Digital garden

It was 1953 and Ray and Charles Eames created a masterpiece film for @BellLabs. Called “A Communications Primer” it introduces Claude Shannon and the concept of signal and noise as well as binary numbers. It has a beautiful “Shannon limit” introduction that still seems fresh.

How to compress a grade level’s worth of learning much, much shorter than a year: 1. Identify what the student already knows 2. Overlay that on a knowledge graph to construct their personal knowledge profile 3. Teach only new topics for which they've mastered the prerequisites, their "knowledge frontier" 4. Each lesson cycles through minimum effective doses of explicitly guided instruction & active practice problems 5. Enforce mastery relentlessly: if you can't consistently solve problems correctly, then you don't move on to more advanced material that depends on it. You continue on parallel learning paths and come back to the halted one later. 6. Review previously learned material using spaced repetition & frequent broad-coverage closed-book timed quizzes 7. Review old stuff by learning new stuff -- i.e., knock out as much review as possible by learning new material that exercises those review topics as subskills.