Data processing vs. getting things done

I think the reason I like Jakob Nielsen's online posts so much, and always seem to get something from them, is the way he alternates concrete observational detail with top-level principles, so that you learn to see in a different way: you learn to look at websites and software interfaces as he does, through the lens of usability design.

His latest post, though starting off with detailed discussion of the winning applications in some recent awards for user interface design, rapidly moves into some refreshing ideas on what we should be striving for in systems design.

"Software's real goal should not be to simply process transactions in a system where users are nothing more than data operators who click required buttons to make things happen. Rather, software should work to augment human capabilities, helping us to overcome weaknesses and emphasize our strengths. "

It sounds obvious. Yet the temptation for software designers, who tend to be more interested in data processing that the intended users, is to design the kind of interfaces they would like themselves. As Alan Cooper observed (2004, pp 93-94), there are two kinds of people: those who on entering an aeroplane would turn left into the cockpit if they could and those who'd prefer to turn right into the cabin; in other words, those who are prepared to tolerate complexity if it gives them control and those who are prepared to tolerate absence of control if it gives them simplicity. Most IT people, including most interface designers, are of the first kind; most users are of the second. As Nielsen says:

"We want to empower users to be creative and accomplish advanced things with our software. But we should also recognize that users sometimes just want to get their tasks done without having to explore numerous options and new ideas. ...To speed users through infrequent or complicated tasks, it's often good to present a linear workflow with minimal disruptions or alternatives. Yes, the lack of flexibility can feel constraining, but it can be faster to just power through all the steps instead of having to ponder which steps are needed. Also, the cost of too much freedom is that users have to decide the order of the steps — something that they're often happy enough to delegate to the computer. "

The temptation for software designers to complexify the interface is compounded by the temptation for teachers to complexify the learning options for our learners. There are so many things we want them to do, or to be able to do, or which we think they might want to do, and we're so worried about whether we've provided enough that we pile resource upon resource upon resource, and we're so worried about whether they'll find them that we put them all at the top level of the interface, until the learner is faced with something as complicated and intimidating as an aeroplane cockpit.

What we need to remember is that most learners, most of the time, are not interested in the technical system or even (though we hate to admit it!) in the learning process. They just want to get on and do the next thing. The trick for us is to create an interface which will let them do that with minimum fuss, and yet provide them with the power to go deeper and do more when the occasion arises.

Reference: Alan Cooper (2004), The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, 2nd edn (Sams Publishing)

Seen and heard: April 2012

The Adjustment Bureau - re-watched on DVD, having enjoyed the film so much in the cinema. Now we know the reason for those odd technical failures such as a mobile phone signal failing or an email going astray: it's the men in suits making adjustments!
White Heat - BBC friends-across-the-years drama series, rapidly becoming more profound and moving than its sixties-nostalgic first episode suggested.Divine Women - Bettany Hughes recovering the ancient history of women as gods, priestesses and promoters of faith. I thought I knew this territory, but many of the women she featured were new to me.
Meet the Romans with Mary Beard - real history from below, with the slums, toilets and mass cemeteries of ancient Rome.
The 70s - no nostalgia fest this, but a proper historical survey by Domenic Sandbrook (also consultant on White Heat). It makes a lot of sense of what I didn't understand properly at the time.
British Light Music Classics - the music of a very specific era, from the growth of radio (or "wireless") ownership to the advent of rock and roll, superbly re-created by Ronald Corp and the New London Orchestra. They're all here: Paul Temple, The Archers, Desert Island Discs, Dick Barton - and many more you know but didn't know you knew.
Our Lady of Walsingham - Anglo-Catholic shrine to the Virgin Mary; worth the pilgrimage.
Norwich Cathedral - and one of the best guided tours I've had in a long time (free, with no hanging around for a tip), the continuous presence of volunteer staff being testimony to how close its ties are with the local community.
Norfolk Summer: Making The Go-Between (by Christopher Hartop, 2011) - bought at Norwich Cathedral, which features in the 1971 film. I remember seeing the film at school in, I think, 1973; being schoolkids, we laughed at the Harold Pinter dialogue, but even we could see what a great film it was (despite not including the book's memorable opening line: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.")
Vera Series 2 - with the wonderful Brenda Blethyn completely out-classing most other TV crime dramas on the box today.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen - well-crafted, well-acted British rom com, with Kirsten Scott Thomas as a female Malcom Tucker, especially hilarious when bawling out her own kids.

