Cramming 12 years of learning into 6 mad, wonderful weeks: My experience in the Learning in Depth summer cohort.
This summer I joined a Learning in Depth program run by Brandon Hendrickson of The Lost Tools of Learning blog and Science is Weird and Alessandro Gelmi, an Egan-education scholar and PhD candidate at the University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy. Learning in Depth (LiD) is the brainchild of Kieran Egan, a program in which students are randomly assigned a topic in early primary school. Students then study and develop a portfolio on this topic for up to the next 12 years.
It was almost a year exactly after I read an Astral Codex Ten book review of Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind and began down the rabbit hole that led me to this summer cohort. I had read a few of Egan’s books and many of Brandon’s blog posts and tried out some techniques, but the LiD summer cohort would be my first chance to really engage with Imaginative Education firsthand. To make matters a little more complicated, I would be doing the cohort while traveling with from Hong Kong to my hometown in Ohio and then also driving with my extended family to visit Canada.
To kick off the programme, we were each assigned a topic from a huge list:
Some people got topics that sounded interesting, like caves, mines and tunnels or sacred buildings, but I got coral. It wasn’t something I knew much about and, if I’m honest, I was a little disappointed.
The Course
The course would be held over 6 weeks and structured around quests issued at the beginning of each week. The quests were due on Fridays with smaller tasks (‘pokes’) each weekday building toward the completion of their quest. The weekly quests were organized based on Egan’s stages of understanding (e.g. somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic and ironic), though the order was remixed. The pokes and quests all centered around Egan’s cognitive tools, applying these ideas to our topic.
I started with a search on Wikipedia and found that I actually had no idea what coral even was. It wasn’t even even that I was wrong so much as that I’d not even properly considered the question. I had thought coral was either something like kelp or perhaps like barnacles (not far off), or maybe those finger-like or swiss-cheese-looking rock formations you find in aquariums. The real answer is that coral are tiny sea animals known as polyps. They live in colonies of millions genetically identical clones and coral reefs are formed from their secretions. That revelation was just the beginning.
Our first weekly quest was to write a parody song about our topic, showing off something that we had learned about it. The first Monday poke was to find some weird and interesting Guinness-style world records on coral. I looked up a bunch of world records on coral and found out that some coral colonies can live for thousands of years, making them among the oldest living animals in the world. Some other pokes early in the process related to finding proverbs and jokes about coral while still another had us trace etymologies for our topics.
Individually any of these tasks might seem esoteric at best, a wasteful exercise triviality at worst, but the benefits emerge when considering the additive nature of these wildly different perspectives on the the topic. If you’ll allow biological metaphor - every new poke and quest teases the topic out further to reveal more surface area, more knowledge receptors for ideas and understanding to bond with.³
By the end of the first week I had a song called Photosynthesize, sung to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. It looked like this:
At first a planula, then I calcified
Budding clonal buddies to live by my side
And after spending nights
Thinking how to grow and spawn
I got algae
And I learned how to get along
I doubt I’ll be winning any Grammys, but I feel proud of it. The programme continued for the next five weeks across airplane journeys, road trips and Airbnbs, from Toronto to Hong Kong. One week we looked at art and what it might be like to physically embody our topics. Another week we became entrepreneurs. One of my favorite challenges was using thematic binaries to create a religion based on coral, complete with rituals, sayings and beliefs.
It was a wild month or so, at times rather overwhelming. I didn’t finish all the pokes or quests on time, but I was able to go back and complete most of the ones I found interesting. Luckily, I didn’t feel a lot of external pressure to perform. There wasn’t a grade for our LiD performance, so my motivation came primarily from wanting to wring as much knowledge out of the course as I could.
Some of the most difficult tasks, however, ended up being the most enlightening as the effort to wrangle a particularly incompatible concept ended up highlighting something new. For example, at one point I was struggling to see how coral or reefs could be exploited for profit without further depleting these imperiled resources. This led me to thinking about how reefs were more like common goods rather than private resources. I researched the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund and its management of Norway’s oil wealth. I was then able to draw comparisons between the Coral Triangle Initiative and Norway’s resource management and to think about the factors that make coral reef conservation similar to and different from other natural resources.
Throughout the course, most of our communication was via the Substack comments section after each post. It was really gratifying to see the other students’ work and all of their fresh and exciting perspectives both on their topics and on common tasks. By the end we had developed quite a bit of fellow-feeling. Brandon and Alessandro popped in throughout, giving comments, questions and examples using their own topics.
Every Monday Alessandro hosted an hour-long zoom session in which students could talk about how things were going. We also played a little game of trickery about our topics (two truths and a lie). Alessandro shared some coffee recipes. I’m not sure how well-attended these meetings were, as I was only able to join a couple of times but I found it really charming to be able to speak with Alessandro and some of the other cohort members face to face.
The Final Product
By the end of the course we were tasked with completing a magnum opus, an interactive lesson designed to share a revelation wrapped in a riddle. There was a lot of freedom to design what we wanted (including format of presentation), but the course offered a framework based upon Brandon’s own lesson design practices at Science is Weird. The lessons employ Egan’s cognitive tools like binaries, mysteries, riddles and metaphors.
