Most lectures and textbooks are fairly boring. Why is this? How can we make material more engaging. I think education should look towards entertainment industries for answers. Most material is fairly boring because of the fact lecturers are typically talking about things they understand well and hence have no frame of reference of what the beginner feels. The speaker doesn’t understand his or her audience.
Ira Glass has a youtube series on storytelling that is intriguing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7KQ4vkiNUk&feature=related). One of the important things he discusses is that good stories provide implicit questions and a sequence of actions. It could be that the human mind has evolved with storytelling as a communication mechanism is central. This means that teaching methods that are closer to stories, which have sequential actions rather than random access discussion, and also creating questions in the audience’s head is a fundamentally better way to communicate material.
I think one good example of this method is The Goal, an operations book which is written as a story. It was easy to digest and was able to get to the heart of the matter, entertaining and fun at the same time.
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