I play guitar, not very well. Mostly I strum chords, because I like to sing. But in that conversation I mentioned, my friend encouraged me to think about getting a quality instrument. That suggestion came at a good time; although I’m not quite ready to spring even for a used Larrivée, I did start picking up the somewhat battered classical guitar I bought when I was in college.

For much of that time I’ve kept a couple of books on fingerpicking. Every so often I’ll work through one or the other, and when I sense some improvement, I feel pretty good. In addition, because I’ve been on a Zachary Richard kick lately, I’ve been trying to learn a couple of his songs, like Travailler, c’est trop dur (link to a video and an English translation on my French-language blog).

That was one track: doing more with my own guitar. A second track was to find out more about Larrivée guitars, and there seem to be few better places than the Larrivée online forum.

When I enter a new community like this, I wander around for a bit and don’t say too much too soon, unless I can contribute something positive, if only to my experience with a guitar-tuning app for Android phones.

I saw that someone on the forum was selling some DVDs–tutorials for fingerpicking. Turns out they feature Happy Traum, a prolific and popular guitarist and instructor. In fact, one of those instruction books I’ve hung onto for so long is his.

Even if you don’t play an instrument, you can get a sense of Happy’s relaxed, encouraging approach:

That sealed it for me, and the DVDs arrived last weekend. As Bill Deterline said, “Things take longer than they do,” so I’m not fooling myself about how quickly I’ll pick up the techniques in the DVDs.

I can’t help but notice the interplay between what’s essentially a lecture–Happy Traum on DVD, explaining and demonstrating–and the invitation to not simply practice, but to actively modify your practice in order to expand you abilities.

Fundamentally, this is a tightly focused relationship. In effect, Happy’s done instructional design around a specific topic: not just “fingerpicking styles” (content alone) but “how to help a beginner learn to fingerpick.”

He can’t see you or hear you, and he probably doesn’t have enough time in his schedule to work with every student one-to-one. Instead, he starts by slowly and carefully demonstrating and explaining fundamentals.  It’s show-and-tell so you can hear-and-do (or at least hear-and-try).

The first thing we should work on is your steady thumb… Keep a bass going relentlessly, so that you always have that pulse underneath your picking… The ability to keep that thumb going while you’re doing whatever else… You have to develop the facility for doing that. It’s kind of like reprogramming your brain…

First thing we’ll do, just do it on one string… Do this with me…

Within a few minutes of that, he adds:

• “The most basic melody note” — add a treble note by plucking the first string on just the first beat
• Switch the treble note to the second string, still on the first beat
• The second string on the first and the third beat
• “Now let’s try putting a note on the first and second beat, but leave the third and fourth alone.”
• Same thing, but with the second string.
• Alternating between the first and second string (first string on the first beat, second string on the third beat).

I don’t want to keep quoting from the DVD, but I do think that attendees at more than one learning conference could profit from seeing how deftly Happy  introduces complexity at a rate that challenges but (mostly likely) doesn’t frustrate the beginner.

(As for badges–when you’re able to get through “Skip to My Lou” at a normal pace, with the steady thumb-beat and the melody in the upper strings, you’ll have all the badge you need for attaining that particular level.)

Probably some people could figure this out on their own, but I suspect that as with so many other fields, beginning guitar players can feel overwhelmed, not knowing what to pay attention to or what’s an optimal way to proceed. Brownie McGhee certainly didn’t learn guitar from a DVD — but Happy Traum learned from McGhee, and depending on your access to an in-person teacher and your interest in guitar, you can learn from Happy’s DVD.

To emphasize the variety of things that people mean when they say “learning,” I often talk about learning a language. Does learning mean mastering basic grammar? Reading literature in that language? Watching movies without subtitles?  It depends on context.

And that’s true with “learning the guitar.” There are some areas that most people would agree on–you probably need to know what standard tuning is, and probably need to know the basic fingering for chords. So there’s explicit knowledge as a foundation for tacit knowledge (it’s one thing to know what the tuning is, it’s another to actually tune). Beyond such fundamentals, there’s the melody or song you want to play, and there’s the integration of all this into a performance.

I’m not performing much yet. One of my mid-term goals is to improve enough that I could try a Larrivée in a store without completely embarrassing myself. We’ll see how that works out.

