Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of education is plain text

simplystatistics.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 349 posts

Re: The future of education is plain text

#131

Post by Sreyanth »

The future of education might be plain text, but not for the reasons mentioned in the article. Also, I think something can be the future of XYZ if it solves the problems XYZ face currently.

The current content for education is good, but is definitely bandwidth-heavy and is tough to maintain. But dropping to plain text will force us let go a few things that otherwise make learning more effective.

I think HTML (or a WYSIWYG style editors - that seem like plain text, but can be powerful with images, videos, animations when required) also does the same thing like plain text,

- it is always compatible (I give it to you that it takes effort to run hifi stuff on browsers, but still better than plain text).

- is easy to mix and match

- is easy to maintain (thanks to many editors)

- is light weight (not compared with plain text of course)

- is forward compatible (not possible when all browsers decided to not support HTML in its current state).

I appreciate the thought behind bringing this up. I think writing something in plain English, which can then be turned into some super cool learning material that runs everywhere would be awesome. It helps both in solving the issues mentioned in the article at the same time keeps learning effective.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#132

Post by [deleted] »

com2kid wrote: post #103
badminton1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode has some symbols. But there is limited ability to arrange them freely. e.g: representing a continued fraction in plain text seems a very futile exercise.

The "Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics" standard[0] can do this just fine. :) a_0+1/(a_1+1/(a_2+1/(⋱+(1/a_n ) ))) Past that into an editor that accepts the spec, and you'll get something like http://imgur.com/a/7hBwv Disclaimer: I work @Microsoft improving on some math features, and we are the main implementors of the spec. Which makes me sad, since it is an open spec and it is really powerful! [0] ht…

[deleted]

Re: The future of education is plain text

#133

Post by Pulcinella »

geebee wrote: post #90

May I share a related vignette? I have a kid in middle school, and he has a tablet. These things are often pushed as "educational". Pop quiz: you walk by, and you need to determine, within a couple of seconds, if what he's doing is actually educational. Here's what you see: lots of graphics, whizzing around the screen -or- black alphanumeric characters against a white background Now, you don't actually know , but gen…

Perhaps educational materials should be designed to benefit the student rather than somebody looking over the student's shoulder...

Re: The future of education is plain text

#134

Post by k2enemy »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #57

Which 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.

I'm in the same boat. I've tried dozens and my leading contenders are...

1) vimwiki configured to use .gpg extensions, then use the gnupg vim plugin. Great wiki syntax, easy links, transparent encryption, optional markdown formatting. Downside is no embedded images.

2) Typora with encfs. Great visual interface and the developer has promised some new features (such as a file browser) to make it more useful as a note-taking app.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#135

Post by dagenleg »

heartbreak wrote: post #102
geebee wrote: post #90

May I share a related vignette? I have a kid in middle school, and he has a tablet. These things are often pushed as "educational". Pop quiz: you walk by, and you need to determine, within a couple of seconds, if what he's doing is actually educational. Here's what you see: lots of graphics, whizzing around the screen -or- black alphanumeric characters against a white background Now, you don't actually know , but gen…

Or the student could be a visual learner.

But there's a reason scientific books aren't very rich in illustrations.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#136

Post by com2kid »

Pxtl wrote: post #113
com2kid wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics" standard[0] can do this just fine. :) a_0+1/(a_1+1/(a_2+1/(⋱+(1/a_n ) ))) Past that into an editor that accepts the spec, and you'll get something like http://imgur.com/a/7hBwv Disclaimer: I work @Microsoft improving on some math features, and we are the main implementors of the spec. Which makes me sad, since it is an open spec and it is really powerful! [0] ht…

I'm curious about that one - was the space necessary?

I just tried it out in Word, apparently it isn't. :)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#137

Post by confounded »

Sreyanth wrote: post #131

The future of education might be plain text, but not for the reasons mentioned in the article. Also, I think something can be the future of XYZ if it solves the problems XYZ face currently. The current content for education is good, but is definitely bandwidth-heavy and is tough to maintain. But dropping to plain text will force us let go a few things that otherwise make learning more effective. I think HTML (or a WY…

Disagree. HTML is a fine output format, but one that can always be generated from plain text. HTML is a poor storage format for the editable 'raw' content itself.

Images, videos, and animations can all be done in markdown -- they're just references to files.

Even something as small as the the MathJax CDN getting retired means that I have old HTML notes which are now 'dead'. If I don't have the markdown/rmarkdown source for them, realistically, they're just not coming back.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#138

Post by fredsted »

doublerebel wrote: post #79
CharlesW wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain text: so when Optik.io melts down immediately from an HN "hug of death" one can use high-availability services instead.

There's nothing to melt down, there is no (public) website there. I can barely get a conversation started on this topic without HN's cynicism, as you demonstrate. But as evidenced by this and other articles, as everyone is getting fed up with the current state of data, people are coming around to the idea.

> There's nothing to melt down, there is no (public) website there

You might want to be a bit more clear in your communication. When someone links a URL/domain, you'd expect that there's something there.

I mean, why not put up a splash page on your domain, telling something about your product (what is it? Something with plain text? A Markdown-based static site generator, maybe? Who knows.), or maybe a form to subscribe to a mailing list.

Did you think people would put that domain in their bookmarks and re-visit it themselves?

Re: The future of education is plain text

#139

Post by wruza »

Spooky23 wrote: post #116

The future of is the solution that best meets the job. For exchange and processing data (data != information), UTF-8 text with contextual formatting like Markdown, CSV, etc is nice as it is generally tool agnostic. But for conveying information (information != data), plaintext sucks. That's why Markdown is a copout -- the formatting still matters... and humans don't perceive markup coding as well as the rendered resu…

Since Unicode already contains directions, smileys, combining marks, why not simply add VGA color plane and few [un]-bold/italic/big/sub/sup markers and forget about these shitty .docs, .htmls, etc? We already have a complex format, why not encapsulate at least simple formatting characters into it? These can be zero-width for rendering on systems that do not support colors.

For those who want to point me at html, html cannot be rendered without a browser and created without a messing with tags, but unicode 𝐜𝐚𝐧.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#140

Post by k__ »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - Twiki - Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML - JIRA - Raw HTML - Markdown (several flavors) With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the co…

AsciiDoc seems the way to go then.

It's like DocBook with Markdown like syntax

Post reply on HN