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
Monday, May 07, 2012
Saturday, April 21, 2012
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.)
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
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:
- repetitive performance of intended cognitive or psychomotor skills.
- rigorous skills assessment
- specific information feedback
- 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:
- planning (organize work in a structured way).
- concentration/dedication (higher attention span)
- repetition/revision (strong tendency to practice)
- 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
Friday, April 20, 2012
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)
Monday, December 26, 2011
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
From College Board site:
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)
How about some "principles" to follow in your group?
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:
- Select people who seem to share your desire to reach your academic goals.
- 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).
- Limit your group to four to six people (large groups get unwieldy and small groups can too easily get off track)
- 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?
- Question each other on the material assigned (Be sure to have all the readings and assignments done!)
- 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.
- Try to predict test questions. Write them down and begin to to develop your own "test bank."
- Make sure someone takes the role of the session leader to keep the session productive.
- Compare notes. Maybe you need yours "filled in" or maybe you can help someone else "fill in" theirs.
- 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?)
- 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.
Friday, October 07, 2011
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
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
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
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.
-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.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
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
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.
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)
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
Monday, March 14, 2011
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:
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
"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?
The first 1:20 seconds is the piece of interest.
Se7en-Title sequence (kinda graphic)
http://www.artofthetitle.com/
Momento (awesome site. Spend a little time on it... .and move your mouse
around for Easter Eggs)
http://www.otnemem.com/mem.
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.
Sherlock Holmes
exquisite 'layering'
http://www.artofthetitle.com/
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/
11@N20
http://www.hockneypictures.
http://shahidul.files.
chris-kienke1.jpg
DIY segment
http://www.wonderhowto.com/
Fascinating wall
http://www.baptistedebombourg.
YouTube minimovie... with a couple of idea walls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Made of index cards?
http://static.dezeen.com/
Various walls
http://images.rottentomatoes.
g
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/
http://www.wikihow.com/images/
http://designdaily.co.nz/
gthumb.jpg
http://www.dezignwithaz.com/
http://floaik.files.wordpress.
American Splendor
http://www.artofthetitle.com/
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
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.
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
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?
The first 1:20 seconds is the piece of interest.
Se7en-Title sequence (kinda graphic)
http://www.artofthetitle.com/
Momento (awesome site. Spend a little time on it... .and move your mouse
around for Easter Eggs)
http://www.otnemem.com/mem.
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.
Sherlock Holmes
exquisite 'layering'
http://www.artofthetitle.com/
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/
11@N20
http://www.hockneypictures.
http://shahidul.files.
chris-kienke1.jpg
DIY segment
http://www.wonderhowto.com/
Fascinating wall
http://www.baptistedebombourg.
YouTube minimovie... with a couple of idea walls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Made of index cards?
http://static.dezeen.com/
Various walls
http://images.rottentomatoes.
g
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/
http://www.wikihow.com/images/
http://designdaily.co.nz/
gthumb.jpg
http://www.dezignwithaz.com/
http://floaik.files.wordpress.
American Splendor
http://www.artofthetitle.com/
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?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
Thursday, September 09, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, August 13, 2010
The Open Data Meme
Here it is in today's Times: "Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s". The article goes on to report the leaps in our understanding of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain, traced back to the work of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and others from industry, beginning in 2003. Evidence of the value of the sharing comes with new tools for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. "More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease.
And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease. A $40 million project to look for biomarkers for Parkinson’s, sponsored by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, plans to enroll 600 study subjects in the United States and Europe.....the key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world." (NYT, Aug 13, 2010).
This links nicely to the book we were tipped to recently while visiting at the Census Bureau, "Open Government"** a collection of essays that center around technology as an enabler of the meme. This from the text:
"Government 2.0 is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and re-imagined as if for the first time. … There is a new compact on the horizon: information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation; government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset. Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally. Government information and services can be provided to citizens where and when they need them. Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance. In this model, government is a convener and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action."
The meme has escaped even its early proponents. Openness will be seen, this blog believes, not just germane to data, but to all forms of information. Despite the controversy around the Wiki Leaks' and specific foreign policy issues, the Obama administration's position on openness and transparency* is already underway at the cabinet level in his government. It did not begin there (for example: the NIH's initiative originated during the second Bush administration), nor will transparency go away because it inevitably winds up putting governments in the hot seat.
