The Learning Science Guidebook V2

I’m about to head off on holiday, but before i do, some news on the ‘Learning Science Guidebook’. Those of you with long memories will recall this as a 2020 project that rather ground to a halt when i completed the first full draft. It was clearly not ready to publish, and my early reviewers suggested that i had accidentally welded two books into one, in a rather clumsy way… anyway, i felt so overwhelmed by the whole thing that i just backed away and let it sleep for a while.

In 2021 i revisited the illustrations and fell in love with it again, but still lacked the structure or energy to resurrect it. I knew that it really needed to be stripped right back to the ground and rebuilt – and now i’m about ready to tackle it. Or in fact, i have the writing partner to do so! More on this soon, but this will most likely be my first co-authored book, written with one of my best friends, who also happens to be a world class learning scientist! We spent a weekend kicking ideas around and are now looking to set ourselves a schedule and push forwards with it.

For now, i’m just sharing a little of our ideas for structural approach to the writing – as i say, the first manuscript got to version 21 before it toppled over… and now i’m starting again at v1… so this is very DRAFT ideas…

There is a SCAFFOLDING of structure in the hard ideas – what the research tells us about ‘how things work’, and ‘what to prioritise’. We have a list of ‘20 ideas’ from the research that will form a a foundation of that. I’ll share more on this in due course.

There is probably some TRANSLATION – where we may base our writing in the research, but build a more pragmatic, possibly simpler, language around some of it. I think our steer is that we are seeking to give insight and understanding, heading into action. Not abstract knowledge alone.

There is probably some CONTEXT around the modern Organisation – the desire to ‘unlock’ potential, and into some of the social collaborative aspects – this is probably a layer that we can weave around it.

And maybe some additional theory or IDEAS – which may lean more into some of my more recent work, shared on the Learning Fragments site – i think we should be unafraid to give our interpretation and ‘next ideas’ – so what would we do about this – in fact, this may be the best bit!

Finally: REFLECTIONS, with questions to ask yourself and your Organisation about the state of health and potential.

For now, i’m feeling pretty exhausted and ready for a holiday, but i will share more on this when i return. In August i think we will be able to share some of the timeframes and structure, and of course i will #WorkOutLoud on the development and production as we go.