in short (over simplified, my take): interactive visualizations are dead because nobody interacts with them.
wondering if this holds here as well.
Can't find the reference anymore, but there were also papers in educational sciences that interactive books usually don't increase comprehension of kids (they just play with them instead of depen their understanding).
edit: sorry didn't want to sound too critical. The work is awesome (upvote), was just thinking out loud.
I am the author of a widely-used LA text, and have considered adding interactive stuff. But there is a tradeoff. For one thing, it locks you to online, and despite the claims of our IT people, my correspondents (mostly self-learners) do not want online, they want print or PDF (as do I, since the appearance that LaTeX gives me is important to me).
For another, the tech has in the recent past changed so fast that maintaining the interactives would be a significant job. I don't mind learning JS to do something good but tying myself to many hours a year responding to bug reports from people on obscure platforms, or using IE6, is not a good use of my life energy.
Finally, I had a colleague, a complex analyst, try Visual Complex Analysis and he reported that students did not get it. He is very sober, very caring, very reliable. This starts to make sense of his report.
First, note that Needham’s book Visual Complex Analysis is not interactive. It’s just a book with slightly more pictures and more geometrically motivated explanations than most books have.
Personally I don’t think it’s ideal to use as an only book for a complex analysis course, but I found it very helpful for crystalizing my intuition/thinking about the subject. I would recommend every university math student try reading it, especially after going through a traditional course. (Also recommended is Wegert’s book Visual Complex Functions, but definitely not as a primary text.)
Finally, I suspect switching primary books is only going to work well if the professor makes a commitment to teaching using the same explanations. If the book goes about the subject in a completely different way than the lectures, I can well imagine students working homework sets on a short deadline may get confused.
I'd be interested to know your thoughts on the Essence of Linear Algebra videos by Grant Sanderson. What role do you see material like that playing? (They are fantastic if you're not familiar) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xV...
For me this gets to a deeper point. While there are probably some people who innately understand tough mathematical or scientific concepts, it's been my experience that learning is largely about spending enough time struggling diligently with the material until you've built a robust and correct mental model of it. Then on to exercises to see if your model breaks or holds up when strained. If you approach interactive aids and videos and images with this mindset, they can be very helpful.
I can also clearly remember times when this was not my approach, and in those times, pictures were just a lot of time saved because I didn't have to read text that otherwise would have been there.
One possible explanation for that: the visualizations are only useful to those strongly motivated to learn the material itself (as opposed to doing well in a class/test or whatever). So, they may not be effective when casually presented to a group of relatively disinterested students—but they may be the perfect thing for some autodidact browsing HN.
in short (over simplified, my take): interactive visualizations are dead because nobody interacts with them.
wondering if this holds here as well.
Can't find the reference anymore, but there were also papers in educational sciences that interactive books usually don't increase comprehension of kids (they just play with them instead of depen their understanding).
edit: sorry didn't want to sound too critical. The work is awesome (upvote), was just thinking out loud.