One thing I’m curious about - does paper matter more to people who grew up learning on it? From what I’ve seen, younger students (25 and under) prefer digital for reading and note-taking, but only if laptops were part of their school experience. No hard data, just an observation.
So, in other words - do we use paper because it’s just what we’re used to, or is there a real cognitive benefit to physically taking notes, reading a paper book, and drawing by hand?
Yes, I think these are interesting thoughts and questions! There is definitely a lot about how used to and comfortable with the technology people are (in all of our work we add a phase of familiarisation with the technology to try and reduce these effects, but of course it cannot compensate for years of using the technology...)
Regarding the paper vs digital, I have not looked much into this myself, so this is just some food for thoughts (or brain dump rather :D):
- The different mediums support different kinds of interaction (i.e. they enable different affordances). No matter how much Miro polishes their UX, moving physical post-its around is just more practical and less cumbersome. So I think technology should not be so much about recreating physical experiences digitally, but think more about what the medium can bring. For example, digital note taking is also great because it enables search features, including multimedia content, etc, which is not possible on paper.
- Interestingly, some studies comparing physical vs digital paper also mentioned that, because of the medium, people have different expectations, and behave differently. For example, for the same text, people will tend to read at a slower pace if it's on paper, as opposed to screen, because we are used to fast paced content on screen.
I loved the point about learning and the connection with how we learn as children. I think the education system in most countries has been so focused on having students regurgitate content and not enough on teaching people how to figure it out.
I wonder whether this is an area where AI can help. In your SQL example, I wonder how your experiences would differ if you tried with an LLM as an assistant... my own experience learning new programming languages has been completely different to when I tried in previous years.
Absolutely. In the example of SQL I would never learn it again the way that I used to, not only because LLM's can teach you but also because you don't need to know SQL as deep anymore as we used to because AI is so good at analyzing it and adjusting it (for most use cases in a PM's life)
Yeah, the only thing I've personally found is that I still like knowing how to verify its logic. I've seen it design some very unnecessarily complex queries and make mistakes that someone who doesn't know SQL may not realise.
I guess that will become less of an issue in the longer term, though, as the models improve.
Thanks, Leah and Julia. Loved this episode!!!
One thing I’m curious about - does paper matter more to people who grew up learning on it? From what I’ve seen, younger students (25 and under) prefer digital for reading and note-taking, but only if laptops were part of their school experience. No hard data, just an observation.
So, in other words - do we use paper because it’s just what we’re used to, or is there a real cognitive benefit to physically taking notes, reading a paper book, and drawing by hand?
That's such a great question, I'll forward it to Julia!
Julia here :)
Yes, I think these are interesting thoughts and questions! There is definitely a lot about how used to and comfortable with the technology people are (in all of our work we add a phase of familiarisation with the technology to try and reduce these effects, but of course it cannot compensate for years of using the technology...)
Regarding the paper vs digital, I have not looked much into this myself, so this is just some food for thoughts (or brain dump rather :D):
- The different mediums support different kinds of interaction (i.e. they enable different affordances). No matter how much Miro polishes their UX, moving physical post-its around is just more practical and less cumbersome. So I think technology should not be so much about recreating physical experiences digitally, but think more about what the medium can bring. For example, digital note taking is also great because it enables search features, including multimedia content, etc, which is not possible on paper.
- Interestingly, some studies comparing physical vs digital paper also mentioned that, because of the medium, people have different expectations, and behave differently. For example, for the same text, people will tend to read at a slower pace if it's on paper, as opposed to screen, because we are used to fast paced content on screen.
Not sure if that helps, but fun to think about :)
~20 mins:
I loved the point about learning and the connection with how we learn as children. I think the education system in most countries has been so focused on having students regurgitate content and not enough on teaching people how to figure it out.
I wonder whether this is an area where AI can help. In your SQL example, I wonder how your experiences would differ if you tried with an LLM as an assistant... my own experience learning new programming languages has been completely different to when I tried in previous years.
Absolutely. In the example of SQL I would never learn it again the way that I used to, not only because LLM's can teach you but also because you don't need to know SQL as deep anymore as we used to because AI is so good at analyzing it and adjusting it (for most use cases in a PM's life)
Yeah, the only thing I've personally found is that I still like knowing how to verify its logic. I've seen it design some very unnecessarily complex queries and make mistakes that someone who doesn't know SQL may not realise.
I guess that will become less of an issue in the longer term, though, as the models improve.