My Standing Desk is Now My Station

Taking a seat at a my desk is a commitment to a stay for a while. I am disposed to relaxation. I am vulnerable. Once here, my body will be constrained, my reach, limited, and departure will involve some effort. 

Approaching my station leaves me freer to move about, and invites me to stay only as long as the immediate task is at hand. My posture is erect, alert, and commanding. Like the pilot at the wheel of his ship, or the hunter surveying the valley below, I am disposed to action.

Station is an old word--at least 600 years old in English and French. It derives from the latin verb status, to stand, which is in turn, the root of "state". It has grown metaphorically to embrace notions of social position (my station in life) , workplace (workstation) , military (position guarded by armed men), communications (radio and television stations)  and scientific spaces, to name a few.

A station is where I re-fuel, pick up my mail, and get my news. I like the fact that it encompasses more than a piece for furniture; it is the action I perform here, as well as a deliberate fixing of the space around the floor, desk and shelves that make it up.

Definition of STATION

1

a : the place or position in which something or someone stands or is assigned to stand or remainb : any of the places in a manufacturing operation at which one part of the work is donec : equipment used usually by one person for performing a particular job

2

: the act or manner of standing : posture

3

: a stopping place: asa (1) : a regular stopping place in a transportation route station

> (2) : the building connected with such a stopping place : depot 3b : one of the stations of the cross

4

a : a post or sphere of duty or occupationb : a stock farm or ranch especially of Australia or New Zealand

5

: standing, rank station

>

6

: a place for specialized observation and study of scientific phenomena station

> station>

7

: a place established to provide a public service: asa (1) : fire station (2) : police stationb : a branch post office

8

: gas station

9

a : a complete assemblage of radio or television equipment for transmitting or receivingb : the place in which such a station is located

 See station defined for English-language learners »

See station defined for kids »

Examples of STATION

1. They drove him to the bus station.
2. The waiters were at their stations in the dining room.
3. The sailors were ordered to man their battle stations.
4. He had married above his station.
5. They were aware of her station in life.

Origin of STATION

Middle English stacioun, from Anglo-French estation, statiun, from Latin station-, statio, from stare to stand — more at stand

First Known Use: 14th century

More on classic expository writing(and oral presentation)

"In the scene of classic joint attention, there is something directly perceptible.  In contrast, the network of ideas we want to present may not be directly perceptible.  The human mind—uniquely among species—is routinely skillful at blending things that don’t naturally go together.  In the complex network, the subject may be completely imperceptible. But in the blend, we treat the subject as if it is something directly perceptible. The result is that we can talk about anything at all as if it is directly perceptible: someone’s disappointment or sense of the absurd, a city’s magnificence or a country’s intransigence, a neighborhood’s poverty or a wine’s elegance—all these invisible things and an endless list of others are treated as if they were directly perceptible.

Nowhere in this quote is the word metaphor, but this is what's at play.

The "network of ideas" is what Shimon Edelman would call a "cloud" of thoughts, perceived not as distinct, but present in potential, waiting to be drawn out into actual utterance. 

The "Secret" of Good Exposition?

Steven Pinker puts us on to a new book that sounds maybe even more interesting than Strunk and White, and perhaps even science-based. It is described here (link)

Francis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner, authors of Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition) have written A Natural Way To Write, an op-ed which explores the concept of “teaching writing” and examines the process of writing itself.

"There is, however, a species-wide, ancient behavior underlying writing.  Cognitive scientists call it joint attention, and we think it is the most sensible and practical place to begin learning to write.  In joint attention, two or more people are attending to something, they know they are all attending to it, they know that they are all engaging with each other by attending to it, and they know that they all know all of that.  This is home turf for the cognitively modern human mind, which all human beings have had for approximately the past fifty thousand years.  More specifically, the cognitive core of writing is “classic joint attention,” in which there are just two people, paying attention to something that is directly perceptible. We never feel any difficulty when we are pointing out something directly perceptible to somebody next to us.  We are built for this.  We feel at home doing it because the scene of classic joint attention is intelligible by itself.  We expect our companion to be able to perceive what we are presenting once it is pointed out.

In order to talk, we blend a complicated mental network, one that often ranges far from home, with a familiar scene—like classic joint attention—so that the foreign network has a domestic anchor.  If we make such a blend, and speak from it, our speech becomes intelligible, consistent, coherent, and familiar, even though the speaker is dealing with a diffuse, complex, foreign network of ideas and relationships.  The complex network is assimilated to a simple scene through blending.

Consider, as an example of classic style, the following passage from La Rochefoucauld:

Madame de Chevreuse had sparkling intelligence, ambition, and beauty in plenty; she was flirtatious, lively, bold, enterprising; she used all her charms to push her projects to success, and she almost always brought disaster to those she encountered on her way...

"In the scene of classic joint attention, there is something directly perceptible.  In contrast, the network of ideas we want to present may not be directly perceptible.  The human mind—uniquely among species—is routinely skillful at blending things that don’t naturally go together.  In the complex network, the subject may be completely imperceptible. But in the blend, we treat the subject as if it is something directly perceptible. The result is that we can talk about anything at all as if it is directly perceptible: someone’s disappointment or sense of the absurd, a city’s magnificence or a country’s intransigence, a neighborhood’s poverty or a wine’s elegance—all these invisible things and an endless list of others are treated as if they were directly perceptible.

In the mental network of ideas and thought supporting your presentation, the audience may be large and psychologically disposed in a variety of ways. But in classic joint attention, we are speaking to just one other person collusively. So in the blend, we treat the audience like a competent individual who colludes with us to recognize what we are pointing out. In the actual network, the purpose can be anything, or multiple, and conflicting. But in classic joint attention, the purpose is always simply disinterested presentation. So, in the blend, purposes in the network are compressed to presentation....

"There are only two steps to learning to talk this way: (1) think of a scene of classic joint attention; (2) blend it with whatever mental network of thoughts and relationships you confront, and speak from the blend."

So, to write good exposition, one must repair to the classic human experience that pre-exists literacy (a mere 2 or 3 thousand years, and perhaps even orality (50 thousand years), where I point to something and I know you see it too. One must stand in relation to the matter as one would if it were out there in front of us both, like a fish on the beach, or a skewered piece of meat on a stick, something self-evident, real and mutually tangible to two or more people. How do you do this when the "matter" is only in your mind?


