Designing learning spaces
How space, participation, tools, and routines get set up so that the form of learning intended is the one the room makes easy — and what to spend on first when the budget will not cover the walls.
Work / Guides
The form a principle has to take before anyone can use it.
A guide is the operable version of a domain — the same material, numbered, sourced, and short enough to keep open while you are building something. Each one exists because a position I can argue in a meeting is no use to the person who has to make something on Monday.
All work
What a guide is
A domain page on this site sets out what I have come to believe and what I would still argue about. That is the right form for a position and the wrong form for someone with a deadline. A guide converts the same material into a thing you can work from: numbered items, each stating what it claims and where the claim comes from, arranged so you can find the one you need without reading the rest.
Every guide holds to the same constraints. Each item names its source. Where the source is narrower than the advice usually made of it, the guide says so rather than passing the two off as the same kind of claim — a body of knowledge that cannot grade itself is a reading list with ambitions. Nothing is included because it is well known; several well-known things are absent, and a few are here to be corrected.
And each guide is one self-contained file that opens in a browser. It reads as a document and presents as a deck, so it can be handed on, projected, marked up, or argued with by someone I will never speak to. That last property is the whole point.
Why I make them
Research becomes a principle, a principle becomes a tool, and a tool becomes a changed practice. The last step is the one that fails, and I have written about why. But the step most often skipped is the middle one: a principle tells you what to optimise for and does not tell you what to do, and the work of making it operable is unglamorous enough that it usually goes undone. What gets circulated instead is the principle, on the assumption that conviction travels. It does not.
These guides are that middle step, done deliberately. Each takes a body of evidence I would otherwise only be able to gesture at and puts it in a form that survives being handed over — which means it has to be specific, findable, and honest about its own footings.
They are also a discipline on me. Writing sixty items down with a source attached to each is a reliable way of finding out which of your convictions have anything behind them. Not all of mine did.
Available
The guides
One is written. The rest are listed because saying what is not finished yet is more useful than an index that only shows the finished thing.
Principles for designing learning materials
What to do with words, pictures, layout, and interaction so that a resource teaches rather than merely covers the ground. Drawn from the learning sciences, multimedia research, visual design, user experience, and inclusive design.
Open the guideUsing immersive media
When a headset earns its cost, what has to happen in the twenty minutes after it comes off, and the cheaper thing to try before committing to any of it.
Designing interactive experiences
Where the learner has to commit, what the system should say back and when, and how to tell careful reasoning from an efficient exploit.
Singapore