Make Me Smarter

Katie, a friend of mine and professor, asks students in her literature course to read a good bit of Beowulf and discuss it for a couple weeks. Then she shows the film from 2007 in class. "They love knowing what's in the real story and being able to spot the liberties taken by the filmmakers." 

This is one of several stories Katie told me emphasizing the power of helping students feel smart. Sometimes she's myth-busting by, say, showing students that Adam and Eve didn't bite an apple in Genesis, but in Dante's Divine Comedy. Other times she's demonstrating the cultural impact of Shakespeare through commonplace phrases and words we use today such as "bated breath" or to "break the ice" which were coined by the bard. 

As Katie shares these stories, her eyes twinkle. Yes, she delights in being their guide into this new world, but more than that she loves the delight they experience as they see themselves learning. Katie's students have a sense that they are, in fact, getting smarter about literature, history, language, people, and the world. Katie clearly loves those moments and has been hunting them for as long as she's been teaching; seeking those triggers which make the lights come on and their faces say, "I never knew that! And I'm never going to forget it."

Each of these stories hinges on something any literature professor would recognize as a basic insight, often into something trivial. But it's exactly the right kind of trivia to connect with her students. These insights build trust. They increase attention. They give students a sense that their professor knows a thing or two. This makes a subtle but significant shift from 'a required course filled with useless information I'm supposed to remember for the final,' to 'a guided tour, led by an expert, unpacking the interesting stories behind how we came to be the way we are today.' Just shifting the instructor's identity from "the enemy" to "the guide" is huge. 

As a course designer, I too am often thinking of students as "those who don't know." And the course I'm creating is "what they need; whether they know it or not." While we use story, context, imagery and other tactics to pull students in, I have to admit I've not spent enough time on the simple but powerful tactic of asking, "What am I offering that students will immediately recognize as making them smarter about their world?" 

Thanks Katie. You've helped another student learn today.

Snowfalling

"Snowfall," verb:
To execute the type of expensive, time-consuming, longform-narrative, multimedia storytelling that earned the Times' ambitious "Snow Fall" feature a Pulitzer last [April]. 
 - Jill Abramson, Executive Editor of the New York Times

The NY Times is at it again. In The Jockey, their second major effort exploring what is possible when telling stories online, we find an exemplar of current best practices:

• start with a good story
• add well-crafted writing, photography and video
• host everything in an interface designed for reading, devoid of all the "click-me" cruft; and
• sprinkle in a few, well-chosen HTML5 tricks like fading to black before a video starts.

One of 8 pages from the NY Times' latest project: The Jockey

I love the way this page gives off strong vibes of "stop surfing and settle in." Starting the scroll on page one feels like cracking open a new book or settling into a theater seat as the lights go down. I'm in the hands of an author and creative team with high-production values, promising a deep and engaging story.

It's not hard to imagine many writers, photographers, and videographers at the Times wanting to showcase their work in such a beautiful setting. So it is perhaps unsurprising when Jill Abramson tells us "Everyone wants to snowfall now, every day, all desks."

This is not limited to the staff of the Times. With over 3.5 million views, a lot of people took note of "Snow Fall." Several of the front-end coders we work with mentioned clients sending them a link to "Snow Fall" and asking, "how much to do something like this for us?" And therein lies the rub. 

Projects like this take far more time and money than a regular NY Times feature. Notice that in Abramson's definition the first two of five adjectives were "expensive" and "time-consuming". And consider that "Snow Fall" was released in December of 2012 to widespread praise and millions of readers, received the Pulitzer in April, but the second project of this type wasn't released until August of 2013.

Margaret Sullivan, author of the Times' "Public Editor's Journal," gives us a look behind the curtain into the decision making behind "Who Gets to Snow Fall."

Sullivan goes deeper than asking "why so few" and "who gets to play" when she quotes Farhad Manjoo asking whether or not these techniques improve the story or "readers' understanding of it." And this is where the discussion pivots neatly into a question of instructional design. 

In 2004, as Soomo produced our first works of multimedia storytelling for American Government courses, it was clear that the expense of creating original, well-crafted narrative and video content required us to carefully prioritize where such content was most needed and would have the biggest impact on learning.  And based on all our experience since, we can answer Manjoo's question with a confident "yes."

Call it up on a mobile device and the presentation is different, but just as thoughtful.

