Dave’s Whiteboard

Thanks to Ray Sims, I got to hear Clay Shirky speaking at a Web 2.0 expo last April. If you haven’t heard it, I found it well worth the 17 minutes. Watch for yourself, or skip to my musings below.

Shirky talks among other things about cognitive surplus — the free time created by technology. We’re at the beginning of such creation now — as he says, “we’re still in special cases.” Web 2.0 tools are sufficiently new that Shirky says they’re like the physics of weather. We know about the individual elements, we can see people doing things, but we can’t predict the results yet because the whole is so complex.

So he says it’s important to fail informatively — a great phrase. Really, it’s the closing loop in any performance system: figure out what didn’t go right, and figure out why, so you can apply that understanding in your next venture.

Shirkey offers an estimate for the total time spend bringing Wikipedia where it is today — talk pages, articles, edits, the whole shebang, in all Wikipedia languages. He and a colleague guess at 100 million hours. Good enough for analogic purposes, especially when he compares that to television watching in the U.S.: 200 billion hours a year.

In other words, the time spent watching TV in one year is the equivalent of 2,000 Wikipedias. Or, from another angle, each weekend in the U.S., we watch enough commercials to create one Wikipedia.

Obviously, most people aren’t going to do that — but as Shirkey said, more and more people are doing something. Get the emphasis clear: doing something. I have a friend who’s developed an attachment to a man who invited her to play World of Warcraft. She talks with some bemusement about her character and her adventures as a night elf.

Shirkey would point out that my friend has moved from consumption of media (watching TV) to production and sharing. She’s interacting with other people (in a virtual world). She’s actively engaging.

I’ve seen the term “mommy blog” used with derision. My notion is that the creators of mommy blogs (or cat blogs or fan blogs or my-political-solution blogs) are well aware that their creations have a limited audience. Hell, I have a blog with an audience of two (no, not this blog), and I consider it a roaring success.

Prior to personal computers and cheap or free tools, we didn’t have many options. As MCI said in mockery of its long-distance rival AT&T, back when you actually thought about long-distance charges, “For over 100 years, when you reached out to touch someone, you didn’t have a choice.”

If like me you hadn’t heard the phrase “looking for the mouse,” I encourage you to spend the 15 minutes with Shirkey.

Yesterday’s post on language learning, and comments by Hank Horkoff, have me musing about two facets of learning. One of them I might think of as personal logistics; the other, as expertness.

(To my surprise as a semipro expert in English usage, “expertness” is not only an actual word, it’s been around since the 14th century.)

By personal logistics I mean the things a learner does to set goals, map routes, gauge progress, adopt and adapt strategies, and so on. With language learning in mind, I’d been thinking about ordinary goals like “learn French for my trip to Lyon.”

Embedded in that sentence is what Joe Harless calls a hidden discrimination. On its face, “learn French for my trip” implies that there’s a tourist dosage of French. All I need to do is get the right prescription.

Other than at the most obvious level, there isn’t any such dosage. You do have to know that oui means “yes,” not “we,” and you probably want to know that demander means “to ask,” not “to demand.”

Beyond that, the novice learner can benefit from keeping two things in mind. First, for language as for clothing, “one size fits all” depends mightily on your definition of “size,” “fits,” and “all.”

Second, no matter where you’re sitting, linguistically, sometimes it’s a great day just to be in the ballpark. In other words, if in your personal logistics you define a language goal as “act with courtesy and understand basics,” then you can begin to choose the tools that will help you achieve that goal.

When I was in Lyon, I found a menu item I didn’t know. (I found lots, actually. In this case, I was hungry and didn’t want cèpes to take away hunger in the wrong way.) From the dosage perspective, my tourist prescription was a failure. From the ballpark perspective, it was a sunny day, I was with my wife, and we were deciding what to order in a restaurant in Lyon.

(By the way, cèpes are large wild mushrooms.)

When I worked for GE, many of our products related to supply chain management: what businesses do to manage their inputs to help them best produce the results they want. Self-directed learning (self-managed?) has many parallels to that process. What do I want to achieve? What resources can I locate? Which ones are good in terms of what I want to do? Which can I afford (in money, in time)?

That’s a good connection to expertness, which probably needs its own post. Stephen Downes makes a point about all knowledge being tacit. Explicit knowledge is factual, the know-what stuff. Tacit knowledge isn’t, well, explicit — it’s the know-how. And even the explicit things get tricky:

So you may say, but a cat is still a cat. But what constitutes a cat - at which point does a cat cease to be a cat? If it is dead, is it a cat? If it is dismembered, is it a cat? If a cat’s head is sewn onto a dog’s body, is it still a cat? If the cat’s DNA is altered, is it still a cat? It all depends on what you think is important about being a cat - and that, my friends, is a property of the observer, not the cat.

Stephen Downes, Is Knowledge Paradoxical?

Going back to the earlier example, an expert would tell you that “yes” is the English word for affirmation, and that “no” is the word for negation. I do remember reading of a lecture in which a professor said that in English you can’t express a negative with two positives.

To which someone replied, “Yeah, right.”

