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DevLearn was a blast! We were thrilled by the positive response to our sessions and the news about our upcoming book. It was great to connect with so many amazing L&D people. Learning about the newest trends and innovative ideas was inspiring. The only downside was not having enough time to chat with everyone I was hoping to talk with.

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📰 News & Notes

Things You Should Know About Attention

Attention is a precious but limited resource in learning, often likened to a spotlight that brightens specific tasks while others fade into the background. This article by Connie Malamed dives into attention's quirks, explaining that selective focus helps filter out distractions, while divided attention, like multitasking, splits our mental resources and reduces effectiveness. Novelty, high engagement, and task relevance can sustain attention, but without these, distractions easily take over. Learning designers are encouraged to engage learners with meaningful, stimulating content to make the most of their attention span.

🎯 Takeaway: Effective learning thrives when attention is focused, meaningful, and free from needless distractions.

How ChatGPT Works: A Non-Technical Primer

In a nutshell, MIT Sloan’s non-technical primer on ChatGPT breaks down how this AI marvel was built to "predict the next word" using vast internet data and deep neural networks, evolving from GPT-3 through 3.5 to ChatGPT, with each iteration gaining surprising conversational abilities. This insightful video explains its growth, underlying mechanics, and challenges with errors or bias, all while emphasizing its role as a powerful but imperfect tool in learning and teaching.

🎯 Takeaway: ChatGPT is a conversational AI powered by predicting words from massive data, but it’s still learning how to be fully accurate and unbiased.

How Good are Claude, ChatGPT & Gemini at Instructional Design?

Dr. Philippa Hardman’s article examines how well general-purpose AI models—Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini—perform in instructional design tasks. She finds that while these AIs can aid instructional designers by speeding up content creation, they often lack the deep theoretical knowledge and practical finesse necessary for nuanced, effective design. For example, they may regurgitate outdated theories like rigid learning styles and struggle to adapt to specific learner needs. Hardman suggests that until specialized AI tools are developed for instructional design, professionals should rely on these AIs with caution, using them as starting points rather than complete solutions.

🎯 Takeaway: General AI models offer helpful but limited support for instructional design, best used as an assistive tool with expert oversight.

🧰 Tech Tools & Tips

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🎧 Podcast

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🧳 Where’s Mike?

• From Boring to Bravo: How to Be a Slide Design Superstar, November 19 ATD Rhode Island (Online and only $10)

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