4 ms·

Books were a product of their time. Interactive media allows us to leverage techniques such as annotations, in-context model building and testing, building memo

Books were a product of their time. Interactive media allows us to leverage techniques such as annotations, in-context model building and testing, building memorization using spaced repetition which should make an immense difference in learning effectiveness. It's a shame that Google, who wanted to organize all of the world's information, still struggles if you want to find best learning resources (books, videos, podcasts, courses, Q&A forums, cheatsheets etc.) on a topic. It's good at answering specific questions but not so good at suggesting at learning path that makes the best use of amazing resources that exist on the Web. This is the problem we have set out to solve. I'd love to see more participation from HN users: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn-awesome

nileshtrivedi 7y ago
What would make your project really useful is if a user can choose a level of detail to get a summary of a given resource (book, course etc) in her preferred format. Perhaps, I just want a 5-minute summary to read or a 20-minute audio summary to listen on my commute. This is of-course a hard problem to solve via software, but manual summarization can go a long way.
anonymous5133 7y ago
IMO, I think google was never designed to really drive people to highly detailed resources. Google is more similar to something like wikipedia where it gives you the high-level overview instead. It makes sense as well that it is like this because the vast majority of people want the basic information, not super detailed information, so over time most of the authoritative sites (sites with tons of backlinks) end up just being sites that are "overview" sites, not a comprehensive resource for the subject. That's why there is still value by going to someone who is an expert in the subject to basically curate the information for you....like in a course. The problem is most of the experts in the subject work for universities and have no interest in giving their services away for free or the people that do are only able to give a basic course in the subject (coursera, udacity etc.) with limited resources that make self-studying the subject difficult. I think we need something similar to YELP but for online courses that can be used to self-study. There might be 100 online physics courses but no one really knows which one is "best". Some might only have a textbook, others might only have lecture notes and then a few might actually be very comprehensive....but no one knows this unless there is some sort of review/recommendation site to use.
- learn_awesome 7y ago
  ClassCentral seems to be taking this path. Our approach is different because we wanted to included learning that happens with media besides "courses". Perhaps a GoodReads-equivalent for LearningResources.

nileshtrivedi 7y ago

What would make your project really useful is if a user can choose a level of detail to get a summary of a given resource (book, course etc) in her preferred format. Perhaps, I just want a 5-minute summary to read or a 20-minute audio summary to listen on my commute. This is of-course a hard problem to solve via software, but manual summarization can go a long way.

anonymous5133 7y ago

IMO, I think google was never designed to really drive people to highly detailed resources. Google is more similar to something like wikipedia where it gives you the high-level overview instead. It makes sense as well that it is like this because the vast majority of people want the basic information, not super detailed information, so over time most of the authoritative sites (sites with tons of backlinks) end up just being sites that are "overview" sites, not a comprehensive resource for the subject. That's why there is still value by going to someone who is an expert in the subject to basically curate the information for you....like in a course. The problem is most of the experts in the subject work for universities and have no interest in giving their services away for free or the people that do are only able to give a basic course in the subject (coursera, udacity etc.) with limited resources that make self-studying the subject difficult. I think we need something similar to YELP but for online courses that can be used to self-study. There might be 100 online physics courses but no one really knows which one is "best". Some might only have a textbook, others might only have lecture notes and then a few might actually be very comprehensive....but no one knows this unless there is some sort of review/recommendation site to use.

learn_awesome 7y ago
ClassCentral seems to be taking this path. Our approach is different because we wanted to included learning that happens with media besides "courses". Perhaps a GoodReads-equivalent for LearningResources.