One practical thought is that to me, the clearest exposition occurs when the speaker is attending to an object you can see as well (a whiteboard/chalk talk, or a cooking show). When you only have text, or an audio presentation, the ability of the presenter to summon up the referred object--be it  a mental model, or a vivid description is the operative factor.


Lately, I've been studying metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, then Sullivan and Rees) and will soon reinvestigate "story", both by re-reading some of the analytic work and a new book The Story-telling Animal by Gottschall. I'm going to pursue the connections among these three elements (metaphor, shared attention and story) and see what light it can shed on presentations and learning.

Perhaps a book worth reading.

Reading Lakoff and Johnson, "Metaphors we Live By"

This book (originally published in 1980) has re-ignited my interest in philosophy, and given me hope that there are useful answers to be found to some of the things in life that most confound us--namely our habitual and unreflected habits of thought.

They have turned me around on something I've said for years; that metaphor is the loom of language.

It may well be, but Lakoff and Johnson and the Neural Theory of Language (NTL)are saying that metaphor precedes language, and that cognition itself is inherently metaphorical. Metaphors may turn up in literary language as consciously elaborated figures ( all of Shakespeare for instance) but these guys show us that metaphors (ontological and orientational) lie immediately below the surface of our plainest language. Metaphor is not just a game of words--it is what the brain does, arching relentlessly from the more concrete experiences to the less concrete. Perhaps, from this perspective, metaphor appears as an artifact of language only because it has been wired in to the human brain from the beginning.

They show that a metaphor can be more than apt, it can be generative. As evidence, they offer a novel structural metaphor, LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART, then systematically mine it for the new insights and meanings the wrought metaphor can deliver. I really appreciate their making an effort to roll out the theory for a non-technical reader.


It strikes me, as a practical matter, that an effort to de-construct our everyday thinking about such matters as WORK, LOVE, and LIFE could reveal the inherent masking and revealing such implicit metaphorical concepts accomplish. On a very mundane level, say we dredge up with something like,  SALES IS WAR. A lot of what people commonly think and feel about "sales" could be explained by bringing this particular figure to the surface. We will find apt-ness to be sure. A lot of sales feels like combat, a zero-sum game where I win and you lose. We might also see what the metaphor masks, that sales is in many ways a collaborative and complimentary experience, one that can be creative and mutually beneficial transaction in a way that war could never be. 


Going a bit further, perhaps a disciplined exegesis of the text of our lives could reveal the traps and opportunities to be realized by swapping old, unstudied metaphors for new ones that make us happer and more successful. We'd start with the casual language we use, then drill down to the conceptual strata below.


Not a new idea, I'm sure. Perhaps this is what cognitive therapies (the insane sentence, etc.) do. What's new here, and potentially useful to the practioner is the deeply analytical approach and the tie to insights from classic philosophy and contemporary linguistics.  



Here, I'll quote extensively from Peter Norvig, I belive a colleague at UC Berkeley:



"Lakoff and Johnson's ``Metaphors We Live By'' (henceforth ``MWLB'') is an important contribution to the study of metaphor that presents a number of controversial points. Investigating these points provides a good backdrop for presenting the state-of-the-art of metaphor in AI work.
First of all, ``Metaphors We Live By'' is an accessible and thought-provoking source of examples demonstrating the range of metaphor in everyday language and thought. This is not a technical book; it is aimed at a general audience. There is very little terminology, nary a greek letter, and no lists of `starred' ungrammatical sentences. Instead, the arguments are stated simply, and are illustrated by examples which are usually phrases one has heard, or at least could imagine someone actually saying.
The examples show that metaphor is not just a rhetorical device of poets. It is metaphor to speak of arguments in terms of battles, as in ``I demolished his argument'' or ``his claims are indefensible.'' It is metaphor to use spatial prepositions to describe non-spatial relationships, as with ``Harry is in love'' or ``Harry is in the Elks'' or ``Harry is in trouble.'' It is metaphor to personify, as when we say ``Cancer finally caught up with him.''


After demonstrating the pervasiveness of metaphor, the second contribution of Lakoff and Johnson is in showing a small number of highly productive metaphor schemata that underly much of language understanding. As an example, one particularly pervasive and productive metaphor is Michael Reddy's conduit metaphor, which underlies the understanding of communication. The conduit metaphor has three constituent metaphors: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS, and COMMUNICATING IS SENDING. The metaphor is expressed in phrases like ``it's hard to get that idea across,'' ``it's difficult to put my ideas into words,'' or ``his words carry little meaning.'' Another example of a systematic metaphor schema is MORE IS UP, which leads to expressions like ``the deficit is soaring'' or ``his income fell.'' Such schemata are motivated, but not predicted. It is easy to see why MORE IS UP is a better metaphor than MORE IS DOWN, but one still has to learn which of the many reasonable metaphors are actually used within a culture. Once the metaphor schema is learned, it is easy to generate new instances of it. Lakoff and Johnson present about fifty basic metaphor schemata, with many examples of each.
To Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are not just matters of language, but are used extensively in reasoning and understanding. Typically, an abstract domain is understood metaphorically in terms of a more concrete domain. To a large degree, they argue, the human conceptual system is metaphorical. This is very different from the classical model of metaphor, which claims that metaphors are artifacts of language use, and have nothing to do with meaning or understanding. It is also very different from most AI models of knowledge representation and language understanding.
The classical theory of metaphor also says that metaphors arise from objective similarity. Thus, we can speak of `digesting an idea' because the mental action of attending to the expression of an idea, reasoning about it, and coming to understand it is objectively similar to the physical action of ingesting food, breaking it into nutrients, and absorbing them into the system. Lakoff and Johnson argue against the idea of a priori objective similarity. They claim metaphors do not just point out similarities that are objectively true; they create the similarities. 


The notion of digesting an idea is coherent only within the context of other metaphors, such as IDEAS ARE OBJECTS and THE MIND IS A CONTAINER. These basic metaphors both create similarities of their own and allow for the creation of further similarities in the IDEAS ARE FOOD metaphor. The second half of MWLB is not really about metaphors at all; it is a comparison of the traditional objectivist theory of semantics with a new view they call the experientialist theory of meaning."



