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Jakob Nielsen on Life-Long Computer Skills

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on Lifelong Computer Skills reiterates the idea that education is about learning fundamental concepts rather than how to do specific things in a specific context.

Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they’re unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them — and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It’s the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.

He goes on to list Search Strategies, Information Credibility, Information Overload, and sundry other things relating to creating and evaluating online content as the appropriate skills to be taught as the basics of information literacy.

Fashions in Cognitive Science

“Spring and Fall Fashions in Cognitive Science” is the text of the first presidential address given to the Cognitive Science Society in 1986 (twenty years ago). It was the 8th year of the Society and the address was given by Zenon Pylyshyn whose book on “Seeing and Visualizing” is my latest fave. This paper is reasonably short and, unlike most of Pylyshyn’s writing, reasonably accessible due to the fact that:

“It was an after-dinner talk and should be read in that spirit, even though there is a serious message hidden in there somewhere”.

The serious message is a very important one. (Pylyshyn’s work is only “inaccessible” due to the information density of each sentence – he writes clearly, concisely and pleasingly, but each paragraph has rich and deep concepts to be considered making it difficult to read quickly – and this is not a criticism by any stretch of the imagination !!!)

Fashions come around again, and just as clothes are moving through the 80’s cycle, so it appears, are issues in cognitive science. Although perhaps it would be fairer to say that it has taken twenty years for people to understand the nature of these issues sufficiently to begin to consider them.

Interestingly, I am also only just beginning to appreciate the real quality of the Monash Psychology Department in which I spent my formative academic years: it was a purely experimental department (ie had no clinical programs) and had the reputation of being focussed on “rats and stats”, but in reality, it was a true cognitive science department with strength across all the fields which would currently constitute cognitive science of the sort alluded to below.

Finally, my conclusion. What do I think of Cognitive Science, I heard you ask (didn’t you?). I have always found psychology depressing because I came into it from physics and engineering thinking that, since it experimentally studied the human mind it was a science. I soon realized that it was not a science but a catalog, and a methodology for adding to the catalog. I don’t doubt that it is a useful catalog: it’s certainly important to know such things as how to help people who are depressed or to understand how people’s memory or opinions can be changed in emotional contexts or by clever questioning (say in eyewitness testimony). But many of us had hoped that there was a theoretical science like physics or chemistry there somewhere and we were disappointed. I now believe that the problem is simply that there is no unitary subject matter for psychology — it is not a natural scientific domain. But I find renewed hope now that within psychology lies one or more natural scientific domains, and that cognition, suitably circumscribed to include those aspects that are explainable in terms of symbol processing operations (together with the nonsymbolic mechanisms required to support symbol processing) may be one of those natural scientific domains.

I think that Professor Ross Day, founding chair of the Monash Psych Department, did an excellent job in circumscribing a natural scientific domain as the focus of his experimental psychology department.

Website renovations and productivity tools

Well I think I’ve finally sorted out how to keep my website a bit more organised. I’m over “hand-crocheting” websites, although the USMA Taekwon-do site is still hand-done. I’m using WordPress for most of my writing these days, and Aperture to manage my photos and make web albums. I’m beginning to play with video editing, but I haven’t really had enough time to do too much other than minimal work using iMovie to archive to DVD.

I haven’t found MediaWiki to be as good for collaborative writing as I thought it would be – maybe because I don’t always have access to broadband internet in the way I have grown used to (and possibly because I destroyed my MediaWiki installation through trying to move the index page … D’oh!). But on mature reflection, the most likely explanation is simply that wikis have a much more limited niche than initially anticipated. The more successful wikis (eg WikiPedia, various codices) seem to be those in which specific agreed-on content (documentation) needs to be collated efficiently by a group of people with overlapping knowledge that is not controversial. I beginning to be convinced that wikis are just not the right medium for creative content that “belongs to an author”, and wikis are not as useful as I envisaged for evolving my own ideas. The refactoring process feels inefficient with multiple versions of, for example, a Word document, but that is because the inherent nature of task (organising ideas into some sort of framework) is an inefficient process.

Spookily, I’m actually finding M$ Word and Powerpoint to be useful individual work tools, especially with Word’s new Notebook layout and the much improved Powerpoint > HTML conversion. Maybe the honeymoon period will end soon and I will have another go at wikis, but M$ is certainly heading in the right direction in terms of creating a tool that synchs with the way I actually work and makes it easy to give a face-2-face presentation which can be also web-distributed with minimal overheads.

I must be getting old because I’m also finding that communication spaces have shifted recently – I no longer use goofey, that wonderful little instant messaging service run at Monash way before anyone much was using online chat. It was an extremely efficient collaborative work tool as well as being an active online community and there were quite a few people I got to know on goofey before meeting them face-to-face. I have cycled through MSN, ICQ and email depending on who was limited to what by their workplace firewalls. I recently had a bit of a love affair with my new phone (a Nokia 6280) – the 2MP camera is pretty effective, and with a 2GB memory card, I no longer feel a need for an iPod. Most of the people I want to talk to will now engage in text messaging, and it’s probably my instant messaging medium of choice.

