The Learning Scientist Blog TEN YEAR Anniversary!
Cover Image: The Learning Scientists together in Portland, OR, October 2023
By Megan Sumeracki
February 5, 2026 marks the 10 year anniversary of the Learning Scientists Blog. (A blogaversary, if you will!!) In late January, 2016, Jude Weinstein (who went by Yana at that time) and I started what we thought would be a fun little project to try to help students learn more. We started our Twitter account and started building learningscientists.org, and by February 5, 2016 we published our very first blog post: Communication breakdown between science and practice in education.
In the last 10 years, we have worked to make the science of learning accessible to anyone and everyone who wants to or needs to learn. We developed downloadable materials, started a podcast, wrote books, and started getting invited to run professional development workshops all around the world. Our website had millions of unique visitors from all over 99 countries (and I’m fairly certain square space just won’t record more than 99 unique countries, since there’s an “other” category). By early 2019, we were a team of four. We’ve working together on this project and whole heartedly supported one another, both personally and professionally. We laugh together, we cry together, we complain about Reviewer 2 together. We lift each other up.
Reading that first blog post again was a little bit like reading my own graduate school admission essay after becoming a faculty member. I think there are a lot of good ideas in there, but I can see how much I’ve grown and how much my approach has changed, for the better. A lot of our original mission is still true, and that so much has changed and grown. We started out wanting to help students learn, and that is still our core mission. We also realized very quickly that we need to communicate with (not to, with) teachers and other educators to really have an impact. The interactions we’ve had with teachers have had amazing impacts on our work.
So, today, on our ten year “blogaversary”, I want to say thank you to all of you. Whether you’ve been reading our work since that very first blog post or just signed on; whether you’ve been using our free resources heavily in your teaching and learning, listening to our podcast, reading our books, or simply reading our emails occasionally—we thank you. We couldn’t have built this amazing community without you, and I know I’ve learned as much from all of you, if not more, than I could ever hope someone might learn from me.
Interested in reading more about how we got started? Check out this post from our first birthday (January 2017).
