Dave's Whiteboard

Microsoft’s Danah Boyd spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo the week before Thanksgiving.  As she says in her own post, she “did a dreadful job at delivering my message.”  She was giving a new talk, though the organizers told her she wouldn’t (or couldn’t?) have a laptop with her.

(I wonder what kind of tech conference they run that they can’t manage that.  Can’t have your computer?  Is there a dress code for speakers?  A loyalty oath? Are you allowed in if you don’t own an iPhone?)

Nor was the podium the kind normal people would use, with a slanted surface suitable for holding notes.  It was level, like a table.

Shortly before her talk, Boyd also discovered there’d be a live twitter feed–behind her.  Which mean that she had no way of knowing what was in the feed, and no way to be sure what the audience was reacting to.

You can (and should) read her full post.  She has what I think are legitimate critiques of the backchannel.  If the speaker can’t see it, what’s it for?  How does it aid a conversation?

Further, she suggests that the public-facing backchannel forces the audience to pay attention — at the very least, it competes for attention, like the television set that your friends don’t ever turn off, even when you’re visiting.

And, you know, public-facing means the comments are available to everyone except the speaker.  Which isn’t a whole lot better than the outside criticism-channel at HeWeb09, which sparked the term “harshtag.”

Vicki Davis posted about this at her Cool Cat Teacher blog.  I think her biggest points are worth repeating here:

• I don’t like the backchannel on the big screen.  Period.
• All presentation backchannels should have moderators.
• Backchannels should be part of the presentation from the speaker.
  • Vicki shares some slides she uses to set the backchannel in context.
• Twitter makes a poor backchannel.
• Backchannels should be intentional.

I’ve seen posts implying that the backchannel’s always and everywhere good.  I think that’s optimistic at best, and irrational if not destructive at the worst.  There’s no way to prevent people from using an outside channel like Twitter, but I’m ambivalent about its value if more than half the in-person participants can’t join in.

I realize there are circles where everybody (and his cousin Steve) has a smartphone or some other way to instantly dive into Twitter — but they’re not circles I’m in.  So if you’ve got an organized course or an in-person presentation, the people most relevant to engage are the ones there in person.  I don’t quite see why someone listening in via Twitter should grab the attention of a presenter more than someone who’s sitting 20 feet away.

I don’t have an answer for this, let alone the answer.  Lately I find “the” answer’s pretty hard to find, and certainly doesn’t come in one-size-fits-all.  So the key question is probably Vicki’s last point, above: what’s the comment channel for? Why have it?  What are you going to do with it?

As the social media guru Douglas MacArthur should have said, old technology doesn’t die, it just fades away.  What’s fading on me, lately, is my Palm Tungsten PDA, one of the two that Noah used on the ark.  It’s the third Palm I’ve owned, though the second one’s life did end prematurely when a heavy shelf decided to part company with my office wall.

The PDA doesn’t have Internet access, can’t make calls.  What it used to do, reliably, is synchronize my contacts, my calendar, and my to-do list so I could use these things either on the PDA or on my laptop.

A while back, the calendar stopped synching, which means the PDA won’t remind me I’m supposed to be at the dentist’s or that the scope of work is due at the client’s on Thursday.

I’ve decided not to try fixing this thing.  My idea of a good time, or even a mildly tolerable bad one, doesn’t include textual analysis of error messages when they boil down to “nope, that didn’t work, either.”  Instead, I’m trying to figure out what I want to do electronically so I can choose a suitable solution for myself.

The status quo:

• I use Outlook for email.  I’m an independent practitioner, so it’s not like I’m required to use it.  I’m just accustomed.
• I use Outlook’s calendar and to-do list a lot.
• My portable phone’s a very basic model.  It makes calls.  I don’t have a text plan; it’s too much trouble to enter text when you only have 12 keys.
• Most of the time, I work from my home office.  Most of the rest of the time, I’m using my own computer at some client site.

So, I’m considering getting a smartphone to replace both the PDA and my current phone.  I still want synchronization, by which I mean I want to be able to rely on either the smartphone or my computer for calendar, contacts, etc.

I am not welded to Outlook, though by nature I’m reluctant to shift fundamental applications.  If I had to switch email, I’d be looking for solid evidence that the New Thing linked well with calendar and to-do stuff.  And if I were really unhappy, I might go to the recommender’s house and let the air out of a tire or two.

I’m not opposed to an iPhone, though I do think Apple’s business model includes the Beanie Baby approach: create the appearance of exclusivity, then charge more.   I talked a bit yesterday with a Verizon salesperson about the new Droid phone; I’d like to hear more from people who do the kind of stuff I’d like to do.

So–how should I be thinking?  What am I overlooking?  Feel free to add a comment here, through Twitter, on LinkedIn, or at dferguson [you know] strathlorne [ditto] com.

CC-licensed image of PDA sketch by andreaspopp.

Daniel Levitin used to be a record producer and a professional musician.  His fascination with how we grasp music, emotionally and physically, led to a new career as a professor of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University.  He’s followed an earlier book, This is Your Brain on Music, with The World in Six Songs.

I’m not far into it, but it’s already a “hey, listen to this” experience.  (Want to see the first chapter?)

Levitin contends that music isn’t simply a distraction or a pastime, but “a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language…”

The six songs of the title aren’t specific songs; they’re categories for how we fit music into our lives.  At the start, he says, he was trying to figure out what all the different forms of song–work songs, love songs, counting rhymes, nearly the entire work of Bobby McFerrin–had in common.

