Books and lectures don't work • Hacker News Board

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#61

Post by fires10 » Sat, May 11, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #38

Almost all the books and blog posts can be made at least 10 times shorter without loss in educational value. People just include too much of irrelevant stuff when writing. Schools should teach brevity and search engines should encourage it instead of requiring people to inflate their writings as much as they can. For many books you can just find summaries online, read/watch them and hardly loose anything compared to…

I agree. I had to critique fellow classmates writing in a business writing course once. I am older and had been in the business world for a while. My one often used critique was brevity. I didn't have all day for then to get to the point.

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#62

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

kalium-xyz wrote: post #18

lefstathiou wrote: post #5

I used to believe this too until I was taught how to read a book, a skill that unfortunately is taken for granted and hasn’t made its way into curriculums. Reading “thinking fast thinking slow” should not take 8-9 hours... it could easily take 50 (after all, it represents many years and thousands of hours of work by the preeminent thinker on the subject). Scholars have spent a lifetime studying the Inferno. I am typi…

A good book that also touches on this subject is: "moonwalking with einstein the art and science of remembering everything". It also covers the subject of priming and why its important. People used to memorize entire books by studying them for years. In a time before printing presses were a thing it was considered normal to spent long long hours learning the contents of a book by heart.

This practice continues in Islam. There's even a word for someone who's memorised the entire Quran: 'Hafiz'/'Hafiza'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafiz_(Quran)

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#63

Post by qwerty456127 » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

fires10 wrote: post #61

qwerty456127 wrote: post #38

Almost all the books and blog posts can be made at least 10 times shorter without loss in educational value. People just include too much of irrelevant stuff when writing. Schools should teach brevity and search engines should encourage it instead of requiring people to inflate their writings as much as they can. For many books you can just find summaries online, read/watch them and hardly loose anything compared to…

I agree. I had to critique fellow classmates writing in a business writing course once. I am older and had been in the business world for a while. My one often used critique was brevity. I didn't have all day for then to get to the point.

Yet every school/college assignment includes a minimum length requirement, web copywriters are paid for length and a 1000-page book is easier to market than a concise brochure.

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#64

Post by aasasd » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

kalium-xyz wrote: post #21

brownknight wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the kid is listening to white noise to block out the sound of the coffee shop? Or the audiobook?

As long as its not vocal it should not interfere with his ability to read and process information of said reading.

Apparently there are studies where performing tasks was compared: in silence vs with music. Routine tasks were performed the same, but creative tasks suffered with music (i.e. a non-trivial solution to a problem was overlooked).

Dunno, however, if reading qualifies as such a task. Namely, the question is whether the same regions of the brain are engaged (and would be busy listening to music).

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#65

Post by ivansavz » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

This is a very well thought-out analysis of the textbook and lecture modalities for learning.

I don't understand the virulent negative responses from many of the comments here—perhaps it's just a reaction about the clickbaity title? Take it easy y'all.

The thesis of the article is much more nuanced that the title would suggest. A more appropriate title would be "Analysis of the relative benefits of textbooks and lectures as medium of instruction, and ways we can improve on them." Specifically, the author talks about the assumptions (in caricature) of how learning works in lectures:

   "The lecturer says words describing an idea;
    the class hears the words scribbles in a notebook;
    then the class understands the idea."

and similar assumptions in textbooks

   "The author describes an idea in words on the page;
    the reader reads the words;
    then the reader understands the idea.
    When the reader reaches the last page,
    they’ve finished the book."

The above two "learning APIs" are in use widely today with various levels of "support" for learners provided by the lecturer/author and the learning setting. In the end though, the hard work of understanding falls on the learner. It's on the learner to absorb, incorporate, relate, and learn to apply the knowledge.

The author points out that rather than thinking about medium of conveying information (lecture, video, text), we should think about "learning API design": what tools, learning modalities, structured activities, projects, and workflows can we provide for learners to foster the cognitive processes needed for learning to happen?

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#66

Post by ivansavz » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

RE this quote:

> Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.

This reminds me of the intro chapter in Derek Alexander Muller's PhD Thesis, which is a very useful summary of a lot of ed-tech research, particularly about video: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/super/theses/PhD(Muller).pdf#... (see Chapter 1 "Framing the study")

Some useful quotes from Muller's thesis:

- [prior work is...] body of research that has failed to establish answers to fundamental questions about learning with multimedia.

- [...] technology developers have focused on the ground-breaking abilities of the new technology to promote interest in its application to the educational domain. Thomas Edison’s appraisal of the motion picture is an oft-cited example of the excitement that accompanies innovation. Promoting his invention, he proclaims “that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks,” (Edison 1922 as cited in Cuban 1986, p.9).

