“But, Mrs. Frankweiler, you should want to learn one new thing every day…”
“No,” I answered, “I don’t agree with that. I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, the you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”

— From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by e. l. klonigsburg

I try to read everythink that my son reads for school.  This year they are reading novels for what they now call “language arts” (and we used to call “English”).  When I started reading From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I had absolutely no recollection of the title and author; however I had always remembered a story about two kids who ran away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  I was delighted to re-disccover this much loved book from my childhood.  You should definitely read it, even if you are no longer in fifth grade.

The stereotype of software engineering is that it is a solitary profession. The alpha geek hovers over his keyboard mind-melded to the machine applying his gifts for computation unhindered by his near autistic lack of social skills. While I’ve heard that such lone coders do exist, I more often see programmers interact in the virtual social setting of mailing list, forum or blog where the masters and the newbies interact with mutual respect and shared enthusiasm. It strikes me that open source projects provide a mechanism for what Lave and Wenger call “legitimate peripheral participation” which describes a specific and effective learning style.

Legitimate peripheral participation is a mouthful, but the authors make a good case for that as an effective description. They argue that teaching is not central to learning, but that we learn when we effectively (“legitimately”) participate. As a novice, peripheral participation is a way to participate before gaining complete skills and confidence, and sometimes the recognition of the community which is required for full participation. This learning is the journey from novice to master; however, they argue that “mastery resides not in the master but in the organization of the community of practice of which the master is part.” (p.94)

The book looks at five different systems of apprenticeship, including one that is ineffective, and reflects on successful learning techniques which do not always include teaching or even the intent of the apprentice to learn a specific curriculum:

… apprentices gradually assemble a general idea of what constitutes the practice of the community. This uneven sketch of the enterprise … might include who is involved; what they do; what everyday life is like; how masters talk, walk, work, and generally conduct their lives; how people who are not part of the community of practice interact with it; what other learners are doing; and what learners need to learn to become full practitioners. It includes an increasing understanding of how, when, and about what old-timers collaborate, collude, and collide, and what they enjoy, dislike, respect, and admire. (p. 95)

I have been experiencing this kind of legitimate peripheral participation lately on the RSpec mailing list. The specific content is less significant than the pattern of interaction that I have seen repeatedly in open source projects. In this case, I set out to learn Ruby on Rails, and decided to start using the cucumber behavior-driven development framework, which is an offshoot of RSpec. There on the RSpec list, live both Ruby novices and masters. One such master, Aslak Hellesøy, has created the cucumber framework. As a novice Ruby developer, I can see how he interacts with the other masters and with their work (incorporating other open source projects). Also, through my postings, I interact with other novices and we learn both from each others and from the very experienced members of the community.

It seems like the Lave and Wenger could be talking specifically about open source software projects when they say that “communities of practice are engaged in the generative process of producing their own future.” (p.57-58) Of particular note is the observation that “learning involves the construction of identities.” (p. 53) When we learn something new, particularly a new skill that enables us to act masterfully as a member of a community, part of our identity is defined by that skill. It reminds me of Derek Sivers who said that programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because *you* are better. He observes that when you learn a new language, you learn a new way of thinking and new methodologies that then can be applied to any programming language. The community of practice stretches beyond the Rails community.

The book introduces the radical notion that little or no formal teaching needs to take place for learning to happen. In this kind of community, the typical teaching moment emerges from a specific challenge that a newbie encounters and in the telling of stories.

…researchers insist that there is very little observable teaching; the more basic phenomenon is learning. The practice of the community creates the potential “curriculum” in the broadest sense — that which may be learned by newcomers with legitimate peripheral access. Learning activity appears to have a characteristic pattern. There are strong goals for learning because learners, as peripheral participants, can develop a view of what the whole enterprise is about, and what there is to be learned. Learning itself is an improvised practice: A learning curriculum unfolds in opportunities for engagement in practice. (p.92-93)

When I set out to learn by developing my own tutorial, I was repeating a common practice in an open source programming community. Lave and Wegner describe the notion of a “constructively naive” perspective where “inexperience is an asset to be exploited… in the context of participation, when supported by experienced practitioners who both understand its limitations and value its role” (p. 117) The development of a tutorial is a recognized form of contribution in the open source world. It’s accurately described as peripheral participation because you are generally developing something very basic, which has little or no purpose other than to explore the language or framework; however, that participation is legitimized by comments from more experienced engineers, and, in this case, the author of the framework itself. Discussion on the list provides an opportunity for learning beyond the initial context of the tutorial and inspires story telling from from which novices learn coding patterns and methodologies, rather than merely syntax.

