“How do you learn?” When the question was posed to me last week,
it was the first time in ten years of work in educational
publishing and design that someone wanted to know how I learn.
As in, me personally, not how learning occurs generally. It’s a
daunting question; and one I’m grateful to be asked. I figure,
if experience as a patient improves a doctor’s bedside care, and
if self-analysis is a prerequisite for practicing good
psychotherapy, then I as an educator should benefit from
thinking deeply about my own learning style. My firm creates
multimedia instructional materials for clients in academia
(primarily graduate level) and industry (corporate training and
professional certification). Most of my career has been in the
arena of adult learning, but I spent a short time early on in
K-12 publishing, and one striking difference between the two is
how central pedagogy is to the delivery of instruction at the
primary school level—versus how peripheral it is to teaching in
college and beyond. The person at t