Dave's Whiteboard

About ten years ago, my parents got a computer. Dad was 87 and Mom was 81.  They weren’t really early adopters, except maybe among their age group.

The primary reason was my dad’s eyesight–he couldn’t drive safely at night to visit friends and play cards.  The computer allowed us to install card-game software.  The software created virtual partners for cribbage, pinochle, and euchre, as well as solitaire cards that never got sticky.

A few weeks later, my mother asked if they could get to the internet.  We got her an AOL account and bought two copies of a graphic-rich how-to book.  (That way, when she had a question, I’d use my copy and say, “Look on page 32.  I’ll walk you through the steps…”)

I printed the first email she sent, in May of 2000.  It read, in part:

I want to know what URL means.  I want to know if my address book has the e-mail addresses in it.  And how do I get it?

Those are great, goal-oriented questions.  And I had forgotten this from my dad, about a month later, until I found the copy this morning:

Hi David

Mom made me do it

This is the old fellow trying to compose a little note.

How am I doing?

Love Dad

For quite a while, they had fun with email (mostly receiving, since their typing skills weren’t the greatest). Over time, though, Mom and Dad had difficulties with the mechanics: they’d get attachments they couldn’t open, and their in-basket will fill up because they didn’t quite get the hang of filing.

Then I had an epiphany: I set up what I called the world’s smallest blog (audience: two).  Instead of writing letters or email, I started posting to the blog.  Instead of searching their in-basket, they’d click on the desktop shortcut I created.

With photos embedded in the posts, they didn’t have to open attachments.  The blog would automatically archive by month, and also by broad topic.  And my three children (who between them have more than half a dozen blogs) had author access, so they too could plop down at this digital kitchen table for a visit.

I mention this for a number of reasons.  First, Sunday was the blog’s fourth anniversary (official readership is down to just my mother).  Second, and not entirely by chance, Sunday also marked the blog’s one-thousandth post.

That’s right: for four years, my parents have had virtual guests about five posts a week.

By and large the posts on their blog are astonishingly mundane.  I write about a trip into Washington, or making chicken stew provençal, or (much less often) about a consulting project I’m working on.

Oh, and the weather.  My dad always wanted to know what our weather was like.

My kids tease me, but they know the real purpose: each post is a brief chat with my mother, often with pictures (she got a lot of pictures of last February’s snowpocalypse), letting her know what’s going on here.  They add their own comments, and a fair number of pictures of the great-grandchildren.

Another reason I mention this is that when I came up with the idea, I realized I’d broken through my own preconception of what a blog was.  Blogs are for the world at large?  Not necessarily.  They have your Big Thought of the Day?  Ehh, maybe not.  They’re all about ever-expanding readership?  It’s debatable.

What really happened is that I had a problem to solve–Mom and Dad’s challenges in working with email, and my own spotty record in sitting down to write them some email.  And by ignoring what I thought were conventions of the medium, I found a solution.

The only drawback?  My brother, who lives with my mother, urges me to post at least four times a week.  If I miss two days running, he says, my mother worries that there’s something wrong, either with her computer or with me.

I’m not sure which worries her more.

Screenshot from WordPress is mine; CC-licensed tea photo by adactio / Jeremy Keith.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, and the first thing to come to mind was this song from Peggy Seeger.

When I was a little girl I wished I was a boy.
I tagged along behind the gang and wore my corduroys
Everybody said I only did it to annoy,
But I was gonna be an engineer.

As I was saying, I needed to replace my PDA.  Last Saturday, just ahead of 6 or 8 inches of “a light dusting of snow,” my wife and I each got the Verizon HTC Droid Eris.  (She meanwhile received a BlackBerry for work; we now have more smart phones in the house than we do smart people.)

The good news is we were able to make a call on the way home from the store, so the phone part was easy to master.  That was the prelude to four or five hours during which we both tinkered with our phones.

It was a good reminder that people who say “learning is fun” are usually talking about past learning, rather than future.

At a particularly high level of stress, I wrote down some comments we were making:

• I know I came across it at one point…
• How do you…?
• How did I…?
• Where was…?

…which helps explain my original delay in getting the phone in the first place.  Cost was one factor: Verizon’s data plan adds $30 to your monthly phone bill.  On a two-year contract, that’s $720 dollars (in addition to your voice plan, even though ours is relatively cheap).

