Knowledge media face an awkward chasm between theories.
The old theory was naive transmissionism: "I'll convey this knowledge by telling you about it." That's effectively books' learning model.
But we know that model's wrong: learning is an active process of assimilation.
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Books (and videos and lectures) sometimes work anyway, but because the learner's doing the heavy lifting—making connections, posing & answering questions, etc
In apprenticeships and great classrooms, the new theory (constructivism) operates: teachers foster active assimilation.
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But what's the equivalent of a "book" which was composed using an effective theory of how its reader will learn? We don't know.
It's a rock and a hard place: we know the old theory's wrong; we don't know how to make media which operate under our new theories.
Exciting times.
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“Book” is super broad, so a super broad equivalent for constructivism would probably be “project”. We have a pretty strong sense of what makes for good educational project design, and we totally have the model for how people learn via projects — eg inquiry-based & “just-in-time”
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Replying to
Yes! PBL covers many of the important ideas here. Some pieces missing, e.g.:
* how should explanatory materials interact with project materials?
* how might "readers" receive timely feedback on their ideas along the way?
* how does retention fit in?
* how about social learning?
Replying to
I see those less as missing pieces and more as dimensions to be explored — no 1 right answer. Also:
* how does the kind of project interact with the kind of subject/idea?
* should projects be about many ideas at once? How many? How disparate?
* what value in repeating a project?
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Further to the idea of “no one right answer” — we’re still figuring out new ways to encode knowledge in books (to say nothing of dynamic books / interactive fiction). It’s not like we found one effective model and stopped at that. The exploration of all media continues unabated!
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