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.
Conversation
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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