Dave's Whiteboard

I’ve always looked at math as a tool to be mastered and wielded
rather than subject matter to be absorbed.

– Steven Wittens

That remark on Wittens’ blog is a worthwhile viewpoint for a discussion today on Twitter about what we mean by behavior change and learning.  But let me backtrack a bit:

When my son was younger — when a computer weighed nearly as much as he did — he got interested in programming.  After a while he could create startling graphics via ray-tracing, though at the time our home computer was so slow he’d start the process before going to bed, and check in the morning to see if it was done.

I remember this passion of his, and a related one, when Stephen Downes led me to a 1K demo by Steven Wittens.  A 1K demo is a program of no more than 1,024 bytes, done as a tour de force.

You can find lots of demo contests, with lots of prizes, but the real rewards seem to be (1) “I did it!” and (2) bragging rights.

Which aren’t bad reinforcers to learning.

I don’t know anything about creating a demo, but I do know animated, focused discussion when I see it.  I can usually tell good explanation from bad, and Witten’s description of his own work is admirable.

While [generating all data on the fly to save space] might seem like a black art, often it just comes down to clever use of (high school) math…

Unlike the actual 1K demo, the code snippets here will feature legible spacing and descriptive variable names.

He explains initialization (how the demo starts) in two sentences, and then uses bullets to introduce the four main parts: activating the wires, making them visible, coloring them, and animating the camera.

You can read the explanation for yourself.  I enjoyed the addendum:

After seeing the other demos in the contest, I wasn’t so sure about my entry, so I started working on a version 2. The main difference is the addition of glowy light beams around the object.

As you might suspect, I’m cheating massively here: rather than do physically correct light scattering calculations, I’m just using a 2D effect. Thankfully it comes out looking great.

Essentially, I take the rendered image, and process it in a second Canvas that is hidden. This new image is then layered on the original.

So, whaddya think?

From my son’s experience and from the comments on Wittens’s blog, I’d say there’s a lot of informal, choose-your-path, get-into-it learning in the demo world.  Note what some of the (currently) 32 comments say:

• I always wanted to start learning more about this, but haven’t found any source for explanation. I like the step-by-step explanation that you have since it goes into the “why” any just not here’s my code. By the way, do you have any recommends for books into this topic?
• I  just wanted to chime in with another big “Thank you!” for taking the time to write this up. Like the other commenters, I’ve long been fascinated and mystified by some of these techniques, and your explanations are brilliant and accessible.
• I liked this demo so much that I took some time off my working day to port it to Flash, hoping to learn the internals of it and how it’s done… I got something 90% similar to the JS version.
  Although I was able to port the code line-to-line, I couldn’t understand many parts of it. I tried to look for some commenting somewhere on the net without results. So you can imagine how cool this article is to me!
• If anyone’s interested in having this version (AS2) please let me know.
• (Wittens, responding to a commenter:) I know there are still opportunities for shortening it by shaving off a few bytes here and there. But I find the problem in these challenges is rarely one byte. It’s usually 200-300 bytes over the limit that you have to simply throw away and replace with something much smaller and equally good.
• I would LOVE to see this as an audio visualizer. I made the visualizer on indieed.com, check out a song to see it. It’s nowhere NEAR as awesome as this.
  Would you be willing to sell a tweaked version of this to indieed (its my company) as our default visualizer for our player?
  Please email me, I’m quite impressed.

There’s a long and very technical comment with suggested improvements from Jason Knight, with a calm if sly reply from Wittens: “Be careful about optimizing blindly…you added 36 characters to save 15.”  And near the end end, after someone’s created a Flash version, other people start offering ways to improve that.

Learning and worth

At first, I thought of that last comment as some serious summative evaluation: “I want to buy this thing you made.”  In a way, thought, all the comments are.  And this is how learning really happens: you work away at something, you search for ways to achieve your goal (or maybe redefine it), and you work at the thing again until you produce a result.

Nearly all my clients have been large organizations, and their traditional models don’t always take in this reality.  Lots of people have said for a long time that talking isn’t teaching and that listening isn’t learning.  A misplaced emphasis on efficiency, often unmoored from effectiveness, tempts managers (and, let’s face it, training departments) to a throughput model.

CC-licensed ray-tracing image by Susam Pal.

I know “knowledge management” is a high-value buzzword; I just tend to feel a twinge of weariness when I see it.  I’m not sure you can manage knowledge; the best you can hope for, I think, is to try and set up weirs, reservoirs, sidings, and whatnot to channel some of the flow.  The idea is that you’ll eventually be able to retrieve it and put it to use.

What helps foster that retrieval?  Note-taking.  I’m not sure I agree with the authors of this study (PDF), who believe that “learning to take notes well… takes as much time as learning to write in a relatively experienced way.”  They see the purposes of taking notes as “to record information and/or to aid reflection.”

