2018 saw me once again complete my target of reading one book per month, a total of twelve books during the course of the year.
My books this year were:
- The fourth education revolution, Anthony Seldon
- Make it stick, Peter C Brown, Henry L Roediger and Mark A McDaniel
- SUMO (Shut up and move on), Paul McGee
- The upside of rationality, Dan Ariely
- Open, David Price
- The gift of failure, Jessica Lahey
- Change, Richard Gerver
- The Cyber Effect, Mary Aiken
- The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau
- The marshmallow effect, Walker Mischel
- Mindfulness, Gill Hasson
- The Art of balance, David J Bookbinder
- Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Kathryn Schulz
- It’s complicated, Danah Boyd
I am also currently part way through Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst by Robert Sapolsky. Am hoping to have it finished before the year is out but acknowledge that is quite a heavy text which thus far has included plenty of technical discussion of neurobiology. As such I am not sure if I will manage to complete it this year.
Looking back the book list is a bit of a mix covering various topics including neuroscience, educational technology, the impact of social media and the internet, and mindfulness.
On reflection I think my favourite books from this years reading have to be Make It Stick, Being Wrong and the Cyber Effect. Make It Stick covers so much about how learning takes place and how a lot of what goes on in the traditional classroom doesn’t align with what research tells us about how we learn. There are lots of suggestions as to how we might redesign learning or at least experiment in classrooms with different approaches more in line with research findings as to successful learning. The Cyber Effect presents an interesting exploration of cyberpsychology, exploring how our behaviours online and offline differ. From the point of view of an educator this has interesting implications for the students within our schools where they are spending more and more time online however personally I believe it has even wider implications for society at large given changing normative behaviour. And finally, Being Wrong was a book I found very interesting in its coverage of the difficult topic of “being wrong”. That we as human beings can progress through life in such assuredness as to our correctness, when we are so often wrong, through differing perspective, through inaccurate recollection or memory and through a variety of other errors. That we can, upon realising our error, change our stance and in the future forget that any such change in position ever occurred. We are almost hardwired for ease over accuracy.
I am already in the process of building my initial booklist for 2019 with nine books on the list, albeit one of the books is something I have read before.
- Hamlets Blackberry, William Power
- Declutter your life, Gill Hasson
- Twitter Power 2.0, Joel Comm and Anthony Robbins
- Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman
- Dare to Lead, Brené Brown
- The power of meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith
- The chimp paradox, Steve Peters
- Mistakes were made (but not by me), Carol Tavris
- 10 mindframes for visible learning, John Hattie and Klaus Zierer
Here’s to 2019 being another successful and enjoyable year of reading. As always I am open to suggestions and recommendations so please feel free to share.
Technology and Learning