Dave's Whiteboard

My wife and I got married on February 29th last year.  (For those who are thinking the obvious: in common years, we plan to celebrate on the day after February 28 and the day before March 1.)

A little diversion:

A pair of interesting posts from Cognitive Daily:

• Is expert memory better than non-expert memory?
• What is a visual expert?

(The first post includes a mini-experiment for you to participate in.  Give it a try.)

Dave Munger quotes a study suggesting that experts have a larger visual working memory in their area of expertise than non-experts do.  But he cites a second study suggesting that experts don’t have a larger working memory; their memory is more detailed.  Think of the difference between having a larger computer, and having a computer with many different applications on it.

Munger’s second post explores whether those experts are good at recognizing objects other than faces–since humans are really good at face-recognition.

Again in the second post, there’s a quick experiment for you to try.

The conclusion Munger draws from the second experiment is that “for visual short-term memory, expertise isn’t about prior knowledge, but the ability to process visual images more efficiently.

So what? In part, this suggests that expertise is not (surprise, surprise) an inborn trait. You don’t get to “expert” level because you had more parking space in your brain; your work increases you ability to make use of the space you do have.

It’s not so much knowing a lot of things; it’s being able to recognize and relate patterns.  We know a lot about ways to help people purposefully increase their ability.  Not everyone can end up as a world-class expert, but it’s certainly possible to shift the average performance upward.

(Added 3/3/09: it’s significant that I posted this four days ago and only now noticed I hadn’t included a title…)

Gadget-pyramid image by andyi, used under a CC license.

I don’t place much value on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, at least in the world of work.  A lot of people like the MBTI and its corporate-astrology cousins, but I treasure Scott Simmerman, who says his profile is GFNJ (Guy From New Jersey).

I’ve been asked to help revise a new-specialist training program.  The specialty hardly matters; what I want to talk about is the personality test the client’s using for an activity early in the course.

And the first thing I want to say about the fictionally-named Banquo Group is: they like this test.

It’s not that big a deal; it doesn’t take  much time in the program.  And the new specialists will have to communicate with lots of people–other employees at Banquo, and clients on the project teams the specialists eventually join.

Banquo sees value in the instrument, which sorts people into the mandatory four groups (call them the Pilot, the Pioneer, the Diplomat, and the Doer).  The idea, of course, is that if you’re a Pilot, you have preferred ways of acting and speaking.  Your strongest tendencies can be drawbacks when you deal with a Pioneer or a Diplomat.

And so on for all four types.  The big idea is that you’re conscious of your own preferred style and those of the other person.

Well, that’s just fine, but–so what?  How does that work on on the job?  Probably not by viewing bullet-point descriptions of the types.  That’s like seeing peshawari chole on the menu when you haven’t had Indian food.  The fact that it’s got chickpeas and tomatoes doesn’t help all that much.

Why not adapt this exercise to the actual business of the Banquo group?  Go ahead and give the test.  Then:

• Have pairs of people work through a Banquo/client problem.
• Give each person in the pair a private note to go with, or against, their own personality type.
• See what happens.

For one thing, this gets people away from “Paul Revere was a Doer, and Eleanor Roosevelt was a Pilot.”  (If you think those two people exemplify the types pretty well, remember that I made the types up five paragraphs back.)

Second, it builds on the fact that people on earth don’t have their personality type stencilled on their foreheads.  You have to talk with them to get to know them.

More important, it gets the participants talking to one another about things that matter to the Banquo Group.

For my money (and, I think, for the client’s), the best that can be said for personality tests is that they encourage mindfulness.  So why not be mindfulness about how Banquo employees relate to each other and to clients on the job?

Personality test photo by Thomas Hawk, used under a CC license.
Disagreement photo by Frenkieb, used under a CC license.

Lately, you can’t swing a dead social-media application without hitting the word backchannel.  Usually, it’s some form of real-time comment stream (e.g., via Twitter) flowing during a   presentation/discussion/enlightenment, like the image on the left (click it for a readable version).

Tamar Weinberg posted has a guest post by Olivia Mitchell about how to present while people are twittering, and Beth Kanter (who commented on Tamar’s post) posted her own tips, reflections, and resources.

I’ve had mixed thoughts about the backchannel.  Reading these two posts (and a few others in recent weeks) has helped a lot, if only to clarify some of the questions.

• Where is the backchannel, physically?  Do you display it where the presentation is?  Can the presenter(s) see it?
• What’s the backchannel for?  Are you bringing in people who aren’t present?  Are those in the room just talking amongst themselves?
• And if I’m a presenter, what do I do with it?

Liz Lawley noted on Tamar’s post, “The backchannel doesn’t have a limited number of chairs… it allowed conversations to occur between people who wouldn’t have known to seek each other out otherwise.”  (Liz’s name is a link to her post, also good to read, along with the comments.)

