I'm leaving Substack

But unfortunately it has turned into yet another Social Media platform. When I started with Substack maybe 18 months ago, it was relatively simple to grow your newsletter just by posting and sharing a note. Today, Notes have taken over (think of it like Twitter without the Bro’s) to the extent that the work required to grow even a tiny bit means it is not worth it.

Add to that my change in circumstances, going from corporate job to solopreneur, and it means Substack just doesn’t meet my needs any longer. I want to cover different topics in the same email, use more imagery, and start building automations to surround the email. This will help me expand the reach of the newsletter which is essential for my business. I no longer want to be a slave to the algorithm on Substack.

For you as a subscriber, not much. I will continue to be writing about all things Learning but on a different platform. I have moved to Beehiiv so you will see emails arriving from [email protected] rather than the old Substack address. You may need to add this to the safe list for your email client.

It also means new subscribers don’t need to give their details to Substack to read the newsletter. I have no idea what they plan to do with the platform in the future and how they might monetise your data over there.

One benefit of the move for you is that I can now keep an archive of all my work available outside of Substack for everyone to read. https://newsletter.learn-stack.com is live now for all past editions. Everything I write will go out via email and be available on my site.

Obviously, if you prefer not to receive these emails any longer, please feel free to unsubscribe via the link at the bottom of this email.

Thank you for subscribing, and I hope to give you more value moving forward.

You can find a quick update below on my last few weeks.

April and May is conference season for a a lot of Learning professionals. Back in April I spent a day at the Learning Technologies conference in London. It’s a rite of passage for any Learning pro - for better or worse. Last year I was presenting alongside Sana. At that point I was a Sana customer. This year I had no responsibilities other than talking to many many vendors at the exhibition.

There is always a buzzword at every LT - this year, just like the last 3 years it was AI. Unsurprising - it must be the same at every conference regardless of the area of focus. This year though there was an extra one - MCP.

If you aren’t aware, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and it’s basically a "universal connector" for AI systems and other tech to communicate with each other.

In learning tech, this has the potential to be a huge win. We can potentially connect the conversations our teams are having inside their AI tool of choice, with the content, paths, skills, context, etc. sitting in the learning tech and other knowledge platforms we use. Craig Weiss has done a decent breakdown of the MCP announcements in learning if you want to drill in. Lori Niles-Hoffman did the same in brief on LinkedIn

It’s still early days, as demonstrated by a few blank faces amongst vendors when they mentioned MCP and I asked them to explain what it is and the benefits. A few were not quite prepared!

It was a great day overall, giving me time to catch up with some folks in my network face to face.

I needed some rest after that 1 day of real human interaction so took 2 weeks off in our motorhome exploring some of Western France, then it was straight back to in-person events at Offbeat Fest. I will do a write up on this event separately as it was so good with a ton of takeaways.

Once again, thanks for continuing to subscribe - if you have any feedback you can reply to this email and it will drop in my real inbox.