Ask an Expert – Carri Walters

 

Interviewer: What is your name?  

Marble: Carri Walters 

Interviewer: What is your position at Six Red Marbles? 

Marble: Associate Director, Science 

Interviewer: What does that position entail? 

Marble: I help clients who make print and digital education materials clearly express their product development goals. And then I assemble and manage teams of people who actively develop those products. 

Interviewer: How did you become a part of Six Red Marbles? 

Marble: My degrees are in education. Earlier in my career I meandered through informal education programming in the museum world, formal teaching in higher ed, and nonprofit administration. About seventeen years ago, I checked the right combination of boxes to try out a role as an editor for an educational publishing vendor. It was a great fit for me. Then about eight years ago, I made my way to SRM with the support of Cary Drake and Joyce Spangler, both of whom I had worked with previously at other companies.  

Interviewer: What is the best part of your job? 

Marble: I get to do a lot of what comes naturally to me. I’m wired to see the order in which ideas fall together to build knowledge and skill. That’s what education is about, and it also governs how projects are executed well. Many of the materials I work on for a living are products I would make as a hobby if I were independently wealthy. 

Interviewer: What do you wish people knew about your work at Six Red Marbles? 

Marble: Every project is a bespoke craft. We offer scalability and hew to workflows that have been refined through vast experience. That’s the systematic, competitive part of our business—our science. But weaving together specific content, process, and learner elements to create instances of learning—that is an art. Thoughtful, creative, and highly qualified people contribute to this endeavor one detail at a time. And it does take a bit of thinking time to orchestrate the process with care. This is equally true for print and digital product development. 

Interviewer: What is a trend you see happening in the education space that you’re excited about?  

Marble: There are a couple. For one, it’s heartening to see a growing number of mission-driven, nonprofit agencies achieve the capacity to become publishers of high-quality courses, texts, and curriculum materials. And secondly, while EdTech integration isn’t a new trend, uses of technology for personalized learning and game-based learning have continued to get better and better. I’m looking forward to working on virtual- and augmented-reality projects in the future as devices that support these types of learner experiences evolve. 

Interviewer: What is one interesting fact about yourself that you’d like to share? 

Marble: I sometimes joke that I have a “ghost MBA.” I taught writing, ethics, and critical thinking courses in an MBA program for a number of years. During that time, I graded hundreds of grad students’ papers on topics of their choosing, which were invariably business and management topics. That was a long marination in a content domain that my resume doesn’t immediately reveal. It turned out to be knowledge I rely on every day.