Open genericallyloud opened 8 years ago
jschwarzwalder
commented
8 years ago How will you determine how much "time something takes. Watching Videos could be as straightforward as the running time, but if you are trying to learn often you pause videos and rewind or code along.
jschwarzwalder
commented
8 years ago If a step takes less than 1 hour than a trail should theoretically either be something you could complete in 7-10 hours. Something you could complete in a week if you dedicated a hour a night. or could complete in one weekend.
jschwarzwalder
commented
8 years ago Who owns a trail?
Will there be admins that help edit or would encourage people to post trails that are in progress
Will we have a stub like feature that welcomes other users edits on a trail while it's in progress
Main Concept
A trail is a guided experience through a set of steps. It should not be too long, like "taking you from zero to web developer", probably no longer than a college course (even that's really probably stretching it). Smaller trails would also make sense, as not all topics require that much effort.
Unlike steps, which I envision as being a little bit more of a group effort, with several people allowed to supply suggestions for resources, etc., I picture a trail more like a singular vision, an opinionated path through an ordered set of steps, with tight control all the way down to recommended resources for a step as well as trail specific notes and descriptions for guiding a user through the steps to the end.
Trail Blazers
Most people will be hiking existing trails, but especially during the bootstrapping period, and even after, there will always be people making new trails. The world of tech is constantly changing, and while some trails will stay popular for a long time without much need for change, others will pop up or fork from existing trails to keep up with what people are learning, and wanting to learn.
I think that a trail should be able to be something that evolves organically, and so to be the most useful, it will likely be used as a tool for the trail blazer him/herself, starting lean and leaving room for details as they work through it themselves. I this way, it should probably be easy to work with, drawing inspiration from Trello or Asana, creating a list of steps largely in bulk in a sort of planning phase. There should probably be some mechanism to identify duplicate steps and make suggestions so that steps aren't duplicated unnecessarily. As the trail blazer builds up the trail, possibly going through the work themselves, they can rearrange, add steps, take notes, and recommend resources. These will all be made available in such a way that a hiker following them later could see them.
Hiking a trails
A hiker, on the other hand, would not actually need to edit the trails at all. They will see the steps that were set up for the trail in order, with any additional notes and recommended resources for steps as they go through it. While they're doing it, they can take their own notes and make their own recommendations for resources, but I'll cover that in another issue.
Open Questions
What exactly is the right size for a trail, and how much overlap is really appropriate. For example, a trail could possibly as small as "learning jQuery" and then have steps for the different aspects like selectors, chaining, events, plugins, etc. Meanwhile, there could be a trail for JavaScript. There is overlap, but the JavaScript trail would mostly be useful for specifically the language and not things like the DOM or libraries like jQuery. Not only that, but it seems like the kind of thing that could be broken down into 3 trails - beginner, intermediary, and advanced JavaScript. The same is probably true about all languages.
I'm wondering if maybe the right size is something like, between 10 and 60 hours of work? Anything smaller is too small, and anything larger is too big. I would expect somewhere between 4 and 20 steps. That raises the question of how big is a step. I think a step is probably equivalent to a chapter of a book or a section of an online course. It should be something that could probably be done in one sitting - about 30 mins to 2 hours.