Digital Fractology: An Example

An example of Digital Fractology

(NB: I think it ironic that I was about to add this post to the blog when I allowed a Microsoft update to execute. It has crashed my computer – this is being created and posted in safe mode. More on the outcome of this at a later date)

After sharing my last entry with several colleagues several points are in need of clarification when considering Digital Fractology.

First and foremost, the conversation is not about something that has become broken, but rather, about something that is broken by design. I am not talking about a flat tire, but about a square tire. Examples of such technologies are all too prevalent, and over the past few days I have begun collecting things that I believe fit the definition. I present one of them here as illustration of the concept.

Lately, a number of web sites have taken to embedding Microsoft Bing searches into article text in the event you might need to look up strange and unfamiliar terms like "Barak Obama" or "Ronald Reagan." The result is an incredibly intrusive popup that leaps into the field of view, blotting out the text you were actually reading. A search on "annoying Bing pop ups" yields several hundred thousand results. A quick review of some of the top results reveals that, among other things, the pop ups frequently crash the browser. Many of the users were also angry with Microsoft for creating this situation, but the solution, to change a cookie setting on the browser, is neither immediate nor obvious. I suspect that most users will simply learn to live with the situation, and either accept that useless search terms will intrude on their reading, or else they will learn how to move their cursor out the way of these inadvertent annoyances. Either case is unacceptable, but is also a perfect example of Digital Fractology.

If you have an example of something you consider DF, please post it below. I am curious to see if other people are experiencing this. In the coming days I will post additional examples.

R

Digital Fractology

The title of this post is a new phrase that I will use to launch a new science – the study of broken technology. I have hinted at this several times in previous posts, but most of those were rants about particular examples that I had come upon as I went through my labors. I have experienced several more in the past day, and as I have thought about this I think that there is actually something here that needs to be examined in a systematic way. I will first attempt the draft of a formal definition, and then site some recent examples. Hopefully, I will receive some feedback on additions and adjustments to the definition.

Digital Fractology: The study of malfunctioning technology. The malfunction may be in hardware, software or inherent in the human-computer interface.

There are several assumptions in this definition. For example, it is assumed that the malfunction is not trivial, but is inherent in the design of the product. I think another way to say this is that the product is broken by design – when used in its proper configuration, it does not work properly.

Several examples may help explain this.

I recently put an HP 8500 into service in my office. It is a multifunction printer that has a great many positives – it prints well, it copies, it scans, it sets up easily in a wireless network. However, the first time you try to print an envelope you discover that there is no capacity to actually do this easily. The manual is no help, and the web is littered with user-developed work-arounds. Most result in 2 or 3 misprinted envelopes which need to be discarded. When you scan a document with the supplied software there is no way to name that document in a descriptive way. Instead you must first save it with the non-descriptive title of "scan009" (or whatever the next number in the sequence was), then go to the scan directory and rename the file. If you scanned two files at the same time, you must open one to confirm its contents. Both of these are examples of Digital Fractology.

Every morning I visit a web site for news and commentary. The first time this site loads the content is visible for a brief moment, but is then replaced with a blank page. In order to see the content, the site must be refreshed by pushing the refresh button. Once this is done, it then displays the content properly. This is not earth shaking, but it is consistent and it is broken. Another example would be the interaction between pop-ups and pop-up blockers, and the litter of unfilled mini-windows that interaction leaves upon the screen.

I described this in a post on a local technology blog with these words:

My latest fascination is with broken technology, i.e. intuitive interfaces that aren't, absolutely stable environments that crash, broadband communication channels that bottleneck, etc. This does not even venture into the willful acts of malevolence from spyware, viruses and the like. Every act of advancement seems to be matched by a retreat on a different front.

As always, the focus here is on learning technology, so let me close with a note specific to learning. Most of the things that could be described as Digital Fractology are annoying, and perhaps even more so because we have chosen to accept them rather than change them. However, when learners are trying to build new mental models, understand new ideas or work with any of the cognitive processes inherent in learning, any instance of broken technology adds to the cognitive distance between learner and content. As teachers and trainers we should simply not stand for this.

R

Beginner’s Mind, Geek’s Mind

I have been away from this effort for some time. As noted in my last post, I have been working on some tutorials to get students through the basics of learning Dreamweaver. The development of those materials has proved interesting, and now that they have been developed, and delivered, I have been considering the activity involved and results achieved.

Perhaps the most striking thing I note about myself is the change from "not knowing" to "knowing." About a month ago I knew how to create a website, but not how to create a website in Dreamweaver. I found the program frustrating and counterintuitive. After working through the issue, and constructing (in my own definition of that word) the knowledge needed to build a website in Dreamweaver I slid into knowing how to do it. I chose the word "slid" carefully, because it seems to define how my brain moved as I changed states from un-knowledge to knowledge. One moment I couldn't do it, then I had a good idea of how to do it but had not yet practiced it, then a moment later it was just another thing I could do. I suspect learning is a little bit like pain in this way; we cannot remember it very well once it is past. The act of learning passes and what we are left with is the knowledge of the subject, while the knowledge of the process of learning slips away like a bump or scrape that has healed.

Since the learning is still fresh in my mind, I can still follow its construction. When I speak here of Beginner's mind it is not quite the same as the Zen idea of openness to possibilities, but rather, an understanding a beginner needs some basic guidance in the basics. Before one can expand a mental model, there must first be a mental model. Building that should be a first, and discrete, step. What was the most frustrating to me about all the tutorials I found was the noise. That is what I mean by Geek's mind, or what I perceived as the need to pile extraneous detail onto the basic mental model until in some cases I could no longer discern the basic mental model, just the noise. I am not sure why geeks do this, but if you have spent any time at all around them I'm sure you recognize the behavior. Perhaps it is just to show off, but in this case a lesson (or multiple lessons) on cascading style sheets degenerated into huge exercises of "do this, then do this, then do this…" until the initial reason for doing anything is long lost.

The problem is that it interferes with learning. This is why I created my minimalist instruction in Dreamweaver. Yes, a lesson on cascading style sheets can cover multiple instances of amazing formatting instructions to achieve almost anything, but THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO START! First create a mental model of a very basic CSS, and then build on it. Yes, templates can be used to create incredibly complex pages, but first, WHAT IS A TEMPLATE AND HOW DOES IT WORK IN DREAMWEAVER? How does the same menu get placed on all the pages and updated automatically? This seemingly simple idea was not part of any of the website tutorials I could find.

Because I could not find any, I took it onto myself to build some simple and easy to use tutorials that could be used to create simple mental models. What would have happened if my students did not have these models? How many would have duplicated my frustration, with the more devoted also finding a way to construct the needed knowledge from multiple different sources? This is not organized learning, it is chaos. What concerns me is the amount of chaos we accept. How many times in learning a basic program feature do we feel that "everyone else seems to know how to do this, why can't I?"

The most critical question for me is how to keep that feeling out of the e-learning that I create.

R