One of them is 7 jours sur la planète (7 Days on the Planet). It’s a regular feature  with three segments from the week’s TV news. For each segment, you can watch the video clip, read a transcript, and then test your comprehension with three levels of questions (elementary, intermediate, and advanced).

I watched the first clip in the grid above, about fish fraud (one species of fish passed off as another). I got the gist, then brought up the transcript to spot words I didn’t know, or catch meanings I might have mistaken.

That’s when I discovered Alexandria. TV5Monde’s site is set up so that on a page with a special icon (red circle with a question mark in the upper right of the following image), you can double-click any word to bring up a multi-language dictionary:

In this example, I clicked on l’étiquette. Alexandria popped up with a French-language dictionary, which reminded me that une étiquette is a little card or tag with the price, origin, or instructions for some product or item of merchandise.

You can set the dictionary to translate into any of more than two dozen languages:

(“Choose your target language.”)

What impresses me about this approach is that TV5Monde doesn’t have to create specialized hypertext for certain words. As far as I can tell, Alexandria’s dictionary works with any word on the page.

If you don’t know any French, of course, this would be a terrible way to learn it. You wouldn’t have any background to decide between one meaning and another, and a dictionary can’t tell you much about syntax or context.  The title of the segment in French, La fraude  aux poissons passe à travers les filets, could be read as “Fish fraud passes through the nets.” But even my paperback French-English dictionary has 27 main entries for passer,  and given the subject, I’d translate the title as “Fish fraud is slipping through the nets.”

If  you’ve got a low-to-intermediate level of ability with French, this is a powerful tool to help you understand more of what you read on the TV5Monde site. 

It looks like there’s a lot more to Alexandria–more than I can spend time on this morning. I have the impression you can link any web page to the dictionary’s features. I haven’t tested that yet, but I will.

The bartender looks up and says,
“What is this, some kind of joke?”

No matter how you reacted to that, it’s a lot like how I react to infographics.

Most of them are more about the graphic than the info, I think. In fact, I’d been planning to write a post contrasting infographics with job aids, because I think many people confuse the former with the latter.

Instead, thanks to Mark Oehlert, I came across Desmond Wong’s post, Infographics to Teach You How to Create Infographics. Wong talks about them as a marketing tool, then goes into the details of constructing them using PointPoint, and of harnessing layout and graphics to achieve your goal.

What’s that got to do with those folks walking into a bar?

Infographics are like jokes.
(This is a different statement from “infographics are a joke.”)

Infographics are situational.

People enjoy jokes, but enjoyment (usually) hinges on context. What’s funny at work isn’t always what’s funny at the game; what sparks conversation at the coffee shop can put off someone reading online.

If you’re uninterested in the context, reading an infographic can sometimes like work–the kind of work you’re glad you don’t have to do.

If the graphic elements are well-done, though–when they engage us, the way a good joke-teller does–we’ll at least take time to find out what happens next. We might not stay long, but we didn’t pass by. 

Infographics rely on patterns.

I haven’t read enough Jung to be sure, but I’d bet he thought about “walking into a bar” as one of his archetypes. It’s really the framework for a pattern: “I’m going to arrange some ideas here and play with them.”

Not every pattern shows up in every good joke, any more than the same cards show up in a good poker hand. Like music, though, jokes and infographics are subject to their version of Duke Ellington’s test: “If it sounds good, it is good.”

X-walks-into-a-bar is a stage for a virtual performance. For infographics, that stage is set, as Wong points out, with strong visual elements: blocks of color, distinctive shapes, headlines, callouts, hand- (or cherry-) picked data.

Even the overall shape is a pattern. While I’ve seen exceptions like Randall Munroe’s graphics on money and radiation, most infographics embrace a long-but-not-wide format. My hunch is they’re following the online convention: people scroll down, but not sideways.

Infographics are an invitation. 

People tell jokes for all kinds of reasons, but they don’t tell them to themselves. Telling is only the start of the process. A joke is an invitation to share.

Maybe you’re sharing silliness or mockery. Maybe you’re sharing stereotypes to ridicule them–or to signal that you’re on the same side. Two-way sharing can be a kind of camaraderie: “Okay, how many accordionists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

Through wordplay and juxtaposition, jokes invite you to take up a different viewpoint. The unexpectedly funny jokes engage us with their contrast and make us feel good because we got them.

A good infographic invites you to look at its content in new ways. Whether polemical or political or even poetic, the infographic is saying, “Did you ever think…?” 