An interesting aspect of open source is that it creates natural communities of practice, enabling practitioners to easily immerse themselves in an effective learning environment. Software is a field which requires almost constant learning of new skills — the specific skills of new language syntax, installing and executing new tools along with new methodologies and programming “patterns.” I may be a novice at developing Ruby on Rails applications or drafting Cucumber “features”; however, I’m an experienced C and Javascript programmer. Spending time in a specific community and assigning myself an introductory project creates an effective apprenticeship, then later as a full participant, I continue to learn about that specific technology and be introduced to new tools and techniques merely by continuing to participate in the community.

2) Focus. “Most companies die of indigestion, not starvation…. if you do one thing well, you will have the opportunity to do another.”

3) Make new mistakes.

Nice interview on vator.tv

via ingeni.us

“For cued-memory tasks (e.g. recognition memory, frequency estimation tasks), which rely more on item information and less on contextual information, Greene (1989) proposed that the spacing effect is due to the deficient processing of the second occurrence of a massed item. This deficient processing is due to the increased amount of voluntary rehearsal of spaced items. This account is supported by findings that the spacing effect is not found when items are studied through incidental learning.” — Wikipedia on the spacing effect

“Incidental learning is unintentional or unplanned learning that results from other activities. It occurs often in the workplace and when using computers, in the process of completing tasks (Baskett 1993; Cahoon 1995). It happens in many ways: through observation, repetition, social interaction, and problem solving (Cahoon 1995; Rogers 1997); from implicit meanings in classroom or workplace policies or expectations (Leroux and Lafleur 1995); by watching or talking to colleagues or experts about tasks (van Tillaart et al. 1998); from mistakes, assumptions, beliefs, and attributions (Cseh, Watkins, and Marsick 1999); or from being forced to accept or adapt to situations (English 1999). This “natural” way of learning (Rogers 1997) has characteristics of what is considered most effective in formal learning situations: it is situated, contextual, and social.” — Sandra Kerka (2000)

I find that I learn best when I provide myself the opportunity to see something from different perspectives and in different settings. I don’t memorize bash commands, I use them on the command line and in scripts until I know them without thinking. Neither do I memorize vocabulary when I learn a language, I learn to say it, write it, see an object and think of it, use it in a sentence or in a song.

By blogging about the “spacing effect,” I incidentally learned about incidental learning. Blogging gives me a framework to dig into a topic, as I seek primary sources or at least URL references. Understanding an idea well enough to write about it, even for a short blog post, means that I need to think about it from a few perspectives.

Frete (2002:92:93) quoting Roger Schank (also via edutechwiki) writes: “The trick is not to teach the facts at all, but rather to have the facts be along the way to getting to something the student naturally wanted to know in the first place. Using the Acquisition Hypothesis, we assume that how one learns a fact is as important as what fact one learns. Thus we should have students learn facts while engaged in a process similar to the one in which they will use the facts. We should use students’ natural interest so they come across such facts incidentally, in the course of pursuing their interests.”

Of course, the problem is that sometimes you need a thousand small fact building blocks to get to the point of what you want to learn. I’d like to learn Chinese, but I can’t get past learning thousands of vocabulary words. However, I’m fascinated with etymology and I am an artist. I’ve been looking for a book or multimedia Chinese language instruction that will teach groups of words together where the Chinese characters have base characters in common and still tell me what the spoken words are in Mandarin. However, I haven’t found that yet, so all I can say is “How are you?” which I use as a sort of PTA parlor trick amongst families who speak far more English than I do Chinese.

I think that the more connections we establish between memories, the more we remember. Nonetheless, there is still a place for memorization when seeking to gain entry into a new field or new language. When we can’t provide enough opportunities for incidental learning at the pace we want to learn, tools like SuperMemo and Mnemosyne can work to augment that learning.

In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus studied memory by repeated experiments of how long it took to learn (and remember or forget) a series of nonsense words. “Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Ebbinghaus showed that it’s possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions.” He called this phenomenon the spacing effect.

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, professors of psychology, sought to understand the spacing effect more recently. They noted a “paradoxical tendency of older memories to become stronger with the passage of time, while more recent memories faded… Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength.”

“One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we’re learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future.”

