Reinventing the Book
Books are incredible repositories for information, but terrible tools for learning.
The lie is that if you read a book, you will learn the knowledge contained in the book. This is not the case. In order to truly learn from a book, you have to apply additional learning techniques on top of the book.
What if there were a new medium for interacting with knowledge that was better than a book for relaying knowledge?
We would probably want to represent knowledge differently (see Knowledge Representation).
A History
What follows is a partial history of ideas about how to invent a better medium for learning than the book.
- Vannevar Bush's Memex from 1945 was the backdrop for Engelbart and Alan Kay.
- Douglas Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intelligence is an important backdrop to everything, but it's a bit inaccessible. Engelbart is probably a Level 6 or 7 (see The Levels of Work) and had a hard time connecting and explaining his ideas.
- Alan Kay is the bridge from Engelbart and Bush's ideas to the present ideas explored by Victor, Matuschak, and Nielsen. He pioneered the Dynabook.
- Here's Alan giving an oral history of the Dynabook. It's about 2 hours, but worth the watch. It will take you through parts of The Dream Machine as well.
- The Learning Research Group at Xeroc PARC did some work as well.
- Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay's Personal Dynamic Media - 1977
- Bret Victor is the next important figure.
- He has done research and prototyping on Explorable Explanations.
- Here's an example of an interactive essay he put together Simulation as a Practical Tool.
- To see more examples, watch his talk on Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
- Andy Matuschak has written a great summary article Why books don’t work | Andy Matuschak
- See Andy's notes on his approach to solving the problem, what he calls the Mnemonic Medium:
- Michael Nielsen has done some thinking on this:
- Andy and Michael collaborated on Quantum Country, which is a mnemonic medium "textbook" for learning the basics of Quantum Computing.
- They wrote about their learnings from this project in the paper How can we develop transformative tools for thought? by Matuschak and Nielsen
A Future
- Future of Text Book (2020) is worth looking into. Pulled together by Frode Hegland
- Future Of Text Community on Circle:
- Join and introduce myself here
- A new way of handling metadata: Visual-Meta
Examples
Road to Reality is a series of essays to build a workshop full of the tools required to create and explore simulated worlds that behave like our most advanced models of reality.