In retrospect, I think the more important factor for me was transition cost (which a couple of friends might phrase as “resistance to change”).  I see three potential sources of trouble from a shift like the one I’ve made:

• You’ve got to learn some new things.
• You’ve got to learn how to do some things differently.
• You’ve got to leave some things behind.

Of those, I think “differently” is the most troubling.  That’s the real change: to accomplish X, I used to do Y.  I knew how to do Y.  I was good at Y, so much so I didn’t have to think about it, because it had been incorporated into a larger set of behavior, the way I instinctively know when to use “the” and when not to (my sister’s in the hospital, my brother’s in college).

A certain amount of stress (or perhaps challenge) can help foster learning–we’ve got a goal, we’re looking for a way to accomplish it.  Too much, though, and we see the new practice or new technology as not just a change but a hindrance–a word whose roots suggest harm, injury, or impairment.

I’ve also noticed several instances of “intuitive cognitive strategies” (a term van Merriënboer and Kirschner use for “incorrect notions that newbies come up with”).  For example, there are seven home screens–a phrase that confused me, since I thought of the middle one as the home screen.    The other sixe were…I don’t know, helper screen.  Subscreens.  Peripheral screens.

(Why this matters: you only have so much space on the smartphone screen.  By flicking your finger across it, you can switch between the various home screens and have more real estate for applications.)

Part of that confusion might have come from the concept of scenes, which are alternative sets of home screens.  (You swap in a new scene and your home screens are different–like one for work and one for play, maybe.)

Got that?  Me, either, which is why I thought that you had to add a new icon to the “main” home screen (the middle one of the seven) and then drag it wherever you wanted it, like the offspring of the iPhone and a number puzzle.

Going back to transition cost, the highest risk for me was that I’d have to re-enter my contacts and my calendar items if the Eris couldn’t sync with Microsoft Outlook.  I didn’t want to have to switch to Google’s contacts and calendar (see above, “learn some new things” and “leave some things behind”).

Cooperative learning came into play.  I don’t recall what I was doing at the time (probably trying to create a clear path for app-dragging), but my wife made a very specific search and found a description of how to get the Eris to sync directly with Outlook on my desktop.

It was a little bumpy, but I got it done–and that payoff boosted my sense of competence on the new tool.  Now I’m having fun playing with applications, and I’m more prone to see difficulties as puzzles rather than setbacks.  I just hope that the next time I’m trying to breeze someone else through “change management,” I remember how frustrated I felt when my own change was getting managed.

Here’s a video from  Lisa Gade’s look at the Eris (at Mobile Tech Review). You can see a demonstration of those seven home screens at about the 3:00 mark in the video:

Biggest mystery about the phone so far?  It turns out that your purchase doesn’t include the 238 page user guide (PDF).  (To be fair, it’s 238 5 x 5 pages, but still…)  Perhaps Verizon has a goal to encourage discovery learning.

Peculiar mystery: if you visit Android Market (the Google source for Android applications) with a computer rather than a smartphone, there’s no search function.

[Here are] some of the more popular applications and games available in Android Market. For a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the thousands of titles that are available, you will need to view Android Market on a handset.

No search?  From Google?

Onetime English major mystery:  Eris was the goddess of strife.  At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, she lobbed a golden apple inscribed “to the fairest.”  Squabbling among goddesses led to the Trojan War, an event somewhat more frustrating than switching to a smart(er) phone.

You can thank my mother for this.  She gives me a subscription to National Geographic for my birthday.  Each year she asks if I’d still like to get it.  Here’s one reason I always answer “yes.”

The January 2010 issue includes A Better Life with Bionics.  Joel Fischman’s article  starts with Amanda Kitts (pictured at right ), who lost most of her left arm in an auto accident in 2006.  Kitts one of the people on the front lines of bionics because of her collaboration with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago‘s Todd Kuiken.

Traditional prosthetic arms, the article says, rely on cables: the individual presses a lever on a harness to make one of three movements of the pincer hand.  In Kitts’s case, Kuiken “rewired” nerves that used to go all the way down her arm.  That’s reinnervation (New York Times graphic).

The nerves started in Kitts’s brain…which holds a rough map of the body…. In an intricate operation, a surgeon rerouted those nerves to different regions of Kitts’s upper-arm muscles…

“By four months, I could actually feel different parts of my hand when I touched my upper arm.  I could touch it in different places and feel different fingers,” [says Kitts.]

That was the start.  Kitts then received a new bionic arm with electrodes that could pick up electrical signals from those muscles.  How does it know which signals?  Because Kitts also has a phantom arm–a set of electrodes controlling a virtual arm in a computer–that RIC’s Blair Lock uses to fine-turn the connection between muscle signal and the desired motion.

