Overachiever: 18 books for school!

This one also did not go exactly as planned; some classes led to multiple books, and some didn't really have any.

Sometimes those multiple books were because I was looking up one thing and found some other things with it. 

Also, a few of these are not so much whole books as reports or some kind of shorter work, but they were still significant.

If I also read several extra academic papers, I did not track those.

Honestly, many of them were not that great. 

One huge exception was Adult Learning Basics by William Rothwell. I just finished it less than a week ago and I know I am going to want to read it again. 

Usually, though, once we had read the section that was required for the class, we really did have the most important part of the book already.

That might mean I should just trust the curriculum, but there is also something to be said for looking at the early thoughts as part of the foundation.

There were two where this was most notable:

Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980.

The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen, 2011.

Metaphors had a revised afterword referring to later works. For some of the areas where I disagreed, I think they got there too, eventually. Those ideas that seem to be my own could easily have been influenced by people who were influenced by them.

Simon Baron-Cohen's (Sacha's cousin) book also goes by Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness. A lot of it focuses on "theory of mind", especially as relating to neurodivergence. 

It does seem pretty questionable, especially considering how relatively recent it is. It still gets referenced, and now those references make more sense. 

In Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning, these books could go under Foundational Knowledge.

Notably, I have not always fount that the most enjoyable area, but I acknowledge its importance.

Looking over the entire list, you will see many more titles referencing design. That is an area that I knew less about (I might be stronger on the instruction side).

The absolute best one that they mentioned was The Non-Designer’s Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice (Fourth Edition) by Robin Williams. (I am not aware of any relation to the other Robin Williams.)

From her opening anecdote about never noticing all the Joshua trees around her until one book introduced her, it is an important reminder that we don't notice everything. We are surrounded by design -- some great, some not so much -- and we can notice it by just thinking a little about it. If you need to design a poster or choose advertising options for your business or understand the impact that what seems like background noise can have on you, it's worth reading.

That is not true of all of these. Playing with Type is probably only good if you are going to do the exercises, and that won't appeal to everyone. 

I don't think Playing with Type had been in the assigned reading, but came up when I was looking for other things. (That is also why I remembered that the Helvetica documentary existed and watched it.)

That is probably also true of Color Theory for Dummies, but it was fantastic, and referenced a lot of work that is hard to find now.  

It may not be something you are interested in, but the Handbook of Usability Testing was surprisingly readable.  

There are two others I want to mention...

The Forum Guide to Data Ethics had really interesting examples that I would not thought of as matters of ethics, and yet it does make sense to think of them that way.  

A lot of the motivation behind the extra reading was to think better.

With The Belmont Report, a report with guidelines for ethical research with human subjects, it was more clear that ethics was going to come up. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report 

It was part of a section on ethics in research, but did not have to read the whole thing.

I am really glad I did. While some of the stories were familiar, there was more that I didn't know, and that is important. 

Nothing I am doing right now requires that level of knowledge, but there is an entire world around me that is sometimes really not right. Having a historical background on that may be very frustrating at times, but I still want to know. 

Which is why I keep reading. 

Books, roughly in the order in which they were read: 

Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980

The Forum Guide to Data Ethics, National Forum on Education Statistics, February 2010.

Learning Analytics in Higher Education, Educause Center for Analysis and Research, 2016.

Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice by Anne Meyer, David Rose, and David Gordon, 2014.

The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, IDEO, 2015.

Design Thinking Meets ADDIE, Glynn, Kathie and Tolsma, Debra, Association for Talent Development, 8/23/2014.

The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen, 2011.

Visual Design Solutions: Principles and Creative Inspirations for Learning Professionals by Connie Malamed, 2015.

Helvetica (film) (2007)

Playing With Type: 50 graphic experiments for exploring typographic design principles by Lara McCormick (2013)

Color Theory for Dummies by Eric Hilbit (2022)

Color - Messages & Meanings: A Pantone Color Resource by Leatrice Eiseman (2006)

The New Graphic Design School: The Principles and Practice of Graphic Design by David Dabner, Sandra Stewart, and Abbie Vickress (2006)

The Non-Designer’s Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice (Fourth Edition) by Robin Williams (2011)

Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests (Second Edition) by Jeffrey Rubin and Dana Chisnell (2008)

The Belmont Report by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1978)

Ensuring Adult and Non-Traditional Learners’ Success with Technology, Design, and Structure by Charity L B Jennings (2021) 

Adult Learning Basics by William Rothwell