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#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:

Transmedia Storytelling
Submitted by Kristen Hewett, Senior Learning Designer 

As I was reading a blog, I came across a term I wasn’t familiar with. A little more digging, and I was looking at Karl Kapp’s site. Take a look at his blog on “Transmedia storytelling,” specifically the first and third videos in the post.

Transmedia Storytelling

How could we use this with clients?

Wanna be a programmer?
Submitted by Leo Caldwell, Multimedia Developer

The article I’ve picked for the week starts: ‘Wanna be a programmer?’

YEAH!

Well, kid, the options are endless. I’ve been trying to up my programming game this last year and I’ve working mostly with Treehouse. It’s awesome – however, what’s even more awesome? The times I’ve sat down with my coworker and he has looked through my work and critiqued it. I’ve found having someone give me feedback on my actual work is the best way to learn. Lucky me, wired.com published an article this week on a site that allows you to upload exercises and have coders give you feedback.

The site: Exercism
The article: Out in the Open: The Site That Teaches You to Code Well Enough to Get a Job

Dumb Ways to Die
Submitted by Sharon Boller, President and Chief Product Officer

My link for this week comes from the Games for Change website. The game is called “Dumb Ways to Die,” and the city of Melbourne, Australia had this mobile game made as part of a public safety campaign on train safety. You can download the actual game for free from the App Store.

I played the game, and found a lot to like. The graphics are strong, and the game characters are clever and funny.The graphics convey a light-hearted tone while hammering home all the stupid things we routinely do that could get us killed (e..g pulling a piece of toast out of the toaster w/ a fork).

You quickly start to get the point about various things we all could do differently to stay safe, though their focus is on being safe around trains.

The game has high replayability because, gosh darn it, it IS pretty funny to see all the scenarios and, dare I say it, to die.

The game uses levels very well – and you learn to play by playing, something that is REALLY hard for a game designer to make happen.

Finally – it is truly a game you can play in spurts – and if you only have one or two minutes to play, you can. It’s probably not something you will sit and play for an hour.

Here’s link to info on Games for Change website about the game:

Dumb Ways to Die