Free business opportunity: make productivity software tutorials exciting
The typical screencast is so slow and boring. Software wasn’t made for passive viewers
What would the Twitch for productivity apps look like?
I would love more active learning - lot's of video courses for Roam, but people are struggling with figuring out how to write good notes. What would an active learning situation looked like where you got deliberate practice by a coach - peer or expert feedback, scaffolding?
Imagine having as an assignment: "Summarize this article", "Which evergreen notes would you extract", "How would you connect these ideas". Of course will always be artificial, but would lead to great discussions and leveling up.
This could be very hands-on (feedback from expert), socially distributed (scaffolded peer-feedback), asynchronous (worked examples, first try yourself then see example of good and bad note), and using AI/NLP to give you automated feedback.
It‘s gonna be a shared Roam for each cohort and a forum to discuss. Collecting the exercise syllabus right now.
But Shhhhhh 🤫 Gotta work on my papers first
Yes. But I concluded that the underlying ideas are too nascent, and that I want to develop them much more before spending time spreading them.
May run workshops/classes in the meantime, but the point will be to help me understand, not to teach.
To put it another way: I’ll want to work on spreading a given computer-supported thinking idea once I feel it's clearly enabled important work on the margin. Before then, feels too navel-gaze-y / “lifehacker”-y. Better to focus on honing and testing the ideas themselves.
Thanks for responding. I think lower-hanging fruit would be teaching people about writing good SRS cards - I've gotten a lot of inspiration from your tweets, and I feel like here you might have some decent understanding (even though still nascent).
Yes, I’m likely to spend a fair amount of time on that in the next year or so, beginning with authors. It’s both in my critical path, and, happily, somewhat better understood. Will likely begin with workshops for mnemonic medium authors.