A note to take: “and/or” is nearly always the worst possible phrase.  It implies precision but just smudges things.  You’re dithering or obsessing or both.  (See how I managed to say that without “and/or?”)

“Aid reflection” isn’t the term I’d use.  I like Stephen Downes’s description of note-taking as your contribution a two-way communication with the source of learning.  Downes recently noted a post by D’Arcy Norman, who says:

Note taking is not primarily about manual duplication of a set of resources produced by a teacher. It’s an active process of sense-making and internalization. Of visualizing the processes of thinking.

Granted, that’s not the way people often think about note-taking.  For them the phrase is a quick trip back to a lecture hall, with a professor relentlessly flinging chunks of some “body of knowledge” at you.  Eventually you’d have to reassemble them to the satisfaction of the flinger.

I can be  a very traditional note-taker.  As an undergraduate, I adopted two strategies that I thought were worth about 0.75 on a four-point grade scale: sit in the first or second seat of a row, and take notes.  Both of these acted to keep me more awake and more engaged, even during the tedium of English Literature: The Augustans.

I have a longstanding habit of taking notes in ink:

Two of my 101 pages of notes from "Complex Learning in Ten Steps"

Ink’s no more essential to note-taking than a soup spoon is to lunch, even if the lunch is soup.

If I’m trying to capture a lot of information for later analysis and search, my first stop is… Microsoft Word’s outlining.  I’ve created a few outline templates (one with I-A-1-a numbering, one with that technoid 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1 format, and other with indents and various bullets for different levels).  I type fast and can shift outline levels almost without thinking, which means I’ve got more bandwidth available to take in and reprocess whatever I’m outlining.

Especially when the knowledge stream’s wider than it is deep, I use Evernote.  I like the idea that my notes are in two places–online, where I can access them from any computer, and on my own laptop, where my useful paranoia means I back my stuff up.

Evernote extends the concept of “note,” because I can take photos of signs, whiteboard sketches, or flipchart pages.  Evernote lets me search for text in images, as in the example on the right (click for a larger view).

I’ve used personal wikis to collect information, and I use several blogs as well.  Each wiki or blog has a focus, a way of deciding what parts of the flow to direct into the format.  And by actively directing–through entering text, through tagging, through classifying and moving–I’m working with the information and increasing the likelihood that I’ll recall it in a context that makes sense to me.

Some more-or-less related items I found along the way:

• iPad, Therefore iKludge: David Dobbs writes about problems with noting, and sharing notes, on devices like the iPad.
• Teaching with Wikis: Sandra Porter enables electronic notes for students who forget the dead-tree kind.
• Cognitive Effort during Note Taking (PDF), a 2005 paper that appeared in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Much of what I found deals with note-taking in an academic setting.  That last paper by Piolat, Olive, and Kellogg makes the point that

…from a cognitive perspective, note taking cannot be conceived of as only a simple abbreviated transcription of information that is heard or read…. on the contrary,it is an activity that strongly depends on the central executive functions of working memory to manage comprehension, selection, and production processes concurrently.

I thought it worth including that statement.  For one thing, note-taking looks obvious–you take notes.  But what you really do, as the researchers are saying, is manipulate incoming information while managing the technical aspects of recording the results of your manipulation.

If you were into straight transcription, like a court reporter, then it’s possible you learn very little, because your focus is purely on the capture.  But for notes to be useful, other than as a transcript, you’re doing things mentally while you’re doing things physically.

A link on Twitter led me to a post at the Law Blog of the Wall Street Journal.  Ashby Jones had fun mocking Our Tech-Savvy Supreme Court.

They were hearing oral arguments in City of Ontario (California) v. Quon.  At issue was whether a member of the Ontario police could expect privacy for personal messages received on his SWAT-team pager, and whether people sending texts to that device could expect that the recipient’s employer would not review those texts.

Jones highlights some remarks by the justices:

• Chief Justice Roberts asked what the difference was between e-mail and a pager.
• Justice Kennedy wondered whether, if you’re sending a text as one arrives, the person who sent that one sees something like “you call is important to us; we’ll get back to you.”
• Justice Scalia asked whether a sent text doesn’t go right to the recipient.  (Jones thinks he was confused by the idea of a service provider.)

(You can judge for yourself, if you’d like.  Here’s the transcript of the oral arguments.  I think the remarks that Jones highlights are at pages 29 [Roberts, email and pages], 44 [Kennedy, your call is important], 48-49 [Scalia, service providers; printing texts].)

Yes, it is amusing if you think the youngest member of the Court doesn’t know the difference between email and a pager.  But that’s about all it is, amusing.  What I think is more pertinent here is that the justices were asking questions to better understand things unfamiliar to them, and that they were focusing on larger issues and not the details of technology.

