A Learning Experiment

Last week my friend and colleague Ross Karchner proposed an experiment for learning new things from books (and I’m paraphrasing below):

Each week, read a chapter from a book. After reading the chapter, think up some questions, some discussion topics, and maybe a project related to the chapter, and discuss, answer, and do.

The idea is that, as Ross puts it, “The way I imagine it working, each ‘class’ would leave something more valuable behind, and I think it would help people learn. The site would create an easy path for turning any off-the-shelf book (books that teach something, I’m not sure how well the concept would translate to literature) into a new kind of collaborative courseware.”

It’s an appealing idea; I have many technical books that I read part of, and having some structure should help me finish more. And I can’t help but be attracted to the idea of adding value even if I don’t end up using the technology for which I bought the book. It also helps that Ross picked a really neat book to start with: Visualizing Data by Ben Fry, which teaches you processing, which is a really neat Java-based framework for creating data visualizations (maps, graphs, iTunes-like visualizations and so on). This fits into another project I have regarding being more visual that hopefully I’ll get to write about soon.

Although I’m sure we both have lots of ideas of how a web application could make this course-creation process even cooler, I think for now we’re going to just use a Wiki for keeping track of our ideas and sketching out what one of these courses will look like. We’ve already started with chapter one and both believe this project should get better as more people join, so if you’re interested, please grab a copy of the book and dive on in.