Seen and heard: March 2012

How Users Matter, edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (MIT Press 2003) - collection of sociology of science papers on how users have co-constructed technologies such as the telephone, mass electrification, internet cafes, and the Minimoog music synthesiser.
ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environment) project workshop on desktop gadgets to support self-regulated learning, hosted by the British Institute for Learning and Development workshop, 14 March 2012.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Quintessential Phase - the 2007 radio version of the Douglas Adams's pessimistic (but still wickedly funny) conclusion to his sequence, when the new edition of the Guide has the single word "Panic" on the cover and the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons again, but this time finally and irrevocably.
Still Life - gritty and disturbing adventure game noir from 2005.
The Artist, Oscar-winning soundtrack to the  2011 film, by Ludovic Bource.
Kyrie, from Missa de Meridiana Terra, by Neil Van der Watt (music for choir and percussion, 2005) - heard in a Jesuit Media Initiative podcast, recording unfortunately not available in this country.
Empire (TV series) -  Jeremy Paxman nicely combining ironic historical detachment with personal empathy for the survivors of the British Empire, colonisers and colonised alike.

The two things you need to know about learning design

A nice game, recently publicised by Oliver Burkeman in his Guardian column - is to sum up an area of expertise in just two things: the only two things you really need to know. The American writer Glen Whitman started the game in 2002 after a bar-room challenge to name the two things about economics (then his own academic field), to which he replied, after some thought: 1.  incentives matter, and 2. there's no such thing as a free lunch. On his invitation, other people have extended the formula to many other fields, such as stock trading (1. buy low; 2. sell high), acting (1. don't forget your lines,  2. don't run into the set) and history (1. everything has earlier antecedents, 2. sources lie but they're all we have). Apart from it being fun, people find the game a good exercise for taking a fresh look at one's own field and getting back to basics.

Playing the game with my own field of learning design, my first attempt at an answer was this:

1. Decide what you want people to learn to do.
2. Decide what they're going to do in order to learn this.

But the more I looked at these two things, the less I liked them.  The problem wasn't that they were untrue or unimportant; in fact, without realising it, I'd followed the ADDIE model (Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate), which is how the learning design / instructional design process is often organised these days. The first of my things corresponded to the Analysis phase, which at its core is about identifying learning outcomes, expressing  them in behavioural terms - so "decide what you want people to learn to do" rather than just "learn". <1> The second corresponded to the Design phase, or thinking up a way for learners to reach those learning outcomes - which on the principles of active learning means "decide what they're going to do". <2> There wasn't anything wrong with my two things; they were just dull. I'd tried to be safe and correct, and I'd ended up with things that sounded obvious. Bor-ing, as Sherlock Holmes would say (at least when played by Benedict Cumerbatch).<3>

So I decided to sharpen my knives a little. The things people really need to know about a subject are the things they're going to get wrong, if left to themselves. No more Mr Nice Guy; my preferred answer lays down a couple of challenges.

1. Teach people not subject.
2. People learn because of what they do, not what you do.

The first is important, because if you're a subject matter expert you naturally take pride in your knowledge of your subject, and so when it comes to teaching you try to get in as much of it in as you can. That's all very well if your learners are aspiring to be subject matter experts themselves, but that's seldom the case: they're studying your subject in order to do something else, and that is the need which as a teacher it is your calling to serve.

The second is also about taking the focus off yourself and putting it onto your learners. It challenges the temptation to try to teach well by working hard: by studying lots of sources, by preparing teaching meticulously, by carefully crafting written materials. The reminder here is that the things you do can only bring about learning in others because of and insofar as it causes them to do certain other things; it’s learner activity which brings about learning, and the whole business of teaching can be summed up as getting learners to do those things which will enable them to learn.

Parenthetical notes

<1> The behavioural form is important even when the learning outcome is about command of a body of knowledge, which is usually the case in higher education: you can't get sufficiently precise about what level of knowledge or understanding you want unless you start thinking in terms of what students are going to be able to do - summarise, describe, explain, compare, analyse, interpret, evaluate etc. - see Learning as assimilation for other activity types.

