New Addition: Explorable Explanations & the Future of Learning + How COVID is Creating a New Normal for Knowledge Workers
Hi Friend!
Welcome to the second issue of my newsletter!
Write of Passage officially ended last week, but with some newfound writing buddies we are trying to carry the momentum and accountability forward by having a 6-days-a-week morning writing group.
For this week's newsletter I'll be giving you a sneak peak at a couple of the essays I'm currently working on.
- Idea Curation: Why Explorable Explanations have the potential to revolutionize the learning process
- Changing World: How COVID has accelerated the remote work movement and given us an opportunity to redefine communications, collaboration, and productivity within organizations.
Essay 1 — Topic: Idea Curation
The original prompt was: Summarize an idea that you care about. What ignites your soul? What framework or concept is foundational to your profession or passion?
Working Title: We Are Made to Explore (With Childlike Wonder) — Why Explorable Explanations Have The Potential to Revolutionize the Learning Process
Key points, takeaways:
- Interactive digital articles called Explorable Explanations (coined by visionary UI designer Bret Victor) have the potential to revolutionize the learning process because they take advantage of the unique capability that is the dynamic nature of our digital tools (screens) to help people learn and engage with complex ideas in a way that they weren't able to previously. They allow teachers to shed old paradigms and representations (mechanical metaphors), and invent new ones that are native to the new medium.
- This interactivity and dynamic visualization facilitates active participation and experimentation that can "allow reader to build an intuition about the behavior of a system, leading to a fundamentally different understanding of an underlying system" that traditional (static) media (like marks on paper) lacks.
- The interactivity and visualization facilitates a connection with the material that can influence both attitude (towards learning) and the amount of time spent learning both (time spent, emotion towards) of which are proven ways to improve learning outcomes.
Exemplary source material:
- Explorable Explanations by Bret Victor (What does it mean to be an active reader?)
- Communicating with Interactive Articles (Exemplary interactive articles from around the web)
- The Structure of Stand-up Comedy (Entertaining, engaging Explorable Explanation example)
Essay 2 — Topic: Changing World
The original prompt was: "How is THE world changing" or "How is MY world changing?"
Working Title: A Remote Possibility — A Guide to Creating a New Normal for Knowledge Workers on Distributed Teams
Key points, takeaways:
- The biggest thing: COVID has given an opportunity to redefine communications, collaboration, and productivity within organizations.
- I am hoping to provide a few suggestions for businesses to run stuff better, and some suggestions for knowledge workers to be more productive while also re-establishing some healthy work-life boundaries (more to come as a flesh out the article)
- Synchronous sometimes, but asynchronous most of the time. In order to be good at being asynchronous, you have to be a good writer and you have to be able to communicate well in writing.
Exemplary source material:
- Collaborative Overload (Too much teamwork exhausts employees and saps productivity. Here’s how to avoid it)
- The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication (The how, where, why, and when we communicate)
- If a discussion will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room
Feedback welcome on either topic or title.
Until next time!