Dave’s Whiteboard

P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula wonders, “Where is science blogging going?” His post is a musing about how blogs fit into the overall world of science — one in theory more rigorous than the training / learning / performance arenas I tend to frequent.

He notes that there isn’t much accountability in science blogging.

This is a general problem with solutions that bubble up from the ground rather than being defined from above — they do something very, very well, but it usually isn’t the something that a planner would design, and they often won’t easily do something else that you think they ought to do.

He also suggests that it’s hard to design what’s going to be the next stage. Design, he says, is “a terrible paradigm for adding unexpected newness and potential (which any evolutionary biologist would tell you).”

A lot of interesting points of view in the comments on his post, as well, like this one from Blake Stacey:

I think it’s important to remember that the nature of the blogosphere is not carved in marble. A few years ago, it didn’t exist. It just is the way it ended up being. When we want something different, it’ll change. Right now, doing anything other than what we normally do might be like hammering nails with a screwdriver, but when every other tool in your toolbox is broken and getting rustier by the day, you start to wonder how you could modify that screwdriver.

It was this lengthy (and rambly) post on “What Science Blogs Can’t Do” by Stacey at Science after Sunclipse that triggered Myers’ post.

Thanks to Greg Laden’s Blog, I came across this TED talk by Benjamin Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic. Serendipitous, especially after yesterday’s post about involving more of the senses. (Time: 20:43)

A comment from Tara at In My Copious Free Time (she was in the audience):

He told a story about a musician who was practicing a piece for an interview to be the associate (2nd chair?) cellist? (sorry, can’t remember) in a Barcelona orchestra. Zander thought the guy was holding back - he kept working with him until the guy was giving it all he had and the guy went away to Spain for the interview. He came back and said he hadn’t gotten the job because he played the first way, holding back. But then he said, “oh, fuck it” and went to Madrid, auditioned for 1st chair in their orchestra and got it. So Zander says that you have to get BTFI - Beyond the “fuck it” point.

Series: The brain rules!

In this second-to-last post about John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’m looking at rule 9, “Stimulate more of the senses.”

A good part of this chapter seems intuitively obvious; what caught my eye were things that had been less clear (at least to me).

I’d heard of synesthesia before — the odd sensory-crossing phenomenon in which a person experiences, say, the number 9 as having a flavor. Synesthetes “display unusually advanced memory ability,” Medina says. And they find their apparently odd perceptions to be pleasurable.

Synesthesia suggests that the sensory processes in the brain are designed to work together; the condition simply makes that more striking. But we evolved in a multisensory environment, and so our brains developed ways to effectively process the stimuli coming in from our senses.

Not only do the senses work together, but their combined effects can enhance their individual abilities. In one experiment, people had a hard time seeing a flickering light if its intensity was gradually decreased. Researchers coordinated a short burst of sound with the light flickering off. Subjects who had the sound as part of the experience could see the light beyond their normal threshhold.

Medina cites work by Richard E. Mayer of the University of California Santa Barbara. (He collaborated with Ruth Colvin Clark on E-learning and the Science of Instruction.)

Five of Mayer’s findings:

• The multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
• The temporal contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding works and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
• The spacial contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
• The coherence principle: Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
• The modality principle: Students learn better from animation and narration then from animation and on-screen text.

As Medina points out, these findings home deal with two senses — hearing and vision. Evidence exists that involving the other senses can also enhance learning. Certain types of memory are sensitive to smells, for example. One intriguing example suggests that the sense of smell can improve declarative memory during sleep.

Five senses photo by http://flickr.com/people/joaoloureiro/.

Nearly eleven years ago, I met Patti Shank through a listserv. I’d asked some question about training on the web. The list at the time may have had 3,000 members. I don’t remember how many replied on-list, but I still have Patti’s one-to-one reply.

Like Patti, it was candid, practical, and helpful. One resource she suggested was an HTML tutorial developed by the indefatigable Alan Levine when he was at the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction. It’s sort of the big brother of Stephen Downes’s explanation of how to create your own RSS feed with a text editor, a web server, and a beer.

I learned how to write HTML with the tutorial (which requires only a browser and a text editor). I don’t earn my living building web pages, but I had an immediate need, and the tutorial helped me meet and exceed it.

I mention it in part because it was then — and now — an outstanding example of a simple, effective design. The idea is that you learn HTML by building a web site about volcanoes. If you’re completely new, there’s a nice logical structure to follow.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can skip ahead. What does the tutorial care?

Actually, it does care. It cares enough that if you jump from Lesson 6 (making lists) to Lesson 18 (spiffing up text), you’ll see this:

Objectives
After this lesson you will be able to:

• Change the size of specific portions of text in a web page
• Change the color of specific portions of text in a web page
• Create superscripts and subscripts for text in a web page
• Specify the font for portions of text on a web page

Note: If you do not have the working documents from the previous lessons, download a copy now.

(Yep, that download link in the example above works.)

So if you think you want to learn how to tinker with the appearance of text before you learn how to uses blockquotes, have at it.  But since Lesson 18 builds on previous lessons, in case you didn’t do them yet, there’s a copy of what you’ll need.

Naturally, at the end of each lesson, you can check your own work with a sample of how it should look.

I haven’t re-taken the tutorial, and I’m not trying to enlist people to take it. I just wanted to highlight a superlative example of self-paced training suitable for novices (sensible structure) and for those who’ve acquired some skill (ability to explore and do things out of sequence). And you get to decide which category suits you.

I don’t think there’s any sound. I know there’s no tracking or scoring. All the thing will do is let an interested person with a browser and a text editor create web pages.

Well, that, and occasionally challenge people who develop training.

Tuesday’s New York Times had a piece on John Kao (author of Where the Whole Agenda is Innovation). I don’t think I’d heard of him, but he’s been a busy guy. Studied philosophy and social science at Yale, played keyboards with Frank Zappa, did a psychiatry residency at Harvard, and taught about science, technology, and entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School

I was struck by his thoughts on innovation, both as quoted in the Times article and on his blog, Innovation Nation:

There are three main threats to our innovation success. First, our base for innovation has eroded. Our education system is great for the top slice, but most Americans are receiving nothing like an adequate education, especially in science and math. Our physical infrastructure needs a dramatic level of reinvestment. And our ability to regenerate our innovation base will depend on our ability to look at all the ingredients in a holistic manner.

Second, we need to engage more deeply with the rest of the world in effective networks of innovation. But our national image is at an all-time low and we seem to be closing more doors to talent from outside the U.S. than opening them.

Finally, our innovation ethos clearly needs reinvigorating. As Americans, we need to answer the question of what innovation is for, and what place it holds in our national narrative.

Although Innovation Nation seems to be a marketing tool rather than a real blog (eight posts so far this year), Kao presents some ideas that I hadn’t considered. I skimmed parts of this interview from FastCompany TV. (It runs 57 minutes.)

Kao: People sometimes confuse creativity and innovation. We’re all creative and come up with new ideas… creativity is the novelty part. Innovation is how the new ideas address a purpose and become valuable.

That’s a nice distinction. I might have thought of innovation as newness for its own sake, but Kao’s got me thinking that unless the new thing turns out to have value, it’s more of a fad.

What about innovation within an organization? Kao says you have to create a framework in which the creative energy is going to be channeled and have a result.