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The Common Craft Newsletter

A free newsletter for communicators, educators, and explainers

Learn about new Common Craft videos, useful resources, and the skill of explanation from Lee LeFever, author of The Art of Explanation.

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Become an Explanation Specialist

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello friends, The Explainer Academy has been through a makeover and I'm inviting you to check it out. Free Course: Become an Explanation Specialist We've assembled a new free course that contains highlights and resources from our paid courses. It's full of videos and downloadable docs and covers both explanation skills and animated video production. You'll be...

2 days ago • 1 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Friends, How many times have you seen a new policy at work or a pitch for a new product, and thought: "Why does this feel so complicated?" It happens too often. A well-crafted explanation in the form of a brief video can solve this problem, and it's easier than you think. My Explainer Video Workshop (5 hours of live, online instruction) starts Wednesday, April...

17 days ago • 2 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Friends, my Explainer Video Workshop (5 hours of live, online instruction) starts Wednesday, April 17th. Learn every step to explaining an idea, policy, product, or project with your own animated explainer video. Learn More New: Watch a New Common Craft Video Come to Life Link to this article Go behind the scenes and see a new video come to life via 1-minute...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Explainer Video Workshop Do you have a policy, product, or service you need to explain? It's easier than you think, and you already have the tools to do it: Powerpoint or Keynote. I'm hosting a new workshop starting April 17th. We'll meet on Wednesday afternoons (Pacific time). I will be your guide through every step of creating an animated video that clearly...

about 1 month ago • 1 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello friends. I want to help you explain subjects like large language models or chatbots from a new perspective. These are great subjects for explainer videos because they're new, interesting, and complicated. Do you know what's not new, interesting, or complicated? PowerPoint (or Keynote). Yet, I'm truly excited about them. Why? Because they now do everything...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello friends. Our focus on artificial intelligence continues. Today we're publishing a new video that explains Chatbots and AI. Common Craft members can now download, embed, or stream the video. Not a member? You can watch the video in full. This video is part of our AI series. Other videos include: Large Language Models Explained Generative Artificial...

2 months ago • 1 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello friends. Recently we've been focused on artificial intelligence and specifically, videos that explain Large Language Models and Generative AI. Today, we're taking a look at a custom video project that I wrote about in 2023. From Abstract to Concrete - A Custom Video Example Link to this article In late 2023, I shared the story of a custom video project...

3 months ago • 2 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello friends. We've published a new video in our series on Artificial Intelligence. It explains Generative AI. Common Craft members can download the video file or grab embed codes in the video library. Not a member? You can watch the video, in full, with a watermark. New: Generative Artificial Intelligence, Explained Link to this article One of the most...

3 months ago • 1 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello, and Happy New Year! Back in 2011, I was focused on writing the Art of Explanation. It was my first book and I was on the hook for turning years of practical experience into paragraphs and chapters. Sometimes, this kind of pressure is what you need to see ideas and concepts that you'd taken for granted over time. In the book, I talk about "fact telling",...

4 months ago • 2 min read

Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello friends. We've published a new video that will help Common Craft members teach artificial intelligence. It's the first in a series that will cover the most important and transformational ideas in AI. More videos are coming soon. New: AI and Large Language Models, Explained Link to this article When a human asks artificial intelligence (AI) how to slice...

5 months ago • 1 min read
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