Speculative Fiction
Reflections on speculative fiction narratives that both inspire and challenge my work in educational technology and learning design. These stories reveal how the public discusses and thinks about technology more broadly, offering valuable frameworks for imagining future learning experiences while requiring critical examination of how certain narratives shape our assumptions about innovation.
-
The Unwavering Band of Light
Early in my career as an instructional designer, I took on a project that should have felt like meaningful work. We were building a train-the-trainer program for people who would be supporting…
-
Vultures, Vibe Coding, and Who Gets to Automate Whom
Part 1 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. In Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, published in 1996, one of the earliest plot points involves a professional role that Russell…
-
What a Fictional Physicist Taught Me About Ethics in Technology
There’s a character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy I think about occasionally. His name is Sax Russell, a physicist and one of the first hundred scientists sent to colonize Mars, and…
-
Action, Information, Rest: Cycles of Design
I keep returning to a single line from Ursula K. Le Guin that has quietly shaped how I approach both learning design and my own professional development: “When action grows unprofitable, gather…
-
“Flow” in Course Design: Organic, Alternative Approaches
For most of my career I have designed courses the way I build Canvas templates, which is out of parts. My atomic design system breaks a course into atoms (colors, fonts, buttons),…
-
Modular Content in Instructional Design
This article has moved into Homegrown Learning, where the Go metaphor from This Is How You Lose the Time War now opens the book’s page on thinking in modules, in the Design…
-
How Science Fiction Can Improve EdTech & Design
I’m an unabashed science fiction nerd. My bookshelf is an embarrassment of riches: dog-eared copies of Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, Butler’s entire Xenogenesis series, and all three volumes of Kim Stanley…
-
Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory in Learning Design
As a learning experience designer and a longtime reader of Ursula K. Le Guin, I keep finding my way back to her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Le Guin is…
-
Let’s Look At This Clearly: AI Hype in Ed Tech
A note from September 2026: I wrote this in fall 2024 and have left the argument as it stood then. The critique of hype still holds, but my view of where AI…