Almost a year of working at DSTO on the restricted Defence Network has desensitised me to the inconvenience of having inconsistent email availability – I can’t access DSTO email from anywhere other than on-site, but while I am at DSTO I can’t reach any of my other email accounts. All-in-all, just as the rest of the world is catching up to the “always-online” expectation, I have moved away from it a bit. I have pretty much managed to avoid MySpace and YouTube and almost all my email is work-related. In fact I rather like the idea of postcards and letters.

Hopefully with a revamped site based around WordPress, a totally cool MacBookPro, a camera, phone and video camera, I’ll be able to create good contet a lot more productively now.

Simulations in aviation and medicine

I gave a talk last week on simulations in aviation and medicine as part of the MUVES seminar series at the University of Melbourne. It covers a wide range of ideas that I hope to capture better over the next few weeks and months.

– Link to powerpoint slides and notes

As an aside, I have recently installed Office 2004 for Mac and this is the first time I’ve used this version of Powerpoint – against all odds, I’m pretty impressed with the Presenter Tools which allow a timer, the notes and upcoming slides to show to the presenter while mirroring only the slideshow itself to the audience. I am also reasonably happy with the web output as per this link. It is now pretty straightforward to prepare a presentation, present it and post it on the web. And with the “save as picture” option for slides, Powerpoint becomes a fairly useful tool for preparing diagrams.

When the tool actually does the job I want it to, I am much less inclined to bag it – though I reserve the right to be deeply offended when people use the wrong tool for their job.

Web brown-bag lunch

Today there is a web brown-bag lunch on blogging where a number of us will give brief presentations on our use of blogs. My blog is somewhat bursty, and lately the bursts have been driven by outside pressures such as this presentation, or The Age article on blogging.

As I’ve mentioned previously (and Stephen Downes says much more eloquently somewhere in a guide to writing a blog), the important thing about writing a blog is actually having something to say.

The sort of blogging that is probably most relevant to my academic work is writing about ideas stimulated by the things I’m reading. The act of writing brings out whether or not the ideas have legs or not, and reminds me at a later date how some of my better-thought-out writing began.

And this brings me to the simultaneous strength and weakness of blogging: this “article” for want of a better description, is poorly structured and unfocussed and probably should not be “published”. However, it is a quick placeholder for the sort of things I might want to elaborate on at the lunchtime presentation, and it has taken about 5 minutes to put together.

And while I was looking for Stephen Downes’ article on blogging, instead I found his 10 Rules for Being Successful in general which is probably way more interesting if somewhat broader.

Taekwon-do and cognitive science

I haven’t written in my taekwon-do blog since our new dojang opened in January – but I have been thinking a lot about the way in which my study of taekwon-do has informed my thinking about cognitive science.

Let me be clear about this: there are three elements to my study of taekwon-do which have been pivotal in influencing the way I think.

1) my Instructor, who introduced me to the martial art in an accessible way, showing the theory and practice, the moral culture and application, and most of all, demonstrating through everything he does the ongoing level of passion and commitment required to become a martial artist.

2) the 15 volume encyclopedia of taekwon-do (and its condensed version), written by General Choi, which documents the martial art itself and the structure of the taekwon-do syllabus through which a martial artist can learn his or her art form.

3) the conceptual mapping across perceptual learning, motor learning and meta-cognitive awareness of learning principles through which my Instructor is able to relate theory and practice and through which he gave me sufficient insight and desire to understand the depth and richness of the curriculum developed by General Choi.

As I have remarked elsewhere in my taekwon-do blog, the structure of the taekwon-do curriculum, bringing together the martial arts of east with the educational system of the western military (US Military Academy), is a masterpiece of curriculum design and exposition. However, based as it is on curriculum design principles for a military curriculum, there is no specific curriculum framework for children. I have also discussed elsewhere in my blog the special facility my Instructor has in working with young children and older people, two groups who are not the traditional focus for martial arts instruction.

The focus I have had in previous posts on martial arts and instructing children have been based around motivational factors in terms of learning most likely because I was involved in educational design of “learning materials”. However now that I am reading Eleanor Gibson (Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development), Williams and Hodges(Skill Acquisition in Sport), Johnson-Frey (Taking Action: Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Intentional Acts) and such things, focusing on perceptual learning and cross-modal sensory-motor integration, I am seeing other aspects of the taekwon-do syllabus that are masterful in terms of design.

