More on the iPad

First, some housekeeping.

I have toiled here without much comment, believing that my comments were either so far "out there" that no one could be bothered to comment on what I was saying either to agree or disagree with it, or that my comments were so trivial as to not bother noting. I have just found out that it may be a more pedestrian problem of the blog site not allowing comments to be posted. As soon as I find out the actual problem I will have more to say on this (probably something that notes the implications for people who were trying to learn something). In the interim, if you read something here and wish to comment prior to the repair of the site please email me at Kordel@verizon.net.

What brought this to my attention was a comment from a former colleague who wanted to know what it was that I was doing on the iPad that was so different from what I was doing on the PC. The answer is short, but I believe interesting.

Nothing much.

I have been thinking about development on a course that is targeted for dual delivery on PC's and on tablets (the iPad being the first such device). While the content is interesting it is not bleeding edge, earth shaking or something completely different. It will involve blending some video, some text, and some graphics, hopefully so that the content can be viewed, learned and shared.

So, with that relatively plain setting in mind, what have I noticed? What's the big deal?

There is not "big" deal, but rather, just a collection of small deals. If the content were to be placed on a PC, and only on a PC, there would be no concern about what happened when the screen was turned sideways. Instead we need to work on content to be viewed in a 4:3 format, and the same content converted to 3:4 content. In addition to the plain old formatting issues, the latest issue of Wired on the iPad makes some interesting use of the conversion, with ad copy that changes as the screen is turned (there may be more, I continue to explore).

The more I work without a mouse, the more I like it, but (for me at least) it places the iPad in a very specific niche. The lack of a keyboard means I will probably never use the thing to create much content, (I may answer a short email, but will not create something like this blog entry) but that is OK – I want to use it to consume content. The other thing I have noted is that I sit differently when I use the iPad. PC's (or since Apple Macs also qualify -we now need a word for keyboard/mouse equipped devices ;-) require you to sit up at a desk in order to use them. I notice that I sit back and read it more like a book. I will need to explore aspects of kinesthetic learning and see if anyone else has noted anything here. I also hold the iPad most often like a book, in the vertical format. When I wanted to read on my netbook, I got a screen rotate program. It is not comfortable, although I have used it that way. It allowed me to use the screen as if it were the right side page of a book. Close, but still different.

None of these things by themselves mean much, but as I use the device, other things that keep bubbling up. Taken together, they seem to move the thing into a new class of device.

I hope this answers the question. If you have any follow-ups hopefully I will have the problem with the blog site fixed in the next day or so.

R

iPad First Impressions: A New Medium?

A career or so in the past one of my teachers at film school said that he saw Hollywood movies change when editing equipment moved from the Moviola to the Steenbeck. The Moviola was built vertically, that is, the device had an upper reel and a lower reel, and the film moved between those two locations during viewing. The Steenbeck was a flatbed device, and the film moved from left to right across the table. For reasons that were not quite clear when this mechanical move was made, the pace of cuts, the construction of shots, and the overall feel of the movie changed.

After not touching an Apple device since 1992, I have spent the last week getting acquainted with the iPad. It has been an interesting few days. At first I thought of it as a netbook without keyboard or mouse, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is something new, something that makes me think of Moviolas and Steenbecks. I think that what is new is the conception of space that is implicit in the way the thing works.

First generation PC's showed a page. They were single tasking, text driven devices that allowed you to do some task, usually business related. The archetypical application was WordPerfect. It presented the user with a spare, blank screen that was ready for words. As I recall, as you typed it paged down, and after you had several pages you could page up to review what you had done. There were some applications that fudged this a bit. Spreadsheets existed in a potentially wide space, but even large spreadsheets seemed to assume a page by page format, as if the screen data conformed to how people needed to conceive of it. Space was two dimensional, with up and down the best options.

With the introduction of windowing systems and mice, and more specifically hypertext browsers, the screen added a new, third dimension of depth. Clicking took you into the screen. Underlined blue text implied another page waiting to be accessed (or deeper content waiting to hover over your page). Text boxes floated above the screen, links opened new browser windows that stacked on the existing screen, and unwelcome advertisements covered the screen. Tabbed browsing implied that there was something else, but more often than not, the link would open a new window, which would then add tabs.

As I have explored the iPad what I am starting to grasp is that inherent in the device is a conception of space that is less three dimensional, a la browser based windowing systems, and more two dimensional. It starts with the simple arrangement of icons on the screen, which are accessed by swiping left or right, but it is reinforced with applications like the Wall Street Journal (which appears to be generating a bit of buzz). It is not two dimensional in the old DOS/WordPerfect sense. Rather, it feels like a huge two dimensional space that can be scanned, read, reviewed up or down, right or left, as it passes under the window, in much the same way that a glass bottomed boat allows a window into the large space underneath the boat.

