI tool for creating and editing images. You can combine elements from multiple images, including adding a character to a scene. There's a free plan with limitations which should be enough to test it.
·app.reve.com·
Reve: Reimagine Reality
The Missing Feedback Problem: When Intellectual Knowledge Just. Isn’t. Enough.
The Missing Feedback Problem: When Intellectual Knowledge Just. Isn’t. Enough.

Julie Dirksen shares examples of the disconnect between what we know we should do and what are physical reality tells us. Delayed or absent feedback makes behavior change hard. Making progress, consequences, or feedback more visible and vivid can help.

"That’s interesting, because I’ve seen a consistent thread in most behavior change challenges: delayed or absent feedback. What it comes down to is that your intellectual knowledge is telling you one thing, but your physical environment is telling you something else. This has important implications for learning design. If we can’t just rely on intellectual knowledge, we need to give people the feeling of consequences or outcomes. That influences design choices—how visceral the experience is, how vivid the consequences are, and what kind of feedback people get."

·linkedin.com·
The Missing Feedback Problem: When Intellectual Knowledge Just. Isn’t. Enough.
Home | AI or Not
Home | AI or Not
Free AI detection tool (with more info for paid plans). It was accurate for the images I uploaded to test. I would be cautious of using this to detect AI text though; all of these tools have a lot of false positives and false negatives.
·aiornot.com·
Home | AI or Not
On Working with Wizards - by Ethan Mollick
On Working with Wizards - by Ethan Mollick
Ethan Mollick writes about the shift from using AI as co-intelligence to how AI is becoming a "wizard" that can do complex work as if by magic. This raises some important points about the challenges of working with AI, especially agentic AI where we have no transparency on the process. Even if we plan to have a human verify the AI's work, that verification is challenging. Do you have the right people with the right skills to verify it?
You don’t know how the AI made the choices it made, nor can you confirm that everything is completely correct. We're shifting from being collaborators who shape the process to being supplicants who receive the output. It is a transition from working with a co-intelligence to working with a wizard.
So what do we do with our wizards? I think we need to develop a new literacy: First, learn when to summon the wizard versus when to work with AI as a co-intelligence or to not use AI at all.
Second, we need to become connoisseurs of output rather than process. We need to curate and select among the outputs the AI provides, but more than that, we need to work with AI enough to develop instincts for when it succeeds and when it fails. We have to learn to judge what's right, what's off, and what's worth the risk of not knowing. This creates a hard problem for education: How do you train someone to verify work in fields they haven't mastered, when the AI itself prevents them from developing mastery? Figuring out how to address this gap is increasingly urgent.
The paradox of working with AI wizards is that competence and opacity rise together. We need these tools most for the tasks where we're least able to verify them.
·oneusefulthing.org·
On Working with Wizards - by Ethan Mollick
Creating AI Art Responsibly: How to Navigate AI Legal Risks
Creating AI Art Responsibly: How to Navigate AI Legal Risks
These recommendations are a good starting point for thinking about how to use AI ethically and to reduce your risk.
Set Clear AI Use Guidelines Choose Tools That Protect You Be Careful What You Prompt Use Approved References Review Before Release Seek Expert Guidance, Mitigate AI Legal Risks
·onwardsearch.com·
Creating AI Art Responsibly: How to Navigate AI Legal Risks
WaveSpeedAI
WaveSpeedAI
WaveSpeed gives you access to multiple different image and video generation tools by paying for credits based on what you actually use. This looks like a promising option to test out tools or generate a few videos without committing to a larger subscription.
·wavespeed.ai·
WaveSpeedAI
MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk
MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk
MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk is an open source AI video generation tool that supports image-to-video and video-to-video generation. This tool can create longer video clips, not just the 5-10 seconds of many other tools. It's open source, so this link goes to the Github for the project with instructions to install it locally. For a local model, the results look very promising. Installing and running it will take some technical proficiency though.
·github.com·
MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk
Our approach to energy innovation and AI’s environmental footprint
Our approach to energy innovation and AI’s environmental footprint
Google published a technical report on the environmental impact of AI, including calculating the cost of training models (not just individual queries). They reported energy use much lower than many earlier estimates, partly due to improvements in efficiency.
Over a 12-month period, while delivering higher-quality responses, the median energy consumption and carbon footprint per Gemini Apps text prompt decreased by factors of 33x and 44x, respectively. Based on our recent analysis, we found that our work on efficiency is proving effective and the energy consumed per median prompt is equivalent to watching television for less than nine seconds.
·blog.google·
Our approach to energy innovation and AI’s environmental footprint
Ideogram Character
Ideogram Character
This is another tool I'm adding to my list to test out. Give Ideogram a single reference image and then generate multiple remixed images. In the demo, I notice that the expressions don't seem to change much, so that might be a limitation. The basic character creation is free, with additional features for more precise editing on their paid subscription plan.
·about.ideogram.ai·
Ideogram Character
Is Any AI Use Ethical? – Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Is Any AI Use Ethical? – Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Wes Fryer shares his thoughts on differing views of ethics and AI. Wes is not ethically opposed to all AI, but that doesn't mean he supports all AI use blindly either.
I am convinced AI technologies present transformative capabilities as a “cognitive force multiplier,” and have willingly drank a healthy portion of the “AI Kool-Aid” and “AI hype cycle.” I’ve said and still believe that AI represents a transformative leap forward in our shared human history of communication as well as information economy / third wave work. At this point, I am not and do not want to be an “AI conscientious objector,” refusing to voluntarily use it in all contexts. I am an advocate for its ethical and beneficial uses, and plan to remain one.
·speedofcreativity.org·
Is Any AI Use Ethical? – Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Taking Blogging Seriously
Taking Blogging Seriously
I think back to the heyday of edublogs when lots of individuals were writing and publishing regularly. I see some of it now in email and LinkedIn newsletters, but so many fewer people write regularly like this. Blogging (like all writing) helps you clarify your thinking. I'm a better ID because I've spent so much time blogging and thinking in public.
Blogging is deeply important to me because it’s a powerful mixture of two ideas: creative expression and finding the others.
·tomcritchlow.com·
Taking Blogging Seriously