I wonder if you have read David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous. In it he argues that in a world where knowledge was recorded on paper we came to think of knowledge itself as being shaped like a book. With the coming of the Internet, he argues, we discovered that knowledge is shaped more like a web, and that part of that discovery is the realization that knowledge is a much more fluid and uncertain thing than we once supposed.
The irony, of course, is that he made this argument in a book. Perhaps what we can take from this is that reading whole books may become a smaller part of the typical student's education in a webbed world, but that there are perhaps still subjects and/or forms of argument for which a book is the appropriate medium. So, yes, while modern education may be shaped more like a web than like a book, books still have their place as nodes on that web, and students do still need to be able to deal with them.
No I haven't, but that sounds very cogent! I'm adding it to my To Read list.
I agree, an individual book can be a node in the web. Or, it could be a journey through the web - such as the book I read earlier this year about British-American cooperation in WWII, which had chapters on many campaigns which could each fill a book in themselves. But, it was describing one specific angle of those campaigns, and drawing a common thread between that angle of each campaign.
I was a public school teacher for 45 years, although not in an academic subject. I did go to meetings, however…If you are unaware of Bloom’s Taxonomy look it up. In the 80’s and 90’s teachers were told they were spending too much time on the bottom level of Bloom’s. Years later in classes I observed teacher’s spending zero time at this level. If you quiz on narrow questions about the characters, events and relationships that can easily be evaluated by fill-in-the-blank, true and false, multiple choice, and short answer questions questions then students are evaluated as to whether they have read the book with a degree of attention in the first place. Reading a book in and of itself is a worthy accomplishment and should be reflected in grades assigned. If this sort of evaluation has not taken place, nothing can be done. Discussion of any higher level elements is pointless if the book is unread, and this holds true at any educational level.
That's an attempt, but fill-in-the-blank quizzes aren't enough. You're either asking about major points that'd be covered in the Cliff Notes / Wikipedia summary, or details a student could forget. When I was in high school, I was occasionally embarrassed to forget a detail the quiz was asking, even though I'd read the book!
Though, I suppose making students at least read the Wikipedia summary is at least something.
> "That said - when most students are hardly reading at all, I'm willing to give most of that up to pique their interest."
Marshwiggle read an article about how someone... who had an English class* full of about-to-fail-to-graduate-because-of-this-class High School seniors, he set the following (iirc) terms for his class:
"We will read Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Come to class, participate in class discussion, and you will pass." And the dude ended up successfully TEACHING them all a ton! (There's a lot in those stories, literarily-speaking - they're brilliant - and they're short! And also, they "read" as having unmistakable evidence of understanding of the human condition--even to the inner-city high-schoolers who were on the receiving end, in that situation!)
* "English class" as in the literature kind, not ESL!
Maybe we shouldn't be forcing kids to read books they don't want to, because books are less and less relevant now, and will be more irrelevant in the future.
One thing you may notice about the things that have replaced books as "storytelling" or "factual communication" mediums - TV, movies, Youtube, Netflix - they're all more naturally interactive and "human scale." They feature visual images of people talking and interacting and doing things, which is how EVERYONE would have learned for the last ~2M years of hominin evolution.
When you think about it, staring at little black squiggles to learn something or hear a story is a fairly odd thing to do, and is fairly far from the ways we have evolved to take in learning or stories historically.
Many of the things that are trending as the hot new things - twitch streams, tik tok, reels, livestreams and the like - are even MORE interactive. Now it's not just people talking, it's often a more interactive dialogue with other videos and the comments.
Ultimately we're going to learn things by asking GPT-N to explain something - how to spatchcock a chicken, say - and it's going to create a real time video on the spot and narrate you through a moving demonstration that can zoom into and reorient to any level of detail or alternate view upon any questions. It will be a real-time, fully illustrated, back and forth exchange. It will use whatever voice and avatar you've chosen to personalize the experience, and will speak with whatever vocabulary and level of education and refinement you prefer it to.
It will be difficult for books to compete with this - the ones sticking with books will be the luddites and cranks of a dying age.
I'm a book reader, incidentally. I read several books a week right now, but even before I was retired, I routinely got through about one a week, and have been doing that for many decades.
