Delusions of Teaching

Timothy Brannan and I don't get along.  I don't think there's resentment on his part; I can't say. He's commented on this blog a few times and I pretty much ignore his blog.  When I hear anything about him, it's usually second hand.

The second-hand in this case is a recent post by JB of B/X Blackrazor, in which he quotes Brannan, then goes on to talk about learning the rules of games.  I'd like to take part of that same quote by Brannan and go a different direction with it.

"Moldvay, Holmes and Mentzer Basics were all a product of their times. That is getting people (often read as "kids") to learn how to play. As someone who has been developing college curriculums for 20+ years I can tell you kids and young adults don't go to books to learn how to do something, they want a video or podcast (but mostly a video) and that's where they go first. If I were writing a course on how to learn D&D I'd first look at my video budget. BTW this is not a value judgement on learning, it is a different modality."

Newsflash.  People don't like to read books.

Let's get into the WayBack machine and visit 1975.  I'm eleven years old and taking advantage of my elementary school library staying open for 45 minutes after classes end.  The library has about 2,500 books and the school has about 310 students.  Number of humans in the library?  Two.  Me and the librarian.  That's a typical day.

Jump forward to 1978.  I'm 14 years old and in grade eight.  The junior high school library is open for an hour after school.  The number of books has increased to 7,000.  The school has 750 students.  Number of humans present?  Four or five.  Usually one of them is a friend of mine.

Jump forward again.  It is 1981.  I'm 17 years old and in grade 11.  My high school library is open for 90 minutes after school.  The number of books is now 16,000.  The high school has 1,750 students.  Number of humans present?  Fifteen to twenty, with two librarians and an administrator.  Most others are researching a paper.  I'm not.

One more time.  It is 1986.  I'm 22 years old and in university, after taking 3+ years to go work in the real world.  The library is open 15 hours a day.  The university library has 220,000 books, plus endless newspapers and magazines on microfiche, a whole floor of theses and about 50,000 physical maps.  Total students: 25,000.  Number of people I might stumble across on a given floor in the library when it is not a week before exams?  Three or four.

People have never liked to read books.

Videos, podcasts, whatever materials we want to point at that have been developed with technology in the last 20+ years have successfully filled a hole in the lives of people who 32 years ago were happy to remain dumbfuck ignorant.  We haven't produced less readers; we've just convinced those people who never intended to read that they can stop feeling guilty about not going to the library.  When I go to my local university today, I find the same number of people among the stacks that I found way back in the day.

These people are not reading books because they are "a different modality."  These people don't "prefer" books ... though a lot of them will say so.  They are reading books for specific reasons.

1.  For all the trillions of pages the internet produces, most of it, even the "academic stuff," is shit.  It is content that is produced without an editor, and therefore with research that either doesn't exist, is done poorly or is done with the goal of sharing values, not information.  Content on the internet, despite what the internet tells you now, is still very unreliable ... and if your goal is to actually learn something, it is necessary to pick up a tool that is specifically vetted so that it is not full of shit.

2.  The amount of pure, reliable, practical, meaty content that exists on any two shelves of a real library dwarfs the total valuable content of all that one person can locate on the internet in the space of three years.  The internet, for all the fun it provides, is like finding a single worthwhile volume that's been stored in a two-acre field covered with two million variations of "See Dick Run" children's books.  In a library that's run by academics (rather than a municipal city that only cares how many people we can stuff in the building in order to read popular novels and other crap), I can stand in one place and run my fingers along the covers of fifty books all on the same subject, each of which say different things about it.  This saves an amazing amount of time.

3.  When I read a book, I can pick whatever speed I want.  I can flip usefully through ten pages in a minute or I can stare for twenty minutes at one sentence, parsing out the exact meaning without the rest of my senses being cluttered by the presenter's choice of clothes, the set, the presenter's voice, the time wasted by sales and marketing the presenter has to do to get views and the real time delivery of the sentence that makes me either want to scream, "TALK FASTER!" or slow down the video, turn the sound off and the close captioning on, so I can reduce his point to text where it can be fully understood.

To the average person, a lot of these look like the same book.
They're not.

Now, I appreciate that Timothy Brannan would likely not dispute any of those points.  I've read enough of Brannan to believe that he probably feels about books exactly the way I do, and that he was probably one of the small number of people in his library after school when he was a kid. But if we are going to write a course on how to LEARN D&D, rather than reduce it to pablum so it can be spooned in the mouth of lazy mutts who don't really give a shit if your video teaches them the game or not, for the sake of feeling sure that your vlog views encourage your belief that you're reaching more people than you would with a book, then we have to stop thinking in terms of our video budget.

Our video budget is what we spend money on when we're ready to recreate the Boob Tube in the all encompassing internet framework.  It's a fucking joke to think your collection of videos is going to teach anyone.  We already have a hundred thousand hours of people pumping out videos about how to "learn" D&D ... and in my 20+ years of sitting on the internet having these conversations, I have yet to meet anyone who has fucking learned anything.

So let's not pretend that making a video is a great act of education.  Go on, make your video, count your page views and subscribers, and maybe you can push out enough pseudo-educational material to equal the income stream of Matthew Colville.  Good on you if you can, it's a nice financial boon to you and yours.  But it ain't education.

Never will be.