I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the research indicates that digital media generally underperform good old-fashioned print books in terms of learning outcomes.
They're certainly more enjoyable and easier to breeze through, which is a large factor behind their popularity. But I suspect that that might also be why they're less good for learning. Cognitive load is an important factor in forming strong memories of things you're studying, and optimal levels of cognitive load are inherently uncomfortable.
When I first learned to code, google had yet to be founded and we had no internet. I had to go to the library and buy books that were much too hard for me and bang my head against the crt monitor until I got things to work.
Now I have access to YouTube tutorials, hacker news, reddit forums, personalized instruction via AI... and I still feel like sitting down with a book, a pen and a notebook or a disconnected computer with a compiler is the way I learn best.
Problem is, it doesn't feel efficient. At my age I have too many pressures to learn as efficiently as possible but not necessarily as deeply as possible. And doing both might well be impossible.
It's possible, too, that a distinction needs to be made between "thoroughly learning" and "familiarizing". Or something like that? I'm not sure we have good words for this in English.
But yeah, sometimes I just need a quick overview of something, and it's perfectly fine (maybe even good) if I forget 90% of the details. I feel like this actually describes a lot of learning later in one's tech career. It's hard to predict what knowledge is worth retaining in a vacuum. Fumbling with it at work, though, is a great signal.
For fundamental skills, though? I'm kind of surprised how little "instinct" for programming undergraduates and recent graduates that I mentor have nowadays. I'm part of the last generation to go through CS programs at a time when programming assignments were often done on pencil and paper. For some classes the development tools we used were only available in a computer lab, and a decent proportion of students didn't even own their own computers. It was decidedly Not Fun, but those of us who went through it seem to have an easier time mentally "compiling and running" code as they read it.
> I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the research indicates that digital media generally under perform good old-fashioned print books in terms of learning outcomes.
I bet a lot of that has to do with the fact that you cant open a new tab in a book to watch youtube or browse the web. You're stuck with whatever book you decided to open.
Yeah, but I grew up in a rural county in Virginia where when we first moved there, the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement of the old courthouse --- some sort of book, even if on a screen should be way better than no book.
How do e-ink e-book readers fare? I do pretty well reading every evening on my Kindle Paperwhite, and have a fair quantity of notes on my Kindle Scribe, as well as using it for reference for technical subjects.
Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently it's now an Android tablet?
I would guess that ebooks are fine. It's been a long time since I looked into this, but as I recall the important distinction the research found was more like, "Multimedia purely for the sake of multimedia seems to be verschilmmbessern, because it tends to inhibit the kinds of deep cognitive processing that lead to effective encoding."
"Screens = bad" seems to be, as far as I can tell, the kind of unhelfpul massive oversimplification that always happens when science gets filtered through the rumor mill. Because the truth is too nuanced to make for a fun anecdote you can tweet or share in light social conversation.
Project Gutenberg and the matching audiobook effort at Librivox are two of the best things on the internet (and I say that as a person who struggled to get corrections accepted by PG, but fortunately, Michael S. Hart, the founder intervened).
>Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently it's now an Android tablet?
It was a pretty huge failure. They couldn't produce a laptop as cheap as they initially wanted, power infrastructure to recharge them was just not there, and most importantly, the prime belief of "just give everyone a computer and education will magically improve" of technologists has not born out at all.
The vast majority of "technology" that got injected into classrooms has had zero impact. Your average teacher is not given the time, material, money, or experience to leverage the technology in a way that multiplies their ability to educate.
My mother is a renowned teacher in the state, since about the late 80s, and lived through both the proliferation of technology in education in general, and specifically the "MLTI" program that gave every single Maine middle school student a personal iBook laptop to use. In the 80s, she learned how to program BASIC in school. In the 90s, she used the nascent internet, before Google, to research my sister's medical condition to discover treatments and support and resources despite literal poverty and living 500 miles from the nearest hospital that even had familiarity with the problem. In the 2000s, she digitized her gradebook and started to keep in touch with parents through regular email, and learned how to use digital tools to build tests and homework assignments. During the 2010s, she had an entire corpus of digital test systems that could autogenerate completely new and distinct tests from a single click. Over COVID, she attempted to teach herself OBS to improve the production quality of her remote lessons. Despite her empirical experience with tech in education, despite her outright buy-in of new techniques to improve her teaching, despite her willingness to learn new methods, none of it really improved her ability to teach a body of students a lesson.
The vast majority of teachers in all the schools in northern Maine had less aptitude with tech than she did and barely used any of the tech, and NONE of their lessons were less useful for it. The best use of "tech" I experienced during education was ONE teacher using a shared notebook application to digitize their entire lesson into digital notes that were automatically distributed to the class in a nice way that could be referenced, and that did not educate students better than a Xerox'd handout.
Tech is simply not a force multiplier in education. It's almost entirely a farce in fact. Khan academy has probably helped a few people improve their understanding on a few topics, but it's been two decades since Ivy League colleges first offered massively open online classes, and they have not moved any needle on education, as this very article shows.
The reality is that motivated people who want to learn haven't been hurting for information access since the proliferation of public libraries. Even in my shithole, dead end rural town, we had a Carnegie library that could borrow a book on any topic from most other libraries across the country. Any book that existed could be yours within a week or so. By the 90s, digital encyclopedias were in vogue and also pretty good.
The primary difficulty in teaching children anything is motivation. You can't really teach a child that doesn't want to learn. Kids in the US want to learn less than they previously did. Part of this is that education is no longer seen as an easy way to money, with those kids instead thinking they'll just become fortnite streamers or influencers or grifters. The large cohort of children of evangelical and fundamentalist families have never had it easier to deny things taught to children either, as we are seeing an outright anti-intellectualism we haven't seen since the scopes-monkey trial. Kids see their parents diss education. Kids don't think education is important.
I just want to say that Khan Academy can't be compared to major universities releasing some of their content in a spotty way. Khan Academy provides a complete pedagogical treatment for elementary math.
No, no, no. We can't be in 2024 post COVID and wondering why we can't just say "Oh look, a laptop and world class pedagogical videos, go ahead." Because every other educator, administrator, parent, and entrepreneur has tried this.
We all know that Khan Academy is top class material, but it's not even close to enough.
i mean, that would be excellent, but that's not what children will use the internet for when unsupervised and immature. there's nothing wrong with accessing educational texts or using computers as classroom/teaching aids.
kids under a certain age should not have an internet-connected dopamine dispenser in their pocket as it is incredibly detrimental to their development.
Maybe set up a society where intellectual effort and achievement is rewarded and teachers get paid well enough to make being knowledgeable seem a laudable thing?
I think we are observing a shift of tectonic proportions in the opposite direction that is picking up steam each year, at least from the US perspective: flat earth movement, vaccine skepticism, climate change denial, “you don’t need college” meme, anti-intellectualism of the sort of “your educated opinion is no better than my pulled out of the ass opinion”, defunding of public education, calls to eliminate Department of Education… I could probably name more, but this seems like enough.
And this before we get into structural things that seem to be designed to thwart the goals of advancing knowledge economy: soaring costs of higher education, making college loans non dischargeable in bankruptcy, schools unable to eject disruptive students that are at the same time burdened with security preparedness caused by constant active shooter threat.
Ironically, arguably part of the problem was the greater availability of college --- back when only a few folks could go to college, it had a marked influence on lifetime earnings.
https://www.khanacademy.org/
or spent time watching:
https://ocw.mit.edu/
or used their screens to read and experiment with:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
or
https://www.motionmountain.net/
or even:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
Or at a younger level:
https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/products