What I’ve learnt, said out loud so it can be tested.
A guide is for looking something up. A talk puts an idea in front of people who can interrupt, and finds out what it’s worth. Each one presents as a deck and reads as an article afterwards, so what you hand on is what the room sat through.
What a talk is here
Each one takes something I’ve spent a while learning and says it plainly enough to be disagreed with. There’s a claim, the evidence behind it, and a point where the subject turns from the material to the people listening and what they might do with it. Every number traces to a source. Where a finding is contested, the talk says so. A room that leaves persuaded of something unsound is worse off than when it came in.
Each is one file. Someone who wasn’t there gets the same object the room sat through, and can mark it up, argue with it and pass it on.
Why I give them
Two reasons, and the selfish one comes first. Nothing sharpens a half-formed idea like explaining it to people who can interrupt. Building a talk shows me which of my convictions have anything behind them, and standing in front of a room finds the rest. We learn best by teaching. I’d rather learn that way, in the moment, than in print a year later.
The second reason is that the ideas aren’t mine to keep. Most of what’s in these talks came from somebody else’s research and somebody else’s mistakes. Passing it on with the sources attached lets a field think together instead of one person at a time. The best sessions end with the room correcting the speaker, and the next version of the talk is better for it.
So this list will grow. If you were in the room for one of these and have a disagreement I haven’t heard yet, I’d like to hear it.
Available
The talks
Each opens in its own tab. Press R at any point to stop presenting and start reading. It is the same document either way.
Good work does not speak for itself
Most work is reported in the order it was done, and readers need it in the order they’ll use it. Communicating the work is its last stage, and a piece is unfinished until it can be stated claim first, for a named reader, at a stated level of confidence. Eight moves, from naming the reader’s decision to checking what they actually heard.
Open the talkDesigning for learning
Ease of use and ease of learning are different things, and they often pull against each other. Product instinct trained on shopping, streaming and feeds will mislead a learning system unless it’s checked against how people actually learn. Seven things that are true about learning, where each collides with design instinct, and a method for turning evidence into principles a team can defend.
Open the talkWhat design is, and what designers do
Design is a category of decision that sets what a system makes easy, hard and impossible. Most of it is made by people without the job title. What the decisions cost when nobody owns them, what the evidence says design is worth, where that evidence falls apart, and the question each role around the table is actually responsible for.
Open the talkZero is an average
Forty years of research finds that educational technology has an average effect of roughly nothing. The average is the least interesting thing about it. The spread around it is enormous, and design accounts for a good deal of the spread. What that means for what to build, what to measure before it ships, and what to stop citing.
Open the talkReflections
What I make of where I’ve been.
What a stretch of my own life turned out to be about, written down once it was over and the lesson had settled. Some were said to a room first. All of them are for reading.
What a reflection is here
Each one takes a period, a year of study or a change of role, and asks what it was about. That’s rarely what it seemed to be about at the time. The test for writing one is whether the lesson would have helped me before I learnt it. Most stretches fail that test, and they aren’t here.
The notes draw on experience without disclosing it. A reflection does the opposite. It’s about the experience, and the experience is mine.
Some began as a talk to colleagues while the year was still recent. Those keep their shape, one file that presents as a deck and reads as an article, so what’s here is what the room saw. Others were only ever written.
Why I write them
Because the lesson doesn’t keep. A year of being a beginner again taught me a good deal, and within months most of it had smoothed back into what I already believed. Writing it down while the disorientation is still fresh is the only way I’ve found to hold on to the part that was new.
I’ve said that most of what I believe about designed experience I first learnt at a table, losing. That’s true. It’s also a flattering way to put it. This is where the losing gets described.
A document opens in its own tab. Press R at any point to stop presenting and start reading. It is the same file either way.