Photo of cèpes by noodlepie / Graham Holliday.

The FrenchPod language-learning site has joined its siblings, ChinesePod and SpanishPod. ChinesePod co-founder Ken Carroll on his blog talks about FrenchPod as a personalized learning system.

Ken make an insightful point about the autonomous learner.

…Real life learners almost certainly want efficiency and convenience. They also expect a learning service to reduce the learning curve for them and provide guidance — learning how to learn is valuable.

I’m inclined to think “effectiveness” rather than “efficiency,” but that may be a distinction without a difference here. In the language learning that tools like FrenchPod facilitate, what constitutes “effectiveness?” I see these elements:

• Helping people articulate their goals.
• Helping people choose how to work toward them.
• Helping people monitor their progress.
• Helping people decide on what (if anything) to change in that mix.

What’s impressive (or even disconcerting) about FrenchPod and the other Praxis Language sites is the way they center on the learner, rather than the content. If you want to learn one of these languages, you’ve got a database of lessons (learning objects) that you can explore via level of difficulty or by subject. (ChinesePod has nearly a thousand lessons; FrenchPod, being brand-new, is nearly at 50. New lessons appear daily.)

You also have ways to manage your own learning, from subscription levels (starting at “free”) to content options to various tools — including online pronunciation guides, essential for the newcomer.

That’s radically different from most people’s picture of how to learn a language — a series of instructional escalators, a linear progression, a tidy department store of content. “Second floor: pronouns, past tense, irregular verbs.”

When I first looked at ChinesePod, more than a year ago, I was impressed with the decision to have two hosts in the podcast, one a native speaker and one a skilled non-native. I think this is an effective way to help the learner experience high-quality use of the language and also to provide a variety of input — helping the learner make increasingly fine discriminations.

This isn’t the language learning of Paris est la capitale de la France, the first line in my French 1 book. With freedom comes responsibility: the independent learner needs to learn how to be independent, how to make her own judgments, how to move ahead.

The online community (which includes other learners and the staff of the FrenchPod site) contributes there, as does Praxis’s use of technology such as RSS and tagging.

Even if you’re not planning to learn a language, a visit to FrenchPod, SpanishPod, or ChinesePod will give a vivid example of, well, “efficiency and convenience” in learning.

Language-box photo by kiwanja / Ken Banks.

Series: The brain rules!

Well, it’s not completely true that your brain’s not working. The post’s title may have gotten it working on something new, which is one of the points in chapter 4 of John Medina’s Brain Rules: We don’t pay attention to boring things.

Our brains constantly respond to electricity. We convert input from the outside world into electrical charges, continuously cycling through:

• Detecting the inputs,
• Attending to some of them, and
• Deciding whether and how to respond.

So, what works if we want people to attend to something? Cathy Moore has one solid answer: appeal to emotions. In some sense, our brains are managing by exception. We pay attention to things that are striking because they stand out from typical patterns.

As you’re driving your car, for example, you’re constantly monitoring for what’s out of the ordinary — even if you do most of that almost unconsciously. No unusual movement in the mirrors? No funny sound from the road or the engine? No vehicles moving much slower or much faster than the others?

Emotions can trigger dopamine in the brain, attaching what Medina calls a chemical Post-it note to the input. “Same old, same old” doesn’t make for emotional attraction.

In the effort to gain and hold attention, Medina stresses meaning before details. Our ancestors on the grasslands of Africa learned in a strict Darwinian way not to get bogged down too early in irrelevant detail.

This doesn’t mean detail is unimportant. It does mean that if you are trying to hold someone’s attention, it makes sense from the get-go to deliver relevant, big-picture meaning that matters to that person.

Medina cites research to suggest that most of the time you can expect to hold someone’s attention for a maximum of 10 minutes. (Did the folks at YouTube know this? Maybe so.) That holds some serious implications for people making presentations, designing learning, or writing blog posts.

In short, Medina suggests chucking your material into 10 minute segments and triggering a relevant emotion at the start of each chunk. I’m stressing relevant here because everyone’s seen pointless animation and heard extraneous or even distracting sound as part of an unsuccessful attempt to seize attention and never let it go.

There’s a lot of good material in this chapter — in particular, Medina’s contention that the brain can’t multitask. That’s more than I could fit into this 10 minute chunk, so I’ll make it a post on its own.

Photo of Capitol South Metro station by cursedthing / Laura A.
Photo of Post-It man by LuluP / Lucille Pine.

One of my favorite undergraduate courses dealt with folktales, and a major topic was urban legends. We read Jan Harold Brunvand, who’s renowned in part for demonstrating that folk tales aren’t limited to centuries past or primitive cultures. Internet warning spam is an example — the FCC’s going to tax email, telemarkers will get everyone’s cell phone number, that sort of thing. (Thank goodness for Snopes.)

I’ve run into one internet urban legend three times in the past week, which is why the topic’s on my mind. That in turn reminded me of this video from This American Life (found at Jonah Lehrer’s The Frontal Cortex) so compelling — an examination of how we can manufacture details about events that never happened to us.

…Ah, yes, it’s all coming back to me.