gistfile1.txt

- Thinking about textbooks, 
    - the [blog post](https://teacherhead.com/2020/04/20/the-next-edu-revolution-textbooks/) 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.