The work leads to a deeper study of the embodiment of the mind, and another book by the same authors. I'm lifting the following (technical) pasages from John F. Sowa's review in Computational Linguistics, vol. 25, no. 4, December 1999.

"George Lakoff and Mark Johnson begin with three sentences that summarize and characterize their book:

The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Part I supports these sentences with findings from cognitive science "that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains" and "that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real." The third sentence is a summary of their earlier work on metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), which in Part II of this book they extend to a more detailed analysis of the metaphors underlying basic philosophical issues, such as time, events and causes, mind, self, and morality. Part III applies that analysis to the metaphors tacitly assumed by philosophers ranging from the Presocratics to Noam Chomsky. Part IV presents arguments for "empirically responsible philosophy" and its potential for understanding "who we are, how we experience our world, and how we ought to live." Finally, the appendix summarizes research inspired by this philosophy that has produced computational simulations of certain aspects of embodied minds.
Given such a broad scope, the authors have not been able to cover all the topics with equal success. Instead of challenging all of western philosophy, they should have concentrated on their major opponent, Noam Chomsky and his philosophy of language. Lakoff began his career in linguistics as a student and later a teacher of Chomsky's version of transformational grammar. But in the late 1960s, he joined with other former students to promote generative semantics as an alternative to Chomsky's generative syntax. The result was a series of "linguistic wars," whose history has been retold by various participants over the past twenty years.




...


By showing the importance of the human motor and perceptual mechanisms for language understanding, these studies give concrete meaning to the catchphrase embodied mind. The "neural" metaphor, however, is not entirely justified, since the computational mechanisms that support these systems are mostly classical. 


Whereas the authors devote 44 pages to Chomsky, they cover all of "Anglo-American analytic philosophy" in 29 pages, while lumping together Frege, Russell, Carnap and the Vienna Circle, Quine, Goodman, Davidson, Putnam, Kripke, Montague, and Lewis. In the same chapter, they continue with ordinary language philosophy (Strawson, Austin, and the later Wittgenstein), which they consider to be based on the same metaphors. Yet these philosophers have expressed widely divergent views on the embodiment of mind, the nature of language, and Chomsky's theory of autonomous syntax. By drawing finer distinctions, the authors might have claimed some of them as potential allies against Chomsky's position.
For the classical philosophers, the authors use their terminology of metaphors and folk theories to make a rather conventional commentary seem novel. Plato, they claim, "had the metaphor Essences As Ideas, Aristotle has the converse metaphor, Ideas Are Essences." No philosopher who hopes to be "empirically responsible" should make such statements without much deeper analysis of how those metaphors relate to the words that Plato and Aristotle actually used.


...


In summary, this book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debates about the roles of syntax, semantics, and world knowledge in language understanding and their dependency on the physical world and the human mechanisms for perceiving, interpreting, and interacting with the world. Its major weakness is its tendency to exclude other perspectives, such as Aristotle's, which can accommodate both formal logic and a theory of embodied mind. Although the authors frequently use the word neural, none of their discussion depends on the actual structure or method of operation of a neuron. NTL could with equal justification be considered an acronym for a Neoaristotelian Theory of Language.

Words and Experiences

Our first way of knowing is through our senses. Language is the second.
The sense-become-word is a point of departure, allowing us to transfer that sense from one context to another.

We are playing at the pool, my 4 year old grandson and me, with a 2 foot long piece of PVC. First, we are blowing air into the submerged end, making huge bubbles erupt on the surface. Then the pipe becomes a water gun, shooting a spray of water across the pool. Then we are taking turns pressing our lips together and blowing into the empty pipe to make new sounds. I do it first, then I hand him the pipe and say, "blow". And he does, and after a few tries, hits on a resonant note. The pipe produces a new kind of sound he can feel as well as hear. He laughs out loud.

Primary play, learning hydraulics and pneumatics by feel, sight and sound. Stumbling across the secret to making music.

In a few years, he will learn about electricity, and he will be able to tap into these experiences to grasp the unseen. He will be able to draw upon these moments of pool play, then imagine how a current of electrons might flow under pressure, from one place to the next, and how that can do work.

He will be in a music class, and will recall that experience of resonance, and apply it to string length, and to tone, and undertone, and so forth.

Language allows abstraction. We can teach children words, and they can be heard using them, but language must be charged with primary experience if it is to bear intellectual fruit.

JEC

Deliberate Practice (2)

It comes as little surprise that, the more time one spends noodling over something, the deeper the learning effect. Learning research shows that the quality of your practice is just as important as the quantity, and expert-level performance is primarily the result of expert-level practice , not innate talent.

K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist and scientific researcher out of Florida State University in the paper titled The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance:


"People believe that because expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance the expert performer must be endowed with characteristics qualitatively different from those of normal adults. This view has discouraged scientists from systematically examining expert performers and accounting for their performance in terms of the laws and principles of general psychology"

One of Ericsson's core findings is that how expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times. An expert breaks down the skills that are required to be expert and focuses on improving those skill chunks during practice or day-to-day activities, often paired with immediate coaching feedback. Another important feature of deliberate practice lies in continually practicing a skill at more challenging levels with the intention of mastering it.[4] Deliberate practice is also discussed in the books, "Talent is Overrated," by Geoff Colvin[5], and "The Talent Code," by Daniel Coyle,[6]among others.

What is the technique?

In music, it may be the "chunking" of performance. In other areas of learning, the intentionality of the focused attention is important. In one study, a researcher Wieman trained a postdoc, Louis Deslauriers, and a graduate student, Ellen Schelew, asked students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class. For 1 week, Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors, which met three times for 1 hour. A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.

The results were dramatic: After the intervention, the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. They were also more engaged—attendance rose by 20% in the experimental section, according to one measure of interest—and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.

(I'd like to see more about the impact of assignment, task-framing or  purpose.)