This is not, strictly speaking about communications technology. Openness has been possible since Gutenberg. Technology is not the driver. Culture is.
_____________
*http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/12/race-top-openness-and-innovation-announcing-agency-open-government-plan-leading-prac
** Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice By Daniel Lathrop, Laurel Ruma Publisher O'Reilly Media Released: February 2010
And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease. A $40 million project to look for biomarkers for Parkinson’s, sponsored by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, plans to enroll 600 study subjects in the United States and Europe.....the key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world." (NYT, Aug 13, 2010).
This links nicely to the book we were tipped to recently while visiting at the Census Bureau, "Open Government"** a collection of essays that center around technology as an enabler of the meme. This from the text:
"Government 2.0 is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and re-imagined as if for the first time. … There is a new compact on the horizon: information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation; government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset. Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally. Government information and services can be provided to citizens where and when they need them. Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance. In this model, government is a convener and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action."
The meme has escaped even its early proponents. Openness will be seen, this blog believes, not just germane to data, but to all forms of information. Despite the controversy around the Wiki Leaks' and specific foreign policy issues, the Obama administration's position on openness and transparency* is already underway at the cabinet level in his government. It did not begin there (for example: the NIH's initiative originated during the second Bush administration), nor will transparency go away because it inevitably winds up putting governments in the hot seat.
This is not, strictly speaking about communications technology. Openness has been possible since Gutenberg. Technology is not the driver. Culture is.
_____________
*http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/12/race-top-openness-and-innovation-announcing-agency-open-government-plan-leading-prac
** Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice By Daniel Lathrop, Laurel Ruma Publisher O'Reilly Media Released: February 2010
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
The Learning Limits of Animation? (MM pattern)
What's better, a movie clip of an internal combustion engine, or a series of stills depicting the critical phases of the combustion cycle? Evidently there is some pretty solid evidence that, at least as far as learning goes, there is little added value in watching an animation of dynamic physical processes over looking at comparable, but static graphics.
Moving illustrations may be prettier, and take up more "reel" time, but based on experimental evidence (referenced below), it seems that learners can do as well or better looking at the stills. Why?
A couple of explanations are possible. One is that the sheer speed and control of the animation may outpace the viewers ability to grasp it. Second, the moving depiction of complex processes may result in too many visual elements to observe at once. If two or more critical events occur simultaneously in the animation, the viewer may not catch them. Suppose we are looking at a cross-sectional view of a 4-cycle engine. In the time-locked presentation style of movies or television, where the learner has no control of the time-sequence, it may be difficult to see the relationship of say, the piston rods down here and the valve lifters over there on the camshaft at a given moment in time.
From a contstructivist perspective, this makes sense. Animation may be inherently more interesting at first, due to our visual brain's "orienting reflex", gaining initial attention. Understanding the action depicted however, requires independent construction, one where we perform the animation in our heads. We can do this more readily when the action is frozen and critical elements are juxtaposed and labeled properly. Putting the static pieces together allows the learner to form concepts transferrable beyond the lesson. A little of our earlier discussion of best practices for voice-over and onscreen text can help us round out this pattern.
What does the science tell us is the best practice then for demonstrating dynamic processes?
1. Offer clear visuals, the more diagrammatic the better (excluding distracting detail)
2. Offer a "structuring explanation" with VO or text (not both)
3. Offer them as stills, allowing the user to spend as much time as they need to grasp the essential parts and relations,
4. Only then do you animate the process, allowing user control over rate and direction if possible.
------------------------
Ref: Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, Richard E. Mayer, ed. Cambridge University Press, p. 457
Moving illustrations may be prettier, and take up more "reel" time, but based on experimental evidence (referenced below), it seems that learners can do as well or better looking at the stills. Why?
A couple of explanations are possible. One is that the sheer speed and control of the animation may outpace the viewers ability to grasp it. Second, the moving depiction of complex processes may result in too many visual elements to observe at once. If two or more critical events occur simultaneously in the animation, the viewer may not catch them. Suppose we are looking at a cross-sectional view of a 4-cycle engine. In the time-locked presentation style of movies or television, where the learner has no control of the time-sequence, it may be difficult to see the relationship of say, the piston rods down here and the valve lifters over there on the camshaft at a given moment in time.