I like that a lot.  When I’ve gone to conferences, sometimes the most engaging conversations with strangers began when I heard someone’s comment or question, then made a note to seek that person out afterward.  It’s one of the best ways for learning to happen–why talk only with the guru?  (For one thing, it’s hard to break through.)  As James Thurber said, it’s better to have some of the questions than all of the answers.

What tends to get overlooked, I think, is the type of presentation.  Who’s talking, about what, for whom?  Is this a panel discussion (usually has the panel, much less often discussion)?  One or maybe two people, in the style of TED talks?  (I haven’t seen a backchannel displayed at a single TED talk, though I suspect one’s active.)

To the extent that nothing much is happening but talk–someone explaining or expounding, people there to hear and to join in–the backchannel makes sense, for reasons you can find in all the posts linked to above.  I especially like the idea that the backchannel gets stored somewhere, so people can retrieve it (if they can’t save it directly) and find links tossed in.

When I  do professional-conference presentations, I start pretty much the same way:

• Hi, I’m Dave, and this is Watching Elizabethan Drama when It’s Not Homework.
• Anyone’s welcome; I pictured the audience as people who have to make technical presentations to non-technical audiences.
• If you find after a few minutes that this isn’t what you were looking for, don’t worry about my feelings–head out to another session and get what you came for.

Okay, I fib a little–if everyone left, my feelings wouldn’t be feeling all that good.  But if everyone did leave, then I didn’t do a very good job of matching my topic to the audience.

I can imagine some hurdles related to the backchannel:

• The techno-gap.  Maybe I just move in different circles, but most professionals I know don’t have a wireless laptop or smart phone they take to every conference.  Many don’t read blogs, let alone have them.  So a backchannel leaves them outside the door, and a public backchannel distracts them, annoys them, or both.
• The learning curve.  As I keep reminding people, there are about 5 million people on Twitter; there are about 12 million families in the U.S. that own pet birds.  So most people haven’t seen it, let alone used it, let alone get it.  (You were that way once yourself, unless you’re a Social Media Guru; that title causes usage amnesia.)
• The social context: do you add to the backchannel while in a room of 30 people?  A group of 12?  Sitting at a table with five others in breakout activity?

I have a presentation coming up, so these aren’t just abstractions.

Backchannel stream photo by Tom Purvis.
Expert visual by cogdogblog / Alan Levine.

I read once that in ancient Greece, the equivalent of “it’s Greek to me” was “it sounds like Hebrew.”  I’ve never found documentation of that, although Mark Liberman at Language Log recently presented a chart showing a complex of “it’s X to me” relationships–e.g., Romanians think it’s Turkish, Turks think it’s French, and lots of people think it’s Chinese.

Which leads to the ChinesePod blog and Ken Carroll’s latest post, Learning from Context. The language-learning approach at ChinesePod (and its siblings for learning French, Spanish, Italian, and English) doesn’t start with vocabulary lists and grammar rules.  Ken’s post helps explain why–and relates well to other kinds of learning.   He offers five reasons for a focus on context:

Context shows, it doesn’t tell. Outside of academia, when someone says you’re getting into semantics, it’s usually not a compliment.  In part that’s because they seem to be looking for overly discrete separation of meaning.  Showing words in context — like, say, showing good customer service in context — helps people understand how things work in real human interaction.

Context makes it natural. No traditional language course will prepare you to say to the waiter, “She’s the broiled scallops; I’m the tuna.”  (Baeed on an example Ken cites from John Pasden.)

Context goes beyond semantic meaning. I’ll let Ken do the talking here:

In linguistics, the relationship between context and meaning is known as pragmatics.  If semantics are concerned with what words mean, then pragmatics are concerned with what speakers mean.  The fact is that literal explanations of what words mean are neither inherently interesting, nor remotely memorable…

Far better to… [let] the learner figure out the meaning for herself, since she already knows what most of the concepts are…The learner figures out meaning by focusing on what speakers mean, which is why drama, sound effects, etc., can be so effective.

Context leverages pragmatics. Think of the many meanings for “That’s some outfit you’re wearing!”

For beginning language learners, you might put that into a literal context, or into an easily-perceived, non-literal one.  As Ken says, this can open up “a world of inference, subtlety, and color.”

None of this is to say that semantics don’t matter.  To speak French, for example, sooner or later you have to know that adjectives agree in number and gender with the nouns they modify (le cheval blanc [the white horse], la Maison Blanche [the White House]).

But few beginners come to a language thinking, “All right!  I’m going to learn number and gender.”  Instead, from the start they envision contexts: I want to order lunch in Lyon, I want to do business in Québec, I want to get a date in Paris.

And the final point: you can use different types of context. Ken gives an example of social context based on the relationship between speakers.  In a job-related setting, you might have a context related to a specific field (like information technology), or to a specific process (like manufacturing), or to an economic setting (like domestic versus international marketing).

Rosetta Stone jigsaw puzzle photo by Kaptain Kobold.
Distinctive outfit photo by Thirteen Of Clubs.