Agile E-Book: Update 1 (of 3)

Trying to run an independent school on sliding scale tuition through an experience of being the US epicenter of a pandemic was…really something. More trying than the initial transition were the few years that followed, where challenges and changes kept coming long after we had worn down our reserves of funding and energy. More to say from an organizational psychology perspective on the details of all that BUT this post is about an e-book.

One of my many inspired, hopeful, desperate creative bursts during the rollercoaster of that mid- late- pandemic season led me to create an online course hosted on the ALC-NYC website. The videos were not professional or pretty…I had no mentorship and no specialized tools, just a lot of determination and some experience with Coursera. The content though! It guides readers through thinking about schools, learning, human development, agile tools, and emergent systems…then brings it together in a segment about Agile Learning Centers. There are opening questions, closing questions, and a whole independent study’s worth of references.

But the online course execution — 3 years old at this point — makes me cringe (a sign I’ve learned to do it better?!) And it’s not accessible.

It also, given the past few years, needed an update to the section on technology and the addition of a section on why and how to risk entangling ourselves in creative communities, in weight-bearing relationships.

The first half of the original downloaded content, updated, is now up in e-book form as “Self-Directed Education & the Agile Approach, an Introduction.” My plan is to update and post the second half, add the chapters than need adding (sticking with the title probably means publishing my notes on “data feminism as an antidote to the problems of Agile” as at least an appendix), then reformat the references into proper endnotes and swap out the photos for drawings.

Maybe it’ll be worth designing a real cover for and publishing publishing! Maybe it’ll be good enough to have content I’d have written on a website anyway in easy-to-read e-book form. We’ll see!