OneMind

Musings on time travel in media

March 14, 2010 in Learning Experience Design | Tags: time and media | Leave a comment

Tim found his childhood bike in his dad's woods

Time travel has always been an implicit function of media.

A book gives us tangible access to the past, present and future. The way in which a book is constructed reflects the way we Westerners view time. For we consider time to be an arrow targeting the future, which in our culture is in the right-hand direction; while the past is the shaft of the arrow to our left.

While reading a page of a book, or any print media, I am always in the present on the page I am reading, yet I have ready access to both the past (pages I have already read) and the future (pages I have not yet read). In fact, I hold past, present and future in my very hands. I can feel the weight and heft of the book and can even see the edges of the pages. I can easily and quickly see any page I want to see.

On the other hand, the browser, the electronic book reader, and the web application tend to extend the duration of the present moment. These offer the promise of time travel, but haphazardly deliver. A dead battery, a failed connection, the wrong password, and you are trapped in the present and cannot do anything about it. It’s like listening to a public speaker with a stammer. In attempting to surf on a wave of information, one experiences not simply a gap, but an expectation that is not filled, creating an unpleasant experience of duration, leading to frustration.

The sense is one of being trapped in the present time, poised to move forward, but stymied.

When we go “back”, we don’t really go back in time. We’ve gone into the future by reading history.

The real problem, however, is that applications and sites are currently architected and designed according to the “time as arrow” paradigm, whereas folks in general are moving rapidly towards a “simultaneous time” state of mind. For how we live in time is a mass hallucination, which, like all forms of information, evolves. But that’s another story.

Hard and soft information

March 7, 2010 in Learning Experience Design | Tags: COW TEA, hard information, Peter Checkland, Rich Picture, soft information | Leave a comment

Sometimes when I draw a Rich Picture, I will use the term “soft information”.

“Hard information” includes verifiable data and knowledge.

So, soft information includes feelings, perceptions, opinions, values—which are often the key to project success or failure. For example, with a project I am currently working on, four information architects are working together in a team, with their manager. Here’s some soft information about our project:

Our manager seems to value getting some concept wireframes done fast.
It seems like all the team members value understanding the nuances of the big picture, doing a competitive analysis, a gap analysis, etc. etc., before creating concept wireframes.
One of the team members has feelings around the fact that he’s going skiing for a week right in the middle of this project.
For my part, I’m excited about the work but I perceive that our stakeholders may be a shifting group, so I’m a little apprehensive about which direction to take with my work.
The company values the Agile method.
One of our stakeholders is of the opinion that we should be conservative in our concepts.

You get the idea. These feelings, perceptions, opinions and values are pretty important to the project. Yet typically, when putting together a list of project parameters, these kinds of soft information are disregarded, or not even noticed in the first place.

It’s the mix of the hard and soft information that puts the “rich” in Rich Picture.

In case you missed my recent post on the subject, a Rich Picture is a cartoon-like diagram which you can draw in order to:

find out about the problem situation
create a preliminary mental model of the situation.

Usually, when I draw a Rich Picture, I’m the only one who ever sees it — because they are messy and too hard to explain. Occasionally I’ll show my Rich Picture to other team members, if I’ve cleaned it up enough for public consumption. Once in awhile I’ve drawn a Rich Picture on the whiteboard in a team meeting, to walk a team through my mental processes as a begin a new project.

I use the menomic “COW TEA” to help myself remember the elements of a Rich Picture.

C: Customers or users: the people who will use the system you are making

O: Owner(s), the person(s) with the power to make approvals or cancel actions

W: World view, or some kind of overall perspective on the project

T: Transformation of inputs into outputs, the core activity, or the primary change to be brought about. In other words, “We are going to build a system to <x>”

E: Environment, or factors which impact the project, such as time and resources

A: Actors, or performers of tasks on the project

Peter Checkland introduced the concept of the Rich Picture in 1981 in his book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, the textbook on his soft systems approach to creating solutions to human problems.

Talking to the sensing-feeling

March 3, 2010 in Learning, Learning Experience Design | Tags: Bloom's Taxonomy, Donald R. Woods, MBTI | Leave a comment

Donald R. Woods, professor emeritus of chemical engineering at McMaster University, has done quite a lot of research into what different MBTI types consider to be good exam questions. Don is perhaps most widely known as a pioneer of McMaster’s distinctive learning strategies: inquiry and problem-based learning. I ran across a reference to his article, Models for Learning and How They’re Connected–Relating Bloom, Jung, and Perry, which was published in the Journal of College Science Teaching, v22, n4 p250-54, Feb. 1993. After spending half an hour hunting around on ERIC and in various university libraries, I could not find a source, so I dug up his email address on the internet and just contacted him directly.