Anthropologist Jim Ferguson (no relation that I’m aware of) told Levitin that was the wrong question.

Quoting the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Jim persuaded me that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ….

it is in the particulars, the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human.

Levitin sees six types of songs as having shaped human nature: songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.  Interestingly to me, his definition of “song” is “any music that people make, with or without melody, with or without lyrics.”

I like the inherent complexity (and possible paradox) in that.  “Without lyrics,” for example, opens the door for the effect that deliberate rhythm may have had on human behavior and the evolution of the brain.

I also like insights he includes from Pete Seeger.  Pete pointed out that not all music is intended to be popular.

“Among American Indians,” Seeger explained, “a young man got his eye on a girl and he would make a reed flute and compose a melody.  And when she came down to get a pail of water at the brook, he would hide in the weeds and play her his turn… It was her special tune.  A tune wasn’t thought of as being free for everybody.  It belonged to one person.  You might sing somebody’s song after they’re dead to recall them, but each person had a private song…”

In addition, Seeger says, the power of music comes from its combination of form, structure, and meaning.  “Ordinary speech doesn’t have quite that much organization….and this becomes intriguing, something you can remember.”

Levitin suggests that before there was language, the human brain didn’t have the full capacity to learn langauge.  That capacity emerged as the brain worked with sounds and verbalizations.  The new structure, he says, made possible three cognitive abilities:

• Perspective-taking: we could think about our own thoughts, and could realize that others have thoughts different from our own.
• Representation: we could think and talk about things that aren’t present.
• Rearrangement: we can “combine, recombine, and impose hierarchical order” on things in the world around us.

I’ve got a number of music- or language-related thoughts circulating.  This post is the first verse.

I’m not a fan of “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  The basic idea works; sometimes good enough is just right.  So why the skepticism?  Like that tiresome definition of insanity (which some people repeat as if casting a spell), the perfect/good nostrum can substitute sloganeering for thought.

Sometimes the humdrum and the mediocre are the enemy of the good.

Which leads somehow to two seemingly unrelated conversations: my wife asking if you can save an Excel chart as a JPG, and a colleague and I exchanging tweets about tutorials and about “fun” in training.  “Seemingly” because the connection between the two is: accomplishment.

Excel chart as JIT graphic

My wife’s request had a clear focus: one of her coworkers, with basic Excel skills, wanted to use a chart as an image on a web page.  So I read into that “don’t get too complicated.”  I fiddled around with menus and right-clicks, but didn’t see anything obvious.

Googling “save excel chart as JPG” got lots of hits.  I learned there’s File / Save as Web Page.  That saves your spreadsheet as whatever.xls.  It also creates a folder, whatever_files, in which you’ll find the chart as image001.gif.  No, not a JPG, but good enough for the outcome.

“Fun” — the tutorial

In the Middle Ages, when I first learned PowerPoint, Microsoft had a clever tutorial–Christopher Columbus’s pitch for funding.  Whatever  umbrage you or Ed Tufte might take with PPT, I recall the tutorial clearly showing how to achieve certain effects: bullets, images, titles, and so forth. So I stuck with the tutorial, and quickly learned how to do things I wanted to do.

Which to me is a lot more important than “fun” stuck onto training like a clown nose onto a marble bust.

Or, say, an Indian war bonnet stuck onto the head of “the greatest man ever to come out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont” (as Clarence Darrow said of Calvin Coolidge).

There’s nothing (in theory) wrong with  clown noses, but context does matter.

More on “fun” in another post.  Let’s stick with what makes a good tutorial.

CTQ: a point of view

In Six Sigma parlance, critical-to-quality elements (CTQs) are things important to a process so you can produce what’s important to the customer.  If you want high customer satisfaction with your service contract, a one CTQ might be “scheduling that suits the customer.”  Meaning your time window should not be the size of a barn door.

One CTQ that I see for a tutorial is: can people get stuff done quickly?  Or is the tutorial so full of overview and first-of-all and before-you-begin that it feels like one of those half-day mandatory snoozefests for the corporate initiative fo the month?

My wife’s coworker already had some context: she knew Excel basics, and she knew about JPGs.  All that was necessary for her to do what she wanted boiled down to:

• Here’s how to turn an Excel chart into a GIF.
• Here’s how to find the GIF.
• You can use a GIF like you’d use a JPG.

When I first encountered PowerPoint, I didn’t have that context.  I hadn’t used presentation software before.  A rich tutorial made sense, and the design of the tutorial kept newcomer me engaged…

Until I hit the point where I felt I knew enough.  Then, I dropped out: I stopped the tutorial and got on with what I wanted to do: build a presentation.

Yes, this goes against a prescriptionist streak that you find in many trainers and instructional designers (including me).  We’re dying to tell you more, to share our hard-won–or at least much-valued–experience.  We mean well, but we can get a bit… smothery.

It’s important for both the designer and the learner to say, “That’s okay.”  I think drop-out-to-do may well be a key characteristic of successful demos or tutorials.  They show that someone feels she’s learned enough to try things on her own.

And trying things on your own is strength training for your neurons.  When things go well, it’s endorphin time.  When they don’t, you’ll put up with a certain amount of frustration and expend a certain amount of effort if you can still accomplish something that matters.

Thus the argument for well-built tutorials (or other detailed support): a reliable resource.  Unlike the typical software “knowledge base” that’s much more base than knowledge.

Photo of Calvin Coolidge from Wikimedia Commons.