Medical Education (Wikipedia article)

Duvivier et. al. reconstructed the concept of deliberate practice into practical principles to describe the process as it relates to clinical skill acquisition. They defined deliberate practice as:

1. repetitive performance of intended cognitive or psychomotor skills.
2. rigorous skills assessment
3. specific information feedback
4. better skills performance^[8]

They further described the personal skills learners need to exhibit at various stages of skill development in order to be successful in developing their clinical skills. This includes:

1. planning (organize work in a structured way).
2. concentration/dedication (higher attention span)
3. repetition/revision (strong tendency to practice)
4. study style/self reflection (tendance to self-regulate learning)^[9]

While the study only included medical students, the authors found that repetitious practice may only help the novice learner (year 1) because as expertise is developed, the learner must focus and plan their learning around specific deficiencies. Curriculum must be designed to develop students' ability to plan their learning as they progress in their careers.

Finally, the findings in the study also have implications for developing self-regulated behaviors in students. Initially, a medical student may need focused feedback from instructors, however as they progress they must develop the ability to self-assess.

Links:
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/a-better-way-to-teach.html
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1993-40718-001

A good post, citing examples from musical performance:

http://expertenough.com/1423/deliberate-practice

Pattern Language for the Standing Desk

Returning to  Pattern Language, my revered old bible of 1960's utopianism, I discover that there is no entry for "standing desk", "writing desk", or "workbench".  They missed it! Even though there is considerable anthropological evidence for the universality of standing work, Alexander and the others assumed that all sustained work is done whilst sitting on a floor or chair.

There ought to be a new pattern for what I'm about. It would go something like this:

Standing desk or workbench


In every workplace, there should be provision for close and precise work to be executed from a standing position. The resulting work surface would be from 40 to 50 inches from the floor. It would be deep and broad enough to accomodate one's papers, screens, keyboard, etc. There should be storage at hand (open shelves, 200) for papers, writing implements and hand tools, and a vertical display area for pictures, reference items and other objects comprising the personal shrine (two more missing patterns!). Secondary and rest seating should also be provided (stools, footrests or high-chairs) to allow for postural diversity during extended work sessions. 

• The optimal work height for an individual would be determined by where the hand rests when the elbow is bent, forearm level to the floor (see waist-high shelf, 201). 
• The optimal depth of the bench shall be the distance one can reach forward comfortably to retrieve a tool.

I'm copying out some of Jason Yip's post on stand-up meetings. He has figured out how to make this practice work, and in doing so has identified some of the relevant sociology and psychology of the standing desk as well:


It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Stand-up Meetings
Jason Yip, ThoughtWorks, Inc.
jcyip@thoughtworks.com
Introduction
The daily stand-up meeting is simple to describe: the whole team meets every day for a quick status update. This short definition does not, however, sufficiently communicate the subtle details that distinguish between an effective and sub-optimal implementation of the practice.

People who have experienced effective stand-ups will generally know what should be adjusted to improve a bad one. This is much more difficult for people with limited stand-up experience to reflect upon. This paper is an attempt to alleviate this difficulty by describing the benefits and consequences of common practices for daily stand-ups.  They are intended to help direct the experimentation and adjustment of new practitioners as well as provide points of reflection to experienced practitioners.

Goals of Daily Stand-up Meetings
Summarizing several papers and references ([Anderson, 2002], [Beedle et al., 2000], [OrgPatterns, 2003], [Rising, 2002], [Rising and Janoff, 2002], [Wells, 1999]) daily stand-ups should achieve the following goals:
· communicate daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers,
· identify obstacles more quickly so that the team can take steps to remove them,
· set focus for the rest of the day,
· increase team building and socialization.

Perhaps the key value of requiring daily status is what it requires of the participants: daily reflection.

The goal is to get everyone moving in the same direction.  The stand-up is used to continually remind the team what that direction is......However, there is a different “feel” to a well-run stand-up that distinguishes it from an empty ritual. The original description of daily stand-up meetings called them Daily Scrums [Beedle et al., 2000] with an intentional association to the rugby term. The energy level of a daily stand-up should perhaps not be quite as high as that of a rugby scrum but it should still feel energizing. Quickness and high energy support the goal of setting focus.  Long, low-energy meetings tend to distract and mute the day.

When things are going right, there isn't much direction or facilitation of the stand-up. It tends to be more self-organising.  This is really more a side-effect of an effective, motivated team.
Patterns

ALL HANDS
People  and representatives from various areas wish to know about and/or contribute to the status and
progress of the project.  Communicating status in multiple meetings and reports requires a lot of duplicate effort. Therefore
Replace some or all of the meetings and reports with the daily stand-up. Anyone who is directly involved in or wants to know about the day-to-day operation of the project should attend the single daily stand-up meeting.
But People not directly involved can disrupt the stand-up (See PIGS AND CHICKENS).  This suggests that another
forum would still be required for queries outside the scope of the stand-up.
Too many people in the meeting may cause disruption and/or cause people to be uncomfortable in sharing
information. For very large stand-up groups, it is even more important to followPIGS AND CHICKENS and TAKE IT OFFLINE in order to ensure all contributers can provide their input in a timely fashion. Not all forms of reporting will be, nor should be, covered by the stand-up format.  For example, overall project progress would be better communicated with a “big visible chart”[Jeffries, 2004] such as burndown, burn-up, cumulative flow diagram, etc. As a side-effect, some otherwise participants of the stand-up may be receiving sufficient information from the chart that they don't need to attend the stand-up regularly.
PIGS AND CHICKENS
A chicken and a pig are together when the chicken says, "Let's start a restaurant!".
The pig thinks it over and says, "What would we call this restaurant?".The chicken says, "Ham n' Eggs!"  The pig says, "No thanks, I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved!".
[Schwaber and Beedle, 2001]

[Beedle et al., 2000] Beedle, M. et al., “SCRUM: An Extension Pattern Language for Hyperproductive Software Development”


[LaPlante, 2003] Laplante, Phillip A., “Stand and Deliver: Why I Hate Stand-up Meetings”,ACM Queue, 1, 7 (October 2003)

Study Groups

In last weeks NYT, a major piece on Mitt Romney told about his days at HBS, and the intense study methods he used to become one of the best, if not the brightest: study groups

Instead, Mr. Romney threw his energy into being the best. Nearly all business school students formed study groups to help them digest the constant flow of cases, but Mr. Romney recruited a murderers’ row of some of the most distinguished students in the class. “He and I said, hey, let’s handpick some superstars,” said Howard Serkin, a classmate.