From a contstructivist perspective, this makes sense. Animation may be inherently more interesting at first, due to our visual brain's "orienting reflex", gaining initial attention. Understanding the action depicted however, requires independent construction, one where we perform the animation in our heads. We can do this more readily when the action is frozen and critical elements are juxtaposed and labeled properly. Putting the static pieces together allows the learner to form concepts transferrable beyond the lesson. A little of our earlier discussion of best practices for voice-over and onscreen text can help us round out this pattern.
What does the science tell us is the best practice then for demonstrating dynamic processes?
1. Offer clear visuals, the more diagrammatic the better (excluding distracting detail)
2. Offer a "structuring explanation" with VO or text (not both)
3. Offer them as stills, allowing the user to spend as much time as they need to grasp the essential parts and relations,
4. Only then do you animate the process, allowing user control over rate and direction if possible.
------------------------
Ref: Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, Richard E. Mayer, ed. Cambridge University Press, p. 457
Friday, July 16, 2010
Learning and the Game Arcade
Games are found in all cultures, even the most "primitive". The need to play (gaming being a rule-driven offshoot, I'd guess) lies very deep in the human code, and the dominant theory seems to be that play is not just what the young ones do the kill time between meals, but an adaptive strategy of evolution.
Play, and the more structured variant that emerged with human's abstractive abilities we call games may help us prepare for life, whether it be stalking prey in the bush or making it in the corporate world. Games are inherently reinforcing, communal, fun, and sometimes even reach over into life-or death consequences for the players. Whatever form they take in a culture, games clearly invoke learning results and are worthy of note for anyone interested in building effective learning devices.
Games, as we know can be addictive too, hence they present a business opportunity.
Games get big audiences on TV, but the actience dimension is where it's at. Electronic gaming is huge, a multi-billion dollar business these days, and in terms of sheer hours of attention paid them, console and online games combined probably already surpass commercial television, if not music and movies as well.
Because of their potential to hold attention, present information and provoke adaptive (winning) responses, over and over again, gaming lies on the frontier of educational and training practice, but the players are mounting up and it's a good part of the border to be policing.
Games seem to fit nicely into the constructivist perspective we have adopted in this blog. They are engineered environments in which the learner makes his choices and responds to the results. Broadly speaking, Seymour Papert's Mindstorms are building games, but any medium that has free parts and carries along a set of connective rules for them qualifies as well.
As I've been browsing the field, I ran across several interesting papers at the Education Arcade (established by leading scholars of digital games and education at MIT funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Microsoft and others) They have developed some intriguing game concepts and pedagogy for math, science and humanities they hope to mix with state-of-the-art game play. Link
Play, and the more structured variant that emerged with human's abstractive abilities we call games may help us prepare for life, whether it be stalking prey in the bush or making it in the corporate world. Games are inherently reinforcing, communal, fun, and sometimes even reach over into life-or death consequences for the players. Whatever form they take in a culture, games clearly invoke learning results and are worthy of note for anyone interested in building effective learning devices.
Games, as we know can be addictive too, hence they present a business opportunity.
Games get big audiences on TV, but the actience dimension is where it's at. Electronic gaming is huge, a multi-billion dollar business these days, and in terms of sheer hours of attention paid them, console and online games combined probably already surpass commercial television, if not music and movies as well.
Because of their potential to hold attention, present information and provoke adaptive (winning) responses, over and over again, gaming lies on the frontier of educational and training practice, but the players are mounting up and it's a good part of the border to be policing.
Games seem to fit nicely into the constructivist perspective we have adopted in this blog. They are engineered environments in which the learner makes his choices and responds to the results. Broadly speaking, Seymour Papert's Mindstorms are building games, but any medium that has free parts and carries along a set of connective rules for them qualifies as well.
