E-Book: audio read-through

When working with students or friends to polish something they’ve written, one of my favorite exercises is reading the piece aloud to them. It helps them hear where they lose the thread of their thoughts, in a way that silently re-reading the piece over and over to themselves might not make obvious. I like that the process slows down my reading, helping me make sure to catch typos I might have glazed over reading to myself. And I like that we both get to hear the words, hear the rhythm and tempo of the piece, which matters for the reader’s experience as much as the quality and clarity of the content.

Having decided to resist adding more examples and topics into my Intro to Agile e-book, for fear of making it too dense for an introductory resource, I started a few weeks ago to go through each chapter one last time using the read-aloud approach. Meanwhile, my podcast channel, Holding Unfolding on SoundCloud, had been mostly sat dormant for the past few years. I had done the producing and transcribing of the first ten episodes alone, taken on a gig where I had to do more interviewing and transcribing, burned myself out on that kind of labor, paused to reflect, and not come up with a way to design a second season that I felt excited to commit to on top of my other work. But recording and posting work I was already doing, the read-alouds of each chapter, didn’t feel as daunting as transcribing audio. I realized making posting podcast “episodes” as I went through each chapter was a potentially high impact (for accessibility), low demand (very little new work) mini project.

The risk was that, since I would be capturing and sharing a stage in my drafting process, that I would be putting moments of failure and revision that could have stayed private and ephemeral into a more enduring, more public space.

Then, I found myself listening to Ethan Nichtern talk about his new book on confidence while weighing my options. As often happens, the nudge I need finds me when I open my attention to it. Explaining his book’s premise, he described confidence as a practice, not of trusting that we can avoid messing up but of trusting that we and those we’re in relationship with can figure out what to do to navigate through the moments we mess up… and their aftermath. It reminded me of Sherry Turkle’s suggestion that people increasingly are avoiding live, improvised conversations because the ability to revise a text or other chat message before sending it allows them more space to manage their anxiety about saying the wrong thing and not being able to navigate whatever follows. If this is true, accepting opportunities to practice and model confidence is particularly important right now. At least for those of us who value authentic relationships and the ability to share and adapt to an ever-surprising world.

This thought didn’t make me feel less nervous, but it helped me to decide to share anyway. Chapters 1 – 7 are up at https://soundcloud.com/sde_dispatches/sets/self-directed-education-and-the-agile-learning-approach-an-introduction and as episodes of the Holding Unfolding podcast on Spotify and iTunes. Here’s to learning in public and practicing trust through whatever follows!