📓 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.