Dave’s Whiteboard

An early-morning side trip at CogDogBlog let me to discover DonorsChoose.org.

This site invites teachers to describe specific projects for which they need money, and allows donors to select such projects to donate to. Like these:

• A fourth-grade class whose students need more books in Spanish for fluent readers.
• A first-grade class needing insect specimens (and copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar).
• Rural high-school seniors whose teacher would like to use Hamlet — the Manga Edition (in which Horatio looks a bit like Harry Potter).

The Charity Navigator gives DonorsChoose a four-star rating. DonorsChoose claims to have enabled donors in 50 states to provide $23,338,925 to 1,351,770 students.

Lots of people talk about large-scale educational reform. In the short run, though, teachers in place struggle with the realities of the classroom and don’t have the liberty to wait for the New Digital Jerusalem.

The Hamlet request is far from the only Shakespearean one. There’s quite a bit of interest in No Fear Shakespeare. I’m biased; I taught high school English in rural Kansas. Thinking of these teachers reminded me of the other pre-battle speech (not the ‘band of brothers’ one) in Henry V, only with teachers instead of the English troops:

We are but warriors for the working-day;
Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch’d
With rainy marching in the painful field;
There’s not a piece of feather in our host…
And time hath worn us into slovenry:
But, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim…

I thought it was worthwhile shining a bit more light on this corner of the world of learning.

If you’re so inclined, you can see both speeches in the clip below. (It’s just before the battle of Agincourt, where the English were outnumbered 5 or 6 to 1.) You’ll probably recognize the first speech; the “warriors for the working day” one begins around the three-minute mark.

Toward the end of a slow week, a cluster of things I haven’t figured out.
(Plenty where those came from.)

Tagging (on a blog)

Alan Levine at CogDogBlog muses about tags versus dog-egories. I haven’t used tags on the Whiteboard — not sure why. Maybe I’ve thought of them as too ad-hoc, though I realize the Taxonomy Police rarely conduct raids.

I may also be a bit analytical. When I started using Quicken, for example, I went back five months with my checking account and credit cards so I could have a full-year record. Even on the blog I write just for my parents, I’ve occasionally gone back and moved posts out of the default “uncategorized” category.

D’Arcy Norman, commenting on Alan’s post, says “I use tags to describe the content, and categories to indicate the ‘type’ of post.” That makes sense, as does his remark that usually he uses the search feature on his blog to find stuff.

Registering to comment

Two or three times a month, I wander to a blog I haven’t read before and find myself wanting to comment. Sometimes I give in to that urge, only to discover — sometimes after writing the comment — that this particular blog requires registration. I don’t mean “enter your name and your email,” which to me isn’t registration. That’s just asking, “who are you?”

What I don’t get is, “if you want to comment on this statement I’ve thrown out to the world, sign up for this site, this group, this portal.” I understand that each person defines ‘blog’ in his own way. It’s your blog; you can do whatever you want.

I myself “belong” to more sites than makes sense. It’s like those paternalistic grocery-store programs where you have to sign up or you’re not allowed to buy stuff at the sale price.

I’m not going to sign up for yet another goofy-named social site or blogger cartel.

(Added twelve hours after the original post)

Ahhh. I just read a post that had elicited several good comments. I liked one of them so much I followed it to the commenter’s blog. Uh-oh, another online community that invites me to join. But the EduGeek Journal, while inviting me in, will let me comment on posts even if I don’t join. (To comment on comments, I have to register. I don’t quite get that, except maybe as an incentive to join, but at least I can take part. ) Good going.

I’ve tried — five months now — but I often feel like I’ve wandering into a presentation at someone else’s convention. Wherever the happy medium is, I haven’t found it. People with lots of followers tweet about wondering why they’re there. People who follow hundreds — are they like the folks who always have the TV on in the background?

They have their own problems; I just wonder about myself. Poor choices in picking whom to follow? Lack of connectedness? Just plain uninterested in what someone bought at the drugstore? Dearth of social skills? I’ve sent 21 updates since March. Over half were sent to individuals, which hints I’m more reactive than proactive. No surprise there, I guess.

Dysfunctional interfaces

My wife and I want to go to the beach again. We usually rent an oceanfront house, and we’ve gone to the same town five or six times. What confuses me now, as it has before: how come, in a field where you’ve got lots of competitors (like vacation rentals), no site gets inspired by good features on competing sites?

For example: the overall best-organized site we check doesn’t let you specify a period long than a week (we’re trying for two). That means having to dig deeper into each property available during week 1. Competing Site 2 does allow multi-week searches, but doesn’t filter for peculiar features that no one in their right mind would look for — like internet access. Competing Site 3, now, has photos of each property — but they’re about 100 pixels wide, with (apparently) no way to enlarge them.

Why make things so difficult for people who are waving credit cards and saying, “Gee, I’d sure like to rent a place. I wonder where I can find one that suits me?”

Tag cloud photo by broken thoughts / Mark Lindner.
Registration desk photo by Toni Malin.
Photo of traffic sign in San Jose, California by Richard Masoner.

In the way that New Hampshire has places worth hiking, Cathy Moore has ideas worth hearing. A recent example asks, “Can your learners wing it?” What she’s asking is whether the training you develop allows people to think for themselves — especially in situations that don’t exactly match those in training.

And, you know, in more than 30 years of full-time employement, the only places I’ve encountered multiple-choice questions are automatic teller machines and the Motor Vehicle Administration. (One of those locales has been weighed, measured, and found wanting.)

Cathy’s post made me think about design advice that makes sense to me, like “show and tell” rather than “tell and show.” That’s meant to capture the idea that by demonstrating something — say, the main steps in some process — you’re offering a conceptual frame onto which people can hang the specifics.

Her post has great examples based on the idea of using “I statements” appropriately in difficult situations. The recommendation about moving from a demonstration to some sort of application — “Here’s an example (not a sermon). Now, do something.” — made me want a quick mnemonic like “show and go.”

A better mantra for a design approach might be blink and think. Instead of yammering away about “seven keys to effectively manage difficult conversations,” go right to a striking example or demonstration — something to make them blink.

You want a little ambiguity, because brains are all about forming patterns — and when things don’t quite add up, we work harder at making sense (finding or creating patterns).

Meaning before details, remember.

What happens after a blink? We think. We try to figure out what’s going on. We’re not always right — but that’s okay; learning hinges on not always being right.

I know I’ve spent lots of my instructional-design time busily constructing safety nets, seat belts, suspenders, safety harnesses, overview, intros, and before-you-begins. (It’s a perverse variation of the Gaelic proverb that says, “A day’s work: getting started.”)

Better by far to treat learners as intelligent adults. You don’t want to plunge into esoterica, the way a Wikipedia page on, say, refraction clobbers you in the fourth sentence with Snell’s law:

(unless you know they’re already into the mathematics of physics). But you do want to assume they understand, interpret, and connect the new to the already known.

Blink and think photos both by K. Sawyer.

It’s not only Mayorga Coffee’s Café Cubano that has me going this morning; I’ve just read a pair of posts by Clive Shepherd.

Last June, he wrote about “Three tiers in the content pyramid.” He was modifying an earlier idea that e-learning would develop two tiers: a high end top tie for complex, high-impact projects, and a lower tier of “good enough” contend “designed to communicate simple information or provide basic knowledge.”

In that post, he said he’d failed to consider the impact of web 2.0 tools. He also felt that as you move further down the tier, you get more user-generated content, a kind of bottom-up initiative.

[The bottom-up stuff] occurs because managers are not the only ones with an interest in learning and performance improvement — it is to every individual’s advantage that they have the knowledge and skills necessary to carry out their current jobs effectively, to take advantage of opportunities for advancement, and to remain competitive in the marketplace.

Clive goes to to say that the three tiers — high end, rapid development, and user-generated — are not in competition with each other. In fact, the more experience people have with creating content for themselves, the more they can appreciate the skills that professional bring to bear.

In a post last Friday, Clive revisited the topic. He’s now thinking that the boundaries between the tiers are less distinct, and that what may be more important is agile development (a term from Nicola Foster). Agility is “a combination of strength, coordination, responsiveness, speed, and balance.” Put another way, “agile development is about getting the right content to the right people in a timely fashion.”

I’ve been involved in the early stages of a project related to flood insurance. Clive’s posts have help clarify a notion that’s loitered near the back burner for a while. Imagine using the insight of experts and the tight focus of the Common Craft videos.

I don’t mean “use whiteboards, drawings on paper, and Lee LeFever,” though you could do worse. I mean: target a crucial outcome and use it as a compass to guide your development.

Notice that there is no interactivity whatsoever in the Common Craft products (unless you count “click here to start”). What makes them “good enough,” to use Clive’s terms, is that they make clear what they can do (e.g., explain social networking in plain English) and deliver on that in under four minutes. What happens after that is up to you (which is pretty much the way learning has always been).

Wikipedia’s main page today among the “today in history” events the introduction of the IBM personal computer on August 12, 1981. It wasn’t the first, and it probably wasn’t the best, but its open architecture and rapid adoption by business changed the way people thought about harnessing technology.

I specially like that this photo, from a PC World article, shows the ubiquitous manuals in their tidy slipcases.

I never used the original PC (which, as you can see from the picture, didn’t come with a hard disk — only two floppy drives). In late 1983, though, as I started a new job, I received a then-new IBM PC XT.

This technological powerhouse had:

• A monochrome screen incapable of displaying graphics (other than the ASCII character set).
• 256 kilobytes of memory (which my boss and I upgraded to 640 thanks to the AST Six Pack.
• A 10 megabyte hard drive (upgraded after a few years to a whopping 30 megabytes).
• An external 1200 baud Hayes modem.
• One of the ubiquous Okidate dot-matrix printers.

All that for something like $3,500, which would be close to $8,000 (using the Consumer Price Index to calculate the effect of inflation).  You’d be hard-pressed to spend eight grand on a computer today; for that kind of money the Three Bears could each get a MacBook Pro — and if they didn’t go for top of the line, the could probably afford a MacBook Air for Goldilocks.

At the risk of sounding like my great-uncle Rory, talking about hauling wood for railroad ties at a salary of 25 cents per day, it’s astonishing to consider the scale of changes since then.

I’m writing this post on a laptop I bought new for around $1,200. It’s got 2 gigabytes of memory, or 8,000 times the memory of the XT. (Heck, the cache in my processor has more capacity than the XT did, and I’m ignoring the power of the processor.) And the 120 gigabyte hard drive is 12,000 times larger.

Granted, today’s applications need a lot more memory and a lot more storage. But today’s applications offer a lot more potential than Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar did, back then at the dawn of time.