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: 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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Separately, I'm curious: Have you run across work attempting to take a control theory perspective on interactive/reactive/dynamic media vis-a-vis learning? e.g. I would be very curious to read about folks' attempts to articulate what the analogy to PID might look like.
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Many of the ITS frameworks (eg ALEKS, GeometryTutor) have that bent—is that sort of what you have in mind?
(I’m very skeptical of these models, I should note!)
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Yes! The literature/examples of those I'm familiar with aren't trying to unpack (from, say, a cognitive science POV) what the equivalent of force or position is, is nor e.g., grappling with figuring out what internal structures might give rise to the equivalent of a Bode plot.
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And to be clear, I'm deeply dubious as well. My curiosity is more from the POV of the sociology of the communities and process of building of those tools.
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