For instance, Jones left off the first part of Roberts’ question, so I’ll highlight it here:

Maybe everybody else knows this, but what is the difference between the pager and the e-mail? (transcript, page 29)

I have no idea what level of techno-expertise Roberts has, but I’d guess he’s more familiar with email than with pagers, and trying to understand (a) what the difference might be, and (b) whether that difference makes a difference.

In terms of the busy-signal question from Justice Kennedy, it turns out that a few minutes earlier, Roberts had asked:

What happens, just out of curiosity, if you — he is on the pager and sending a message and they are trying to reach him for, you know, a SWAT team crisis?  Does he — does the one kind of trump the other, or do they get a busy signal?

To which the attorney answered, “I don’t think that’s in the record,” which is how a lawyer often phrases “I don’t know.”

As for Scalia’s remark about where a message goes, my guess is that he was being facetious (though we can’t know till there are audio recordings of oral arguments).

A discussion (starting about page 45 in the transcript) had to do with whether it made a difference that the text messages were handled by a service provider.  Scalia asked whether, when you send a text message, you’re pretty much aware that it remains private only if the recipient “or somebody else who has power over the recipient” chooses to look at it.  The lawyer said yes.

Roberts:  Well, then they can’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy based on the fact that their communication is routed through a communications company.

Dammeier (attorney): Well, they — they expect that some company, I’m sure, is going to have to be processing the delivery of this message.  And –

Roberts:  Well, I didn’t — I wouldn’t think that.  I thought, you know, you push a button, it goes right to the other thing.

Dammeier:  Well –

Scalia:  You mean it doesn’t go right to the other thing?

[Laughter]

You may not agree with the opinions that the justices issue, but I think the transcript illustrates several things.  First, they’ve gotten a grasp of the legal issues in the case (which is, after all, their job).  Second, they’re more than willing to ask questions.  Third, as evidenced by Roberts, at least some of them are unafraid of saying, “I don’t understand X.  Can you explain it to me?”

Which isn’t a bad way to start learning more about things you know that you don’t know.

Supreme Court image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by Virginia Foxx.

Yes, you’re right.  Head First Statistics is really a form of teaching, not learning.  As with any book, you could see it as an extended lecture (660 pages, if you count the appendices).  No way to ask anything, easy to slide past questions or problems by turning the page.

Which is why HFS makes such a great example of a tool (depending on your interests) and such a great example of fun (depending on your mindset).

Those two “depending on” clauses are like the uprights for a suspension bridge.  If you’re not interested in learning about statistics and nothing’s pushing you to do so (like your job or your graduate program), then I’m confident (at the 0.975 level) you’re not going to, regardless of the form in which the opportunity to learn appears.  Much the same is true for the other upright: the way you feel about this particular opportunity. 

HFS has given both ends of that bridge some thought. Click the sample page to enlarge; you’ll see what I mean.

♦  ♦  ♦

What Dawn Griffiths has done is sketch a very high-level picture of the learning goals that HFS supports and the types of people who probably respond well to this approach.  Who’da thunk you could do that without the sacred incantation, “At the end of this course the student will be able to…?”

But–how can you be sure of what you’ll learn?

Hmm… the body-of-knowledge approach to learning.  It’s true: in many fields like statistics, there are concepts, principles, terms, equations, and so on that you’re expected to know.

By “know,” I mean you can agree on a description or definition for X with people who aren’t related to you.  Even if their reaction is, “Well, you could put it that way.”

At the same time, despite the sputterosity of purists, zealots, and cranks with time on their hands, most fields don’t have a body of knowledge; they’ve got a herd. Beyond the most basic definitions (like the difference between mean, mode, and media), no one factoid is make-or-break.

Granted, statistics does tend toward the lots-of-specific facts side. So HFS furnishes some tables.

A “Table of Contents (Summary),” which takes up a little more than half a page.  It’s followed by “Table of Contents (the real thing)” with a page for each of the 15 chapters, plus half a page apiece for the intro appendices).  Check the O’Reilly Books preview page for HFS yourself; use the next / previous buttons at the top of the book page to browse.

If I were smart, I’d end by suggesting you also look at a sample chapter (probability, PDF) or explore HFS on your own via Google Books.  The good-humored approach, the absence of dense text–those are obvious at first glance.

Beneath that, though, there’s a lot of cognitive infrastructure, the sort of thing that shifts from “fun” to “learning.”  Chapter 3, “Power Ranges,” is a good example.  It’s got 44 pages dealing with range and variation (the previous chapter dealt with mean, median, and mode).  This is what’s lurking as you turn the title page:

• The coach of the neighborhood basketball team needs one player.  He’s got three candidates.  All three have the same shooting average.  So, which one should he pick?
• Here are their individual stats (points per game and frequency).  What else does the coach need to know?
• Explanation: what “range” means (also, lower bound and upper bound).
• You try it: figure the mean, lower bound, upper bound, and rang for these two players.  Then, draw a histogram (as you learned in chapter 2) for each.
• Feedback for that exercise, and a troubling question about outliers.
• Explanation: why outliers are problematic.  Can you think of how to reduce their impact?
• Explanation: why ranges are quick-and-dirty solutions.
• Sneaky intro (“one way is to measure only part of the range”)
  accompanied by this:

That’s the first 8 pages.  Not only did you have a couple of get-out-your-pencil problems, but also questions to provoke thinking, questions to highlight potential confusion, and even, as in the above example, questions that are intelligent stand-ins for ones a learner might have.

