E: Textbook design for learning

• #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.