This is the board game night in the post-COVID world. You and a few friends gather around a table, trying out a new game.
You pick up the rulebook and start reading it aloud to everyone, but after a few minutes, everyone becomes restless. So you think to yourself, why not just start and think as you go along. The first round takes a long time because you keep going back to the rulebook every ten seconds; you constantly struggle to remember what you "should do"; and it's hard to emotionally engage in the game when you know you'll have to look at the rulebook in a while.
Maybe we can replace playing a new game with watching a movie?
I've written a lot about a problem with reading: we often quickly forget what we've read, except for the main points. So, this is another problem with books, especially those aimed at helping you learn a skill: the medium makes it difficult to bridge the gap between words and action. Books rarely involve doing the thing they're supposed to help you do. Most books, even those aimed at skill-building, are just about what they talk about. Reading a book about board games instead of playing board games.
If you ask people about the periods in their lives when they grew the most, you'll notice that the most favorable environments often involve action. A summer spent preparing for an upcoming competition with your team; a failed startup that taught you valuable lessons; taking on the challenge of writing a new song every day for a month; a weeks-long meditation retreat; an overwhelming apprenticeship; and so on. In these stories, books are sometimes a source of knowledge, but they are often secondary to great mentors, teammates, contextual motivation, etc. The key is to take action.
Similar to our board game problem: consider playing a board game for the first time, but with people who have played it before. This is a completely different experience from what I previously called a "cold start." In this case, experienced players might give you a brief introduction - not overwhelming you with memorization - and then you can start playing. They might set up the board themselves or tell others to shuffle and deal cards, etc. They might say, "Let me demonstrate first. I'll start by drawing two cards, then I can choose to move here or play this card. I'll move here, which will block John from moving to this open area. Now it's your turn. Your goal is to go to XYZ, and you might start moving from this side. Now, if you draw an action card, you can take immediate action if you want; otherwise, read what's on the card..." As the game progresses, they might continue explaining, narrating what you need to know in a timely manner, explaining options you might consider, providing feedback. As long as your experienced friends have enough grace to avoid falling into the realm of overbearing Clippys, this is a more enjoyable and effective way to learn the game.
This may have always been a good way to learn board games, but there are practical advantages to skill-building books. Consider information density. If you want to learn to program for a quantum computer, you need to absorb a lot of material before you can "act" on your own. This might require hours of explanation from a knowledgeable companion, which can quickly become burdensome for most people. Explanatory text may lack personalization and interpersonal connection, but it can be more carefully crafted; it doesn't tire, always ready; it can embed graphics and abstract symbols; it can be consumed non-linearly; it can be read faster than spoken language, etc. Perhaps most importantly, it is a mass medium. The world's deepest experts and most astute communicators can write a book on a subject that millions of people can hold at almost zero marginal cost.
So, how do we create a mass medium that has the advantages of books and is situated in practice? How do we create an explanatory mass medium that feels more like playing a board game with an experienced friend than playing a board game while fiddling with an instruction manual?
The role of dynamic mediums
It is difficult to create a book that is in action for a reason: books are static, fixed. As a reader, you have to transfer the text to an environment where you can "act" on it. Even then, there is rarely an opportunity for interaction between action and text. Authors can suggest how to reflect on exercises and generate your own feedback, but these are scripts you have to execute in your own mind. Videos haven't fundamentally changed this situation. But the prospect of computers and the dynamic mediums they support is that they can perform and respond.
We are often advised to leverage this feature to integrate simulation environments. Perhaps biology textbooks could embed a simulated petri dish that you can "do" certain types of cellular biology experiments with, reducing the distance between text and action.
But at least in the cases where it's possible, I'm more interested in what happens when the computing environment becomes a real (not simulated, not "educational") execution environment. Non-linear video editing interfaces aren't just "toys" for editing movies; they are how professional filmmakers actually edit movies. Mathematica isn't just a "toy" for manipulating symbolic expressions; it's how some math work is best done. So, a dynamic "book" about video editing wouldn't need to include a "toy" environment, a simulated petri dish. Instead, it would put itself in the same environment used to edit the best movies on Earth.
But what does it mean for explanatory content to be "placed" in such a real environment? How does explanatory content interact with the environment's content?
Over the past decade, authors and programmers have written dozens of interactive articles that might tell us the answer (see Communicating with Interactive Articles). Personally, I find the work in this field very inspiring. However, I don't know of any articles that align perfectly with the desires we're discussing here. These articles might be interactive - involving some actual manipulation - but those manipulations take place in a sandbox specifically constructed for them, not in an actual environment for deploying the skill being built. They integrate with simulated petri dishes rather than actual lab benches.