But I'm not long on "books" as a medium staying relevant for the broader population very much longer, I can tell you that.
> Tik tok and reels, ah yes, the fountains of learning and knowledge. Just curious if you have used these platforms for the things you say?
I haven't, no, but I'm a cantankerous throwback who doesn't watch movies or tv and actually enjoys reading.
I see my (much younger) girlfriend use them all the time though. She gets new recipes, or looks up stuff like how to make meringue out of egg whites, looks up makeup and nail tutorials, and similar.
I see everyone from her generation and younger use various apps all the time for learning or for entertainment, but I never see a one of them read anything. I just don't think it's relevant any more, and it will be even more irrelevant when AI is just a *little* bit better.
I've sought out videos myself too, for things like unclogging a pipe or unlatching this one type of bottle or things where a picture really does communicate more clearly than words.
But just the same, when I'm in the middle of cooking and I want to see how much sugar to add, I don't want to have to scroll back and forth to the right place in the video. It's the same thing at work when I want to double-check an explanation of how to do a particular task. Text still has definite advantages.
And what's more - experienced readers read much faster than video or audio.
Perhaps, eventually, there'll be an AI that can make up a video with a book's level of detail about (say) the WWII French Resistance. But I'm sure that'd take much longer to watch than it would to read that book. Maybe it wouldn't for your girlfriend (especially if she's got the same short attention span I had some years ago), but it would for me.
> And what's more - experienced readers read much faster than video or audio.
Amen - this is exactly why I *don't* watch movies, listen to podcasts, or click on Youtube links. I'll go for the transcript every time.
On that front, do you know Gemini is the only AI that can summarize Youtubes for you? It does a decent job too, and you can ask clarifying questions and dig deeper. It's literally the only reason I ever use it.
Excellent piece! And I speak as one of those not forced to read whole books. No question that attention spans have plummeted; but this is only one factor. Your message is important to everyone who wants to attack their world thoughtfully, though.
I wonder if you have read David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous. In it he argues that in a world where knowledge was recorded on paper we came to think of knowledge itself as being shaped like a book. With the coming of the Internet, he argues, we discovered that knowledge is shaped more like a web, and that part of that discovery is the realization that knowledge is a much more fluid and uncertain thing than we once supposed.
The irony, of course, is that he made this argument in a book. Perhaps what we can take from this is that reading whole books may become a smaller part of the typical student's education in a webbed world, but that there are perhaps still subjects and/or forms of argument for which a book is the appropriate medium. So, yes, while modern education may be shaped more like a web than like a book, books still have their place as nodes on that web, and students do still need to be able to deal with them.
No I haven't, but that sounds very cogent! I'm adding it to my To Read list.
I agree, an individual book can be a node in the web. Or, it could be a journey through the web - such as the book I read earlier this year about British-American cooperation in WWII, which had chapters on many campaigns which could each fill a book in themselves. But, it was describing one specific angle of those campaigns, and drawing a common thread between that angle of each campaign.
I was a public school teacher for 45 years, although not in an academic subject. I did go to meetings, however…If you are unaware of Bloom’s Taxonomy look it up. In the 80’s and 90’s teachers were told they were spending too much time on the bottom level of Bloom’s. Years later in classes I observed teacher’s spending zero time at this level. If you quiz on narrow questions about the characters, events and relationships that can easily be evaluated by fill-in-the-blank, true and false, multiple choice, and short answer questions questions then students are evaluated as to whether they have read the book with a degree of attention in the first place. Reading a book in and of itself is a worthy accomplishment and should be reflected in grades assigned. If this sort of evaluation has not taken place, nothing can be done. Discussion of any higher level elements is pointless if the book is unread, and this holds true at any educational level.
That's an attempt, but fill-in-the-blank quizzes aren't enough. You're either asking about major points that'd be covered in the Cliff Notes / Wikipedia summary, or details a student could forget. When I was in high school, I was occasionally embarrassed to forget a detail the quiz was asking, even though I'd read the book!
Though, I suppose making students at least read the Wikipedia summary is at least something.