As I said in an earlier post, fun in training (or in support of learning) shouldn’t be an afterthought.  It shouldn’t be force-injected, either, like the fake smoke-flavored streaks applied to frozen burgers to make you think they were grilled.

Dawn Griffiths shows that part of the engagement comes from a general approach (irreverence, retro photos, quirks of layout); another part comes from sample problems that offer real statistical challenges placed in…let’s say surreal settings.  (In chapter 7, you use Poisson distributions to figure out how often a movie theater’s popcorn machine is going to break downnext week.)

Maybe we can get Griffiths and the folks from Head First to have a long lunch with von Merriënboer and Kirschner.

Collaborative Enterprise‘s blog carnival this month looks at formalizing the informal–are there ways to deliberately harness social media to foster learning without losing the (presumed) value of personal connection?

Sure.

Now, I tend to slightly resist two of the implications I see here.  First, while it’s true that “training, education, and schooling are not learning,” I don’t think it follows that learning can’t occur where these are present.  And second, learning did not start happening only after the invention of internet-based social media.

I know that Harold Jarche doesn’t think that, and I’m pretty sure Frédéric Domon doesn’t, either.  I just wanted to make my thinking explicit.

I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics and thinking about how it combines individual and organizational goals.  And just as I write this, I see multiple organizations that aren’t all in a single hierarchy:

• Small, individual sport groups (German women’s bobsled)
• Related-sport groups (sliding sports)
• National teams (Germany)
• Judges, referees, and other arbiters
• Timekeepers, scorekeepers
• Coaches
• Trainers
• Volunteers
• Fans
• Reporters, writers, bloggers, and other who opine
• Local, national, international Olympic officials
• Technicians
• Security
• Sponsors
• Donors

You couldn’t ever satisfy all these groups, let alone their subgroups and individual members–but they find enough common ground to bring about an Olympics.

I see a dynamic for the competitors: each has his or her personal goal, but each had to fit into a larger structure, especially but not exclusively for team sports.  If you want to compete in Nordic combined, you agree that your performance on the jump will determine your starting place in the cross-country element.

Since we’re talking athletic competition, psychomotor skill comes into play, and “training” (in the sense of focused attention, demonstration, feedback) plays a major role.  You do learn as you train–by which I mean, not only do you build the muscle memory and automatic physical behavior, but you also refine and deepen awareness and the potential to respond to outside stimuli.

Another thought came to mind when I was getting annoyed by local-news people focusing relentlessly on medal count: so-and-so “had to settle for silver” (because she was favored to win gold, but didn’t); someone else “won a stupendous bronze” (because he performed much better than expected).

Those phrases got me thinking about how, if you work within a large organization, you need to find ways to align your personal goals with the organization’s in a way that’s authentic for you and helpful to the organization.  In part, it’s the old concept of the king’s shilling: if you’re accepting the paycheck, you’re granting the organization’s right to set and pursue its goals and to ask you to help achieve them.

When you can’t ethically do that, it’s time to get out.

Another point of view emerged when I was reading an obituary for jockey and mystery author Dick Francis, who died this week.  He wome some 350 races in a nine-year career, and rode as jockey for the Queen Mother’s horse in the 1956 Grand National–where his horse, in the lead and 50 yards from the finish, suddenly collapsed.  In his autobiography, Francis wrote:

I heard one man say to another a little while ago [4 or 5 years after the race], “Who did you say that was?  Dick Francis?  Oh, yes–he’s the man who didn’t win the National.”

I’m sure Francis would have love to win it, just as every Olympian would love to win the gold.  But individuals and even organizations often need to reframe their goals, to redefine what success means.

In the workplace, I think that means organizations have to work harder at finding ways to match their goals with those of individuals within the organization.  I once worked across the hall from an ambitious young guy.  He had some “rules for success” on his wall, including “love the business.”

Me, I didn’t love the business–and I can think of at least one boss who’d agree.  But often I did love helping the customer perform better, and that didn’t mean beating him to death with PowerPoint.  It sometimes meant working with him to apply performance-improvement strategies while calling them “transfer of training,” because at the time helping that transfer occur was a lot more important than fretting about jargon.

CC-licensed photo: Olympic colors by kk+ / Kris Krüg.