I’m working with the learning aspects of our travel web site. I was interested to know how to correlate MBTI types to the levels on Bloom’s Taxonomy . I had the idea of associating the categories I came up with to differences in the types of questions people might have when they come to the web site.

Don promptly responded with helpful information.

Sensing/Thinking (ST), which is 30% of the US population, includes ISTP, ESTP, ESTJ, and ISTJ. They ask questions on the Knowledge/Remember level of Bloom’s taxonomy. Questions like, What does it cost to check a bag? What is an e-ticket?

Intuiting/thinking (NT), which is 10.4% of the US population, includes ENTJ, INTJ, ENTP, and INTP. They want to Understand (Bloom’s second level), and appreciate questions that ask them to compare and contrast.

Intuiting/Feeling (NF), which is 16.3% of the US population, prefer Evaluation questions (what if?)

Most interesting to me is the Sensing/Feeling group, which comprises 43.4% of the US population. They want to know, “How would I feel if…?” and this is not usually the type of question that is addressed in a scholastic exam or on a travel web site:

How would I feel if I choose this trip A compared with trip B?
Would I be at ease in this hotel room?
Would I be happy if I choose this car?
How comfortable would I feel if I choose this airline seat?

However, the use of sensory information such as rich media, video, sound, images, diagrams and visualizations of data speaks powerfully to this type of sensing/feeling person, which, if you give credence to this type of analysis, comprises a huge chunk of any potential audience of learners.

Fox tracks

February 21, 2010 in Learning, Learning Experience Design, Relationalism | Tags: visual language | Leave a comment

Waves made by sound. Fox tracks. Events in the natural world create patterns, specific and literal. The designer works to distill meaning from events in the life of the mind. A trail of symbols and systems forms in the wake of her work. Examine first the imprint of the fox’s running foot, the coarse displacement of the snow. Then the eye encounters the structure of the individual flakes of snow, the blue shadows, the scintillating light. Design evokes the radiance of meanings in which it participates.

What is the meaning of color? Of a point, a line, or a plane? Of a vortex, a fractal, any sort of radial pattern? With no evidence other than the personal and anecdotal, I believe the human race is increasingly thinking in visual ways, and that persons of the highest visual evolution are increasingly able to recognize and describe common design patterns. We’ve seen this happen in many disciplines over the past few decades: art, architecture, urban planning, and programming being a few. Of course no one can argue that we daily absorb and act on great richness of visual information.

As human beings, we are naturally language makers. It makes sense that as we are beginning to communicate in a more global way, and that we are developing a language to do so. This language consists of universals, whether arbitrary or natural, of structure and form, which when completed will provide a vehicle for communicating and manipulating meaning. That this language is primarily visual also makes sense, for it derives from visual experience.

The syntax of visual language, when worked out, will be as deceptively simple as the rules which govern the flight of birds, or the workings of our dopamine cells which, it is theorized, increase or decrease their firing rates in response to errors in predictions about the world around us, predictions based on metaphorical information input to the brain: sensory input and memories of sensory states.

Yet because the radial reciprocity of the code is so complex, we haven’t yet drilled down to the matrix of energy states which underly visual phenomenon. Art and psychology, physics and metaphysics all have their theories; what we’re lacking is a Unified Field Theory of graphical/textual communication.

Some questions about social learning interactions

February 16, 2010 in Agents and interactions, Learning Experience Design | Tags: Learning Experience Design, learning systems design, LxD | Leave a comment

What are the agents in a social learning network?
What are the roles played by these agents?
What are the interaction types they engage in?
What are some structures of interaction?
What design elements make the community palpable?
What welcomes the newcomer?
What sustains engagement?
How can we measure engagement? Shared meaning? Cognitive play?
What difference does it make when interactions are perceived as coming from peers, from authorities, or from the user interface itself?

What makes a kid play with the same toy over and over again?

February 15, 2010 in Agents and interactions, Learning, Learning Experience Design | Tags: Learning Experience Design, learning interaction design, LxD, Surowiecki, Tielhard de Chardin, Wisdom of Crowds | Leave a comment

What makes a kid play with the same toy over and over again?

Or, here’s another way to phrase it:

What is the structure of interactions between agents which result in ongoing engagement of the learners, the growing of shared meanings and playing with shared cognitive artifacts?

Interactions can be defined as the micro-events that occur between autonomous agents in processes that eventually result in a healthy agents and a healthy network. On the most basic level of life, autonomous organisms solve problems of encounters with the environment through mechanisms such as a selectively permeable membrane, a group of energy currencies such as those used for transport processes across a membrane, a set of catalysts responsible for modulating the rates at which reactions to the environment take place and mechanisms for stabilizing metabolism. More advanced adaptive interactions include motility, multicellular organization, and sensorimotor systems, leading to the development of the mind as a neurosomatic activity which establishes a sense of self in the environment.

