Learning online
I study this page in order to make some comments on web links and pedagogy.
For context I took a course with good grades which taught the use of Lagrangian methods.
I have used Hamiltonians successfully.
Yet I feel that I do not understand Lagrangian mechanics.
Wikipedia generally comes closer as a source where you can learn about something than any other site, with occasional exceptions for specialized sites.
In a web article technical terms are often used.
Some of the audience will not know the meanings of these terms.
It is common practice and good practice to include a link to an authoritative description of the term with enough information to proceed with the current page.
In the case of Wikipedia these links are frequently to a Wikipedia article.
The common use of such links often fails in one of two ways:
- The linked article demands even more prerequisite than the current article.
- The student does not know which concepts from the linked article are necessary for the current article.
An article may need passing reference to the notion of mathematical group.
The need may require only the leanest understanding of a group.
The article on groups may have category theory as a prerequisite.
(Wikipedia does not.)
Guidance is usually missing as to how much you need to know before you return to the referring page.
Occasionally is it possible to refer to a particular subsection of a page with implicit or explicit instructions that you need to understand that one ‘sub-notion’.
The student may discover prerequisites in the referred page as defined in that page.
There is a vague notion of ‘parasitic’ that relates these ideas.
Proposals
Establish some sort of clue easily accessible to the reader about the nature of this link—perhaps link color.