I think I agree that the generalizations you cited were hasty, especially as there is no formal review on those matters. I, too, find that I can get value out of books and can probably do a better job than just giving a brief summary.
Let me try to pick out the parts that I liked and see if you disagree with those:
The main part of the thesis that I found interesting was the analogy between books and lectures. In both cases, there is the potential of transmissionism as one naive way of thinking about how information gets absorbed.
It’s clearer, however, that lectures in an educational setting aren’t enough. Without problem sets, examples, and other applications, most of the “real learning” doesn’t happen. (i.e. “mathematics is not a spectator sport”) Good professors seem to recognize this and supplement their teachings accordingly.
Then, the author points out that a similar acknowledgment for books is not the norm. There is still room for improving the medium, and one example he gave was the spaced repetition enhanced online book. There is an undercurrent of “you as the reader need to put in effort to get value out of your reading”, which I agree with. It’s a different state of mind when I’m reading for insight vs reading for fun. In the first case, I might re-read passages, skip around, stop for a bit, take some notes, etc. etc. whereas in the second case, I’m probably just reading rather quickly from cover to cover.
Yes, if an instructor were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only give lectures, and not assign any problems, projects, etc., then the students will not learn the material. Similarly, if a student were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only attend lectures and not take notes, put together outlines or study guides, read the text, or do the exercises, he will not learn the material.
This seems very obvious and is almost certainly true for the overwhelming majority of, if not all, academic subjects. It’s also not new. In fact, I have never met anyone who works in education and thinks otherwise.
Then, the author points out that a similar acknowledgment for books is not the norm.
That anything similar is true for books needs to be demonstrated, not just asserted without evidence. “Books”, for one thing, is a much broader category than “lectures”, even if you limit the scope of your claim to non-fiction books.
There is still room for improving the medium
What medium? Books in general? Textbooks in particular? If the former, then I’m not really sure how to intepret it—what does it mean to improve “books”? If the latter, well… textbooks already come with supplementary material, such as media on CD or on the web, workbooks, exercises, etc. (I don’t remember the last time I encountered a textbook that you’re expected to just read as if it were a novel, and somehow learn the material that way.) Is there room for some new sort of enhancement to textbooks? Yeah, maybe. Who knows.
It seems like maybe what’s going on here is that the author of the linked post has come up with (what he considers to be) a fancy new kind of edutech, and in order to hype it up, he’s got this grandiose, sweeping thesis about how “books don’t work”, and his fancy new thing is the answer. Well, shiny modern edutech ideas are a dime a dozen. They’re mostly empty promises based on questionable theories. What makes this one different?
Yes, if an instructor were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only give lectures, and not assign any problems, projects, etc., then the students will not learn the material. Similarly, if a student were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only attend lectures and not take notes, put together outlines or study guides, read the text, or do the exercises, he will not learn the material.
I don’t disagree, but this seems indicative of preexisting damage to the students or at least a direly impoverished environment. After all, we usually don’t give babies problems, projects, etc to teach them to walk and talk, but they learn just fine. Someone invented this stuff, and plenty of people in the past have made efficient use of standardized streams of text (whether delivered visually or aurally) to improve their understanding of a thing.
If someone said CDs don’t work because you can’t hear the music by looking at them, we’d wonder whether this person knows about CD players.
Uh… what? This comment really makes very little sense. I hesitate to try and pick it apart, but literally every sentence of what you wrote there seems to individually be wrong, and also together they seem like a bunch of non sequiturs… I’ve got to be misunderstanding what you’re saying; could you try and rephrase?
I would expect healthy people who want to learn something found in a book to think of complements to the book, e.g. to take initiative to try something based on what the book says, to think through different cases than the ones discussed in the book to see how the same principles might apply, etc.
If students wouldn’t do that, something’s gone wrong that isn’t easily summarizable as a local failing of pedagogy.
You’ve switched from talking about lectures (in your earlier comment which confused me) to talking about books. Now I’m even more confused.
I’m going to go ahead and try and pick apart your earlier comment, after all, in the hopes that it will let us disentangle this confusion. Here goes…
Yes, if an instructor were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only give lectures, and not assign any problems, projects, etc., then the students will not learn the material. Similarly, if a student were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only attend lectures and not take notes, put together outlines or study guides, read the text, or do the exercises, he will not learn the material.
I don’t disagree, but this seems indicative of preexisting damage to the students or at least a direly impoverished environment.
This seems straightforwardly false, but there’s not much to dissect here without specifics of why you think this. One question does occur to me: by “this” do you refer to the first part of the bit you quoted (about the instructor), or the second (about the student), or both?
After all, we usually don’t give babies problems, projects, etc to teach them to walk and talk, but they learn just fine.
But of course we do. Parents talk to their kids, and read to them, including children’s books and alphabet books and nursery rhymes and “say ‘ma-ma’! go on… ‘ma-ma’!” and so on; and parents play with their kids, and build or buy playpens, etc., etc. What is that, but “problems” and “projects”?
