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I'd love to see an alt site called SocraticOverflow, where people answer everyones programming questions like this :) I know a lot of the time people on stacko

I'd love to see an alt site called SocraticOverflow, where people answer everyones programming questions like this :) I know a lot of the time people on stackoverflow only have a problem because they haven't asked themselves the right question. Of course, there's still a lot where it's just a gap in knowledge that needs filling in.

charlieflowers 9y ago
that is such a brilliant idea. I'd love to see it.
deepnet 9y ago
I second, @charlieflowers endorsement below. This is a brilliant idea and it would like to see it. If the Socratic method get stuck, ask a different question. Can questions so implicitly contain the answer that one can practically make a statement with a question ?
CGamesPlay 9y ago
This is interesting. Let's think it through. For the teachers and students, it would need to be realtime. A teacher couldn't write out a string of follow-up questions in advance and hope the reader answers them in exactly the way you intend. For the observers, you need them to be engaged with the content as well. I am imaging a sort of dialog tree would be useful here, where a new reader could add an alternative answer to a given question which would then be a candidate for other teachers to add follow-up questions. How would [1] look like if it were resolved using the Socratic method? For programming in particular, building out an interface to encourage experimentation would be critical. Take for example [2], a recent question from StackOverflow. The questions I would ask to lead the student to the answer are: - What is the actual difference between iPhone and desktop for this code? - What nodes are being selected by the call to `$`? - What makes you confident that the call to `$` is even happening? - etc. The student's ability to even answer these follow-up questions will make the socratic method painful when conducted through a text-primary medium. This raises another point that teachers need to already know the solution, or at the least have much better guesses than the students (and those guesses need to be generally correct for the site to provide value). This greatly limits the number of people who would be capable of being teachers on the site. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10059594/a-simple-explanation-of-naive-bayes-classification https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10059594/a-simple-explan... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46570102/jquery-on-not-working-on-iphoneonly https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46570102/jquery-on-not-w...

charlieflowers 9y ago

that is such a brilliant idea. I'd love to see it.

deepnet 9y ago

I second, @charlieflowers endorsement below. This is a brilliant idea and it would like to see it. If the Socratic method get stuck, ask a different question. Can questions so implicitly contain the answer that one can practically make a statement with a question ?

CGamesPlay 9y ago

This is interesting. Let's think it through. For the teachers and students, it would need to be realtime. A teacher couldn't write out a string of follow-up questions in advance and hope the reader answers them in exactly the way you intend. For the observers, you need them to be engaged with the content as well. I am imaging a sort of dialog tree would be useful here, where a new reader could add an alternative answer to a given question which would then be a candidate for other teachers to add follow-up questions. How would [1] look like if it were resolved using the Socratic method? For programming in particular, building out an interface to encourage experimentation would be critical. Take for example [2], a recent question from StackOverflow. The questions I would ask to lead the student to the answer are: - What is the actual difference between iPhone and desktop for this code? - What nodes are being selected by the call to `$`? - What makes you confident that the call to `$` is even happening? - etc. The student's ability to even answer these follow-up questions will make the socratic method painful when conducted through a text-primary medium. This raises another point that teachers need to already know the solution, or at the least have much better guesses than the students (and those guesses need to be generally correct for the site to provide value). This greatly limits the number of people who would be capable of being teachers on the site. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10059594/a-simple-explanation-of-naive-bayes-classification https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10059594/a-simple-explan... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46570102/jquery-on-not-working-on-iphoneonly https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46570102/jquery-on-not-w...