Having been a teacher most of my life I’m interested in the learning process. There’s a concept(?) called ‘the magic number 7, plus or minus 2’ which refers to how much new information a person can process at one time. Too many tutorial producers don’t understand this, and will try to teach 6 different ways to do one thing without realizing that they make it impossible to learn anything else at that time. The short term memory buffer is full. Better to learn one way to do six different things. But people do love their options.
Another issue is chunking. What is ‘one thing’? For a child learning to read, a letter is one thing. Then a word becomes one thing. Then a phrase. By the time the child has grown a book is ‘one thing’. Too many experts can no longer break down a topic into simple components because they no longer even see the components. Thinking at too high a level.
When I was teaching mathematics at high school, and a student was having a problem, the question I always asked was ‘what do they need to know already to understand this new idea?’ Quite often the prerequisite had not been consolidated, hence the difficulty. Learning is a building process, and every prior stage needs to be solid.
A while back I read this article, and found it very challenging. But after doing some study of the basics (wherever I could find someone who just dealt with the basics) I can now read through it and work out what it’s doing at each step. Can even incorporate some of the steps into my own problems. There are some interesting ways of doing things here. I guess I’ve made the foundation strong enough at last.