Designing in My Sleep

...No matter how long I've been doing this, I'm still struck by how much hard work it takes to create a solid learning design. ..... My most recent design process was no different in that I found myself struggling to choose the right amount of content from the reams of ideas that I had dumped into the design. I really wanted to pare it back to what would be "just enough" -- to "leave space for the design (and the learners!) to breathe". But invariably, by 11pm each night I ended up again with too much What for the Who, When and Why, and I went to bed feeling really frustrated... But then I'd wake up early the next morning -- 5 am sometimes -- with my mind bubbling with new ideas on how to make it all work: add this, cut this, reinforce that concept in a new way, transmogrify that long text box into a Wordle, drop that "perfect" activity that I've been saving for months since it's irrelevant to the learners' needs, excise that "writing of discovery" in favour of the "writing of explanation", "murder my darlings", bend the design, fold this task in half, knead that example and streeeeetch that conversation! Make this task more Uccellanian to serve 2, no 3 purposes....

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