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.
On the one hand I agree - you want teachers teaching from the right context. But on the other hand, this feels very close to the sentiment of „those who can‘t do, teach“. Do I need to take math lessons from a Nobel Prize Winner for the lesson to be legit?
My concern is similar but slightly different. Not just: "I don't understand these ideas enough" but "*no one* understands these ideas enough" (to enable transformative impact)—i.e. there is no "Nobel-level" teacher, only high school math teachers (and people fooling themselves).
It's a tempting trap to fall into. It's so much easier to spend a bit of time ideating about how this all should work and getting a bunch of likes by hopping on the productivity train than it is to spend months building up a library of ideas and using it to ship something great