Ohh! This (below) reminded me of something:
> "That said - when most students are hardly reading at all, I'm willing to give most of that up to pique their interest."
Marshwiggle read an article about how someone... who had an English class* full of about-to-fail-to-graduate-because-of-this-class High School seniors, he set the following (iirc) terms for his class:
"We will read Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Come to class, participate in class discussion, and you will pass." And the dude ended up successfully TEACHING them all a ton! (There's a lot in those stories, literarily-speaking - they're brilliant - and they're short! And also, they "read" as having unmistakable evidence of understanding of the human condition--even to the inner-city high-schoolers who were on the receiving end, in that situation!)
* "English class" as in the literature kind, not ESL!
Maybe we shouldn't be forcing kids to read books they don't want to, because books are less and less relevant now, and will be more irrelevant in the future.
One thing you may notice about the things that have replaced books as "storytelling" or "factual communication" mediums - TV, movies, Youtube, Netflix - they're all more naturally interactive and "human scale." They feature visual images of people talking and interacting and doing things, which is how EVERYONE would have learned for the last ~2M years of hominin evolution.
When you think about it, staring at little black squiggles to learn something or hear a story is a fairly odd thing to do, and is fairly far from the ways we have evolved to take in learning or stories historically.
Many of the things that are trending as the hot new things - twitch streams, tik tok, reels, livestreams and the like - are even MORE interactive. Now it's not just people talking, it's often a more interactive dialogue with other videos and the comments.
Ultimately we're going to learn things by asking GPT-N to explain something - how to spatchcock a chicken, say - and it's going to create a real time video on the spot and narrate you through a moving demonstration that can zoom into and reorient to any level of detail or alternate view upon any questions. It will be a real-time, fully illustrated, back and forth exchange. It will use whatever voice and avatar you've chosen to personalize the experience, and will speak with whatever vocabulary and level of education and refinement you prefer it to.
It will be difficult for books to compete with this - the ones sticking with books will be the luddites and cranks of a dying age.
I'm a book reader, incidentally. I read several books a week right now, but even before I was retired, I routinely got through about one a week, and have been doing that for many decades.
But I'm not long on "books" as a medium staying relevant for the broader population very much longer, I can tell you that.
Tik tok and reels, ah yes, the fountains of learning and knowledge. Just curious if you have used these platforms for the things you say?
> Tik tok and reels, ah yes, the fountains of learning and knowledge. Just curious if you have used these platforms for the things you say?
I haven't, no, but I'm a cantankerous throwback who doesn't watch movies or tv and actually enjoys reading.
I see my (much younger) girlfriend use them all the time though. She gets new recipes, or looks up stuff like how to make meringue out of egg whites, looks up makeup and nail tutorials, and similar.
I see everyone from her generation and younger use various apps all the time for learning or for entertainment, but I never see a one of them read anything. I just don't think it's relevant any more, and it will be even more irrelevant when AI is just a *little* bit better.
I've sought out videos myself too, for things like unclogging a pipe or unlatching this one type of bottle or things where a picture really does communicate more clearly than words.
But just the same, when I'm in the middle of cooking and I want to see how much sugar to add, I don't want to have to scroll back and forth to the right place in the video. It's the same thing at work when I want to double-check an explanation of how to do a particular task. Text still has definite advantages.
And what's more - experienced readers read much faster than video or audio.
Perhaps, eventually, there'll be an AI that can make up a video with a book's level of detail about (say) the WWII French Resistance. But I'm sure that'd take much longer to watch than it would to read that book. Maybe it wouldn't for your girlfriend (especially if she's got the same short attention span I had some years ago), but it would for me.
> And what's more - experienced readers read much faster than video or audio.
Amen - this is exactly why I *don't* watch movies, listen to podcasts, or click on Youtube links. I'll go for the transcript every time.
On that front, do you know Gemini is the only AI that can summarize Youtubes for you? It does a decent job too, and you can ask clarifying questions and dig deeper. It's literally the only reason I ever use it.
Excellent piece! And I speak as one of those not forced to read whole books. No question that attention spans have plummeted; but this is only one factor. Your message is important to everyone who wants to attack their world thoughtfully, though.