I have years of experience in lesson design but I’d never created anything using Egan’s frameworks. I was surprised how beautifully it came together. This was a result of good design - the pokes and quests had helped me to internalize the cognitive tools so that when it came time to reproduce them everything flowed very naturally. We’d spent weeks coming up with revelation after revelation so in the end I had so many ideas I had to cut back on the material.
You can find my final task below. If you are interested in joining the Learning in Depth cohort yourself, this might represent a spoiler, so be forewarned:
Learning in Depth Summer Cohort - Final Task Coral
I went in feeling nothing, but now I love Big Brother coral.
Researching Coral
You may wonder how we were able to find all of this information. Throughout the course, many of the pokes and quests were constructed around researching using AI large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Claude. Before LiD, I’d used AI image generation for some teaching-related tasks. I’d messed around a little, but found the AIs overly wordy and less reliable than simple Google search. How could these random sentence-completion algorithms help Egan education, a program built around human cognitive tools?
It turns out that the AI enabled all sorts of activities that would have been somewhere between painfully slow and impossible without computer assistance. I realize now that there are many domains where are LLMs outperform all sorts of traditional resources. AIs do especially well for:
very specific questions, especially the kinds of questions for which it is difficult to locate answers in typical reference materials like Google search or Wikipedia
ex. I want to know about the type of coral that would be scariest to small fish - give me several options and explain your reasoning
answers that require collating information from a large number of (potentially opaque) sources
ex. give me a list of successful entrepreneurs and businesses that made money because of coral or coral reefs
refining / expanding on information
ex. Can you give a list similar to the previous list but focus more on people/organizations with a humanitarian impact? I’m especially interested in pioneers of their various fields.
tell me more - Ever found the article too short? This won’t work ad infinitum but better than you might expect.
ex. Walk me through the
creative tasks - compose a poem, write a story, etc.
ex. use the voice of Edgar Allen Poe to write a rhyming poem about the loss of coral reefs
Now I’m sure some of you may wonder how you know whether anything the AI says is true. It certainly isn’t perfect. Hallucinations (a polite euphemism for made-up information) are a well-known problem with ChatGPT and other LLMs. First, you can cross reference the information: LiD also had us going to libraries, reading scholarly articles, even learning how to use Wikipedia like a boss. Second, AI inaccuracies weren’t pervasive and certainly outweighed by the benefit of having an additional source. By the end of the program I felt that I had dramatically enhanced my general research skills. Becoming more comfortable and more skilled with AI was a big part of that improvement, especially learning the relative benefits and limitations of the medium.
Who should (and shouldn’t) do LiD? And criticisms
Not everything about the course worked perfectly. It was incredibly condensed. We received pokes every weekday but many took up to an hour to complete (some even longer). At one point I found some great books on coral at a library but there wasn’t enough time for me to be able to read and digest them before the course finished. I think that the sheer amount of content and the time constraints wore down some of the other students in the cohort. Some of the later tasks were quite involved and would have been better if broken down into several sub-steps. The quest about entering a scholarly fight was difficult to narrow down because many of my main areas of interest didn’t match with areas of open scholarly debate.
I know that Brandon and Alessandro heard students’ criticisms and have made efforts to alleviate their concerns in future cohorts. The next iteration of this course will run for 30 weeks rather than six, breaking some of the more challenging tasks into multiple parts. They hired a couple of mentors (including me!) to answer questions, provide guidance and help students work through any difficulties they may face.
That said, if you don’t have any time this probably isn’t the course for you. I would think 20-30 minutes a day for several (3-4) days a week is about the right time commitment. There are two pokes a week and every 5th week there will be ‘quest’, so there should be plenty of time to do the challenges.
Also, I highly recommend being the type of person who can forgive yourself if you don’t finish something. Sometimes it’s better to just skip ahead to the next challenge. There’s no award or grade for completing this, so a degree of self-motivation would also be beneficial.
This LiD course isn’t aimed at younger kids. I do think parents could help lower primary students do some of the tasks, but they’d miss out on a lot. I would think middle school is reasonable starting point - possibly a couple years earlier for very advanced and motivated kids.
Hopefully I haven’t scared off too many people.
I think this version of LiD is ideal if you are interested in becoming a better teacher. This is true for both schoolteachers and home-schooling parents. It provides an excellent introduction to Egan’s Imaginative Education and his cognitive tools. Learning in Depth was conceived by Egan as a way of bringing Imaginative Education ideas into the classroom. This course should help you to make better lessons. I think that Brandon’s lesson design ideas are a real breakthrough because they are reliably engaging, approachable and flexible enough to accommodate a huge variety of topics.
You also could benefit from this course if you are interested in tackling new topics as a learner, particularly if want to develop a deep appreciation of the subject. Learning in Depth as originally promulgated by Egan takes a long time, but the beauty of this specific course is that it *only* lasts 30 weeks. Once you have these techniques in hand you could apply them to learning almost anything. If you are (or want to become) the kind of person who gets a fiery passion for learning, who wants to see the hidden connections between and behind everything - then I think LiD could be for you.
There is a new online LiD course starting very soon, and hopefully regular courses in future. I am going to be a mentor for the upcoming cohort, so I am not a disinterested party. You can read about the next course here:
https://www.scienceisweird.com/lid
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