Learning online and off
Books about learning online and off – what we’ve thought works, and doesn’t, over time.
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The Complete HyperCard Handbook This guidebook is a three-in-one: software use guide, programming primer, and programming language design treatise. If you want to build software to help students learn better, I’d recommend this one.
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On Intelligence How humans might think and learn, and how that’s different from how we might train machines to do the same. A very good counterbalance to the current AI / “the machines will eat us all!” punditry.
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The Rise of Universities How and why medieval universities established thsmelves. The patterns are interesting on their own; how much certain tropes have stuck and continue to this day? Oof!
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Deschooling Society One of those books that seems to have predicted what the internet would do before it did it. One idea from the book (sadly written in patent-ese): “The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description .. ” The ideas will seem less novel now, but it’s probably still worth reading.
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Among Schoolchildren Solid long-form journalism about an elementary-school classroom in working class Massachusetts. I didn’t finish the book feeling like I’d learned concrete facts or specific strategies so much as I better understood why in-classroom teaching is so hard.
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Mindstorms How children could learn better with computers, first published in 1980, and relevant today. That its ideas still seem useful / worth trying is either a testiment to the book’s timelessness or the sludge we’ve called education innovation (I’ll leave that one up to you) but it’s worth reading if you’re interested in these sort of things.
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Zero to One It feels a bit cliche – certainly not contrarian – to recommend this book, but (in its near terms) I’d rather be cliche and right than contrarian and wrong. Though this book isn’t specifically about learning, its ideas are related, and it seemed worth including.