In the quest to improve thought and developing meaningful skills for young learners, I am glad their are people like Bret Victor. He has been thinking deep thoughts about how to create more active readers: readers that are engaged with the material, that question hypotheses and model alternatives. And he’s developed some interesting prototypes of his concepts.
The one I like best he calls “Reactive Documents.” Reactive documents would have a spreadsheet of data behind the text document, that would let users change some of the parameters to see the impact. In the case of this example, users can change the amount of the proposed tax, or the type of taxed population (and, therefore, the size of the taxed population), and several other factors to assess the advisability of this bill. (Victor cautions that the data not real.) Reactive Documents have evolved into Tangle, a downable API.
For those of us who develop educational resources and who are interested in helping develop future generations of creative, critical thinkers, this type of approach is an interesting way to make text more interactive.