Every day for an hour, the all-male group — there were relatively few women in the program back then — sat at a semicircular table outside the classroom and briefed one another on the reading material. It was an exercise in mutual protection, since any of them could be called on in class and their performance would affect their grades. Mr. Romney served as a kind of team captain, the other members said, pushing and motivating the others.

“He wanted to make straight A’s,” Mr. Serkin said. “He wanted our study group to be No. 1.” Sometimes Mr. Romney arrived early to run his numbers a few extra times. And if his partners were not prepared, “he was not afraid of saying: ‘You’re letting us down. We want to be the best,’ ” Mr. Serkin added.

The students were experiencing the most unusual, distinguishing aspect of a Harvard Business School education: in every class, even accounting, there were no textbooks, no theories of management, just the school’s vaunted set of cases — one-page summaries of real-life corporate situations.

The case study method “doesn’t start with the theory or even principles,” said Kim B. Clark, a friend of Mr. Romney’s who later became dean of the school. “It starts with ‘All right, what is going on? What does the data tell us?’ ”

The cases did not even lay out questions. Students had to analyze the material, sometimes just a paragraph long, figure out the company’s problems and pose solutions. “The case study method is like trying to train doctors by just showing them [sick] patients, rather than by showing them textbooks to depict what a healthy patient should look like,” said Mr. Brownstein, the former classmate.

From College Board site:

The Power of Study Groups

Working Together Helps Everyone

You may have noticed that when you’re explaining something you've learned to a friend, you begin to understand it better yourself. This happens because, when you explain an idea, you need to think more deeply about it.

The same principle makes study groups useful. Studying with others in a small group is helpful because you:

• Think out loud.
• Share ideas.
• Learn from one another.

In an effective study group, you and other students hash out lesson materials together — explaining concepts, arguing about them, figuring out why one person's answer differs from another's — and in the process, you most likely learn more than you would have studying by yourself.

The Benefits of Study Groups

Group study offers other advantages in addition to gaining a deeper understanding of class material. These include the opportunity to:

Reinforce note-taking. If your AP^® Biology notes are unclear, you can ask a member of your study group to help you fill the gaps.

Share talents. Each person brings different strengths, such as organizational skills, the ability to stick to a task or a capacity for memorization.

Cover more ground. Group members may be able to solve a calculus problem together that none would have solved alone.

Benefit from a support system. Members often have common goals, such as good grades. Each person’s work affects the other members, which results in making members supportive of one another. 

Socialize. It's more fun to study with others; the give-and-take makes it more interesting. And because it's more fun, you spend more time studying!

Guidelines for Getting a Group Together

Here are some guidelines for creating and running a study group:

How many? Create a group of four to six people. In a larger group, it's easy for someone to get left out and smaller groups can too easily get off track.

Who? Pick classmates who seem to share your interest in doing well academically. Look for people who stay alert in class, take notes, ask questions and respond to the teacher's questions. Include someone who understands the material better than you and can explain the concepts and someone who doesn’t understand it as well, to whom you can explain the material.

Where? Hold study group sessions in a place that is free of distractions and that has room to spread out books and notes.

How long? Meet for no more than two to three hours at a time. Having a time limit helps the group focus. If you know you only have an hour, you're more likely to stay on task.

When? Try to meet regularly, on the same day and time each week. Treating the study session as you would other activities helps you to keep to a schedule and ensures that everyone attends.

Getting the Most Out of a Session

Here are some tips to help your group get the most out of each study session:

• Decide what you’re going to do in advance.
• Prepare for the session, so you can make the most of your time together.
• Take turns teaching, to reinforce your own knowledge.
• Stick to the session topic.

By supplementing your individual study with a study group, you can reinforce what you've learned, deepen your understanding of complex concepts, and maybe even make a few new friends. Whoever said learning can't be fun?

From U Minn Handbook (http://www.d.umn.edu/kmc/student/loon/acad/strat/grpstudy1.html)

Often college is seen as a competitive place, so we tend to overlook the power of cooperation. The power of groups is widely accepted in the business world and can easily be used in your job as a student in the form of a study group.

Here are a few pointers for setting up a study group:

1. Select people who seem to share your desire to reach your academic goals.
2. Look for people who stay alert in class, who take notes, who ask questions, who respond to the professor's questions. (This may represent two or three different people, but that's good because you may also have different learning styles represented in your group).
3. Limit your group to four to six people (large groups get unwieldy and small groups can too easily get off track)
4. Schedule a meeting to "test the waters" and see how you get along together. Once the group seems to be doing well, try to schedule regular meetings.

How about some "principles" to follow in your group?

1. Question each other on the material assigned (Be sure to have all the readings and assignments done!)
2. Take turns "teaching" each other the material. Arthur Chickering, a student development researcher, says that often a student's "most important teacher is another student." If you have to teach a concept, you really have to know that concept, so you are not only helping the other group members, but also you are reinforcing your own knowledge.
3. Try to predict test questions. Write them down and begin to to develop your own "test bank."
4. Make sure someone takes the role of the session leader to keep the session productive.
5. Compare notes. Maybe you need yours "filled in" or maybe you can help someone else "fill in" theirs.
6. Take a few minutes at the end of the session to evaluate what you've done. (Did everyone put in their full effort? Did we concentrate on to much on one topic? How can we improve our efforts?)
7. Plan the next meeting. Give the group assignments if appropriate.

Deliberate Practice

It is clear, after months of study in a training effectiveness project I have been pursuing, that lecture is undeserving in its continued prevalence in higher ed and secondary education.

We have a solid evidence, based on emergent systems 1 and 2 thinking, that lecture has to go.

....In this study, Wieman trained a postdoc, Louis Deslauriers, and a graduate student, Ellen Schelew, in an educational approach, called “deliberate practice,” that asks students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class. For 1 week, Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors, which met three times for 1 hour. A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.

The results were dramatic: After the intervention, the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. They were also more engaged—attendance rose by 20% in the experimental section, according to one measure of interest—and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.

DP is not lecture. What it is also not is playing games or teacher entertaining the class.

At the heart of it is what Kahneman tells us about all System 2 thinking: it is effortful. It is also social and features very short feedback loops.

