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Comment by paulnelligan | Hacker News Reader

Emmm, Socrates was right

I know I remember things waaaay better when someone TELLS me something, versus when I read it in a book or online.

If I have an interesting conversation with a friend, and we're discussing something, I will remember it pretty well.

If I am listening to a professor read through a lecture, with little to no interaction from the students, I am not as likely to remember it as if I had read it from a book.

I have often found that most college lectures have a hard time with distance learning. There normal lecture style translates very badly on a TV screen and people tend to fall asleep in front of a boring TV. The best distance learning teachers I have found come from a community college background. They tend to have to be more interesting to their students and know how to work an audience.

Yes. I like lectures, by the way, but that's because most professors are smart enough to interact with the audience.

Not everyone learns in the same way. Some people learn better when they see something, some may want to hear it, some read...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles

It's more than that. Writing naturally invests itself with great authority. It tends to override ones own judgement, reason, experience, and sensibilities. This is what Socrates was referring to.

Thus the skilled reader learns to question authority, as a necessary defense.

> Emmm, Socrates was right

Consider the following statement:

  It's a good thing that the Library of Alexandria
  was destroyed, because now all of that information
  was handed down the *right* way, through oral
  tradition...

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