I do have some misgivings. Some people seem to think that any collection of text, shapes, and colors doing time together is an infographic. I suspect they’re the same sort of people who think “outtake” is a synonym for “hilariously funny.”

Still, if somebody wants to follow Desmond Wong’s tutorials and come up with his own infographic, I think that’s great. He’s got some design fundamentals and a set of templates as a fast start. The real learning begins where the infographic leaves off.

I’ve enjoyed reading many of these. People talk about skateboards, about a box of dress-up clothes, about a “typewriter” with 12 keys (constructed from an egg carton, a paper-towel tube, and similar highly engineered materials).

One woman wrote about a box of watercolor paints her mother got for her:

…which she said were the best watercolors on the market at that time. I felt so professional! I made many paintings with them, including huge ones… The little watercolor pans are incredibly visually appealing to me and have a particular paint smell that I still find irresistible. I love the case, the way it snaps, the way the brushes fit elegantly in the isle between the rows of pans, and the way the palette comes out and attaches to the box to create huge mixing space.

She captured me with that snap. To me the word, the sound perfectly captures a way in which childhood memories are stored so deeply. We’re attending (without necessarily focusing deliberately) on so many parts of the experience and interpreting them in ways that make sense to us.

So the snap of the box is a central part of how she remembers and relives her paintbox experience. She is now a teacher of visual and media arts. In her comments, she says:

I recommend that my students go touch all the sketchbooks in the art store and buy the one that feels the best to hold. For many it helps establish a different relationship with the work and be a lot more productive. I think this concept also applies to the physical spaces in which we live and work.

Immediately I thought of an artifact from long ago — a repair manual I bought in college to help maintain my 1963 VW Beetle. I’ve written before about How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive as an outstanding job aid.

The words about touch, though, reminded me of chapter 3, “How to Buy a Volkswagen.” The chapter is 10 pages long, including an 18-step “pre-purchase procedure” that starts by telling you what tools to bring along.

It’s crammed with practical information intended to help the novice make a better decision about a used car:

[Start the car, and with the engine idling]…put your hands over the tail pipes, quickly because they’ll soon be hot, and feel the pressure. Feel the pulses; they should be even…

Then hold your hands about four to five inches away, letting the exhaust pass over them. The pulses should be even and about the same temperature   If they are not, the engine needs or will soon need a valve job.

 Prior to that pre-purchase procedure, Muir has advice on things to do before you even put the key in the ignition. These are paraphrases:

• Walk around and look at the car. Does it sag and look beat? Do the doors open and close well?
• Put your foot on the brake; it should stop three inches or more from the floor.
• Push the clutch pedal with your hand till it’s hard to push. Let it up and see how much free play there is. More than two inches: the clutch is suspect.

He goes on with a short paragraph about the upholstery (as an indicator of overall treatment), the engine (it’s air cooled – dirt is a bad sign), play in the front wheel.

And then:

Now sit back and look at it again. Does it stand up with pride? Does it feel good to you? Would you like to be its friend? Use your other senses. Sit in the driver’s seat and scrunch your butt around. Hold the wheel and close your eyes and FEEL!

…Get away from the car and the owner or salesman to let your mind and feelings go over the car and the idea of the car. What has its karma been? can you live with the car? Walk around or find a quiet place, assume the good old lotus and let the car be the thing. At this point some revelation will come to you and you will either be gently guided away from that scene…

It is important that you neither run the motor or ride in the car until this preliminary scene has run its course. It also puts the owner-salesman up the wall because he has no idea of what you are doing and will be more pliable when the hard dealing time comes.

I was never quite that touchy-feely, not even when I bought my original copy of this guide from the Whole Earth Catalog back in 1968 or so. But I think Muir did a great job of situating the pragmatic, procedural parts of VW ownership and maintenance within the context of the reader situating the car into his life.

This paper argues that the “kindergarten approach to learning” – characterized by a spiraling cycle of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and back to Imagine – is ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century, helping learners develop the creative-thinking skills that are critical to success and satisfaction in today’s society. The paper discusses strategies for designing new technologies that encourage and support kindergarten-style learning, building on the success of traditional kindergarten materials and activities, but extending to learners of all ages, helping them continue to develop as creative thinkers.