So, how does it do?  Here’s Kitts in the lab.  (Note: there’s no sound in this video.)

Related items:

• Amanda Kitts’s Patient Story (from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago)
• Prosthetic Limb Advance (from NPR’s Science Friday; includes video of bionic arm in use)
• The Bionic Body (interactive graphic at the National Geographic)
• In New Procedure, Artificial Arm Listens to Brain (New York Times, Feb. 10, 2009)

I have three real blogs, by which I mean ones I actually post things on.  I have two others I received by registering at WordPress.com and Blogger.  I almost never sign on to Blogger (a choice, not a critique), and mainly use WordPress.com when I show someone how to start a blog.

I don’t do that often; I’m a poor proselytizer.  But I’m not bad at explaining.

There are two main routes to having your own blog.  The simpler one, for most people, is a blog hosted on sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.  You don’t have to consider domain name, hosting services, or any of that stuff.

You do have to figure out how a blog works, which like many things can seem quite complicated from the outside.  I’m a WordPress fan, but its distinction between Post and Page is not intuitive, and the explanation in the WordPress Codex isn’t much help to a newcomer.

( *** Tech term alert: if you don’t care about WordPress, feel free to skip the next paragraph. ***)

A WP novice doesn’t immediately grasp whether, when, or how to use categories.  She doesn’t necessarily see the distinctions between publish, preview, and save draft.  It’s not obvious how to write a post and set it to appear automatically at a later time. And that’s just the writing-a-post stuff, not the admin controls, the use of plug-ins, or the tradeoffs that come with switching your theme.

The second route to having a blog is to have your own domain (like my www.daveswhiteboard.com), to have that domain hosted (by a hosting service or, for those with lots of tech time, on your own), and to install blog software on your domain the way I’ve installed WordPress on mine.

None of that is all that hard, necessarily — but it’s comparable to learning to drive a standard transmission car when you only know how to drive an automatic.  There’s more stuff going on, more that you have to think about, concepts you need to incorporate, skills you need to build.  The effort can well be worthwhile (either for the stick shift or for the domain), but it’s not essential.  At least not in the way that food, shelter, clothing, and shortbread are.

My own impression of a blog, way back when, was “here’s my big thought of the day.”  After nearly four years, I know quite a few bloggers.  Most of them don’t see their blog that way.  Still, you can see the parallel with the (relatively) uninformed picture of Twitter as “here’s what I had for lunch.”

My first blog is a collection of stories by and about people from Cape Breton Island, where I was born.  Most of them aren’t by me.  My second blog began as a way to keep in touch with my parents, who’d been online for a few years but had trouble when it came to reading email, finding items they’d previously read, and opening attachments.

My point is not that you ought to blog for your family stories or to keep in touch with your parents.  Instead, it’s that if you’ve got something you want to share with one or more people at a distance, and you think you might have a number of things to share, then a blog’s one way you can do that.

A longtime colleague and friend has a serious-hobby interest–to preserve his privacy, I’ll say this interest is in Japanese ceramics, because it’s not.   He collects Japanese ceramics, he makes trips to examine them, he meets often with people also interested in ceramics.

He asked about making a web page to summarize lectures about Japanese ceramics, I suggested a blog to accomplish this–far less a technical leap for him than a full-blown website.  I walked him through WordPress.com’s setup.  He made practice posts (so he learned by doing simple versions of the real task).  I’ve spent five or six hours all told helping him maintain and troubleshoot his blog.

He does almost nothing the way I would.  The most recent post doesn’t appear on the main page.  He has white type on a dark background.  He has dozens of photos in a single post.  He has enormously long posts (no “click to read more” for him).  He doesn’t allow comments.

And yet…

He gets email from strangers who him for sharing in this way.  Guest lecturers collaborate with him because they’re so pleased to have their material circulated more widely, especially by someone attuned to nuance in the world of Japanese ceramics.  He’s chugged along for two years with a slow rise to about two posts a month.

I’ve learned a lot from helping him.  In particular, I’ve been reminded of the difference between an option, a preference, and a recommendation.  You could argue that his blog might be more “successful” if he changed some of his practice–but I believe he knows what he wants to say, how he wants to say it, and quite a bit about who might want to hear it said.

CC-licensed images:
Tow-away hours image by Brett L.
1940 Oldsmobile manual image by Hugo90.