Choosing books

I always have trouble selecting books. There is never one book that does it all, and I am reluctant to ask students to purchase a ton of books knowing we will only read a chapter here and there. For awhile, I was convinced that I would ask the group to purchase three books: Tufte's Beautiful Evidence, Medina's Brain Rules, and Reynolds' Presentation Zen. I like all three of these books. But, the problem was that I really needed a book that would get at design principles for instructional messages. That left me with two obvious options: Mayer's Multimedia Learning and Lohr's Creating Graphics for Learning and Performance (there are others too, such as Williams' The Non-Designers Design Book...a good one, for sure, but fairly narrow for the context). And, for a let's-get-inspired-by-just-looking-at-the-pages perspective, neither book is very good. Although I like Lohr's book (except the images are a bit too cartoony for my liking), I went with Mayer. It makes sense for a graduate level course because it presents theory and empirical evidence in support of principles we can apply to the design of instructional messages. It is an easy read, although he is SO repetitive (the book could use with a thorough edit...cut it in half). That's OK, I will instruct the group to keep this in mind as they read the book and use their best judgment for scanning, skimming and moving on. Mayer is an important person in our field, and it is absolutely appropriate for them to get to know his work.

After settling on Mayer, I REALLY wanted a visually inspiring book, one that not only presented good content on the instructional message design topic (even in the author didn't use that term), but one that actually put the content into practice with a great book design. Tufte's books all meet this criteria. Presentation Zen does as well (but, the content is thin, and Reynolds has most of the content on his blog). I had been keeping an eye on Nancy Duarte's book -- slide:ology -- for awhile. It was getting great press (Garr Reynolds was really talking it up on his blog, for example), but it wasn't due to release until September. Suddenly, the date changed to early August...and I knew I had to check it out for the course. I'm glad I held off on making the book decision until seeing her book, it was exactly what I was looking for to compliment Mayer. She's great!

I am also happy that I have selected a few readings from Tufte and Medina, and one from Reynolds. I think the group will enjoy the reading. (And, Tufte should do a good job at ruffling some feathers...he's always good at that.)