“It is a common intuition,” Wozniak later wrote, “that with successive repetitions, knowledge should gradually become more durable and require less frequent review.” Wolf details Wozniak’s life study of how to remember effectively through refreshing that knowledge in the moment just before you are about to forget it. He adjusted this technique over many years, applying it to whatever he was studying: English vocabulary, facts from biology, and eventually anything he wanted to read. All of his early work was done on paper. It was in the day of the punch card, and lines to computer use at his university made automating the process impractical. Later he got a friend to encode his technique into Atari software and it is now available on Windows and Palm. SuperMemo allows you to enter a series of Flash Cards which it will present to you in intervals which are optimized for your learning.

At the end of the article, Gary Wolf writes, “philosopher William James once wrote that mental life is controlled by noticing. Climbing out of the sea and onto the windy beach, my skin purple and my mind in a reverie provoked by shock, I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired.”

Awesome advice, but either I’ll never be a genius or I’m taking a significantly different path :)

I enjoyed reading The Cognitive Load of PowerPoint, an interview by Cliff Atkinson with Richard Mayer.

Richard Mayer relates several principles from his book Multimedia Learning which are applicable to PowerPoint, as well as any type of presentation. While these seem obvious, I often find it helpful and interesting to have good sense boiled down to some basic principles presented in a handy list (is that the signaling principle?).

* multimedia principle, in which people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone;
* coherence principle, in which people learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included;
* contiguity principle, in which people learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen;
* modality principle, in which people learn better from animation with spoken text than animation with printed text;
*signaling principle, in which people learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines and headings;
*personalization principle, in which people learn better from conversational style than formal style.

Cecilia Burman makes this unusual condition easy to understand in a funny and enlightening essay explaining some of the challenges we might have learning to recognize stones and how we might overcome those challenges.

Meet Sten

Easy to recognize in his usual spot on the steps:

Harder to spot if you unexpectedly see him in the garden:

via findaface.org via techspace via Ron Jeffries

According to a recent “study,” women are being overlooked or actively ignored for promotion and the committee could find no reason for the discrepancy in gender representation. This committee of experts ruled out “biological differences in ability, hormonal influences, childrearing demands, and even differences in ambition.”

Sigh.

In related reading today, Sylvie Noël notes an article Are expert users always better searchers?: “Results from an experiment revealed that expert users outperformed novice users in IR [information retrieval] when the elements of a system interface are organized semantically, but not when organized randomly.” The article looks interesting but I can’t quite justify purchasing it at (cough) $28.

Evidence that relates experience to effective recall has been seen in multiple studies. Master chess player deGroot studied grandmaster chess players and concluded that they had superior memory for chess pieces on a chess board. Later research showed that master chess players had greater memory than novices for well-known chess patterns, as well as random positions on a chess board.

“Similar differences were found by Berliner ( Brandt, 1986) in a study comparing expert teachers to novice teachers. Thus, when briefly shown a photograph of a classroom and asked to describe what is happening, expert teachers frequently noticed two children in the back of the room who were not attending to the teacher, whereas novices rarely noticed such patterns and focused instead on details of physical setting, clothing, and other less relevant characteristics.” (Dimensions of Thinking and Cognitive Instruction by Lorna Idol, Beau Fly Jones; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990)

So, what does this have to do with human interface design?

Take advantage of domain expertise
If you are creating software for a specific group of people who have specific knowledge, use key words, icons, or layout that is familar from that domain. The web is a new medium, but most web sites or web applications are associated with off-line experiences. It can be effective to use design elements from offline counterparts.

Make it fun and interesting for people to become experts
Software can be itself a destination. There is value in learning a tool well. I fondly remember the first time I saw Joe Sparks use a 3D modeling tool (sorry I can’t remember what it was), and it was like watching a musician play an instrument. Effectiveness with a tool can lead to superior creative performance. Make sure that is true with the tools you create and entice the people who use them to become experts.

Help is for experts [update]
“in usability tests we see it again and again: novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason things out and look them up in help…experts are the people most likely to know the ‘magic’ words to bring up what they’re looking for.” (Jensen Harris via guuui) Jensen notes: “if you’re authoring your help system for newcomers, you might be designing for the wrong kind of person.” Of couse, you should do your own usability tests — what’s true for MS Office may or may not be true for your software. Personally, I like to focus on his first point about novices learning through exploration. Think about how to make your software resillient and productive when poked at.