#BLPLearn is our way of saving all of the great content our team curates… and sharing it with the wider community. We’ll take the best articles shared by our Learning Services, Multimedia, and Product Development teams in their weekly meetings and include them in the weekly #BLPLearn blog. We’ll usually include some commentary from the original team member who found the article, too.
Our goal is to make the weekly #BLPLearn blog a dependable source for quality, curated L&D content. Check back every Thursday.
JOIN IN THE FUN
Rather than restricting the social media conversation to a 30 minute window, we’re inviting everyone inside and outside BLP to share interesting links, thoughts, and articles with the #BLPLearn hashtag on Twitter. We’ll check the feed once a week and include the best articles submitted via Twitter in the post, too.
THIS WEEK’S ARTICLES
Now that introductions are out of the way, let’s dive in to this week’s articles:
Is it ever okay to be a control freak?
Submitted by Erika Bartlett, Learning Designer
I have a brand new article from Cathy Moore for my link this week. I also have a couple of different types of branching scenarios that are referenced in that article for you to check out.
http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2014/08/is-it-ever-okay-to-be-a-control-freak/
https://www.branchtrack.com/projects/6i8fl9wz
http://blog.djangolabs.com/scenarios/autoloon-ethics-training/
Which style of branching do you prefer? Do you find that we do one type more often than the other? And do you think that there are occasions where each type of branching scenario would work well as described in the article? I look forward to your thoughts!
Heatmap.js Dynamic Heatmaps for the Web
Submitted by Jake Huhn, Marketing Technologist
My link this week is heatmap.js! Now, I haven’t done any in-depth investigation here, but this link was sent to me in a design newsletter I subscribe to and it really caught my eye. Imagine how useful heatmap data could be in our industry!
As designers and programmers I feel like we all have a vested interest in how people are using the things we make. This seems like a quick and powerful way to collect that data.
What are some ways you think we could use a heatmap? Do you think this is the tool to do it, or are you noticing some big limitations?
http://www.patrick-wied.at/static/heatmapjs/
Touch Love: Ledoliel and the world of Devine Lu Linvega
Submitted by Corey Callahan, Senior Multimedia Developer
This week, I’m sharing out a unique game out for iOS. Fair warning: this game is WEIRD. Ledoliel is a game in which you attempt to communicate with an otherworldly creature given only a few clues as to its nature. The game is really more of a conversation simulator requiring the player to learn new social cues.
There are a couple of reasons Ledoliel is so interesting to me – one, it’s a very pure conversation simulator that could easily be adapted to help people practice real-world conversations. Secondly, this shows the benefit of developing an entire SYSTEM as opposed to a hard-coded one shot experience. There are thousands of mixtures of creatures, personalities, and conversation topics in Ledoliel. The system that governs gameplay can grow and adapt as the developer wants to add new elements. Conversely, a single-pathed hard-coded experience created in something like Lectora has limited use and can be extremely inefficient to alter or update.
So while an adaptable engine may require a lot more forethought and be more difficult to produce, it’s definitely worth investing the time and energy into creating a game system that can be updated and adapt to a wide variety of content.