Someone invented this stuff, and plenty of people in the past have made efficient use of standardized streams of text (whether delivered visually or aurally) to improve their understanding of a thing.
This is a perplexing sentence and I’m not sure how to interpret it; do you simply mean “people have been giving lectures and writing books for a long time”? If so, then of course that is true, but do you claim that “in the past” (when?), lectures didn’t come with exercises or problems or any form of practice, but nonetheless were as effective, or more effective, than modern instruction?
(And I really have no clue what “Someone invented this stuff” refers to.)
If someone said CDs don’t work because you can’t hear the music by looking at them, we’d wonder whether this person knows about CD players.
I’m having a hard time applying this analogy/metaphor to the case of lectures. In this metaphor, it seems to me, I said “if you’re handed only a CD and no player, you will not be able to hear the music on it”, and you’re saying “the inability to hear the music on a CD without having a player is a sign of pre-existing damage”. Or, something like that?
Anyway, if you find yourself motivated to explain further, please stick with the topic of lectures; it seems to me that I need to understand what you’re saying about that, before you can talk about whether the same applies to books, etc.
Lectures were literally invented as a method of text distribution, when printing was unavailable and paper expensive. I don’t mean that in the past they were more effective than integrated instruction—I mean that an academic context in which the main formal service provided was delivery of lectures did not prevent students from thinking about the content of lectures on their own.
Here’s what I meant by the CD metaphor. It seems like there’s an old practice of doing the equivalent of handing students CDs. We can now see that this practice is broken, in the sense that students, lacking CD players, don’t appreciate the music or other audio. One plausible interpretation is that the practice of handing students CDs has always been a poor fit for the audio formats compatible with students’ ears. But another plausible interpretation—the one I’m proposing—is that the students used to have CD players, and no longer do.
Likewise, it’s not as though learning didn’t go on in highly lecture-centric (or book-centric) contexts. So if students aren’t learning from lectures (and books), we might expect that some interpretive faculty they used to have is now absent. This seems to me like it ought to be a higher priority to get to students (or stop taking away from them), than the content of almost any particular lecture course.
Parents talk to their kids, and read to them, including children’s books and alphabet books and nursery rhymes and “say ‘ma-ma’! go on… ‘ma-ma’!” and so on; and parents play with their kids, and build or buy playpens, etc., etc. What is that, but “problems” and “projects”?
It’s play. In extremely rare cases like A Mathematician’s Lament, people do propose that teachers play with their students about the subject matter, but mostly problem sets and projects are not assigned by the same methods by which language is introduced to children. If the OP were proposing that professors play with their students, I’d be more sympathetic, and have brought up the babies as a confirming rather than disconfirming example!
It seems like maybe what’s going on here is that the author of the linked post has come up with (what he considers to be) a fancy new kind of edutech, and in order to hype it up, he’s got this grandiose, sweeping thesis about how “books don’t work”, and his fancy new thing is the answer. Well, shiny modern edutech ideas are a dime a dozen. They’re mostly empty promises based on questionable theories. What makes this one different?
I don’t want make any general statements. But in this particular case the spaced repetition algorithm is mentioned by the author. And there is pretty solid evidence that it works. Many studies show that it raises long-term retention.
I think I agree that the generalizations you cited were hasty, especially as there is no formal review on those matters. I, too, find that I can get value out of books and can probably do a better job than just giving a brief summary.
Let me try to pick out the parts that I liked and see if you disagree with those:
The main part of the thesis that I found interesting was the analogy between books and lectures. In both cases, there is the potential of transmissionism as one naive way of thinking about how information gets absorbed.
It’s clearer, however, that lectures in an educational setting aren’t enough. Without problem sets, examples, and other applications, most of the “real learning” doesn’t happen. (i.e. “mathematics is not a spectator sport”) Good professors seem to recognize this and supplement their teachings accordingly.
Then, the author points out that a similar acknowledgment for books is not the norm. There is still room for improving the medium, and one example he gave was the spaced repetition enhanced online book. There is an undercurrent of “you as the reader need to put in effort to get value out of your reading”, which I agree with. It’s a different state of mind when I’m reading for insight vs reading for fun. In the first case, I might re-read passages, skip around, stop for a bit, take some notes, etc. etc. whereas in the second case, I’m probably just reading rather quickly from cover to cover.
Yes, if an instructor were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only give lectures, and not assign any problems, projects, etc., then the students will not learn the material. Similarly, if a student were, for some strange reason, to decide that he will only attend lectures and not take notes, put together outlines or study guides, read the text, or do the exercises, he will not learn the material.
This seems very obvious and is almost certainly true for the overwhelming majority of, if not all, academic subjects. It’s also not new. In fact, I have never met anyone who works in education and thinks otherwise.
That anything similar is true for books needs to be demonstrated, not just asserted without evidence. “Books”, for one thing, is a much broader category than “lectures”, even if you limit the scope of your claim to non-fiction books.
