Principle #10 - Learning by doing
by Robbie, February 4, 2006
Studies have consistently shown that active learning produces better results than purely passive learning (i.e., reading a book). We are just in the infancy of interactive content online and much of what is available today is not very good, but this will be a key differentiator for successful internet publishers in the future.
At O’Reilly Media, I’m very interested in Robbie’s “learning by doing” proposal (and the rest of the manifesto). I heard several years ago of a system someone developed where people could run Java programs on a site without having to set up their own personal environments. They could edit programs and rerun them to see the effects. This never took off, unfortunately. I think it’s a great way to teach programming: let people use a server that’s already set up, instead of having to install the software with all the inconsistencies that might lead to. System administration would be harder to teach this way, but still might be possible.
Andy Oram February 13th, 2006