📚 node [[e textbook design for learning]]
📓 garden/houshuang/content/E--Textbook-design-for-learning.md by @houshuang
  • #public
  • Thinking about textbooks,
    • the blog post about why textbooks are good for learning
    • and all the lists of really good textbooks
      • The Best Textbook on Every Subject
  • Imagine taking a transcript of [[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]].
    • How long would it be, how long would the entire series be if it was published as a book?
    • How much editing would you need to turn it into readable prose?
    • What would it look like to turn it into, not a nonfiction book, but a textbook?
    • Where is the best research on effective textbooks for learning for efficient adult learners?
      • There are often many graphical elements and pedagogical elements
        • definitions of terms.
        • Pull outs with anecdotes, or more details.
          • And I guess this can be seen in one way, as kind of a zoomable interface where you can go more or less in depth in one way.
          • And you can also skip explanations if you already know the concept.
        • There can be
          • visualizations,
          • graphs,
          • knowledge graphs,
          • pre-reading questions
          • post reading questions,
          • learning objectives
          • comprehension questions.
        • Is there a good course, whether as a textbook or interactive on how to write a textbook?
        • Are there good examples of interactive textbooks?
          • They don't have to be intelligent, but just web native with very responsive layouts
        • Are there good frameworks, or tools to author very nice looking web textbooks with all these design elements?
        • There are probably LaTeX templates or DocBook or whatever, for programming books, but the end result is a PDF.
          • That is very difficult to read on a small screen.
          • Is there a good HTML template.
            • Something like Tufte style with margin annotations. Table of Contents.
  • It would be a really interesting candidate for experimenting with Andy Matuschak integrated spaced repetition.
  • It could also grow wiki like with
    • annotations and
    • links to interesting discussions,
      • from reading groups or blog posts, etc.
    • I wonder what kind of visuals, or explanations or even interactive elements, could be useful.
      • And to what extent they would be actually useful for the understanding or disruptive.
    • I often felt that textbooks from schools in Norway today are far too busy with elements graphical elements and pictures and so on.
      • But perhaps it is working well.
    • How do you test the effectiveness of a textbook?
      • What do you measure, at the end, retention?
    • It's interesting how we have never ever looked at textbooks during my PhD studies.
      • Yet it is such a fundamental aspect of learning.
    • Open Learning Initiative at CMU might be an interesting source.
    • OpenStax are still just very traditional textbooks, written in a different way.
    • Wikibooks/Wikiversity.
    • Brett Victor's stuff.
    • I started thinking of this because I was thinking about the ebooks about running a company in Norway, that I just purchased and worked through.
      • They are helpful because they are extremely well structured,
        • which probably also makes them easy to update every year.
      • Of course there are no pedagogical features there.
      • But I am so much happier with these textbooks than with a series of short videos,
        • like all of these Teachable courses and so on. Or a MOOC, or a webinar.
        • But why do so many people prefer videos?
          • Even for something as visual as drawing or painting. I think I would prefer an interactive textbook, which has many of the ideas or theories, written out.
          • And then, shorter or longer video clips illustrating specific visual aspects.
            • Is there any platform that works like that, or that even helps you build it yourself.
            • It would be interesting to talk to the LearnAwesome people who have been building these skills trees.
  • I wonder if John Vervaeke could be convinced to release his material under a Creative Commons license to enable this kind of remixing.
    • What would it look like to make a skills tree of [[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]]
      • chopping the videos into small pieces, and interlinking them.
        • That's an interesting corollary to Roam, to have deep video integration with transcripts,
          • that you can then block indent, and you get automatically block-style back references,
            • so that you could quickly see all of the segments from many videos talking about for example Shamans,
              • just like the tools that let you edit video or audio just by editing the transcript
  • What would it look like to add more textbook-like features to podcasts, even though you would be listening to the actual podcast.
    • Think of the podcast as a class,
      • you would do pre work.
        • Maybe some short readings, maybe, reflecting on certain questions,
    • then you would engage with the actual podcast.
    • And then you will have some follow up questions, and maybe some Spaced Repetition questions that keep coming back to you.
      • Over the next few weeks or months.
    • Are there ways in which we can enable people to create massive amounts of high quality textbook material from the raw material that we already have.
      • And would it make big differences in people's ability to learn and retain.
  • What would popular nonfiction books look like if they were rewritten as textbooks?
    • Could you have a textbook overlay?
      • I guess in a way you have that for with reading guides for popular/non-popular fiction, for example.
        • Of course there are probably superficial surface features of textbooks and much more profound details about how content is organized
        • Are there competing pedagogical theories about textbook construction?
        • Behaviourist, mastery learning, others? multimedia learning theory and cognitive load theories?
  • Is Distill a kind of academic journal that has had textbook functionality applied to it?
    • I just saw a tweet saying they wanted the podcast where someone is live-sketching ideas, but I've never really been so impressed by sketch notes and live sketching
      • was pretty amazing the first time I saw it
        • but afterwards it seems to focus far too much attention on things that are not relevant to the argument.
      • However, having something like a Compendium facilitator.
        • Live mapping out an argument while a discussion or a debate or a complex argument is being presented could be really interesting
        • building out a concept map as you're talking or going back and doing it over the recording.
          • Why don't we have good videos of this, I should talk to Jack Park about it.
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