As I've been browsing the field, I ran across several interesting papers at the Education Arcade (established by leading scholars of digital games and education at MIT funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Microsoft and others) They have developed some intriguing game concepts and pedagogy for math, science and humanities they hope to mix with state-of-the-art game play. Link
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
The Coded Picture
In film, the "problem" picture is a fully developed trope; i.e. the whodunit. How many thrillers and mysteries have opened with a clue-laden, but unhinted scenario, only later to be fully explicated at the climax of the movie? A shorter, and now widely-seen version of the same idea is the basketball passing clip, which viewed naievely, is a snooze, but on second view surprises (prepared) viewers (spoiler alert) with a perfectly clear walk-through of a man in a gorilla mask. What's impressive is that almost nobody catches the anomalous walker-by on first look, and the lesson is that we see, not necessarily what is there, but what we expect to see there.
This is structurally similar to "Where's Waldo" and those embedded word drawings that used ot be a standby of the old color comics page in the Sunday paper. Looking for hidden clues in a still, as above, or a motion sequence,
From a constructivist perspective, "problem pictures" could be a valuable tool, perhaps in unexplored ways. How much more could be done with short clips, set up with an invitation to "decode" them? What about applying a previously-learned scheme to a real-world scene, then discussing it in small group for a while? Reversing it could also work: where a scene is viewed prior to the presentation of the scheme or theory.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Applied Research: The Worked Example
It is hard to find any empirically tested media tropes, but here is one: the worked-example effect, predicted by cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988). According to him, this is the best known and most widely studied of the cognitive load effects.
"A worked example is a step-by-step demonstration of how to perform a task or how to solve a problem” (Clark, Nguyen, Sweller, 2006, p. 190). Studying worked examples is an effective instructional strategy to teach complex problem-solving skills (van Merriënboer, 1997). This is because example-based instruction provides expert mental models, to explain the steps of a solution for novices.
Researchers Sweller and Cooper looked first at the teaching of algebra. Early on, they saw that merely showing worked problems was not any better, learning-wise, than merely having students solve problems on their own. With sufficient structuring, however, which reduces cognitive load, the method appeared to work better than unaided solutions. Importantly, for media designers, they found that (paper) display of both text and diagrams reduced cogntive load, as we covered in an earlier post (Split-attention effect). Sweller later proposed applications for animation, (closer to home for us).
Not for beginners
The folks this strategy works best for are the more experienced students, and just a little "worked" material seems to be sufficient, follwed by multiple experiences of unaided solving. All of this is related to a more general body of thought, coming out of Dewey, Piaget, Montessori, Vygotsky, and others, called Problem-based learning (PBL) where students collaboratively solve problems and discuss their experiences as they go, or immediately following the exercise.This is not a matter of dumping the non-swimmers into the deep end. PBL assumes some earlier, didactic training in various problem solving strategies and heuristic reasoning first. In this view, the teacher's role quickly shifts however, after providing sufficient theorectical and procedural structure, to that of a facilitator of active collaboration by students facing a challenging, practical problem. The payoff is solving in context, with the complexity of the real-world reflected in the process as well as the outcome.
This techniqie has been applied extensively in professional training for physicians and engineers, and is one I'm entertaining for the training of non-profit professionals in recruiting, fund-raising and enrollment tasks.
Most of the citations I've found are in classroom or lab settings. Applying the technique to video and online will take some imagination. Clearly, the media will have to model a process as well as introduce specific "challenge" materials to be solved.
.
Researchers Sweller and Cooper looked first at the teaching of algebra. Early on, they saw that merely showing worked problems was not any better, learning-wise, than merely having students solve problems on their own. With sufficient structuring, however, which reduces cognitive load, the method appeared to work better than unaided solutions. Importantly, for media designers, they found that (paper) display of both text and diagrams reduced cogntive load, as we covered in an earlier post (Split-attention effect). Sweller later proposed applications for animation, (closer to home for us).
Not for beginners
The folks this strategy works best for are the more experienced students, and just a little "worked" material seems to be sufficient, follwed by multiple experiences of unaided solving. All of this is related to a more general body of thought, coming out of Dewey, Piaget, Montessori, Vygotsky, and others, called Problem-based learning (PBL) where students collaboratively solve problems and discuss their experiences as they go, or immediately following the exercise.This is not a matter of dumping the non-swimmers into the deep end. PBL assumes some earlier, didactic training in various problem solving strategies and heuristic reasoning first. In this view, the teacher's role quickly shifts however, after providing sufficient theorectical and procedural structure, to that of a facilitator of active collaboration by students facing a challenging, practical problem. The payoff is solving in context, with the complexity of the real-world reflected in the process as well as the outcome.
