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Questions I keep returning to
Some questions persist because the answer is difficult. Others persist because answering them too quickly closes useful possibilities. These are questions that repeatedly surface across projects, reading, conversations, and design work.
Questions
Learning and design
What should a learner have to do, rather than merely see, inside a digital learning experience?
Related argument: Interactive learning experiences · Challenge it: WP-01: A product becomes educational when its interaction changes what the learner must think about.
When does difficulty contribute to learning, and when is it simply poor design?
Related argument: Ease of use is not ease of learning · Challenge it: WP-02: Removing friction from an interface and removing difficulty from a learning task are different design operations.
What can be standardised without suppressing professional judgement?
Related argument: A design system is not a component library
What should educational technology optimise for if engagement is not learning?
Related argument: Evidence of learning · Challenge it: Engagement is evidence of learning
When does personalisation increase agency, and when does it remove productive choice?
Challenge it: Personalisation is inherently learner-centred
Questions
Evidence
What counts as convincing evidence that learning has changed?
Related argument: Evidence of learning
Which behaviours are meaningful signals, and which are merely convenient to measure?
Operationalise it: Learning analytics (opens in a new tab) · Challenge it: WP-06: The usefulness of an educational metric decreases when the metric becomes a substitute for the construct it was meant to approximate.
Questions
Systems
How can a system learn from local variation without eliminating that variation prematurely?
Challenge it: WP-04: A scalable intervention must specify what may change as clearly as what must remain invariant.
What happens when a good intervention enters a system that changes it?
Operationalise it: Education reform: why change is slow and what scales (opens in a new tab) · Challenge it: Successful pilots should be replicated faithfully
What should remain after an innovation has disappeared?
Related argument: Ask what persists · Challenge it: WP-07: The most durable output of an innovation may be the capability the organisation develops while implementing it.
Questions
AI
Which decisions should AI make, which should it support, and which should remain deliberately human?
Operationalise it: AI in learning products (opens in a new tab) · See it in practice: One problem, four ways of seeing it
What should education make scarce when information and generated answers become abundant?
Operationalise it: Futures of education (opens in a new tab)
Questions
Collective thinking
Under what conditions does adding more people improve a decision?
Related argument: Designing collective thinking · Challenge it: WP-05: A group needs structures for independent thought before it can benefit fully from collective thought.
How should disagreement be designed rather than merely encouraged?
Related argument: Nobody in the room has to be wrong