Introduction To The Series

Almost everyone who has spent time inside a school, a university, a training course, or a learning app has had the same quiet thought, and most of us never say it out loud.

The thought is that the thing being delivered is not quite the thing we needed. A child who is struggling at school is not usually struggling because nobody told them the facts. A teacher who goes home tired is not usually tired because the syllabus was too short. A grown adult who cannot seem to grow into the next stage of their working life is rarely stuck because no one ever explained what the next stage looks like. The information is there. The courses are there. The apps are there, more of them every year, brighter and more confident each year. And yet the people inside all of it keep saying the same thing, in slightly different words, which is that what they are being given does not quite match what they are trying to do.

I have spent the last ten years trying to work out why this gap keeps showing up. Not just by reading about it, although the reading mattered, and not just by building things, although the building mattered too. I have been trying to understand why so many serious people, with serious money and serious good intentions, keep producing education that looks impressive on the outside and feels a little hollow once you are inside it. The answers I have slowly arrived at have come from many different places. From learning theory that is sometimes more than a hundred years old and still sharper than most of what gets published this year. From watching learning platforms get built and sold and rolled out, and seeing what actually happened to the people they were meant to help. From sitting in on the conversations that happen in companies before the marketing department gets involved. From paying attention to the gap between what good research already knows, what the rules require, and what actually ends up in front of a learner.

What I have come to believe is that the gap is not an accident. It is the natural result of treating learning as a content problem rather than a whole-person problem. When you treat learning as a content problem, you end up measuring the things that are easy to count, and the things that are easy to count are only a small part of what learning really is. When you treat learning as a whole-person problem, the way you design changes, the way you measure changes, the way you manage the system changes, and in the end the technology has to change too. This series is my attempt to walk through that shift one idea at a time. I am going to explain seventy-six different ideas in short pieces. Some are about how people think. Some are about how teachers teach. Some are about how machines and rules work. Some are about how things go wrong. I am going to try to show how they connect to each other and to the everyday experience of trying to learn something hard.

I am writing this on LinkedIn rather than in a book for a simple reason. Books mostly get read by people who already care about the subject. LinkedIn sometimes gets read by people who are busy with their own work and stop for a moment because something caught their eye. That second reader is the one I most want to reach. The ideas in this series do not belong to researchers or policy makers or software engineers. They belong to anyone who has ever tried to learn something difficult, or tried to help someone else learn something difficult. I have written each post so that it works on its own, in three minutes, for somebody who has never heard of the theory inside it. If you read one piece and it makes sense to you, that is enough. If you read several and they begin to fit together, that is the bigger picture I have been quietly building over a decade of work.

A few honest notes about what to expect. The posts will not be inspirational. There are already plenty of inspirational posts about learning on this platform, and I have nothing to add to them. The posts will not pretend that every question has a clean answer, because most of the interesting questions in education really do not. Some of the posts will be hard on the industry I work in, including on tools I have helped build, because telling the truth about where we are means naming the places where the current ways are failing. Some will be hard on educational habits that have been kept for generations, because not everything old is wise. What I hope the posts will be, taken together, is a fair description of a field that matters enormously and is more confused than its public face suggests.

If you are a teacher reading this, I hope the series gives you words for things you have always sensed and have struggled to defend in meetings. If you are a leader making decisions about learning technology, I hope it gives you a clearer map of what those choices really involve, underneath the sales pitch. If you are a student, or a parent, I hope it helps you ask the kind of questions that might otherwise never come up, about systems you are quietly inside of. And if you are one of the people building the next generation of these tools, I hope the series is useful for thinking about what you are building, and for whom, and why. The thing we are all working on matters more than the way we currently talk about it, and it deserves a slower, more patient conversation than the one the industry usually has.