This techniqie has been applied extensively in professional training for physicians and engineers, and is one I'm entertaining for the training of non-profit professionals in recruiting, fund-raising and enrollment tasks.
Most of the citations I've found are in classroom or lab settings. Applying the technique to video and online will take some imagination. Clearly, the media will have to model a process as well as introduce specific "challenge" materials to be solved.
.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Notes on Mutimedia Theory (2)
Here are the constituents of we might call modern multimedia theory, and their founders (... and for which we can thank Richard E. Meyer for lacing together in his wonderful book, Multimedia Theory)
Dual Coding Theory, Pavio
Working Memory, Baddeley
Cogntive Load, Sweller
Generative Theory, Wittrock
For all of these, perhaps the overriding component is this last, the generative notion of the mind (mind defined, for now, as simply as "what the brain does") as an actor, building meanings, testing them against evidence and knitting them into what has already been stored away in long-term memory.
The old model of the brain was a passive one. It fit well into the industrial model of schooling, with boxes and bells and students sorted by age. Sitting in those classrooms, we took in knowledge when it was placed in front of us, and our labor was that of mere retention for regurgitation at testing time. The emphasis was on all the social and spatial arrangements around the student, about teaching and not about learning.
This is important, I think, because we still see that old passive brain model reflected in schooling and in much of "adult education" and industrial training today. "Sit 'n git" still rules in too many places when we really should know better.
An active brain model is better suited to these times when machines are taking over for teachers in much of the non-school teaching establishment (....oh, the machines are coming to the schools alright, but we will probably hold out there for decades.) The question for MM designers and educational technologists is what ought we be doing with these machines to make the best use of what we now know about human learning?
If the active brain is the foundation, dual coding theory is the first story of the emergent model. There are two channels for us humans; one for processing visual information, the other, auditory. Scholars have gathered a considerable body of knowledge about the interactions of these two channels and the media objects they encounter.
Oddly, a third channel, the haptic/kinesthetic, does not seem to have made much of a stir in mainstream, academic discourse yet, even though a century of experience with Montessori's constructivist ideas seems to be well-supported by findings on the value of movement, physical media, collaboration and discovery, not just for children but life-long learners. The interface and game designers are way ahead of the academicians, though, at least on the haptic dimension. (A good topic for a later inquiry.)
Working memory and cognitive load are closely interlinked. More on that next time.
Dual Coding Theory, Pavio
Working Memory, Baddeley
Cogntive Load, Sweller
Generative Theory, Wittrock
For all of these, perhaps the overriding component is this last, the generative notion of the mind (mind defined, for now, as simply as "what the brain does") as an actor, building meanings, testing them against evidence and knitting them into what has already been stored away in long-term memory.
The old model of the brain was a passive one. It fit well into the industrial model of schooling, with boxes and bells and students sorted by age. Sitting in those classrooms, we took in knowledge when it was placed in front of us, and our labor was that of mere retention for regurgitation at testing time. The emphasis was on all the social and spatial arrangements around the student, about teaching and not about learning.
This is important, I think, because we still see that old passive brain model reflected in schooling and in much of "adult education" and industrial training today. "Sit 'n git" still rules in too many places when we really should know better.
An active brain model is better suited to these times when machines are taking over for teachers in much of the non-school teaching establishment (....oh, the machines are coming to the schools alright, but we will probably hold out there for decades.) The question for MM designers and educational technologists is what ought we be doing with these machines to make the best use of what we now know about human learning?
If the active brain is the foundation, dual coding theory is the first story of the emergent model. There are two channels for us humans; one for processing visual information, the other, auditory. Scholars have gathered a considerable body of knowledge about the interactions of these two channels and the media objects they encounter.
Oddly, a third channel, the haptic/kinesthetic, does not seem to have made much of a stir in mainstream, academic discourse yet, even though a century of experience with Montessori's constructivist ideas seems to be well-supported by findings on the value of movement, physical media, collaboration and discovery, not just for children but life-long learners. The interface and game designers are way ahead of the academicians, though, at least on the haptic dimension. (A good topic for a later inquiry.)