Links:

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/a-better-way-to-teach.html

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1993-40718-001


From Freakonomics Blog:

Thanks to recent, hugely popular books about the development of expertise, the term deliberate practice is coming into common usage as the kind of practice that produces expertise.

Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. (and this is key, I think: immediate feedback) A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.

As I have learned more about deliberate practice, I often think about its lessons for the educational system. And they are not happy ones.

In the grade-school years, deliberate practice is already hard to find. My strongest memory from fifth-grade mathematics is pages and pages of tedious three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication problems. Day after day! It is, alas, the kind of rote practice that I have done for chess: simply playing lots of games.

In a classic paper, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,” Neil Charnessand colleagues studied the effect on chess rating of different types of chess practice, including total hours of serious study (i.e., deliberate practice) and total hours of tournament play (their Table 3). The effect of deliberate practice far outweighed the effect of tournament play. Related: Gutenberg method

http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html




What does the Gutenberg Method involve? Simply this. You assign the students portions of the textbook to study before they come to class. When they come into the classroom, they are already acquainted with the material. You don't waste your time, and theirs, outlining the course. You don't waste time telling them that butyric acid smells like rancid butter, and that valeric acid smells like old socks, and other difficult intellectual concepts. The textbook has taken all that drudgery off your hands. You don't waste your time doing what Frank Lambert calls "presenting a boardful of elegantly organized material with beautiful answers to questions that the students have not asked."


The students have read the material, they have thought about it, and they have questions to ask about it. You answer these questions, or, better still, try to get them to answer their own questions, or get other students to give the answers. You ask questions. You have a discussion. If they're slow to come alive, you take up points that you know give students trouble. You lead them through difficult problems. The entire class hour becomes like those few golden moments at the end of an old-fashioned lecture when a few students manage to rise above the system and gather around your desk.

Whitehead on Education

Interpreting Whitehead today:


 ttp://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2548/Whitehead-Alfred-North-1861-1947.html


Romance is the first moment in the educational experience. All rich educational experiences begin with an immediate emotional involvement on the part of the learner. The primary acquisition of knowledge involves freshness, enthusiasm, and enjoyment of learning. The natural ferment of the living mind leads it to fix on those objects that strike it pre-reflectively as important for the fulfilling of some felt need on the part of the learner. All early learning experiences are of this kind and a curriculum ought to include appeals to the spirit of inquiry with which all children are natively endowed. 


The stage of precision concerns "exactness of formulation" (Whitehead 1929, p. 18), rather than the immediacy and breadth of relations involved in the romantic phase. Precision is discipline in the various languages and grammars of discrete subject matters, particularly science and technical subjects, including logic and spoken languages. It is the scholastic phase with which most students and teachers are familiar in organized schools and curricula. In isolation from the romantic impetus of education, precision can be barren, cold, and unfulfilling, and useless in the personal development of children. An educational system excessively dominated by the ideal of precision reverses the myth of Genesis: "In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system, children named the animals before they saw them" (Whitehead 1925, p. 285). But precision is nevertheless a necessary element in a rich learning experience, and can neither substitute for romance, nor yield its place to romance. 


Generalization, the last rhythmic element of the learning process, is the incorporation of romance and precision into some general context of serviceable ideas and classifications. It is the moment of educational completeness and fruition, in which general ideas or, one may say, a philosophical outlook, both integrate the feelings and thoughts of the earlier moments of growth, and prepare the way for fresh experiences of excitement and romance, signaling a new beginning to the educational process.



Whitehead's general concept of the nature and aims of education has as its psychological corollary a conception of the rhythm of education that connects him with developmental educators such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). For Whitehead, education is a temporal, growth-oriented process, in which both student and subject matter move progressively. The concept of rhythm suggests an aesthetic dimension to the process, one analogous to music. Growth then is a part of physical and mental development, with a strong element of style understood as a central driving motif. There are three fundamental stages in this process, which Whitehead called the stage of romance, the stage of precision, and the stage of generalization.

Read more: Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) - The Nature of Education, Educational Development and the Rhythm of Growth, Universities and Professional Training - StateUniversity http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2548/Whitehead-Alfred-North-1861-1947.html#ixzz1a5LXkdJD

Cost vs. Value

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing 
-Oscar Wilde


In matters of training, this distinction is an important one. It underlies all of the discussions we have about relevance and effectiveness. More and more, I see the responsibility for giving value to training to fall upon those who would learn. Without the learner's effort, attention, and experiment (Wilde also said that "experience is what we call our failures"), noting is transferred into practice and no ultimate value is ever realized.
Thus, as would-be designers of learning (not training), we need to give more attention to matters of motivation and incentive, rewards and reinforcers of learning behavior. 

Artifacts and Learning

Homo faber, homo discens.

Constructivist learning theory predicts that making objects derived from subject matter would enhance retention. ("If they build it, they will learn"?) Nothing new here. Traditional artifacts generated by the teacher/school since ancient times include models, maps, graphics, specimens, photos and media. Objects created by the student have also been around forever: : term papers, reports, presentation slides, drawings, posters, and e-media objects. The classic schooling has required student reconstructions of the knowledge object usually in oral or written form as the ultimate proof of mastery.

http://blogs.usask.ca/medical_education/archive/2007/10/active_learning_4.html

"Creative Projects: Medical students at the U of S have an annual art auction and an example illustrating the history of medicine in Saskatchewan is currently hanging in the Westwinds Clinic. Activities like this could be expanded into the classroom to create multi-modal learning resources such as models, illustrations, visual mnemonics and simulations".


Corporate learning events don't exploit this long tradition, and the solid science behind it nearly enough. A durable instance of a group-made artifact could be a powerful trophy for the participants. Overnight book-publishing is now possible, along with 3-d printers. Framed photos, posters, imprinted gear, jump drives ("enchanted crystals"). Artifacts might endure online as well as videos, blog posts and podcasts.

Issues: artifacts would have to be more than mere off-shoots inspired by a topic, but active re-creations or instances of the content itself, as in the model above, which retains the essential geometry of the famed molecule. The work involved, hours of motor and spatial rehearsal of the model, might be expected to leave deep mnemonic traces.

Group projects would have to derive from a process where each individual interacted with the entire object; division-of-labor schemes might be efficient but miss the point of the exercise.

