I am personally invested in learning from books because some of my professional time is investing in writing books. However, I think I have a logical position for advocating the learning benefits of a book in comparison to disconnected resources. I feel the need to describe this position in opposition to the notion of personal professional development that results from exposure to unconnected and brief online sources. Just to be clear – by book I do not require that the resource be the old style object with paper pages.
An important contribution made by the author of a book is a structure – a model of some sort – that organizes many ideas. A book generated by a small group of authors (not authors writing different chapters) requires many decisions about what goes where and this requires some guiding principles – translate this as a structure. One important insight from cognitive psychology is that the structure of our stored information adds learning and thinking advantages that extend beyond the quantity of stuff that has been stored. We do all form our own personal structures, but having something to use as a starting point provides a great advantage. There is a reason college professors use a textbook in introductory classes and primary source resources in graduate classes. Putting together your own structure will eventually be necessary, but generating the big picture when starting from scratch overwhelms most learners.
I started thinking about this perspective as I struggle to organize the various topics I have in my head but want to see appear on my computer screen. Alternate structures are typically possible, but for reasons of efficiency you have to commit to a particular way of communicating your ideas. For example, my writing about technology integration differentiates tactics for communicating from tactics for presenting. Ignore your own meanings for these terms for a moment and translate this as learning from interacting and learning from generating a product to inform an imagined audience. The first is a two-direction experience and the second is not. Both processes offer benefits in shaping the understanding of the learner who interacts or presents.
Given this distinction, how would you offer specific examples? Would you position Twitter within the section on communication? Would you position full-length blogs in the section on presentation? Practice is complex. One might suggest that a blog post offers an initial position and is the starting point for interaction by way of responses/comments. One might take this position, but, of course, there are actually very few responses to nearly all blog posts and this would be one of those hypothetical benefits that is seldom realized. My decision was that it is best to explain things in terms of what is most likely to happen.
Consider the structure I have just generated – I have identified major tactics that can be argued to generate important cognitive activities, I have identified tools specific to each tactic, and I have explained what behavior tends to look like in practice. This is a structure. You might generate a very different structure taking these elements in different directions, but that would also be interesting because our different structures could then be contrasted against actual descriptive data.
I am obviously a fan of writing and reading the long form.