Pictures are sometimes worth more than 1,000 words and can tell stories which words just aren't up to. Imagine geography without maps or biology without illustration. Likewise, video can humanize topics in ways that elude even the best of writers. Challenging preconceptions, creating empathy and a dozen other tasks are performed more ably by video, images, or illustration than text alone.

However, it's essential to notice that it's not simply the media at play or the large budget that increase understanding. What we see in both "Snow Fall" and "The Jockey" is a team taking the time to ask "what are we trying to explain here?" and "what's the best way to explain that?" They are then free to use words, images, videos, maps, or illustrations appropriately, deploying each to explain what it explains best. 

As Dean Baquet, managing editor at the Times, tells Sullivan, "We’re just learning how to do them." And here journalism and instructional design overlap. We are all still learning how to tell multimedia stories online. And we are all indebted to the NY Times for these pioneering efforts that have done so much to show us what's possible.

Pages, Practice, Peers, and the Pro

This spring I set out to learn more about running and, along the way, stumbled into learning something about why courses typically include what they do: a book, assignments, classmates and a professor. 

It started, as so many adventures do, with a book. In this case Chi Running. Authors Danny and Katherine Dreyer (Asheville locals) draw on experience in Tai Chi to provide a perspective on running which emphasizes good mechanics and relaxed movement. For someone prone to pushing too hard too soon and causing self-inflicted injuries like shin splints, the promise of this approach is quite appealing. 

The Pages

On Amazon

In their book, the Dreyers layout all the basic concepts, the theory behind them, methods of practice and, as is required of all fitness books, a liberal supply of anecdotes. Having taught these ideas to hundreds of people, they have a strong sense of what to introduce and when, how much they need to say to get the point across, and how to say it memorably. 

The Practice

There is a certain irony in reading a book about running while sitting on your couch. To learn in any meaningful way, the ideas have to be put into practice. So I lace up my go-fasters and hit the streets of West Asheville. Some of the concepts are immediately rewarding to apply, such as "land on the middle of your foot, not your heels." Others mystify me: "running uphill, use your arms and abs instead of your legs." I make some progress, but can only glean so much feedback from my reflection in store fronts as I trot past. To learn more, I need people.

The Peers

On Saturday mornings, a small group of new Chi Runners gather to do steadily longer runs in preparation for the Asheville Marathon this Fall. After an awkward period of walking up to people in the park and asking “are you here to chi run?” I find the group and soon we are off for a mellow five miles. 

The biggest gain from the peer group for me turns out to be not informative, but social. Now there is a time, place and prescribed route for doing the long runs each week. Having people who expect me and who will ask where I’ve been if I miss a week is very different than having a plan in a spreadsheet. And there is now a recurring appointment on my calendar for Saturday mornings which makes it a lot easier to defend that time from encroaching obligations. The peer group quickly becomes a commitment, to other humans, which I need to keep and this keeps me on track as the miles escalate. 

However, these lovely, generous, wonderful people, share roughly the same level of understanding and experience that I have. We are all beginners. And while it is helpful to hear how others had interpreted one idea or another, none of us had any real authority. No expertise. What I needed was an instructor.

The Pro

According to the official website, Jeff is a Master Instructor of Chi Running. We meet early one morning at a school track and my learning is accelerated dramatically.  Jeff has amazing powers no book could ever have. For example, he can:

• give feedback and correction in real time based on what he sees me doing
• diagnose my particular problems and guide me to resolving those
• answer my questions

When Danny and Katherine wrote the book they were writing for everyone - that's the nature of a book. But what Jeff says on the track is just for me, focusing on what is holding me back and the dozen things I most need to work on next. This hour cost four times what the book cost, but it is well worth it for the growth in understanding.

The Lesson

So I return to West Asheville neighborhoods to work on the things Jeff explained and to get ready for my next Saturday long run. And somewhere between the ice cream shop and the mattress store it occurs to me: 

• PAGES - Without the book, I would be trying to capture and organize a collection of snippets gleaned here and there. Having it all in one place as a cohesive work of instruction is really helpful.
• PRACTICE - The running I do alone is what a science lab or paper writing is supposed to be; a chance to try these ideas out. Learning without application is like reading about running while sitting on the couch. 
• PEERS - The Saturday runners are my class and very quickly created accountability. As thin as our connections are, I still felt the pull of “I have to go.” And on rainy mornings, this commitment makes all the difference. 
• PRO - Jeff, the coach, is my instructor. Individualized attention. Diagnosing my particular problems and providing the focused instruction I need. Answering questions about the material. Telling me which parts I'm understanding and where I still need work.

