By contrast, consider the Aro meditation course: aromeditation.org (👋). 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.
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They leave time for concepts to sink in before elaborating later. They spiral back, refreshing earlier ideas every few weeks. They lean on the reader’s growing trust. This series of emails feels like a much more profound evolution relative to books than MOOCs relative to courses.
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's fascinating experiment over his last 6-week walk struck a similar chord. Each day of the walk, Craig sent one photo from that day's segment to subscribers. The vibe yawns over weeks, a totally different feel from a coffee table book compiling a journey in retrospect!
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Games have really figured this out.
e.g. MOOGs like WoW choreograph players’ incentives and environments to invoke an ever-expanding horizon over many months. The design elements aren’t about raw hours: they’re more about how the feel of play sessions change, week to week.
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and I have been excited about how the mnemonic medium creates a context where readers continue interacting with an author's work after the initial reading session. It's a mass medium with a weakly authored time component.
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In an upcoming mnemonic essay, we exert more authorial control over time, adding questions which evolve over weeks of review sessions. But there's much, much more to explore there!
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Can you all think of any other good examples of a mass medium with a lengthy, strongly authored time dimension?
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I keep trying to read and reread the thread to see if comic books and TV episodes (before the golden age of tv stuff) should count. I think they should.
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Though comic issues these days are written with collection in mind, and the tendency in TV/movies has been to give control of time to the viewer. One way of seeing this is a result of internet culture which gave us a great deal of control over when we consume information.
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I remember a certain educational organization even argued videos were more effective as learning tools because the student had ultimate control over time...
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Not that I’m a devotee or KA pedagogy, but how does this rough heuristic strike you?:
expert personally curating time for student >
student self-curating time >
live lecturer bulk-curating time
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I was just teasing (and making a point about internet culture) but to take this seriously: I roughly agree with the heuristic but wouldn't want to reduce the social experience of attending a live lecture to an informational transaction.
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Also I think probably there are advantages to a lecturer spacing out learning over the course of a semester rather than a student watching a lot at once. You do get kids in school who will say they "learned all of algebra" the week before a final and it means they crammed videos.
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