I am currently working with concepts of dynamic coordination and constraints in skill acquisition, which fit pretty nicely with the taekwon-do concept of sinewave, and how these fit in with instructional models. This approach contrasts sharply with traditional instructional approaches emphasising verbal instruction, active cognitive processing of knowledge, and dependency on feedback from instructors. The role of the instructor or coach in the dynamic approach is

“to ensure the correct ‘discovery environment’ through the manipulation of task and environmental constraints in an attempt to guide exploration of the dynamics of the perceptuo-motor workspace … if one uses the metaphor of a ‘story’ to conceptualise the skill acquisition process in sport, then the end-state form (the skill) to be acquired by each individual is not prescribed at the outset, but is painstakingly and creatively written ongoingly. In such a ‘self-reading and self-writing’ dynamical system (Kugler, 1986), practitioners have a major say in the development of the individual’s unique storyline by creating localised pressures (as constraints) so that functional global systems behaviour emerges from practice time. The implication is that there is a need for significant research programmes in the sport and exercise sciences to gain a broad understanding of how constraints shape the individual ‘stories’ of skill acquisition in different sports contexts.”

The constraints-led model asserts that the set of possible movement solutions for a skill to be acquired can be limited by the dimensions of the perceptuo-motor workspace imposed by the coach or training environment. Directed coaching or training environments with limited dimensionality will only support a very narrow search process, whereas unbounded workspaces allow unconstrained search which can be unrewarding, inefficient and potentially unsafe. An important role of the coach or instructor from this perspective is to support the perceptuo-motor search process by manipulating constraints so that exploration occurs within the optimal area of the perceptuo-motor workspace.

Interactions between the coach and student are minimised during early stages of learning so that the important dynamics of the movement task are revealed through discovery.

“In a soundbite, the key point is: Let the learner begin to write her own story. Direct coach intervention at this stage may well assist in the short-term assembly of coordinative structures as temporary solutions, but the ongoing process of establishing control may be delayed as a result of inappropriate (i.e. textbook and non-individualised) coordinations early on. In fact, the adoption of generalised ‘textbook’ approaches can be likened to the short-term solution of ‘plagiarism in our analogy of writing a story. In other words, the learner may come to rely on these ‘neatly packaged’ temporary solutions for immediate performance effects in specific environments. But the unique relationships between movement subsystems, which influence long-term performance transfer to novel situations, will not be established early in learning” Williams et al 1999, p322.

This all starts sounding very like the ideas I was trying express early in my blog in the article on Teaching Kids.

Corruption in evidence presentations – Edward Tufte

I have just received my copy of “Beautiful Evidence” and I love it already …

“Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. The use of corrupt manipulations and blatant rhetorical ploys in a report or presentation – outright lying, flagwaving, personal attacks, setting up phony alternatives, misdirection, jargon-mongering, evading key issues, feigning disinterested objectivity, willful misunderstanding of other points of view – suggest that the presenter lacks both credibility and evidence. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell, Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and a moral activity.”

Steve Irwin and Crocodile Tears

I am pleased to find I am not alone in my lack of surprise at the passing of Steve Irwin, although like Jack Marx, I extend my sympathy to his friends and family who have lost a loved one.

Steve Irwin engaged in risky behaviour, and although we are assured that he went to great lengths to minimise risk, there are inherent risks in dealing with deadly animals that cannot be eliminated. It is simply not possible to be simultaneously “confronting danger” and be completely safe – and it is surely not rocket science to understand this mutually exclusive relationship between danger and safety.

The “message to children” sent by Steve Irwin seems to have been that confronting danger is fun, exhilarating, and allows you to experience things you would otherwise not know – this message has now been rounded out by adding that confronting danger may also lead to death. It is truly bizarre how parents wish to shield their children from this rather obvious conclusion – dangerous animals are dangerous and can kill you. It’s not their “fault” – it’s what they do, and there is no moral value in play when they do it. You invade their territory, they may kill you and they don’t agonise about the right or wrong of it.

I’m sure Steve Irwin knew this, but it didn’t deter him from living his life to the fullest that way accepting the consequences of risk. Perhaps if we were not so freakishly safety conscious about things that carry small risks, we would be able to learn how to assess serious risks for ourselves and accept the consequences of our choices (safe and bored, or risky and exhilarating) rather than relying on litigation and the assignment of blame after any adverse event. And if we want our kids to make informed choices, they need information about consequences of accepting risk.

I am not generally a fan of Germaine Greer, but her comments on Steve Irwin’s death balance the accolades for his “animal-loving” “conservationist” persona.

Decision making at universities

from The Age: Melbourne Uni row over degrees

“If you take heads of departments somewhere and tell them we’re about to climb Mount Everest with one sherpa and no oxygen, they’ll say ‘of course’,” he said. “It’s only when you get to camp two they say, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and ‘I didn’t realise I was going to have to carry my own provisions.’ “
Professor Stuart MacIntyre – Professor of History

This quote captures the problem of corporate-style decision-making in the age of marketing and spin – who needs to worry about the details when the glossy brochures looks so good? Only nerds seem to read the fine print or worry about the substance of an argument these days, and then – shock !! horror !! – they are so surprised when things go pear-shaped in ways apparently noone could have foreseen – at least not while wearing their HHGTTG peril-sensitive sunglasses.