Resnick’s image of kindergarten learning

Resnick is referring to the kind of kindergarten where kids are not “filling out phonics worksheets and memorizing flash cards” — more like the one I remember, with huge wooden blocks, a full-size rolltop desk, and nothing that I can recall as an effort to get me ready for the LSAT.

His diagram’s a spiral because the steps in this process aren’t as distinct or sequential as describing or depicting them might imply.

It’s through this process that kindergarteners “develop and refine their abilities as creating thinkers.” And, as they grow, they need resources beyond wooden blocks and finger paint.

I like his stress on little-c creativity (“creativity within one’s personal life”). Not everyone’s going to be the next Freeman Dyson or Linus Torvalds, but everyone can “become more creative in the ways they deal with everyday problems.”

In the Imagine section, he points out that many kindergarten materials encourage the imagination–they don’t over-structure. By contrast, a lot of “education technologies are overly constrained” — you can only do what they’re set up to do.

It’s like all that fun drill and practice.

He offers the example of Crickets, which I hadn’t heard of: small programmable devices, suited to children, that they can interconnect, modify, and program. Don’t take my word for it, though:

In the article, he says:

The design challenge is to develop features specific enough so that children can quickly learn how to use them, but general enough so that children can contine to imagine new ways to use them.

For some reason, this reminded me of explanations of “simple machines” in long-ago science classes–things like inclined planes, wedges, screws, and pulleys. I’d been told that a screw was a kind of inclined plane, but when it came to pulleys, I don’t think we ever actually rigged up a bunch of pulleys to experience how the right combination would let us lift a load we otherwise could not.

While reading the Create section, I read this line three times:

With Mindstorms and Crickets, for example, children can create dynamic, interactive constructions — and, in the process, learn concepts related to sensing, feedback, and control.

It’s the last part that got me. What it brought to mind was the first course I wrote in the computer-based training system we used for reservations training at Amtrak. Things I had learned about learning (like using a minimalist approach, or providing feedback without giving away the answer) clicked. I could create a course that would help someone learn how to request and interpret train schedules–and I wouldn’t have to be there when that happened.

Resnick says (sensibly) that playing and learning ought to be linked. “Each at its best involves…experimentation, exploration, and testing.” This is part of why he disliked “edutainment” (and not just for its overripe, marketeerish name).

Studios, directors, and actors provide you with entertainment; schools and teachers provide you with education… In all of these cases, you are viewed as a passive recipient. If we are trying to help children develop as creative thinkers, it is more productive to focus on “play” and “learning” (things you do) rather than “entertainment” and “education” (things that others provide for you).

Also in this section, he mentions Scratch, a programmable language that kids can use to create interactive stories. I haven’t gone into this, but just the illustrations of the code remind me of the MIT App Inventor that I used to build a smartphone app (touch a picture of a cat, hear a purring sound, after which the image changes to a cow).

A scrap of Scratch

Say meow, then switch to the cow.

Scratch is one way that Resnick’s article moves into the Share section. He quotes Marvin Minsky as saying that the Logo programming language has great grammar but not much literature.

So the Scratch website is an example of “both inspiration and audience.” And, in my way of thinking, if that’s not what you want to share, you at least see how sharing can happen.

Resnick is talking about children, but I come to this from a career mostly involving helping adults to learn. And perhaps the single biggest drawback to learning in the workplace (well, after you get past icebreakers and listening-as-learning and endless recordkeeping) is the dearth of support for reflection.

What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How’s it going? What do you think made that happen (for all kinds of outcomes)?

A colleague I respect recently said he’s decided to propose his first professional-conference presentation. I was surprised that he hadn’t presented already, but no matter. I can recall the first one I did. I wanted to share with people, but I was nearly paralyzed by the idea that I didn’t have all that much to say.

And you know, maybe I didn’t, depending on what measurements you choose.

What I did have was my particular experience (using a complex computer-based training system) combined with the data-based, lean approach to helping people improve, which I’d learned from folks like Geary Rummler and Dale Brethower.

My point is that thinking about what I’d been doing, and trying to uncover value it might have for other people, helped me see the everyday in a new light. That’s the goal of useful reflection.

* * *

I’ve written this post both to help me process the ideas in Resnick’s articles and to set down thoughts of my own. In addition, I found myself noting in a separate document things I wanted to know more about (like Crickets, epistemic games, and Lev Vygotsky). To me those were sidelights; I might discuss them one on one, but this post is plenty long as is.