By As the web producer on the team, I spend a lot of time looking for ways to bring the Head First pedagogy into our online offerings. It's a slow process, as there are a lot of technologies to consider, but every now and then we find something pretty cool. Like the Hands-On SQL interface that Andrew Cumming wrote for us. And just last week, one of our prospective authors send me a beta version of an awesome fridge magnets application (you can try it out here), which I'd love to make available for all of the fridge magnets exercises in our books.
What I'd like to know from our readers is: what helps you learn?
There are a lot of things in Head First books that we could translate into interactive activities online: Crosswords, Sharpen Your Pencils, BE the Compilers, Exercises, Who Does Whats... anything that motivates our readers to put the answers down before they turn the page. For our books that teach to a specific test (Servlets, EJB, and PMP), getting practice tests online in an interactive format is practically essential.
We could also implement audio, which could be entertaining, but I'm not sure how useful. Would it really help your learning if you could hear the Fireside Chat between INNER and OUTER JOINs? There's a point at which multimedia stops supplementing the learning and starts distracting from it. With all the crazy stuff on the web these days, I want to make sure whatever we put up on Head First Labs is truly worthwhile.
Fortunately, one of the great things about working for O'Reilly is that the sorts of people who can write these applications are all around me. We have hundreds of books that are the definitive titles in their fields, and all I have to do is look at the author's name on the cover to know who the expert is. And chances are, since I used to be an Editorial Assistant here, they might even recognize me (and remember me as the person who used to make sure they got paid). Plus, it's usually pretty easy to convince people to take some time out of their jobs to work on a cool Head First app. So tell me, Head First Readers: What should I get them working on?
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I think that Fridge Magnet applet is awesome!
I think an interesting feature would be if Head First readers can use some sort of Fridge Magnet builder (or crossword puzzle builder, etc.) to submit their own post-chapter problems for people to solve. Then you could potentially have some sort of rating system to bring the popular submissions come to the top.
Mike, that's a very cool idea. I'd also like to see a button that pops open a window with the magnet-generated code in such a way that you could copy it and try it in your own query window, compiler, etc.
Mike, we tried to do something like that for PMP (the HeadLibs form), but it didn't take off -- I suspect because the interface is too clunky, and there's no instant gratification of seeing your submission added to the list. Having people generate their own exercises and having readers rate them would be a lot of fun, and useful too -- Andrew and Jennifer (authors of Head First PMP and the upcoming Head First C#) believe strongly that people learn a lot about taking tests by creating their own questions, so you can look forward to more and better stuff like that in the future.
That's a great idea, Lynn. One limitation of the fridge magnet applet is that there's no way to check your answers aside from comparing it to a page. Being able to generate copyable code and run it would be really cool!
I really like those movable code magnets. I also think there should be dedicated forum topics to every Brain Power and a shortened link at the bottom of the box for us to go to and discuss.
"Being able to generate copyable code and run it would be really cool!"
I agree, great idea :)
I'm one of those auditory learners that absorb information better aurally than visually so the audio would help me tremendously. Unfortunately what I would need is not the asides material (e.g. Fireside Chat) but the actual explanations themselves. You're doing a good job of presenting visual material in several learning styles but I need a different modality.