Motility is the baseline for the appearance of cognition; in collaborative learning we should expect to see that a knowledge flow which is open and free is the baseline for the appearance of Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon. Online interactions are like non-terminating data processing algorithms, in that they are defined lists of instructions for completing tasks, but the length of the process cannot be determined in advance. If they are well designed, they extend our adaptive interactions in ways that allow us to move, use our senses to touch one another, and organize ourselves into complex systems.

It’s that kind of complex organization that provides a venue for self-realization. As our systems become more complex, they give us the opportunity for increasing individuation.

As de Chardin has said, “union differentiates.”

Designing for solitude

February 8, 2010 in Learning Experience Design | Tags: Ben Fullerton, Designing for Solitude, Interaction 10, Johnny Holland Magazine | Leave a comment

I really resonated to Johnny Holland magazine’s summary of Ben Fullerton’s talk, Designing for Solitude, at Interaction 10, which ended yesterday. The summary was written by Niklas Wolkert & Brad Nunnally.

“In the past, the devices we used in our everyday life only had a single mode to them. Products of the present are becoming more and more multi modal, providing more unique types of interaction all at the same time. To combat this certain products are going back to this single mode of interaction . . . Allowing yourself to get away from everything, or disconnect, is Ben’s big call to action. There is nothing wrong with BEING connected, just allow yourself the freedom to disconnect too.” Read more

Conceptual Graph Structures Visio stencil

February 4, 2010 in Learning Experience Design | Tags: Andrew Rice, causal networks, Conceptual Graph Structure Viso Stencil, Conceptual Graph Structures, Dr. Arthur Graesser, goal heirarchies, Sallie Gordon-Becker, Scott Confer, spatial relationships, taxonomies | Leave a comment

You’re itching to draw a Conceptual Graph Structure.

But perhaps you just haven’t memorized the six nodes and 18 arcs and their legal combinations.

Maybe you just don’t want to!

Relax. Just download this Conceptual Graph Structure Visio stencil developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.

You’ll be making CGS diagrams of goal heirarchies, causal networks, taxonomies and spatial relationships in a jiffy!

Previous posts on the topic of Conceptual Graph Structures:

http://onemind.com/2010/01/27/conceptual-graph-structures-part-1/

http://onemind.com/2010/01/28/conceptual-graph-structures-part-2/

http://onemind.com/2010/01/29/conceptual-graph-structures-part-3/

http://onemind.com/2010/02/03/conceptual-graph-structures-part-4/

Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. The arc structure is drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. The CGS guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer. The Visio stencil was developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.

Conceptual Graph Structures: Part 4

February 3, 2010 in Learning Experience Design | Tags: Agile, Andrew Rice, CGS, Conceptual Graph Structures, Dr. Arthur Graesser, Learning Experience Design, learning interaction design, LxD, Sallie Gordon-Becker, Scott Confer | 4 comments

Hand-drawn Conceptual Graph Structure by Scott Confer

The Secret Sauce

In past posts, I have outlined the components of the type of mental model called Conceptual Graph Structures. There are six kinds of nodes, connected by 18 types of arcs, which indicate semantic relationships between the nodes. I have talked about the basic CGS substructures: taxonomies, goal heirarchies, causal networks, and spatial relationships. I have given you cheat sheets for the “legal combinations” of nodes and arcs for each substructure type.

But let’s say you are on a new project of some kind or another, and all you have to work from is your rough notes from a kickoff meeting, and an sketchy set of project requirements which your project manager dashed off last night between dinner, and his 9 pm appointment to read The Phantom Tollbooth to the kids before bed.

So where do you start?

Take your rough notes and the requirements document and lay them out on the dining room table. Read them both through once, identifying key pieces of information:

who are the learners, or people who are going to use your work?
who are the actors (the people who are going to do the work on this project)?
what is the context?
what transformation is needed?
can you pick out any taxonomies (like a navigation system, or a group of roles, for example)?
does a goal or two jump out at you?
can you see any cause and effect relationships?
are there any spatial relationships described?

Now you’ll need a big, clean piece of paper and a pencil. Sentence by sentence, identify nodes (concepts, states, styles, events, goals, and goal-actions) and how they could be connected, using any of the 18 types of arcs. Draw these nodes and arcs on the piece of paper. You’ll wind up with something that looks sort of like the drawing above.

My colleague Scott Confer (who drew the CGS above) calls this method the “secret sauce” of making Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS). It’s a great way to kick-start an Agile project.