Learning Guide · A working answer to the small screen
The worry is fair. Academic material is denser than a TED talk: a full attention diagram, a scanned line of verse, a seven step argument, a detailed artefact. Shrink any of them to a phone and they break.
So do not shrink them. On a large screen density is shown all at once, in space. On a phone the same density is delivered as a guided sequence, over time.
The move is the same in every case: progressive disclosure, focus and context, pan and zoom. What a big screen hands you to scan, the phone walks you through. Handled this way it is not a lesser version. It is often the better teaching, because it directs attention rather than dumping it.
Six specimens on the right, each built on one of the hard content types from the note: an attention mechanism, a metrical scansion, a philosophical argument, a historical artefact, an equation you can scrub, and a lesson taught by contrast. Open them on a phone.
Field Guide for Learning Guide · demonstration build
The small screen problem
Everything below is real and interactive. Each one takes something that only seems to need a big screen and teaches it on this one instead.
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SPECIMEN I
The mobile move: progressive disclosure. One idea per screen, built over time.
STEP 1 / 5
Specimen II
A large screen shows every layer at once. A phone delivers the same density as a guided sequence: one focal line, marks on tap, layers on a switch, a swipe to the next.
The whole ode, eight lines
Two lines fill a phone. For a page of Homer you would open a map like this to move about, then hand off to a large screen to see every layer laid out in space.
SPECIMEN III
The mobile move: on a wide screen the whole map shows at once. Here it builds one step at a time.
But this is no reason for denying that mental pleasure and pain may be much greater than physical pleasure and pain. For in the case of the body, all we can feel is what is actually now present. With the mind, both the past and future can affect us. To be sure, when we feel physical pain, we experience equal mental pain; but the pain can be hugely increased if we believe it is some eternal and infinite evil that is in store for us. The same point applies to pleasure: it is all the greater if we fear no such evil. Therefore the greatest mental pleasure or pain has more influence on our happiness than does physical pleasure or pain of equal duration.
Seven steps fit one column, so the map stays still. A much longer argument would let you zoom out to this overview and back.
Specimen IV
The mobile move: one artefact at a time, a curator's eye moving you to each telling detail.
Drag to explore, double tap to zoom
Detail
Specimen artefact, drawn for demonstration. After the portolan chart tradition, circa 1561. On a large screen you would take this in whole; here you move from detail to detail.
An honest note. Roughly half of a typical artefact set reads well this way on a phone. The densest few, a full manuscript page for instance, are better met big, so this viewer can hand those off to a large screen rather than shrink them.
Specimen V
The mobile move: the equation built one term at a time, and a graph you scrub.
The question
How does a population grow when food and space are limited?
It cannot climb for ever. Calculus lets us write the brake straight into the growth, so the rule and its limit sit in one line.
Build it, one part at a time
The solution, plotted live
The full working
Separate the variables, integrate, and the rule becomes a closed form for P at any time t. That line is very wide, so it stays whole and scrolls sideways rather than being crushed.
Turn your phone sideways for the whole line at once.
The mobile move: two states you slide between, and a change you can play.
This is not a claim that everything belongs on a phone. The densest few exhibits, a full manuscript page, a wide matrix, a whole page of Homer under three layers of annotation, are better on a larger screen, and the product should hand off to one when they appear.
The point is narrower and it holds: the phone is not only a place to discover a course. With the right interaction it is a real teaching surface, even for university level material. Most of the content works here. The densest few move to a larger screen.
Best viewed on a phone, or in the frame to the left.