Readings Lists for Instructional Designers

Amit Garg has posted a nice list of 22 essential books for beginning instructional designers. 

Which reminded me of an old post of mine from 2008:  Essential Reading for Instructional Design.

Lots of books to read, so get to work, you!

Photo credit:  bookworm by Oo_Dee_oO

My Summer ID Reading List

I have big plans for my summer reading. If I can get to one or two books on this list I'll feel like a hero.

My Summer Reading List

What are you hoping to read this summer?

Photo credit: This Year's Summer Reading by ephemera assemblyman

Essential Reading for Instructional Design?

As an instructional designer/eLearning professional, what books are the essential tools in your reference library?

I'm not looking for the obtuse theory books. I prefer the get-down-and-dirty variety.

These are my current faves. Easy-readers (a term of praise, in this case). Practical books with lots of real examples. They might refer to theory, but they don't get bogged down in it:

• e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer
  
• Michael Allen's Guide to E-Learning by Michael Allen
  
• Gadgets, Games & Gizmos for Learning by Karl Kapp
  

Last May, I started a bit of a list in this post: Beginning Instructional Designer's Toolkit.

Dr. John Curry was kind enough to post a really detailed reading list in his post How to Get an Instructional Design Education Without Paying Tuition (gotta love that title!)

After my appeal for something a little more pared down that I might actually be able to read, Dr. John came up with these essentials:

• The Conditions of Learning and Theory of Instruction, by Robert Gagné
• Training Complex Cognitive Skills, by Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer [currently unavailable on Amazon]
  
• The First Principles of Instruction, by M. David Merrill [I couldn't find that listing on Amazon, but there are a number of results for M. David Merrill]
  
• The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman

Other ID books of note that have been recently recommended to me:

• e-Learning by Design by William Horton (recommended by Christy Tucker)
• What Every Manager Should Know About Training by Robert Mager (recommended by Dave Ferguson)
• The Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams (not the comedian) (this was recently recommended to me by someone who asked the same question on LinkedIn.

What would you add? Or can we stop? I'm already feeling a bit overwhelmed. Perhaps we need to start a lending library.

Photo credit: Little by MegElizabeth

Go Read a Book

How many books did you read in 2007 that were not work or school related?

Reading Well by moriza

73% of Americans said they had read "a book of some kind", according to a survey cited in this fascinating article (I was reading way past my bedtime last night):

Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading? by Caleb Craine, The New Yorker, December 24, 2007.

It's all in how you ask the question. Another survey asked Americans if they had "read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months". The numbers were down at 46.7% in 2002.

Granted, these stats refer to words in print, and don't include pages read online.

The History and Biology of Reading

Craine references a book by Maryanne Wolf: “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Add this to your reading list for 2008.

As people read less (and Craine's statistics indicate that they are), he wonders if we're transitioning from a literate culture back to an oral tradition. Reading brains work differently from listening ones.

The Benefits of Reading

As we learn to read fluently, our minds our freed up. Imaginations wander and you make your own connections with the content.

With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. “The secret at the heart of reading,” Wolf writes, is “the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.” (Craine)

As you're reading this post, you're thinking about other things. How you read. What you've recently read that sparked some new insight. What you should have for lunch.

In a recent book claiming that television and video games were “making our minds sharper,” the journalist Steven Johnson argued that since we value reading for “exercising the mind,” we should value electronic media for offering a superior “cognitive workout.” But, if Wolf’s evidence is right, Johnson’s metaphor of exercise is misguided. When reading goes well, Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone. (Craine)

Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You) (a book of which I read about half of in 2007) argues that games can make us smarter. What do you think?

Audio Narration and PowerPoint

And then there was this, yet another argument in favor of NOT narrating the text of a PowerPoint (or eLearning course):

....there is research suggesting that secondary orality and literacy don’t mix. In a study published this year, experimenters varied the way that people took in a PowerPoint presentation about the country of Mali. Those who were allowed to read silently were more likely to agree with the statement “The presentation was interesting,” and those who read along with an audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the statement “I did not learn anything from this presentation.” The silent readers remembered more, too, a finding in line with a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves.

A Call to Action

Don't just sit there. Go read something. (Oh wait, you just did!) And then go read something to your kids.

The Smell of Books

I can't see myself getting an Amazon Kindle. I like sitting on the couch with a book and a cup of tea, thumbing through the pages, smelling the paper and the ink.

Mark Oehlert's response to Tom Crawford on the Kindle reminded me of a New Yorker article from last month, in which Anthony Grafton concludes that paper books are an anthropological record of their times and of the people reading it. The article is mostly about Google Book Search, the massive project to "build a comprehensive index of all the books in the world." Which I think sounds like a good thing.

But Grafton points out some of the more subtle things that are lost when books are digitized.

FUTURE READING: Digitization and its discontents; Anthony Grafton; November 5, 2007; The New Yorker.

And yet we will still need our libraries and archives. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have written of the so-called “social life of information”—the form in which you encounter a text can have a huge impact on how you use it. Original documents reward us for taking the trouble to find them by telling us things that no image can. Duguid describes watching a fellow-historian systematically sniff two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters in an archive. By detecting the smell of vinegar—which had been sprinkled, in the eighteenth century, on letters from towns struck by cholera, in the hope of disinfecting them—he could trace the history of disease outbreaks. Historians of the book—a new and growing tribe—read books as scouts read trails. Bindings, usually custom-made in the early centuries of printing, can tell you who owned them and what level of society they belonged to. Marginal annotations, which abounded in the centuries when readers usually went through books with pen in hand, identify the often surprising messages that individuals have found as they read. Many original writers and thinkers—Martin Luther, John Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—have filled their books with notes that are indispensable to understanding their thought. Thousands of forgotten men and women have covered Bibles and prayer books, recipe collections, and political pamphlets with pointing hands, underlining, and notes that give insights into which books mattered, and why. If you want to capture how a book was packaged and what it has meant to the readers who have unwrapped it, you have to look at all the copies you can find, from original manuscripts to cheap reprints. The databases include multiple copies of some titles. But they will never provide all the copies of, say, “The Wealth of Nations” and the early responses it provoked.

Photo Credit: Books by algiamil on stock.exchng