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> Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations... the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have

by sfifs 9y ago

> Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations... the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library. This is exactly the kind if situation where digital hi-res screens and zoomable vector diagrams as presentation formats are immensely superior to paper print. You're a collector and hence holding on to print editions because of nostalgia. We're however hobbled from evolving high quality modern documentation by being tired to "printability" like pdfs and Tex

jacobolus 9y ago
The interface for reading on screens sucks. The hardware (e.g. iPads) is getting there but the software is still miserable. Hard to browse, bookmark, annotate (either in place or separately), cross-reference, cut and paste (as with scissors). Doesn’t help that most books are not available in a carefully crafted digital-native format. The people I know with the most effective research habits, even ones who get most of their material online, still make great use of note cards, white boards, marked-up printouts, and the like. For now paper is definitely preferable for reading anything but pulp novels, newspapers, and ongoing discussions. But I can imagine that changing if some people put in work on the software side in the next couple decades. Biggest pain point at the moment is probably authoring tools. If every basic textbook was filled with interactive (programmable?) diagrams, computer simulations, extra related media, links between text and video lectures, a wider variety of practice problems at varying difficulty with full listings of hints and solutions, in depth technical annotations and bibliographic links to primary sources (viewable in place) for every chapter, etc., learning from textbooks could be made much more reader-centered, with books becoming less a serial prose format and more like a tree/graph. But all that stuff takes massive amounts of work, and would require some kind of collective funding by a group laser-focused on the real-world effectiveness and quality of the output, rather than political bullshit or rent-seeking, as most current curriculum designers and textbook publishers are. Teams of volunteers like Wikipedia aren’t really able (at least that I’ve seen) to make a novice-friendly but still accurate explanation or a coherent narrative for a whole large subject.
- huhy 9y ago
  So you want qualified expert content producers working on producing top quality learning and educational material? Well our great market tells us this is only possible at Pixar or HBO or Weta in the service of fantasy and nothing else. Khan Academy and Wikipedia type models are what is left to serve everything else.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Additional data point: affiliate-compensated reviews of high value consumer items, e.g. http://wirecutter.com http://wirecutter.com (now owned by NY Times) and http://dpreview.com http://dpreview.com (digital cameras). These are not cross-media, but require expensive research and good summaries.
- rsfern 9y ago
  Why should it take decades? I think you're conflating the UI issues with pedagogy and teaching-oriented publishing. GPs point seems to be that we already have the tools we need to start webifying the academic literature. There's no technical reason that we're stuck reading two-column PDF documents with no internal or external links. Your other points I think are important, but really more related to teaching materials and textbooks than journal articles. Projects like nanohub are doing interesting work in this area imo.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Usable implementations shouldn’t take decades if people put the research and development work in, though the basic UI research probably needs at least 8–10 years of some top-class people thinking hard about it. I’m just speculating that it might happen within a few decades that that work gets done, but alternatively it might not and paper might remain superior.

by sfifs 9y ago

jacobolus 9y ago

The interface for reading on screens sucks. The hardware (e.g. iPads) is getting there but the software is still miserable. Hard to browse, bookmark, annotate (either in place or separately), cross-reference, cut and paste (as with scissors). Doesn’t help that most books are not available in a carefully crafted digital-native format. The people I know with the most effective research habits, even ones who get most of their material online, still make great use of note cards, white boards, marked-up printouts, and the like. For now paper is definitely preferable for reading anything but pulp novels, newspapers, and ongoing discussions. But I can imagine that changing if some people put in work on the software side in the next couple decades. Biggest pain point at the moment is probably authoring tools. If every basic textbook was filled with interactive (programmable?) diagrams, computer simulations, extra related media, links between text and video lectures, a wider variety of practice problems at varying difficulty with full listings of hints and solutions, in depth technical annotations and bibliographic links to primary sources (viewable in place) for every chapter, etc., learning from textbooks could be made much more reader-centered, with books becoming less a serial prose format and more like a tree/graph. But all that stuff takes massive amounts of work, and would require some kind of collective funding by a group laser-focused on the real-world effectiveness and quality of the output, rather than political bullshit or rent-seeking, as most current curriculum designers and textbook publishers are. Teams of volunteers like Wikipedia aren’t really able (at least that I’ve seen) to make a novice-friendly but still accurate explanation or a coherent narrative for a whole large subject.

huhy 9y ago
So you want qualified expert content producers working on producing top quality learning and educational material? Well our great market tells us this is only possible at Pixar or HBO or Weta in the service of fantasy and nothing else. Khan Academy and Wikipedia type models are what is left to serve everything else.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Additional data point: affiliate-compensated reviews of high value consumer items, e.g. http://wirecutter.com http://wirecutter.com (now owned by NY Times) and http://dpreview.com http://dpreview.com (digital cameras). These are not cross-media, but require expensive research and good summaries.
rsfern 9y ago
Why should it take decades? I think you're conflating the UI issues with pedagogy and teaching-oriented publishing. GPs point seems to be that we already have the tools we need to start webifying the academic literature. There's no technical reason that we're stuck reading two-column PDF documents with no internal or external links. Your other points I think are important, but really more related to teaching materials and textbooks than journal articles. Projects like nanohub are doing interesting work in this area imo.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Usable implementations shouldn’t take decades if people put the research and development work in, though the basic UI research probably needs at least 8–10 years of some top-class people thinking hard about it. I’m just speculating that it might happen within a few decades that that work gets done, but alternatively it might not and paper might remain superior.