Matuschak, Mediums and Metacognitive Burden
[This is a part of series of essays on Epsilearn, an educational content aggregator I’m making. Here’s an intro explaining everything.]
A week ago, I wrote this essay.
TL;DR — it’s about how books, especially old ones, are often not very information-dense, and can sometimes be adequately replaced with summaries. Having read my essay, my friend sent me one by Andy Matuschak that, frankly, articulated my point far better and with more detail.
I’ll summarize Matuschak’s point here (though I suggest you read the essay, it’s excellent).
Books and lectures are both flawed mediums for learning, because they rely on a flawed cognitive model of learning: that people can simply absorb knowledge by being exposed to it. In fact, people learn the best from interacting with the material (doing problems, making projects, etc.)
Though people learn best through practice, it’s not possible to practice without absorbing information first — you can’t do multiplication problems without knowing how to multiply. A well-designed course provides scheduled practice and learning. Someone who learns on their own has to decide when to learn and when to practice, while a course decides this for you. When you learn on your own, you have to actively think about your learning — Matuschak calls this “metacognitive burden”. A structured course does that for you. Less metacognitive burden.
Matuschak leaves us with the idea that we might construct new mediums, that implicitly reduce metacognitive burden.
Easing Metacognitive Burden
It looks like the challenge here is to ease metacognitive burden. Where to start?
First, we might want to define it. I think of metacognitive burden as any thinking I have to do about learning — that includes the act of finding a resource, parsing which parts are worth learning, thinking about whether I’m absorbing the material or not, etc. We’ll consider metacognitive burden to be any cognitive burden sustained from thinking about thinking.
How Epsilearn will help
Let’s consider a hypothetical student who wants to learn computer programming. Many moons ago, this was me.
My father (a software engineer) gave me many books about programming, none of which made sense to me, at all. What was an object? Why do goldfish “extend” fish? How do I use any of this to make stuff? I found all of the books he gave me obtuse and confusing — until one day, he handed me a copy of Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way. Something about that book spoke to me. I suspect it was the blunt, no-nonsense style of writing, combined with a plethora of examples and projects.
But that’s not the point. The point is that I learned programming in quite possibly the best case, most privileged scenario — my dad’s a software engineer, who cared about fostering my interests, and I lived in the middle of Silicon Valley — and even then, it was a challenge to find a good resource to teach me programming. If it’s hard for the son of a software engineer, living in the middle of Silicon Valley, to find a suitable resource to learn programming from, imagine what barriers rural or inner city kids face.
This is an example of metacognitive burden. It’s hard to learn programming; it’s even harder to know where to start. The metacognition that goes into finding a resource, filling in the gaps with other resources, and assessing your own progress is immense — and this goes for other subjects too.
Epsilearn aims to crowdsource this metacognitive burden. Content creators and users submit their favorite educational resources and tell us their difficulty/length/style; then other users vote on those resources and provide feedback on their difficulty/length/style.
The result will be reduced metacognitive burden. If you want to learn programming, Epsilearn will have a list of resources perfect for beginners, that fit your schedule and learning style. You spend less time finding a resource and more time learning from it — less metacognition.
In a sentence, Epsilearn crowdsources the metacognitive burden of finding good educational resources.
Study Guides
On Epsilearn, there’s the option to make a “study guide.” This is really just a collection of links.
In my 7th grade biology class, I was once assigned a “webquest” for classwork. This webquest was a series of websites I was supposed to visit, with a worksheet that had questions corresponding to each website. A “study guide” is basically that — a curated collection of resources bundled together.
This goes back to the idea of courses and how they ease metacognitive burden. Abstractly, a great deal of the work/value provided by teachers and courses lies in the curation of resources. Your Calculus teacher will deliver a lecture on Riemann sums, then assign problems #37–65 odd on pg. 457, and maybe recommend a Youtube video that’ll help you if you’re struggling with the concept. He’s curating problems from the textbook for homework, and concepts from the subject for his lecture, then pairing them all together into a cocktail of learning resources.¹
Study guides let anyone curate resources. I could create a study guide that contains all the resources I used to teach myself React.js, and share it with others. Over time, as votes accumulate, the best “curation” rises to the top.
The end goal is to have a series of “study guides” naturally float to the top, through user votes. These study guides would serve as curated collections of the best resources the internet has to offer, hopefully easing the metacognitive burden of anyone looking to learn something.
Summary
Epsilearn looks to reduce the metacognitive burden sustained from searching for educational resources.
More on Epsilearn
You can try the site right now! Go to epsilearn.co to give it a spin.
If you have a favorite educational resource you’d like to submit, you can do that here.
Here are more essays about Epsilearn:
