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Threads of Thinking
design, information, internet
May 24, 2003, 01:21 PM
One beef I've had with the generally excellent Movable Type engine that I use to maintain this here weblog is that it doesn't have any convenient way to connect posts that are continuing the same basic topic thread. You can categorize posts to organize them by topic, but most posts, although nominally on the same topic, discuss completely different things. What I need is a way to get an overall picture of an entire rolling thought process that I've posted about. This need also arose in the Weblogs Informal SIG at CHI last month.
Right now, I do this by posting links to related previous posts in the text of the weblog entry (like I just did in the previous sentence). This works reasonably well, but it would be nice to have a convenient way of seeing the entire topic thread in one glance. So in a future iteration of this weblog, I'm thinking of adding a sidebar to the individual entry template like the following:
The "Looking Forward" posts are future posts that reference this post. The "Looking Behind" posts are just the collection of links to previous posts that appear in this posts. I'm hoping this will help make it more clear which posts are connected to this one and afford reading entire threads of thought at once.
Whuffie and Rejection
psychology, society & sociology
May 24, 2003, 10:45 AM
A couple days back, Micah posted about whuffie, a "reputation currency" that appears to at least purport to be a metric for respect. This reminds me of a lecture I went to last fall given by the psychology department. The lecturer talked about the psychology of rejection. Among other things, he pointed out that to feel that someone has rejected you has nothing to do with how much they like you in some absolute sense. Rather, it depends on whether they like you in the way you want them to and to the degree you want them to. So if a girl I'm romantically interested in only considers me a very good friend, I'll feel rejected even though she likes me a lot in an absolute sense. And if a person I can't stand tells me he hates me, I don't feel rejected because I don't care if this person likes me at all.
So as we can see, the feelings of rejection are tied to how much you respect a person in the small and how much they respect you. The psychology lecturer, if I recall correctly, was trying to develop a scheme for measuring rejection which struck me as a particularly difficult thing to do. Likewise, I'm skeptical that this "whuffie" concept will be able to encompass enough of a complex emotion like respect to be useful. Some have complained that the Social Software people are reinventing intellectual wheels; they're recasting old ideas as new memes and confronting the problem of software in society without understanding the work of their predecessors. I'm not as vitriolic in my criticism, but I have started to get that feeling as well.
Posted by Rob on May 27, 2003 at 11:23 AM
Chad makes this last argument much more convincingly over at Brightly Colored Food: http://www.brightlycoloredfood.com/mt/mtarchives/000677.html#000677 I knew I was missing a reference...
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Whispers of Elegance
personal, religion
May 23, 2003, 10:07 PM
"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
The correlation between beauty, wholeness, and distance resonated with me. I'm not yet sure what it means.
Posted by cindylouwho on May 27, 2003 at 11:50 PM
i really like that quote, robin!! i'd tell u in person, but u arent online. where are u?!?!?!?
:-P i miss u :-P
Posted by Geoff on May 31, 2003 at 01:04 AM
Like most of LeGuin's writing, beautifully said. And I think there's a lot of truth to it. But is it the whole truth? My most aesthetic moments always come when I contemplate wholeness, but they also usually come when I feel most intimately connected to the beauty I'm contemplating; when I sit in a forest, or a garden, or watch people while drinking coffee in a cafe on a busy street. But it's true, distance can sharpen the aesthetic sense as well as connectedness.
I'd be interested to hear if you've had any more thoughts on the subject since this post.
Posted by Rob on June 01, 2003 at 02:21 AM
Sadly, I haven't had any profound insights into what the quote means to me, just the feeling that it means something profound and important.
I agree that it certainly isn't the whole truth, like everything this quote has to be taken in context. I'm not sure I really believe in a "whole truth", at least as something humans can reach. But it reasonated as part of the way I understand the world, which is why I mentioned it here.
Le Guin's writing often seems to strike me in this fashion. Maybe its because, what with her Taoist leanings, she encounters the world in a similiar manner as I do, and expresses it better than I could ever dream of doing :).
Posted by Ben on February 09, 2007 at 08:08 PM
I was reading "The Dispossessed" and this quote caught me. I'm glad to see it struck someone else too.
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A Cost-Effective Problem Reporting System
design, systems
May 22, 2003, 01:55 PM
Earlier today I was in one of the CMU bathrooms near where I work and I noticed that one of the urinals was continuously flushing. I thought of contacting facilities to report the problem, but I was busy, I have no idea what the number for facilities is, and I was suffering from the "Somebody Else's Problem" effect.
Later on, I was thinking that a problem reporting system to fix this breakdown would be pretty easy to implement, especially since CMU has a campus-wide wireless network (which seems to be spreading; one day in the not-to-distant future wireless may be near-ubiquitous). All it would require is a small embedded device with a single "big red button" interface that could be placed in areas where equipment frequently breaks down, people need assistance, or some other situtation where one person needs to notify a geographically distant person that a problem has occurred in the area. When someone pushes the device's button, it uses an embedded wireless card to send a notification over the network to a central server that processes the notifications and routes them to the people in charge of maintenance for the area so they can quickly respond. See the diagram below.
I can think of several extensions to the system to customize it to particular situations, such as adding the ability for the problem reporter to leave a quick voice message describing the problem as they hold down the button to give more context, or a fingerprint-recognition system on the button to identify the problem reporter so the support person can contact them for more information or discourage pranksters from pushing the button as a joke. But in its simplest form, this system solves a practical problem, is easy for support people to maintain, and is cheap to implement if the wireless infrastructure already exists (I can't imagine the problem button devices would be difficult to mass produce; they seem pretty simple to me).
Someone should further develop this idea and market it. I have to start making friends with some business students.
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Journals for Lesson Plans
teaching & learning, writing & communication
May 21, 2003, 12:20 AM
My friend Matt is interested in teaching and education, specifically lesson study and experiential learning. One of his life's goals is to improve education in academia, which is generally done particularly badly (most professors' ideas of "teaching" is equivalent to "lecturing", which most modern psychological theories of learning tell us is a particularly ineffective way to transfer skills). Currently, however, there is little incentive for professors at most colleges to improve since (1) their performance is mostly evaluated by the quality of their research rather than their teaching and (2) current students are unaware that there are better alternatives available and thus don't complain.
What we need is an incentive structure that will help bring lesson plan improvement forward as a major goal of academics. I have a proposal that I think is both tractable and will constitute a major step in accomplishing this: piggyback on the research and form academic journals that focus only on publishing lesson plans.
This has two benefits. First off, professors take journal articles seriously and would probably be more likely to consider lesson plans in a peer-reviewed academic journal for use in their own classes. Second, professors would have a direct incentive to develop high-quality lesson plans for publication since they would get credit for doing so (since an academic's performance is generally assessed in terms of how many journal publications they can claim). Hopefully this will help get some professors interested in improving their teaching using modern learning theory. This should help students realize that there are more effective ways to learn available, which will hopefully lead them to demand similar quality from their other professors.
Ideally, teaching journals of this sort should spring up for every field of study that appears in the modern universities. Professors tend to get credit for publishing in journals that are relevant to their research interests, which implies that teaching journals should be divided up similiarly to how the research journals are. It may even be worthwhile for university tenure committees to require that a certain quantity of publications appear in teaching journals if the tenure position is for a teaching faculty member.
Developing a venue for publication of lesson plans is the most immediate way available to ensure academics have incentives for improving their teaching. If journals of the sort I'm proposing become a common part of academic practice, we may see the boring hour-and-a-half lecture class become a thing of the past.
Posted by Matt Easterday on May 21, 2003 at 03:41 PM
This is exactly the right idea--it is so good in fact, that not only did American teachers hit on this decades ago, but they covered it up and left if for Japanese educators to pick-up and innovate on leading to the absolute supremacy of K-12 Japanese students in math and science.
The trend in the U.S. (I think in the 20's?) was move all educational research activities into the hands of "experts" i.e. academia, and view instructors as mere implementors. In some cases, teachers actually doing research on improving how they taught were forced to stop. This is unfortunate as actual teachers are in the best position to observe and form a research agenda.
Meanwhile, for the last 50 years, k-12 Japanese instructors in all disciplines have been collaboratively studying how they teach and improving their teaching based on their observations. Each semester or so, a given department will meet at least once a week for the duration of the semester to discuss how to teach a single lesson. At the end of the semester, they teach the redesigned lesson, make their final conclusions then publish the results in a scholarly journal.
In the last decade, the US has rediscovered lesson study when researchers working on the Third-International Mathematics and Science Study tried to characterize the differnces between Japanese, German, and US mathematics instruction. It's not only important that mathematics is taught very differently in Japan (with more collaboration and focus on problem-solving to name a few attributes) but that there is a _system_ (lesson study) by which these improvements can be discovered an implemented. While it may seem slow to just improve 1 or 2 lessons a year, over time, this research effort implemented entirely by teachers has produced the best educational system in the world.
US K-12 teachers have already began to collaborate and learn from their Japanese counterparts and have started (often with no finacial support or resources) their own lesson study groups here in America. Other initiatives include creating on-line lesson study resources and video-clips of teaching. While a movement like this will take time to develop, its future looks promising.
As for academia, perhaps publishing journals would provide the necessary incentive, however, I think that until "teaching" is valued in our society (and given the needed resources) as much as "research", then I think the quality of higher-education will continue to suffer.
Posted by Matt Easterday on May 21, 2003 at 04:06 PM
Just to provide you with controversy Rob :-) ...
I completely disagree with the views expressed in the experiential learning learning included in the post. While I don't have a _great_ link, a quick google search yielded this link on experiential learning which at least explains the basic idea and the most often cited names (with the exception American philosopher/psychologist/teacher John Dewey): http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~jamesa/learning/experien.htm
Posted by Rob on May 22, 2003 at 02:45 PM
Hi Matt,
Just to clarify since I'm not sure I made it clear in the post, but the idea behind these journals would be for academics to publish the lesson plans for the classes they teach, not to have "education" academics make lesson plans for everyone else. Plus, these journals, at least at first, are only intended to form incentives for academics to care about their teaching effectiveness and provide the same level of rigor in lesson plan development that they apply to their research. (Ok, just a little bit of sarcasm there... :). So the intent of this idea is to turn academics into real practicing educators, not to have them sit in their ivory tower and develop the lesson plans real educators use.
So once that's accomplished, there is the question of how elementary, middle, and high school instructors, adult and continuing education instructors, etc. should fit into this picture. Ideally, I think they should be publishing in the same journals as academics, peer reviewing the same articles as academics, etc. Personally I think the gap between practitioners and academics in more fields that just education is a problem, and maybe forcing checks and balances through journal publications would be a good way to do this. But one thing at a time.
I wholeheartedly agree that what's ultimately important is to ensure that teaching is valued higher in our society. The question in my mind is how to go about ensuring that this happens. This proposal is a suggestion of how the system could be changed through the actions of a few people (the ones who set up these journals) in a way that would give one part of the population (academics) the incentive to care about teaching and value it as an activity. I agree it is only one part of a larger goal, but hey, every little bit helps, and we have to do something if we want to see the problem solved in our lifetimes.
Thanks for the excellent reference for experiential learning. I frequently post links to other sites just because I need to reference a source that explains a concept, not because I know them to be reliable. I always appreciate corrections and sources of supplementary information and opposing viewpoints.
Posted by Matthew Easterday on May 22, 2003 at 03:09 PM
Just for the sake of more controversy...
I didn't mean to suggest that academics should publish lesson plans for K-12 teachers. Perhaps the confusion is due to the fact that I wan't really agreeing with the idea that "journals for academics" will improve University education, (although I do agree with that "reasearching curriculum" should be placed at the same level as other kinds of research). I see K-12 teachers as understanding this need doing precisely this kind of research in their community.
As for academics, I think "lack of lesson plan journals" is just a symptom of the root cause that teaching is undervalued. Here's the causal chain I'm assuming:
IF teaching is valued -> funders will provide resources -> people will research teaching -> paper and journals will be created.
If this assumption is correct, then I _don't_ agree that simply creating a journal will change things.
What I'm guessing you're saying is that:
the university values education -> the University will by some unknown mechanism create journals -> academics will want to publish in journals -> education will be researched and improved.
If (CMU in this case) really valued education however, they would just hire good teachers (instead of hiring researchers and making them teach). I think trying to change researchers into teachers probably is not the right strategy. I think the right thing to do is get teachers, and treat them like professionals by giving them the tools they need to imrove their craft.
Posted by Rob on May 24, 2003 at 11:09 AM
Ah, I think I see our point of disagreement now. I'm not convinced that the root cause of the problem is that teaching is not valued in our society. I do believe that other things are frequently valued more, which, given limited resources, means that teaching gets bumped off the bottom of the queue. I think there are many who want to teach well but don't have the time or the expertise. I guess I can't prove this assertion; it's based purely on what I've observed from working with academics.
The point here is that researchers are _already_ teaching. So they are "teachers" by definition (frequently bad teachers, but teachers nonetheless), regardless of whether this is a good idea or not. The other solutions you propose sound like good ones, but they're outside the scope of this recommendation and so I'd like to defer those discussions for another weblog post. I'm not proposing that education journals will solve all the education problems in the world; just that they might help professors get better at what they are supposed to be doing.
So the question then becomes "Given that researchers are teaching, how can we provide incentives for them to improve their teaching?" That's the sole problem this suggestion was trying to address. In case I was unclear, remember this is most certainly NOT a proposal for improving all education, everywhere, nor is it trying to solve the entire education problem in one simple maneuver. It is a point solution to one important problem in the domain of higher education: give academics incentives to do their work well. Right now there are no incentives, so any lesson improvement academics engage in is done ad hoc through a sense of responsibility. Is it any wonder it rarely gets done?
Posted by Jackie on July 26, 2006 at 06:42 AM
Hello,
I am working on a white paper on experiential learning. My goal is to find research that shows whether students K-12 learn better through experiential learning than other styles. If you know of any reserach, please email me. Thank you.
Jackie
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Corporate Murder Revisited
politics, society & sociology
May 20, 2003, 09:11 PM
K5 has an article about how the UK has enacted a law on corporate killing. If a corporation is responsible for deaths in the UK, and the deaths can be shown to be the result of upper management failures, then members of upper management can be prosecuted as criminals and could face jail terms. This relates to my earlier post on how corporations are viewed as separate entities from the people who make them up and how this affects our language. It's especially interesting that this law is appearing in the UK, where the names of corporations are plural nouns. Not that I'm implying this is the primary reason they made the law, but I'm guessing both are at least partially originating from a different perception of what a corporation is.
If this law is given real teeth, I hope someone looks into the effects it has on corporate operations. We may need something like this here in the USA.
Posted by Rob on May 20, 2003 at 11:06 PM
Unfortunately, it looks like the legislator who is proposing the law is actually claiming that it targets "companies" themselves and not any individuals who sit on the boards. Many people interviewed in the article are protesting this, asking why individual board members can be held accountable for misuse of funds but not for manslaughter.
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Markets for Usability
society & sociology, usability
May 19, 2003, 10:06 PM
Since many of my friends here at CMU are nearing the end of their one-year program and are actively hunting for jobs, I've been thinking a lot recently about the market for usability in the software industry. Here's the basic problem I've been pondering: although there seems to be a great deal of need for usability professionals in the IT industry, there appears to be distressingly little demand for us.
My assumption that we are needed isn't just based on wishful thinking. Anecdotally, people complain all the time about how frustrating they find computers and technology in general; they can't program their VCR, figure out how to format tables in Microsoft Word, etc. It's a truism in the software field that 90% of the users only use 10% of any reasonably large application's functionality. Why? I believe it's because they don't even know the other 90% is there, or can't figure out how to work it if they do. Many companies that develop software spend way more on running their technical support centers than they do on writing the software itself. The list goes on.
And yet many talented usability professionals with a graduate degree from one of the top academic institutions in the world in the computing field are having serious problems finding a job. Why?
I believe the key problem is not that usability professionals don't provide significant value to their market, but that they don't provide value that can easily be assessed. Since their value is invisible to those making the hiring decisions, they aren't seen as necessary.
Here's my logic: for software developers, the value they provide is tangible. They write code that does stuff; they have a tangible output that could not be produced were it not for them. Companies need software developers if they want to develop custom IT systems or even if they want to integrate commercially purchased systems. I know this is true because I am a software developer and have lived it myself. Product designers (the people who make sure a company's products look nice and are desirable) also provide tangible value since their work translates directly into increased sales. A more desirable product will be purchased by more people, which brings more money to the company, which shows the managers bottom-line results for the hard work of the product designers.
But usability professionals aren't in either of these camps. They don't produce any direct work artifacts that are (a) essential to the company and (b) can't be produced without them like the software developers do. User interfaces are essential, but they can be produced without usability professionals, they just tend to be badly done. Yet unlike ugly or undesirable products, the unusable interface often doesn't directly impact the sales of the product. People frequently buy products with badly designed user interfaces only to realize their error later. And although this may give the product a bad reputation which impacts sales, its difficult to tie this back to raw dollar figures. So the usability professional doesn't have the direct impact on the bottom-line that the product designer enjoys.
The one market that seems to be an exception to this rule is the web design industry. Usability sells better to web design firms than just about anywhere else, I've found, and I think the reason is that unlike conventional products, a web site's marketability is badly damaged by poor user interface design. Users who can't figure out how to use a web site leave and don't come back, which directly impacts the bottom line of the company. Correspondingly, the professional usability scene has had an almost unhealthy fixation on web design for quite some time now.
If we want to make our skills as usability professionals marketable, I think there are a few changes that need to occur:
- Usability professionals have to become better at showing bottom-line business value, and this means in terms of real dollars. There need to be techniques for getting at least a rough estimate of how much money producing a usable interface as opposed to an unusable one is saving the company. I know Deborah Mayhew has done some work on this.
- Markets must change to favor usable products over unusable ones, perhaps by allowing users to try products out before committing their hard-earned dollars to them. This has become easy to accomplish on the web, and will hopefully become more prevalent if the industry moves more towards a software-as-a-service model where you rent your applications rather than buying them.
In the mean time, if anyone out there is pulling their hair out trying to design a usable interface, shoot an email my way. I know many amazingly talented people who would love to help you out (for the right price).
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Website Redesign Rollout Has Begun
announcements, internet
May 18, 2003, 05:38 PM
I've finally converted the main pages of my website into the new design I talked up oh so long ago. I warned you I was lazy...
Check out the new design and tell me what you think. I'll be converting this weblog over to the same look and feel shortly. In the mean time, I'm open to visual design criticism, information architecture complaints, implementation bugs, anything.
For now, however, I have to devote my time to Bonnie and Len's U&SA website, which should be a great resource for our (hopefully) helpful new technique when it's finished. This has been a very webby weekend, all things considered. I even got wind of a rumor that Kerry is finally working on her long-anticipated wearables weblog, but don't tell anyone you heard that from me...
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