Working memory and cognitive load are closely interlinked. More on that next time.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Multimedia Theory (1)
There is no grand unified theory for MM yet, but there are some well-accepted sub-theories that seem to hang together pretty well, and which could offer some practical advice for the multimedia designer.
Cognitive Load Theory is one such sub theory, established in the late '90's. Based on the metaphor of a computer's processing limitations as applied to the brain, the theory predicts that when humans are overloaded, their ability to process new information (learn)is impaired. The so-called split-attention effect was cited as evidence for the theory (a decrease in learning efficiency when exhibits carry redundant information). This choking down of our mental processes is more than just a matter of taking in too much information over time, like water slowing as it moves through a narrowed pipe. The brain is not a passive container, but an active processor in learning; we don't learn what we perceive, but what we construct out of what we perceive. This active process of building up new mental models, then relating them to our previous knowledge takes up mental resources. Any redundancy or overloading that inhibits this internalizing process defeats its own educational objectives.
Learning is not a result of being exposed to an exhibit, or simply recalling a memory, it is work, and takes energy and resources. "Exhibit minimalism" is the best practice. Hence, "cogntive load" suggests the following MM rules of thumb:
Don't put animation, narration and text on the screen at the same time. This provides distraction and makes learning harder.
Don't add extraneous visual or auditory details to an explanation. Same as above.
Don't place on screen (or page) text apart from the visuals you are trying to describe. "Working memory" is limited too, so the less one has to carry around the exhibit in recall, the better off they are.
Likewise, don't separate such explanatory items in time.
Cognitive Load Theory is one such sub theory, established in the late '90's. Based on the metaphor of a computer's processing limitations as applied to the brain, the theory predicts that when humans are overloaded, their ability to process new information (learn)is impaired. The so-called split-attention effect was cited as evidence for the theory (a decrease in learning efficiency when exhibits carry redundant information). This choking down of our mental processes is more than just a matter of taking in too much information over time, like water slowing as it moves through a narrowed pipe. The brain is not a passive container, but an active processor in learning; we don't learn what we perceive, but what we construct out of what we perceive. This active process of building up new mental models, then relating them to our previous knowledge takes up mental resources. Any redundancy or overloading that inhibits this internalizing process defeats its own educational objectives.
Learning is not a result of being exposed to an exhibit, or simply recalling a memory, it is work, and takes energy and resources. "Exhibit minimalism" is the best practice. Hence, "cogntive load" suggests the following MM rules of thumb:
Don't put animation, narration and text on the screen at the same time. This provides distraction and makes learning harder.
Don't add extraneous visual or auditory details to an explanation. Same as above.
Don't place on screen (or page) text apart from the visuals you are trying to describe. "Working memory" is limited too, so the less one has to carry around the exhibit in recall, the better off they are.
Likewise, don't separate such explanatory items in time.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Applying the Frame Story
According to Wikipedia, the frame story (also frame tale, frame narrative, etc.) ..."employs a narrative technique whereby an introductory main story is composed, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage for a fictive narrative or organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story. The frame story leads readers from the first story into the smaller one within it."
This is a trope that can be useful in making an appeal piece (for an Olympic bid, for instance). Each story conveys a moral or principle embedded within a specific narrative. One story tells all, each story supports the others. This approach has variety, simplicity, and memorability going for it.
The ultimate frame story may be Boccacio's "Decameron", re-mixed a bit by Chaucer in "Canterbury Tales", but there are many modern examples from cinema, such as "New York Stories" (1989), "Thirty-two Short Films about Glen Gould" and Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (both in 1993). The recent film "Crash" while, like a frame piece has distinctive sub-story arcs and protagonists, so jumbles the orders of presentation and occurrence as to make it another thing altogether (see the article in Wikipedia on Fabula and Sujet for more).
Before we get too academic here, for the story-teller who wants to keep and audience attentive, the frame story lets us make a big one out of lots of little ones. (more to come)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
A National Block Party
A really cool multimedia site on this happy day.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/18/us/politics/20090119-city-block.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
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