What we know about the power of small groups might suggest not only strong retention effects, but powerful tokening, a high sentimental value placed on the produced object. Just as a trophy may recall the "agony and ecstasy "of a footrace 20 years ago, an attractively bound book, a professionally-finished poster or DVD, or even a custom-imprinted tee shirt might become a valued keepsake long after the learning event.

Delving into participative aspects of learning:
http://www.designbasedresearch.org/reppubs/bell-Linn.pdf

Multi-media from a librarian's perspective:

http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/students-creating-content-with-multigenre-learning-artifacts/

Sensemaking. Each learner will come away with a different mental model--is that OK, or inevitable? Does this apply in math?

http://www.learninganalytics.net/?p=94

"One of the primary ways of connecting with others in an open course is through creating and sharingartifacts of sensemaking. These artifacts are resources produced by individual learners (diagrams, summary posts, podcasts, videos) that reflect their attempts to make sense of the course from her/his perspective." 

Good discussion and study of role of artifacts in university-level teaching:
[DOC]
Teaching and Learning Artifacts:
lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/aera/03/artifacts/AERA-represent.doc

Check out anything by Semour Papert on constructivism and Mindstorms application.


Proposed: 
Common objects, either material or digital, could enhance individual recall and retention while capitalizing on the peer-learning effects of editing, idea production, and affiliation: examples might include mediated group reports, sticky-note assemblage/pastiche, posters, or physical models  such as soda straw constructs (see Gamestorming for more).

Runners:
The remembered place as scaffold for retention of exogenous verbal material (memory palaces)

Visualization of abstract material

Tactile and gestural impacts on learning and retention

Thinking about Skype

I've been "Skype-ing" for a year or more, and I am just now getting into it (aside from Skype calls to our children and grandkids, which was an instant hit). I have been "Skype-ing" close friends and colleagues more often, but I still prefer the phone for a lot of business and personal interactions, but I have not been entirely sure why.

It may seem a strange admission for a "video professional", someone who has spent decades trying to visualize everything, but it's just now sinking in on me as to why video calls might NOT become the dominant form of business communication.

It's a performance, dude. No doubt about it, a one-on-one or group video call is more of an event than a plain 'ol phone call. For one, in my experience anyway, it's still common for such calls to be mutually arranged beforehand via text or voice--as we do for conference calls. In such occasions, I can feel my "inner producer" at work. All this suggests that, regardless of the payoff, putting on a video call "game face" demands more energy from us than other, "cooler" forms of communication.

So what are the differences between the phone and the video call? It seems to me there are at least three features of video call that might account for our disinclination to use it all the time:

• On video, we are communicating a whole lot more as we speak. Real-time voice itself is a pretty broad-band affair, compared to asynchronous text. In an ordinary phone call, there are all sorts of "paralinguistic" information carried on through emphasis, intonation, pitch and other dynamics of vocal delivery. Doing all this on video widens the data stream, adding new meaning through facial and hand gestures, head and body posture, and overall animation.
  
• We are communicating even when we are not talking. As a live audience, you inadvertently give off "comprehension cues" to the speaker. These cues may be largely subliminal for both of you, but they are there and have been demonstrated to influence the interaction. If it is easier for the speaker to know when you are not "getting it", it's also easier for him to read your "fake listening". Those wonderful little phone-silences-while-they-are-talking that allowed you to scratch your nose, roll your eyes (for the benefit of others in the room), or browse your email, are sadly missing once you get on camera. Ask any poker player about the unconscious "tells" they read in other players' behaviors.
  
  
• The props and the set communicate too. One of the great things about video calling is the ability to aim the camera at the subject matter; that new baby's blue eyes, the new work on your back deck, or the graphics for last months's sales figures. Video calls are a great way to show off those new golf clubs. In business situations, though, small bits of "theatre",  like that five o'clock shadow on your chin, or a tacky backdrop, can trump the verbal message, and work against you. Over the voice-only channel on the other hand, both sides of the conversation are freer to "illustrate" the chat with an idealized image of one another and their surroundings.
  

All in all, video can make us more powerful presenters, but it can make us vulnerable too. In all but the friendliest situations, it opens us up to a kind of scrutiny not possible over the phone. It brings us closer to a "public appearance", giving us more to stage-manage*. Just as we will still resort to letters or email to communicate particularly intimate or potentially reactive messages to loved ones, we may find ourselves preferring the phone for business calls when, for whatever reason, we want to present a smaller target. 


More to think about here. One wonders for example, with all of the buzz around Apple's new Facetime and Cisco's HD "telepresence", just how far the deep human need for discretion and distance will allow those media types to reach into our lives.
------
*Erving Goffman, in his classic "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (1959) saw social life as a kind of theatre and "impression management" as one of the main tasks of the ego. The new work being done in unconscious processing shows the breadth and depth of this real-time computation is far greater than Goffman ever imagined.

"Crazy Walls" and related tropes for graphic exposition

My note to day to several colleagues:
I'm working on an expository concept for a new project. I'm running
down a trope, a bit you might call "crazy walls", often used in
thriller movies, where the mind of the “crazy” antagonist is revealed
first and full-blown. The best example of this of the top of my head
was in "A Brilliant Mind" where we first see the genius’ blackboard
with manic scrawls or formulae linked by arrows. It produces a kind of
OMG this-guy-is-a-nutcase moment for the straight character.

The device can also be used by a sane protagonist --the de-coding
hero--fretting over a jerrybuilt cork-board with photos and post-it
labels linked with string, suggesting convoluted or esoteric
connections he has discovered. Other examples of the crazy wall might
be in the title sequence for “Rubicon”,  "The Number 23". Useful
variants could be any “wall” of display, personal shrine or collection
housed in a specific space.

What I'm really interested in is the expository potential for the
graphic itself, not so much the drama. Can you think of anyplace else
have you seen this trope used?

Thanks for any help you can give!!

Steve:
Interesting idea you have.

These may not be dead on... but the are memorable for me.
There is a 'wall' in Usual Suspects that prompts the Kevin Spacey (character) with all
of HIS story components.  Detective character discovers he has been conned
right at the end of the movie... as Spacy is walking down the street.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBrwUGdbODA&NR=1
The first 1:20 seconds is the piece of interest.

