stickylearning: 10 Best (Learning) Books of 2009
by Scott Smith
After my longest break away from the stickylearning blog I thought a good place to begin was by reviewing the 10 books that I got the most from during 2009. When writing blog posts I draw ideas from a pretty wide range of areas and my reading over the last year has been equally wide. If you haven’t seen or read all the books in the list, I can highly recommend all of them!
1 The Designful Company
A clear winner for my best 2009 book! Marty Neumeier’s book has had me coming back to re-read bits of it time and time again and has definitely influenced how I view design in learning. I think this should be a must read for anyone involved in learning!
2 Delivering E-Learning
Kenneth Fee’s book was a timely read for me in 2009! With a clear focus upon elearning strategy I found Kenneth’s approach towards learning design refreshing, up-to-date and it fitted well with how I see learning moving in the future.
3 a fine line
a fine line continued my reading in 2009 around design, not specifically learning design in this case. This is an easy book to read with clear explanations of Esslinger’s design approaches with clear applications for learning design.
4 The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
This book by Carmine Gallo should be added to your shelf along with recent books by Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte. Like it or not powerpoint and other slideware is used in many learning environments. This book is a must read for anyone involved in facilitating learning workshops, it is chock full of useful tips!
5 Six Pixels of Separation
Mitch Joel’s book fits the times well, increasingly we are becoming more connected through a myriad of online tools. Without a doubt this will is already influencing how people learn and will continue to effect learning environments into the future.
6 Twitter Power
I’ve included this book because it really helped me understand the potential of Twitter for my own personal learning and for learning in general. If you haven’t used Twitter, or would like to get more from it, this is a great book to read.
7 Design Thinking
Edited by Thomas Lockwood, this book brings together 23 chapters by a range of design experts focussing upon integrating innovation, customer experience and brand value (all important from a learning design perspective).
8 The Backchannel
Cliff Atkinson, also author of the presentation skills book, ‘Beyond Bullet Points’, has written about what we all see in conferences, workshops and learning environments – The Backchannel. Increasingly learners share their thoughts on workshops with others via social networking sites such as Twitter. Whilst this backchannel can provide another learning tool it also has the potential interfere with learning. Cliff’s book provides great ideas on how to accentuate the positive and minimise the less desirable aspects of the backchannel. We can’t ignore that this new channel exists so we must learn to use it to assist learning!
9 Ignore everybody
40 creative ideas bundled up together, quick to read, and it gets your mind thinking (and we all need to get our minds thinking!)
10 Pow! Right Between the eyes!
Not your average choice for a top 10 book list on a learning blog! OK, true, but, Andy Nulman’s book is really worth a read. I have his ideas in the back of my mind whenever I’m designing new learning materials and programs. Simply put, we don’t remember boring things!
(10+1)the art of the idea
And just because I couldn’t leave this book out, it expands my top 10 list just a little! A simple, visually beautiful book with 20 thought provoking observations. The book also shows the importance of the visual, each observation is accompanied by a graphic. The ideas work better with the visual (always worth remembering when designing learning materials!
In the next week I’ll add a new post that looks at the books to put on your reading list for 2010, I’ve already had three new year deliveries and expect 2010 to be a great book reading year!
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