Like you, I’ve been around this magical mix of book, practice, peers and instructor since kindergarten. But this summer, in light of my adventures in Chi Running, it’s making a lot more sense. It feels less like “the way we’ve always done it” and more like the wisdom of tradition; all the key ingredients to give students the best chance of success. 

Revealing Process

29th Drive, a software design group in Phoenix, recently hosted a webinar on using sketches in the process of designing user experience (UX). One brilliant thing about their presentation was a willingness to actually show the process of sketching. They didn't just talk about sketching in the abstract or tell stories in retrospect. Instead, they sketched in real time while people on the webinar watched. Courageous.

By "they," I mean three designers sketching at the same time. Each designer drew, pen on paper, under one of these nifty cameras, and all three streamed simultaneously. The effect was the sketching equivalent of a three-ring circus.

View fullsize

screenshot from the webinar hosted by 29th Drive.

This style of presentation beautifully illustrates important truths about sketching, such as:

• Seeing three people succeed in different ways, it's clear that there's no one right way.
• Watching this happen in real time illustrates some patterns for sequence, e.g. first I draw the big box, then the detail I'm focused on, then I fill in enough around it to give viewers some context.
• How much polish is possible in just a few minutes is tangibly demonstrated. These aren't framed stills from Fantasia; they're just quick sketches. And that's the point.

After six minutes they put their pens down and each designer talked through what they'd sketched.

The discussion emphasized that these sketches are a means for presenting ideas. If the sketch communicates the idea, it succeeds.

User interface is notoriously difficult to talk about and high resolution mockups are slow and expensive. What this webinar showed was the effectiveness of sketching to quickly and clearly share ideas.

For example, one of the ideas was "unlock your phone by snapping your fingers above it." As the designer talked through this interaction it was clear that visually conveying the idea of a finger snap was helpful, but he didn't need to draw the perfect likeness of one hand snapping to convey the idea. And by placing the finger snap in a series of sketches, the story of this proposed interaction becomes quite clear: the phone is like this, then the user snaps, then this happens.

Many simple, practical tips could be gleaned from the discussions of the sketches:

• Number your sketches to make it easier to talk about them.
• Use a piece of paper to cover the sketches you're not currently talking about to keep people focused.
• If you need to show a user clicking through a series of screens, use color to show what was clicked.
• If you want to show animation, sketch a few key frames.

And so on. Each of these was presented in context, as a way of overcoming a communication problem. That context made the tips much easier to understand and the use of the insight was immediately obvious. By showing process, the webinar demonstrated how sketching can accelerate design, clarify thinking, and enable collaboration.

And this got me thinking about the potential for showing process in other disciplines. Take literature for example. I'd love to hear a lit professor talk through the process of how she approaches a new piece. Say she's about to read a poem for the first time. Does she read it aloud? Does she look up obscure words as she finds them or just push through the entire work once and then go back and dig deeper? Does everything make sense on the first read? (It certainly doesn't for me.) And if it doesn’t, what does she do to better understand it? Does she outline it? Make margin notes? Read critiques by others or seek out interviews with the author? I remember being told to read things from Norton's Anthology, but I don't remember any tactical suggestions on how to read better.

Or, consider social science. Rather than just sharing the bottom line of a study, what if an instructor took the time to reveal the process which produced these results? Maybe start from the initial research problem and tell the story all the way through to revise and resubmit notes from the journal which ultimately published it. This might reveal the work to articulate the right questions, to design the experiments, properly evaluate results, and then communicate them clearly; in short, all of the struggles and failures along the way. Would that be a waste of time and seen as irrelevant by students? Or would it make the process of social science unforgettable and easily transfer to a deeper understanding of all subsequent studies?

The process is so often more interesting than the result. And a result has more meaning, and more stickiness, when we know how and why it came to be. Consider a business student seeking to understand market segmentation. Or history–where, jumpin' jiminy, do historians have great stories of how they came to know what they know– stories that they consistently forget to share with students.

Knowledge is the by-product of trying to do something, fix a problem or resolve a mystery. These insights are hard-won and shared by people who see how that knowledge could be helpful to others. Yet too often we teach the results of discovery as a given; as a fact without a past or a future.

When we teach without revealing process, without struggle and without a sense of how this will be useful to the student, we devalue the very insights we're most eager to share. But by demonstrating techniques, and revealing the process through which people learn and apply what they learn, we can make the ideas easier to understand, remember and appreciate.

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