Se7en-Title sequence  (kinda graphic)
http://www.artofthetitle.com/2008/03/26/se7en/

Momento  (awesome site.  Spend a little time on it... .and move your mouse
around for Easter Eggs)
http://www.otnemem.com/mem.html

Requiem for a Dream website.
(You will be 'fooled' by what appears to be a 1-900-website rediret Pop
Up... but stay with the site.... use your mouse on white screens.  Enjoy the
layers and complexities that are revealed with mouse movement.  If you feel
like you are at a dead in... mouse somewhere else and click on it.  Often
your screen will appear 'frozen'.  Just move your mouse and keep drilling
down.
http://www.requiemforadream.com/

Sherlock Holmes
exquisite 'layering'
http://www.artofthetitle.com/2010/01/21/sherlock-holmes/

In the movie Amelie... there is a 'workbook' that is part of the story.  It
is a collection of photos the photomachine repairman constructed.... and
have some interesting graphics.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/olivierbarjollepolaroid/5102711937/in/pool-7128
11@N20
http://www.hockneypictures.com/photos/photos_polaroids_02_large.php
http://shahidul.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/war-room-tarek-al-ghoussein-and-
chris-kienke1.jpg

DIY segment
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-build-idea-wall-for-art-studio-233447/


Fascinating wall
http://www.baptistedebombourg.com/en/works/aggravure-0

YouTube minimovie... with a couple of idea walls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwSdUGYwStM

Made of index cards?
http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2008/10/storyboard-4.jpg

Various walls
http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/spotlights/2008/walle/Storyboard3.jp
g
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition3/images/storyboard_mf.gif
http://www.wikihow.com/images/4/41/Copy_of_DSCF5465_795.JPG
http://designdaily.co.nz/VERSIONS/images/c-bench-carbon-fiber-sculpture.1_bi
gthumb.jpg
http://www.dezignwithaz.com/images/crazy-cube-wall-stickers.jpg
http://floaik.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/japan_day4_42.jpg?w=450&h=338

American Splendor
http://www.artofthetitle.com/2008/03/31/american-splendor-2003/

John to Steve:
Well, among other things, you've pointed me to the movie titles site which provides a lifetime of great ideas to steal.  Thanks, friend, for all of these, which send off sparks all over the place.

I know this was my quest, but obviously, you've already spent some time thinking about visualization of the abstract. You ought to check out prezi.com, the zooming presentation tool, if (by some small chance) you have not seen it yet. It relies on the scalable nature of outline fonts to fly around text, jump scale and move laterally, allowing us to see context. The jumps in an x-y-z space are laid out in advance and rendered in Flash. There are other ways to do the same trick, but this could help with rapid prototyping. I see a lot of potential for this as a way of providing contextual understanding of non-linear processes and relationships.

I'm looking at all kinds of mind-maps. Any semantic or theoretical space (such as any map, a calendar, the Periodic Table of the Elements) in which, not just the text but the spatial organization is relevant and meaningful. Inspiration or Visio-built diagrams, if moved and "jumped" in After Effects could be cool too.

GoogleEarth “jumps” do with the planet what I want to do with ideas.

I liked this "crazy wall writer" for technique: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTX3zqB3GM

Hey John:

Sounds interesting.  Something kitchy I have always wanted to replicate myself!

Don't forget the "crazy wall" that's defined by the repetition of a word or phrase. Ala the "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" manuscript pages Shelly Duvall's character discovers in Jack's typewriter during Kubrick's "The Shining."  That was surely the reveal moment for her that he husband had gone insane.  Or take even miscreant Bart Simpson of cartoon fame, who's forced, every episode, to scrawl and re-scrawl some different character affirmation on the chalk board after school as punishment. Maybe that treatment makes him the malcontent he is? But actually, what's more insane, is he doesn't seem affected by it at all. Just part of his daily routine.

My other favorite type is the audience reveal pull out.  Where all the elements on screen seemed to be unassociated, but when the camera pulls back, a bigger pattern is clearly revealed. Not always something the protagonist has made out... yet.

There's a site called tvtropes that covers a bunch of these...

And one of my favorites: 

The Stalker Shrine (crazy wall) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uov9d-nqyFY&feature=related

Loved Rubicon. The characters in that would spread the materials (usually 3x5 cards with single words on them) out on the floor and "connect the dots."  Sorry to hear it wasn't picked up for a second season... a victim of Walking Dead's immediate, if visceral, success. (Must everything be zombies and vampires these days!) -Chris King, Reader's Digest

John -an interesting challenge. I need to think about this.  off the top I think of the CIA sculpture story  and music; Glenn Gould, John Cage.  more later.

 -Bill Clarkson

John- Happy Thanksgiving.  The place I see that device used the most is in all these cop shows like Traces, CSI, Law and Order.  Specific episodes are hard to remember, but the use that thing both from the 'figuring out the crime POV'  to the 'weird guy has shrine to the person he's stalking'  Maybe in the 'Silence of the Lambs' franchise.
-Mark Menza

Nine Rules of Thumb for Digital Signage (or anything)

1. Less (words) is (are) more. Audience attention is inversely proportional to duration of your message. Read up on your Strunk and White, then pare down your language, if you use any at all, to the bare minimum.

2. Start a conversation. Ask a question. Nothing hooks a reader like being asked for his or her opinion. Find a way to collect and exhibit the results, and you've gone from attention to engagement.

3. Use a single, compelling image. Look a the most compelling article layouts and ads in magazines. They will have a strong central figure, and a controlled level of detail.

4. Serialize. Look up Burma-Shave in the ad history books. Start something that can be extended over time. Use #7 below to build interest, and pay off your readers' gift of attention in ensuing messages.

5. Typography matters. Learn to design with type, and match the font to your message. For best examples, look at award-winning ads in trades like Communication Arts.

6. Subordinate/emphasize.

7. Mystery can be engaging. Don't give it all away.

8. Make it a masterpiece.

9. Surprise me. When all are shouting, whisper. Stand on your head. Paint your nose red. Attention goes to the unexpected, so think of the surroundings of your exhibit space, and make what's on the screen stand apart from that. If your exhibit is in Times Square, go B&W, or use white space.

10. Convey your brand respectfully. Stand on its shoulders, steal it's moxie, but don't ever mess with it. See Target for best practices here.