Cultural institutions often author experiences that stretch over longer time scales (e.g. multi-year religious coming-of-age rituals). But mass mediums rarely do. That’s an unfortunate limitation: mass mediums give authors enormous reach!
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Books have a longer time dimension, but it’s generally unauthored. Books often take months to read. But they almost never have an *authored* time dimension like that of films or plays. The days and weeks are rarely specified by the author the way minutes are by a filmmaker.
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In an expert–apprentice relationship, E can introduce an idea, then watch for a few weeks as it blooms in A, maybe guiding its growth with a few well-timed references. Then E can broach some dependent idea when it’ll be most impactful—after the first idea's had time to take root.
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Learning science often fixates on how experts can better evaluate, give feedback, and personalize. But I think a lot of value comes from the way those relationships naturally curate a time component, even if there's no personalization at all.
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If an author wants to introduce both an idea and some nuanced consequence of that idea, those points can only separated by pages in a book’s spine. Occasionally authors will write notes like “don’t read this chapter until…” but this approach seems quite limp.
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Some MOOCs begin at fixed times, with students moving together in cohorts through the syllabus. The shared timelines may deeply affect students’ experiences. But as far as I’ve seen, course designers aren’t carefully authoring how that experience unfolds over weeks and months.
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They convene a group of people, then have them do mostly-time-independent things together over some period of time. Likewise, MOOC materials often “unlock” over time, but the material doesn’t meaningfully interact with that timeline.
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It’s like an author wrote a complete book, but the publisher decided to serialize it, mailing subscribers a chapter at a time for their convenience. Sure, there’s an experience over time—yet there’s no authorial intent. This arrangement leaves much on the table.
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By contrast, consider the Aro meditation course: http://aromeditation.org (

@Meaningness). It’s a sequence of 18+ emails, one automatically sent each week after you sign up. But the emails aren’t written like MOOC materials: the passing weeks are carefully woven into each letter.2 replies 3 retweets 28 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @andy_matuschak @Meaningness
It's a shame the course doesn't seem to be available anymore.
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It’s not? I can bug report if you had trouble?
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Replying to @Meaningness @andy_matuschak
I get "connection refused" when I enter my e-mail address. I wrote them an e-mail about it before but didn't get a response.
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Replying to @the_aiju @andy_matuschak
Ah, hmm, apparently it was down for a week or so recently. May be worth trying again.
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