📣 New essay distilling one strand of some ongoing work✨
I argue that books lack a functioning model of how people learn—instead, they're (accidentally, invisibly) built around a model that's plainly false. Plus some early models for what to do about it.
Conversation
Replying to
very insightful! adding a rather ancient aspect: most religions have manifestos in book form (eg bible), but they still have to hammer the contents home with readings and discussions every single week during service. clearly, the book form (and service?) don’t work on their own.
1
2
9
Some truth to this re Bible studies and sermons. Though other aspects are more important. For Christians, generally it’s 1) God coming to you in Word (and Sacrament) 2) you praising God and doing it within 3) a community of believers. Learning probably comes in 4th place.
1
I think there may be a more fundamental issue: many readers aren't really interested in becoming competent in a field they're reading about. They may not know what competence is available, what it would mean to have it, or why they should value it. They're just curious.
1
20
Replying to
“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.” — Joe Hill, en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joe_Hill
Maybe authors and professors should sing their books and lectures. 🎶😉
3
2
24
2
1
10
Show replies
Replying to
Strongly agree. In fact, this realization was the very reason why we started collecting learning resources across media types & formats. Once we're done tagging those with LRMI tags, exploration and learning effectiveness should see huge improvement.
Replying to
Maybe books should embrace repetition. Present many variations of the same idea in many contexts and with many examples, Make sure that idea will resurface periodically in the book. Write it as if there is a chance that whole paragrphs and pages are lost.
1
Replying to
This made me think of how choosing the right data structure for doing something in code is the difference between elegant code and a hacked together mess that still works, but not as well as it could
2