- When Clark (1983) concluded that no particular media had a unique impact on learning and that research seeking such an impact should be abandoned, he believed the point to be uncontentious and well-supported by the evidence. “Media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition,” he wrote (p.445). The paper kicked off debate in the research community because, stated explicitly or not, the notion that media inherently affects learning had been a presupposition of virtually all previous studies in educational technology [...] he proposed the ‘replaceability’ challenge: “to find evidence, in a well designed study, of any instance of a medium or media attributes that are not replaceable by a different set of media and attributes to achieve similar learning results for any given student and learning task.” The challenge was meant to demonstrate the equivalence of different platforms and highlight the methodological differences that actually impact on learning.

- “It is time to shift the focus of our research from media as conveyors of methods to media and methods as facilitators of knowledge-construction and meaning-making on the part of learners” (Kozma 1994a, p.13).

- The equivalence principle in multimedia states that the relevant cognitive processes inspired by different formats of multimedia can be made indistinguishable, by choosing appropriate methods. [...] Consider a student reading a book with words and pictures about Newtonian mechanics. Then, consider the same student watching a movie about Newtonian mechanics. The two experiences appear very different. One involves written text and static images while the other involves spoken text and dynamic images. If we found that following these two instructional treatments, our hypothetical student performed equally well on the same test, what could we conclude about the two different forms of multimedia? We might, like Lewis (1995), suspect that a movie may not be an appropriate medium for teaching Newtonian mechanics, or perhaps that the movie was deficient in content or presentation. The alternative is to conclude that both media encouraged similar cognitive processes in the student.

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#67

Post by hevi_jos » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:16 PM UTC

The most profound thing that ever happened to me reading books was "spaced repetition".

Spaced repetition is the model about how your memory works the author claims do not exist. With Anky I know exactly how much I retain of everything and how much I forget, with graphs and all.

So now , every time I acquire something new I must make an allocation in the future for rehearsal with Anki.

Another very useful thing is fast reading. Your mind can read extremely fast provided one detail: You use always the same layout standard format, then your subconscious can read multiple lines at a eye glance(after lots of training of course).

Every single book has a different format, and most of the time is not suitable for fast reading, with things like long lines that make it impossible to make sense of multiple lines for your mind.

So in order to make them useful I have to parse them and display on a standard way.

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#68

Post by bosie » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:19 PM UTC

chpmrc wrote: post #51

tw1010 wrote: post #30

Try only learning things with books for 4 months and then tell me it doesn't work. I tend to notice that learning from books get a lot harder if I allow my brain to be flooded with whatever chemicals are released when I watch youtube or game of thrones. If I avoid those for a while, and avoid sugar etc, and if I work out every day and get enough nutrients etc, then my ability to learn via books is no trouble at all.…

Do you feel like this is ultimately related to the medium or to the content as well? Intuitively new media won't have as much (good quality) content as books, so that might be the main issue here.

> Intuitively new media won't have as much (good quality) content as books

care to share that intuition? this doesn't seem obvious to me unfortunately

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#69

Post by adamnemecek » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:24 PM UTC

vannucci wrote: post #56

adamnemecek wrote: post #14

For both the main problem is that there comes a point where you lose track of what's happening. I think that the main problem with lectures is that each feels very simple during the intro and very complicated towards the end. Generally there's some steps that you just missed. It's hard to pause the lecture and go back. Each additional minute of being lost then feels like a waste of time. The audience is generally at…

This is an excellent example of what the author wrote as "taxing but skillful metacognition" and it's great! You hit the nail on the head that it's really easy to lose track of what's happening and where you are.

Idk if I would say taxing. Like I find myself much more engaged than with "read pages 30-60 by next Tuesday".

Re: Books and lectures don't work

#70

Post by ivansavz » Sat, May 11, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #38

Almost all the books and blog posts can be made at least 10 times shorter without loss in educational value. People just include too much of irrelevant stuff when writing. Schools should teach brevity and search engines should encourage it instead of requiring people to inflate their writings as much as they can. For many books you can just find summaries online, read/watch them and hardly loose anything compared to…

So true! I think the problem is particularly bad in high-school and first-year undergraduate textbooks, which are "padded" with useless extras, non-sense boxes, and lots of blah blah to the point of being literally 5x thicker than they need to be. Let's face it, nobody is going to read a 1000+ page PHYS 101 textbook.

Textbooks for graduate level courses are usually much better, as are textbooks outside the North American educational system, and best of all are old math textbooks from like 100+ years ago...