The fundamental learning situation is one in which a person learns by helping someone who really knows what he is doing. – Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language Human beings are evolved to pick up the skills that are practiced in the communities they live immersed in.
I am creating the system level software for pushing what I call Digital Apprenticeship to the masses which your essay provides a great intellectual grounding of.
Yeah, it's a videogame, so it's supposed to be fun. But I've never seen such a steep learning curve. It's a wall with wires on top of it
And could look up any game and watch a replay of the very best the competitive scene has to offer. At any moment you can see his screen, his mouse movements, keyboard presses. You could stop, slow down the replay if it gets too hectic.
So the school would be guide series, be it text or video. That's basically how I got entry knowledge AND the stuff that's just extremely hard to explain without isolated examples.
There are mentors! I would call people who are pretty competent in the game, just not on an international level, but stream the game constantly and *narrate* what they do and why they do it, sometimes answering people from the chat. Logical next step after guides. And it's not easy to do on a constant basis, I feel there needs to be a different personality compared to a stereotypical professional player.
You can even hire a tutor! He could watch the game as you play, talk to you as you play, even draw lines on your screen to explain a point. But again, usually, it costs money.
You could ask mentors to try to explain what professional players do! People love it, but professional players are so and so about mentors opinions.
And it's a videogame, the worst you could do is to have a bad match and anger your teammates. Now consider if we talk about the nuclear power plant. People don't want to let go of control because a lot of stuff is dangerous not only to equipment but to people. Some countries don't put human lives that high on the pedestal though.
In the end, I'm very sceptical that a glass box would be enough. It would be better than trial and error, but https://youtu.be/nw0xg2MMnRM?t=266
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis by Scott Alexander:
“Knowledge,” said the Alchemist, “is harder to transmit than anyone appreciates. One can write down the structure of a certain arch, or the tactical considerations behind a certain strategy. But above those are higher skills, skills we cannot name or appreciate. Caesar could glance at a battlefield and know precisely which lines were reliable and which were about to break. Vitruvius could see a great basilica in his mind’s eye, every wall and column snapping into place. We call this wisdom. It is not unteachable, but neither can it be taught. Do you understand?”
Could you do a deep investigation into cancer research yourself and involve your daughter?
Quite coincidentally I started looking into taking an apprentice today independent of seeing this. I've done mentoring before but the students often poorly directed and don't know how to make use of me (though the biggest issue is them quietly disappearing, like a failed exercise habit).
I'm not sure exactly how to implement it but this post gave a lot of ideas. One you didn't cover might be pair programming, though the slowdown might be too much.
I'm also looking into milieu shaping by your inspiration, though I don't have a concrete idea of how to go about it yet.
As someone who always wanted to contribute to open source but doesn’t know how (every repository has different ways of contributing) and I certainly don’t want to be that guy who doesn’t read instructions, I wish there was a better onboarding (or you call it mediating later)
Your diagnosis that expert attention is the bottleneck is absolute spot on
I am creating the system level software for pushing what I call Digital Apprenticeship to the masses which your essay provides a great intellectual grounding of.
https://scrimba.com/ uses screencasts which you can jump in and edit the code of -- as you describe
Consider DOTA
Yeah, it's a videogame, so it's supposed to be fun. But I've never seen such a steep learning curve. It's a wall with wires on top of it
And could look up any game and watch a replay of the very best the competitive scene has to offer. At any moment you can see his screen, his mouse movements, keyboard presses. You could stop, slow down the replay if it gets too hectic.
So the school would be guide series, be it text or video. That's basically how I got entry knowledge AND the stuff that's just extremely hard to explain without isolated examples.
There are mentors! I would call people who are pretty competent in the game, just not on an international level, but stream the game constantly and *narrate* what they do and why they do it, sometimes answering people from the chat. Logical next step after guides. And it's not easy to do on a constant basis, I feel there needs to be a different personality compared to a stereotypical professional player.
You can even hire a tutor! He could watch the game as you play, talk to you as you play, even draw lines on your screen to explain a point. But again, usually, it costs money.
You could ask mentors to try to explain what professional players do! People love it, but professional players are so and so about mentors opinions.
And it's a videogame, the worst you could do is to have a bad match and anger your teammates. Now consider if we talk about the nuclear power plant. People don't want to let go of control because a lot of stuff is dangerous not only to equipment but to people. Some countries don't put human lives that high on the pedestal though.
In the end, I'm very sceptical that a glass box would be enough. It would be better than trial and error, but https://youtu.be/nw0xg2MMnRM?t=266
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis by Scott Alexander:
“Knowledge,” said the Alchemist, “is harder to transmit than anyone appreciates. One can write down the structure of a certain arch, or the tactical considerations behind a certain strategy. But above those are higher skills, skills we cannot name or appreciate. Caesar could glance at a battlefield and know precisely which lines were reliable and which were about to break. Vitruvius could see a great basilica in his mind’s eye, every wall and column snapping into place. We call this wisdom. It is not unteachable, but neither can it be taught. Do you understand?”
Could you do a deep investigation into cancer research yourself and involve your daughter?
Quite coincidentally I started looking into taking an apprentice today independent of seeing this. I've done mentoring before but the students often poorly directed and don't know how to make use of me (though the biggest issue is them quietly disappearing, like a failed exercise habit).
I'm not sure exactly how to implement it but this post gave a lot of ideas. One you didn't cover might be pair programming, though the slowdown might be too much.
I'm also looking into milieu shaping by your inspiration, though I don't have a concrete idea of how to go about it yet.
As someone who always wanted to contribute to open source but doesn’t know how (every repository has different ways of contributing) and I certainly don’t want to be that guy who doesn’t read instructions, I wish there was a better onboarding (or you call it mediating later)
Your diagnosis that expert attention is the bottleneck is absolute spot on