What medium? Books in general? Textbooks in particular? If the former, then I’m not really sure how to intepret it—what does it mean to improve “books”? If the latter, well… textbooks already come with supplementary material, such as media on CD or on the web, workbooks, exercises, etc. (I don’t remember the last time I encountered a textbook that you’re expected to just read as if it were a novel, and somehow learn the material that way.) Is there room for some new sort of enhancement to textbooks? Yeah, maybe. Who knows.
It seems like maybe what’s going on here is that the author of the linked post has come up with (what he considers to be) a fancy new kind of edutech, and in order to hype it up, he’s got this grandiose, sweeping thesis about how “books don’t work”, and his fancy new thing is the answer. Well, shiny modern edutech ideas are a dime a dozen. They’re mostly empty promises based on questionable theories. What makes this one different?
I don’t disagree, but this seems indicative of preexisting damage to the students or at least a direly impoverished environment. After all, we usually don’t give babies problems, projects, etc to teach them to walk and talk, but they learn just fine. Someone invented this stuff, and plenty of people in the past have made efficient use of standardized streams of text (whether delivered visually or aurally) to improve their understanding of a thing.
If someone said CDs don’t work because you can’t hear the music by looking at them, we’d wonder whether this person knows about CD players.
We have adaptations for learning to walk and talk, though: the process for learning evolutionarily-novel content could be different.
Uh… what? This comment really makes very little sense. I hesitate to try and pick it apart, but literally every sentence of what you wrote there seems to individually be wrong, and also together they seem like a bunch of non sequiturs… I’ve got to be misunderstanding what you’re saying; could you try and rephrase?
I would expect healthy people who want to learn something found in a book to think of complements to the book, e.g. to take initiative to try something based on what the book says, to think through different cases than the ones discussed in the book to see how the same principles might apply, etc.
If students wouldn’t do that, something’s gone wrong that isn’t easily summarizable as a local failing of pedagogy.
You’ve switched from talking about lectures (in your earlier comment which confused me) to talking about books. Now I’m even more confused.
I’m going to go ahead and try and pick apart your earlier comment, after all, in the hopes that it will let us disentangle this confusion. Here goes…
This seems straightforwardly false, but there’s not much to dissect here without specifics of why you think this. One question does occur to me: by “this” do you refer to the first part of the bit you quoted (about the instructor), or the second (about the student), or both?
But of course we do. Parents talk to their kids, and read to them, including children’s books and alphabet books and nursery rhymes and “say ‘ma-ma’! go on… ‘ma-ma’!” and so on; and parents play with their kids, and build or buy playpens, etc., etc. What is that, but “problems” and “projects”?
This is a perplexing sentence and I’m not sure how to interpret it; do you simply mean “people have been giving lectures and writing books for a long time”? If so, then of course that is true, but do you claim that “in the past” (when?), lectures didn’t come with exercises or problems or any form of practice, but nonetheless were as effective, or more effective, than modern instruction?
(And I really have no clue what “Someone invented this stuff” refers to.)
I’m having a hard time applying this analogy/metaphor to the case of lectures. In this metaphor, it seems to me, I said “if you’re handed only a CD and no player, you will not be able to hear the music on it”, and you’re saying “the inability to hear the music on a CD without having a player is a sign of pre-existing damage”. Or, something like that?
Anyway, if you find yourself motivated to explain further, please stick with the topic of lectures; it seems to me that I need to understand what you’re saying about that, before you can talk about whether the same applies to books, etc.
Lectures were literally invented as a method of text distribution, when printing was unavailable and paper expensive. I don’t mean that in the past they were more effective than integrated instruction—I mean that an academic context in which the main formal service provided was delivery of lectures did not prevent students from thinking about the content of lectures on their own.
Here’s what I meant by the CD metaphor. It seems like there’s an old practice of doing the equivalent of handing students CDs. We can now see that this practice is broken, in the sense that students, lacking CD players, don’t appreciate the music or other audio. One plausible interpretation is that the practice of handing students CDs has always been a poor fit for the audio formats compatible with students’ ears. But another plausible interpretation—the one I’m proposing—is that the students used to have CD players, and no longer do.
Likewise, it’s not as though learning didn’t go on in highly lecture-centric (or book-centric) contexts. So if students aren’t learning from lectures (and books), we might expect that some interpretive faculty they used to have is now absent. This seems to me like it ought to be a higher priority to get to students (or stop taking away from them), than the content of almost any particular lecture course.
It’s play. In extremely rare cases like A Mathematician’s Lament, people do propose that teachers play with their students about the subject matter, but mostly problem sets and projects are not assigned by the same methods by which language is introduced to children. If the OP were proposing that professors play with their students, I’d be more sympathetic, and have brought up the babies as a confirming rather than disconfirming example!
I don’t want make any general statements. But in this particular case the spaced repetition algorithm is mentioned by the author. And there is pretty solid evidence that it works. Many studies show that it raises long-term retention.