Design For How People Learn, Second Edition

Hey Folks — the second edition of Design For How People Learn is now out! It came out right before the end of the year. I’ll be updating the website this week.

Design for How People Learn, 2nd Edition

What’s different?

The first edition content is still mostly there. I expanded on a few points about motivation and skill development, but the main change is the addition of three new chapters:

Design for Habits
Social and Informal Learning
Designing Evaluation

Both the social/informal material and the evaluation material are things that probably should have been in the first edition and weren’t (fixed that!), and the habit chapter reflects a change in my own practice — I’ve been finding it useful to call out habit formation separately when doing analysis and design.

Where can I get it?

All the usual places, in all the formats:

If I already have the first edition, do I need to get this one too?

Not necessarily (don’t tell my publisher I said that), but if you’d like to get around buying a whole new copy, here are some other resources:

The habit chapter is an expanded version of this article: https://www.td.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2015/07/Habitual-by-Design

The social/informal chapter is an overview of that topic, but there are lots of smart people writing about social/informal learning who specialize in that area. A few include:

http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/762/nuts-and-bolts-social-media-for-learning

http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1417/nuts-and-bolts-how-and-why-to-show-your-work

http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1037/is-content-curation-in-your-skill-set-it-should-be

I collected a few other favorite resources here:

https://usablelearning.com/2015/08/30/social-games-community-development/

The last chapter is evaluation. It’s an overview as well, but the biggest two points are:

– User testing (see Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think book)

– Qualitative measure (see Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method)

I go over some of it in this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/usablelearning/guerrilla-evaluation-for-learning

But what if I want the shiny new version?

I, of course, support that 🙂 Maybe you could pass on your first edition copy to somebody who could benefit, and get yourself a second edition? Just a suggestion.

Sincere thanks to all the readers of the first edition! If I’m reading the royalty statements right (no guarantee), it looks like we are right around 25K copies sold, which is fantastic and amazing and gratifying. Thank you.