A long text explaination of how a piston engine works or a short explanation and an animated GIF.
Which is better?
I would say the second one is more effective.
The future of education is plain text
51–60 of 349 posts
Re: The future of education is plain text
#52As others have mentioned, once you dig into the innards and nuances of plain text representations and formats, things can get hairy. Still, I think the author is correct in that plain text formats are certainly a better base for sharing curricula, and for knowledge production in general, than something proprietary like word docs, pdfs, etc. I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert…
PDFs are still ok though. There are many implementations of PDF parsers, many Open Source. It may not be as "universal" as plain-text, but it is definitely universal. At this point, I believe that all major operating systems ship with the ability to open PDFs for display.
PDFs seem to render poorly on ebook readers.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#53Re: The future of education is plain text
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.
Yeah, go teach a 60-year-old math teacher to use TeX.
why would someone with 40+ years of math experience have such a hard time learning a new notation?
Re: The future of education is plain text
#55What about the existing "standard", PowerPoint slides and PDFs? Although most of my notes could be plain-text, any graphs or figures need pictures. ASCII art doesn't cut it.
Are you stating that there are people that like pdfs?
pdf is my prefered format of storing information, after markdown and source code, of course. It allows me to portably crystallize visual information without resorting to images which completely wipe out textual information.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#56And the future of operating systems is the command line.
We deserve better than this reductionist thinking. Constraints can breed innovation; but they can also just constrain.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#57Which reminds me of my "biggest" crux these days: what should I replace Evernote with? Looking for a text-based solution, possibly open source, possibly encrypted, and possibly with sync.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#58Re: The future of education is plain text
#59Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.
TeX is a joke.
I mean, it's not a joke for its intended purpose; that's fine. It typesets the #$@! out of documents. But TeX is a joke for mathematical notation in particular. Put another way: the best way to understand what an arbitrary mathematical expression in LaTeX really means, is to render it as an image and read that image. TeX can be understood best as a concise way of writing a certain class of vector images, and when you are reading TeX you are reading a computer program which generates an image.
I'm not saying it can't be used for this context, of course it can, I have used it a ton and found it quite enjoyable. The fact that it's an image-based representation makes it very easy to switch from `\int_A dx~\int_B dy~f(x,y)` to `\iint_{A\times B} dx~dy~f(x,y).` However let's not mistake the fact that TeX does not know and does not want to know how you are using the `\int` and `\iint` symbols, is 100% OK with omitting those `~` characters, and has no semantic conception of what `dx` and `dy` are. If TeX were the CAS that it doesn't claim to be, as far as it's concerned that expression could be canonically refactored to `\iint d^2fxy(x,y),` since no one wrapped the `dx` and `dy` in curly braces. TeX claims to be a typesetting and layout system, and it does that well; it's not trying to be a universal mathematical notation.
The contention of the original link posted is, all of these image-based formats like PDF and lecture videos are going away. This may or may not be true, but if it is true then TeX is not going to survive the death of images, precisely because it is a programming language for a class of images.
Maybe something else will survive. The biggest player right now is the Wolfram language, of course, but that can look terribly unwieldy too.