| I hope that everyone watches the full set of four videos of Ira Glass on storytelling from which this comic was excerpted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA&playnext=1&#... It's important because you get a different perspective on a "story" from the artist's side, and it gives you an idea of how to communicate: there are moments of "drawing the reader along" with a causal sequence, and "moments of reflection" where you pause and say "here's why you care about this." If you think about writing a good tutorial, I think everybody understands that it should be incremental knowledge, that you should build upon whatever your students already know. But lots of tutorials are confusing precisely because they lack the other bits. Some tutorials look more like API documentation -- a bunch of disconnected things; no causal narrative goes between them. Other tutorials -- especially in functional programming! -- link together a whole lot of great ideas incrementally, and it's a killer story... and it's never really for anything. Contrast this with SICP for example, that famous realization which many of us had where you're halfway through this Lisp course and suddenly, out of nowhere, the authors say, "okay, let's introduce the assignment statement." And you have this moment of reflection -- "wait, assignment statements aren't necessary?! ... huh! I guess they weren't! I did a lot of stuff without them already!". Even if it's a tiny little moment where you mention, "okay, so here's an example of what you were writing before, here's why it's ugly, here's how this new technique does better" -- that sort of short intermezzo can be so amazingly helpful for learning programming that it startles me how often it's missing from tutorials. I think a good understanding of storytelling can help inform how we present information in general. (This especially holds when you draw a distinction between new ideas and news, as Alan Kay does in the SRII 2011 keynote: http://vimeo.com/22463791 .) |