Blog posts
Beyond Cutouts - Issuu
Miranda Verswijvelen shares tips for creating and writing believable characters in interactive stories for learning.
Do not confuse traits with facts. Ages, shoe sizes and job titles do not make an interesting character. Are they impulsive or thoughtful, trusting or suspicious, assertive or passive?
Elements in backstory and traits that really matter for the story need to be released slowly: through flashbacks, dialogue, or actions. This gradual discovery keeps learners intrigued and invested.
Broadcast and Media Volume 30, Volume 1 (Ultra-realistic media created by biomorphic AI) (2025-01-30)
This page is in Korean, but you can use Google Translate to read the page. I bookmarked it for the article by Oh Jewook titled "AI-based virtual human-related technology and commercialization." The author used one of my collections of Midjourney images as an example of consistent character images (with citation and permission, of course). Very cool to see my work cited in such a different setting! I never know when I publish a blog post where it might end up being useful to someone else.
LABS.GOOGLE
Google Labs has an "Experiments" page with a collection of AI tools for a variety of purposes. These are very explicitly experimental and probably not ready for production environments. I also expect many of them will disappear later (this is Google, after all--look at their track record). Still, this looks like a fun site to spend some time exploring what tools can do right now.
2025 Learning and Development Work and Salary Survey - Blue Eskimo
Salary survey with additional questions about satisfaction and outlook. The respondents for this survey are mostly in the UK, and I appreciate having a different source to point to since most of my other sources are USA-focused.
Accessibility personas
This site from the UK government includes a series of personas of people with different access needs and required supports. In addition to the personas are simulations where you try to complete tasks on websites as these people with disabilities experience them. You can see how poor design affects their ability to complete tasks, as well as see an improved design that makes it easier for users with disabilities to use websites. Even though this is more about general web content, a lot of this applies to elearning as well.
StoryMate
AI-supported tool for creating interactive fiction. Add passages and choices and use the embedded AI tool to draft the story. This is a wrapper for ChatGPT with custom prompts plus an interface for building the branching structure and buttons connecting passages. The interface for the branching structure looks like Twine, so I wonder if it just is designed to look similar or if Twine is part of the code underneath. This would be easier to learn for beginners than Twine though, so even if you didn't want to use AI, you could create a branching scenario in this tool. I wasn't super impressed with the AI results in my quick tests, but maybe it will improve with time and better prompts.
How People Read Online: New and Old Findings
Research from the NN Group on how people read online. Eye tracking patterns, how people scan content, recommendations. Overall, their findings haven't changed in 20+ years: it's critical to make online text easy to scan and divided into chunks with clear headings and hierarchy.
Monetise your expertise - Graphy
Graphy is an online course builder for experts to build and sell courses. It's one of the cheaper options available. I've heard from another ID that you can include SCORM content, although I don't see that in their documentation. I also see some negative reviews related to poor customer support for problems. Still, for some clients who want something much cheaper than Thinkific or Kajabi, this might be an option.
Save Data to Google Sheets from Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate eLearning Courses
This is a Google Sheets eLearning Widget for basic tracking outside of an LMS. If I had stronger Javascript skills, I could probably figure this out myself. However, paying for someone who has already written the code will save me time, effort, and aggravation. This looks like a promising option for one of my current clients.
How Much Does Animation Cost Per Minute? (2024 Update)
This article breaks down different tiers of animation from amateur and free tools through high-end broadcast quality prices. This shows more of what you get at each tier of pricing. It will be interesting to see how AI tools affect these prices moving forward, although I think most of the AI video tools aren't quite there for production yet.
Animated Video Price: How To Calculate The Price For Your Animated Video
Pricing for animated videos based on length, animation style, and other variable. It's helpful to have some benchmarks to compare pricing to, even though this is more focused on custom animation rather than tools like Vyond.
AnimateAI
Create animated videos with AI. Start by generating characters, which the site says will be consistent throughout your story. You can turn scripts into storyboards and customize them. Then, create videos in 30-second clips. The voice syncing doesn't look great in their demo videos, but this still might be worth experimenting with. The free plan should be enough to test it out.