<2> So for example, people don't learn just by reading something but by doing something with what they read. (See The Reader.)

<3> Couldn't it be the case that the two most important things about a subject really just are dull? Of course it could; but a lack of excitement should be a sign that there's a better answer to be found. The whole point of the game is to fling a small net across something vast and large ; if you really succeed in capturing something of its essence in a few words, there should be a frisson  or thrill: a sense of liberation as the squawk and clutter of too much detail falls away into relative insignificance. Anyway, if you're trying to explain your field to someone else, do you really want them to think it's boring?

Seen and heard: February 2012

Inspector Montalbano - Sicilian detective TV series, with more sun than The Killing and better food.
A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet - a 2000 classic book by super-commentator John Naughton, whose new Guttenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know about the Internet I must get round to reading some day.
An Ecology of Mind - film about Gregory Bateson by his daughter Nora; having set up the framework of the elderly Bateson talking to her as a child, the filmed extracts from lectures address the child in all of us, making him the wise grandfather we all wish we had (or in my case, wish I was).
A Dangrous Method - Jung wasn't as nice as portrayed (he had a filthy temper), but good to see Freud with a sense of humour (which is authentic).
The Descendants - sad and moving George Clooney film, though leaving me without any desire whatsoever to visit Hawaii.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Tertiary Phase and Quandary Phase - the Guide was never so great as on the radio, and these dramatisations of the later books, after Douglas Adams' death, remind me how prophetic he was about the future of human's relationship with technology.
How to Write a Lot, by Paul J. Silvia - no-nonsense get-down-to-it-and-stop-bullshitting-yourself advice, written originally for academic psychologists but generally applicable.

The Reader

As teachers, we sometimes assume that students will just absorb whatever we write for them and that reading is "essentially passive in nature" (Conole  2007, p 84). IT unfortunately encourages us in this assumption, by turning everything into a problem of information transfer, so that the reader of a text is just a recipient of information.

I've already written about assimilative learning being an active process, and here - in a painting of c1665 - is a picture of it. The painter is the Dutch artist Eglon van der Neer, a contemporary of Vermeer, and it comes from that genre of domestic interior scenes showing people intensely absorbed in some private activity. In the Protestant Low Countries , the devotional intensity which might elsewhere have been expressed in overtly religious art was being brought into the sphere of the personal and the internal.

The reader is clearly a well-educated woman: the writing set on the table shows that she lives through her literacy. The book she's reading is probably what was called an "emblem book": the picture visible on the left-hand page would have been an allegorical image, accompanied by a short and memorable motto, with a longer explanation and exegesis in the supporting text.

But the most remarkable thing about the painting is that she's not looking at the book. Her gaze is straight ahead of her, into empty space: she is looking inwards. It "suggests a life of the mind that remains impenetrable, inaccessible to even the most persistent viewer" (Wieseman, 2011, p 194).

Of course she is. For reading - meaningful reading, not just sounding out the words on the page, aloud or silently - involves thinking. And reading which is challenging - which is presenting something not only new but different, as is inevitably the case in education - involves a lot of thinking. So she is re-making her understanding, re-making her thought processes, perhaps re-making her very soul and identity; and for all this the words on the page are merely the start.

References:

Conole, G. (2007), “Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice”, and Appendix 7 “Taxonomy of learning activities”, in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.

Marjorie E. Wieseman (Curator of Dutch Paintings a the National Gallery), Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 2011).

The van der Neer painting was included in a Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition of that name between October 2011 and January 2012. It is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Emblem books could be both sacred and secular. For an interesting tour of some 17th century Dutch love emblem books, see http://emblems.let.uu.nl/emblems/educational/home.html on the Emblem Project Utrecht website.

Seen and heard: January 2012

New Year's Day concert from the Vienna Musikverein, live transmission on TV.
Sherlock, series 2.
Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope), new film, funny and moving, with Michel Piccoli as the reluctant Pontiff.
The Artist; they don't make films like this anymore, oh wait a minute they just did.
Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence, exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (and podcast by the curator).
Boundaries and boundlessness, Day Conference of Re-Vision (Centre for Integrative Psychosynthesis), with Nick Tonnon.
Galaxy Quest, film on TV, even after many viewings still makes me laugh and cry.
The Ghost, film on TV, still gripping but not as oppressively menacing as in the cinema.