Party poppers at the ready!
New year, new you? Here are some recommendations to help you get 2023 off to the best possible start.
Happy slightly belated 2023 to those of you who abide by the Gregorian calendar.
More importantly, Absolutely Textbook has turned 1.
🎉🎉🎉
In place of a trolley laden with mixed bowls of crisps (a classic mix of salt and vinegar Hula Hoops, paprika Walkers Max, and Quavers), plastic cups, cheap warm wine and sparkling water, here’s a reading list.
But don’t worry, like the crisp-bowl this list is full of flavour and spice. In fact, it’s kind of eclectic. But if you’re interested in education, textbooks, and publishing in general, I think you’ll get something out of each recommendation.
Books
You’ve Been Played by Adrian Hon
Read for: digital product design ideation, user-centred design, and digital business models.
Adrian Hon is the co-founder of Zombies, Run!, the best-selling fitness game, and has been involved in the designing, writing and running of many other games. You’ve Been Played is a wide-ranging analysis of the promise and perils of gamification, largely – and perhaps surprisingly, given Hon’s background – coming down against its proliferation.
Hon dives into gamification in education, of course, which makes for an interesting read. But the real insight in this book is the chapter in which Hon describes the thought process behind the product design for Zombies, Run! In particular, he describes really understanding the user’s needs – the game is largely audio-based, for example, because making runners look at their screen is unhelpful at best.
Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
Read for: understanding and challenging your priors.
Julia Galef has written a concise, accessible handbook to help you understand what’s what. The premise of The Scout Mindset is that there are often two ways of thinking about problems. The first is a soldier mindset, where the priority is to defend a position no matter the cost. The second is a scout mindset, where the priority is to understand the terrain and to seek to constantly update your internal map.
Education can be a tribal space. Take your pick of the hot topics – behaviour policies, knowledge-rich versus skills-based curricula, inclusion versus streaming – and the chances are you’ll find a lot of Very Online people shouting at each other and hurling ad homonyms. Galef’s book will help you navigate these choppy waters.
Apocalypse How? by Oliver Letwin
Read for: thinking about risk.
In March 2020, Sir Oliver Letwin, MP for West Dorset, published a strange little book. Apocalypse How? outlines why people are bad at estimating the probability of low-risk, high-impact events choosing, instead, to focus on preparing for high-risk, low-impact events. To illustrate this point, he fictionalises a Carrington Event – a severe geomagnetic storm capable of knocking out the power grid and digital telecoms.
It is, of course, deeply ironic that this book was published the same month as the first national lockdown in the UK. A pandemic is precisely the kind of low-probability, high-impact event that Letwin was worried people failed to prepare for.
Why’s this relevant? There are many relatively low-probability but high-impact events that impact publishing. What if there’s a paper shortage? What if a major third-party distributor or vendor goes bust? What if there’s a change of government?
Recognising and preparing for these risks is not just good business. It would also be immensely helpful for the education policy-makers around the world who seem particularly keen on a game of brinkmanship that revolves around books landing on desks just in time for the start of term.
Podcasts
Things Fell Apart
As a colleague pointed out when I recommended this series, Jon Ronson’s got quite an annoying voice, but if you can get over that, he’s got some quite interesting things to say. Things Fell Apart is an 8-part series from the BBC tracing the origin stories of some of the current culture wars that are bitterly raging online.
The whole series is worth a listen, but if you’re just here for the books, episode 2 is where it’s at. In this episode, Ronson tracks down the woman who led to a state-wide insurrection over “dirty books” in 1974.
Echoes of this story have been playing out in the US over the past year or so, where grassroots conservative campaigners have been packing school boards and getting books banned. All cheered on by a rising Republican star with his eyes on the 2024 nomination.
This post from June, written a few months before the 2022 elections, still stands up.
And as a follow-up, listen to this episode from The Coming Storm, which draws the link between the continuing grassroots activism
Sold a Story
Sold a Story is a 6-part investigation into a publisher’s role in the Reading Wars in the US school system. Reported by Emily Hanford, it’s that rare thing – good journalism about education.
I wrote very recently about the podcast, so I won’t retread old ground here other than to say that my conclusion is maybe a good companion piece to The Scout Mindset.
However, publishers and policy makers could really do with taking one more lesson from this podcast – the importance of communication. Part of Sold a Story’s impact is the craft and thought with which it presents a fairly technical pedagogic issue and makes it accessible and engaging.
We tend to think about communicating impact through numbers and hard data, but the power of testimony and narrative shouldn’t be neglected.
Hot Money
It’s a cliche to look to over-leveraged VC-funded media companies for inspiration about what the future of publishing might be. Spotify for textbooks, anyone? Facebook (or YouTube or TikTok) for education?
The music industry was the classic comparison. The problem parallels are obvious. A publishing industry built on intellectual property, physical format sales, and rights licensing suddenly disrupted by the advent of digital disintermediation, streaming, and piracy. The solutions, less so. Increasingly smaller cuts of ad-funded revenue shared between increasing numbers of parties and a reliance on live events, merch, and scarcity to make up the shortfall (Record Store Day being the logical end point).
But what if there’s another industry with these same parallel problems, and perhaps at least one more? And what if that industry is, um, NSFW?
Hot Money is an 8-part investigation into the adult industry [he writes euphemistically, trying to anticipate various workplace spam filters] from the Financial Times. The reporters, Patricia Nilsson and Alex Barker, stay in their lane and follow the money in a surprisingly interesting investigation. If you’ve enjoyed The Missing Cryptoqueen or The Dropout, you’ll appreciate the journalist-with-the-scent-of-a-story vibes.
What’s this got to do with educational publishing, though? Two things:
Firstly, the often-overlooked mechanics and logistics of getting paid for digital. If you’re processing transactions online, the chances are you’re relying on technology that’s not your own – and accepting the risks and compromises that come with that, explicitly or implicitly.
And secondly, the impact of unknown content moderators and gatekeepers. For UK publishers selling to international markets, it’s worth really, really understanding your gatekeepers. There are more than you might expect, and they are less explicit that you might hope about their gatekeeping criteria.
Newsletters
Minding the Gap
writes about education, cognitive science and fairness. Her recent post about an infographic that has plagued literacy policy and implementation in the US for the last 20 years is a good companion piece to Sold a Story.It's also useful food for thought for those of us who see a big old block of text and say “let’s break that up with an illustration”. Poorly thought-through illustrations and infographics can do more harm than good…
Make Work Better
writes about workplace culture, research and case studies as business try different approaches to adjust to hybrid working. His posts are often pithy, interesting, and often with practical takeaways.Here’s a post from the height of Elon Musk’s period as Main Character of Twitter.
Experimental History
writes about academic research and communication. He's interested in making academic research more open and accessible, which should be of interest to publishers trying to engage with education research and turn its insights into actionable applications.This post should be of interest to anyone doing market research or interviews. How does the phrasing of a question affect the question that participants actually answer?
Shameless self-promotion
What kind of a fool publishes their best post of the year in the twilight zone of the week before Christmas?
🙋
Anyway, in case you missed it, here’s my piece about a whirlwind trip to Ethiopia and a puzzle about the sometimes-unexpected origins of curriculum content.
A favour, if I may
Writing a newsletter about textbooks is a weird passion project of mine, but I find it a good way to articulate ideas and test arguments that would otherwise be fleeting occurrences soon washed away unexplored in the daily traffic of meetings and deadlines and emails.
I really appreciate that you’ve signed up to these emails and that you’re here, still reading. Each post has stimulated interesting conversations with colleagues past and present, connections and friends. I hope they’ve given you something to think about.
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