I am not sure what effect this will have on using the device for training - my original motivation was to look at the device for a potential training project. McLuhan said that each new medium starts with the content of an old medium, but then changes it to fit the needs of the new medium. Intel and Microsoft have announced pad projects. If this is indeed the start a new medium, the sooner we appreciate that, and begin to look at how it might be used for training, what will change, what will get better, and what will no longer work, the better off we will be.

R

 

 

When Life Changing Technology Fails

If I had to describe two bits of technology that have truly changed the way we live, the first would be the VCR/DVR and the second would be the GPS. One changed the way we look at time, the other the way we conceive of space.

Before the widespread adoption of time shifting tools the schedule of prime time television marked the passage of the week with much the same regularity as a medieval church bell sounding for evening vespers. The passage of the workweek/school week was marked by the progression from the Monday shows to the Thursday shows. (The passage of the years was marked by new shows becoming favorites, then reruns, then cancellations.) A curious side effect was the disorientation people felt as they visited across time zones and found their favorite show were on either an hour earlier or an hour later.

With the convenience of a DVR, time can be stopped, rewound or fast forwarded. If you would like to experience how pervasive this is, first get the technology, then get used to it, then check into a hotel that does not have it. The concentration that was no longer necessary now needs to be relearned. If anything at home seems interesting, and missed, just press the rewind button. 8 seconds back is one click. Two or more takes us backwards in increments of 8. One click forward skips 30 seconds. If anything is interesting enough to be watched live, the commercials are interminable.

Space was defined by driving through it, using local gas station or visitor center maps, or Rand McNally atlases (which showed multiple states and countries). Traveling any distance meant finding your starting and ending points, and then finding the best route between them, based on your particular criteria that day. Did you want to make time or take in the scenery? Arguments broke out based on different routes, and people gained status based on their knowledge of the best shortcuts. Before you started it was clear where you were, where you wanted to be, and how you would cover the distance between the two.

Then technology intervened.

My smart phone (an Android) has a GPS app that allows me to enter the starting point ("my destination" – wherever that might be, and I don't even need to know where I am to make it work), then enter my destination. A route will appear, small enough to only allow viewing the next few miles of a hundred mile journey. A voice will instruct me to turn in ¼ mile on the next leg of the journey. As this technology was tested, passed, and became part of my technology suite, a curious thing happened. I stopped conceiving of space as something I needed to know how to navigate through. Then an even more curious thing happened. The technology failed.

I had occasion to visit someone in an unknown location. No problem, I had the address and I had my GPS. A quarter mile away from the end point I lost the connection to the navigational satellite. That last ¼ mile took an hour to navigate as one initial wrong turn compounded itself. When leaving for the next leg of the journey, the GPS plotted a route that took us over 275 miles of streets, back roads, and small two-lane highways (and yes, there was a large road alternative, and no, I had not selected "avoid highways.")

We bought an atlas, then used it to take major roads. We turned on the GPS only after we had put sufficient distance between us and the last tiny-road turn-off. It was both amusing and sad. And it did illustrate just how fragile some of the technology we take for granted can be.

Going Up? : Of Interfaces and Elevators

I will be teaching a class on information visualization this summer at Harrisburg University. Last evening I attended a faculty get together at the school. Something I had noted each time I have been there combined with a project I have been thinking about all day and the result is this post. It has nothing to do with information visualization, Harrisburg University itself, teaching strategies, or anything of that nature (well at least not yet). It has to do with elevators.

I am sure that everyone has a clear and unambiguous idea of how to ride an elevator, but allow me to state that explicitly here. You walk into an office building. If necessary, you exchange pleasantries with the security folks. You are directed to the elevator bank, where you push a button on the wall to get an elevator. If necessary, you wait, and then when the doors open you get on. You select a floor, then get off as appropriate.

Except here there are no buttons on the wall. There are two banks of elevators on opposite walls. There is a podium like device in the middle of the floor, between both elevator banks, and it is used not only to summon an elevator, but to specify the floor that you want. The device then tells you which elevator you will be taking. When you get on the elevator there are no buttons to select a floor, you just go where you said you wanted to go.

So, the first thing that needs to be said is that this system works flawlessly, at least on every occasion that I have been there. I got on, elevated (or descended), and then got off. So why am I writing about it?

Because it feels odd. (is is appropriate to discuss an elevator interface as potentially "intuitive"?- is this something we can grasp?) If I were feeling philosophical I might describe it as an especially deterministic mode of travel. One cannot get on the elevator and decide, spontaneously, that some task on a different floor had been momentarily forgotten, with a quick button push all that was needed to correct the oversight. You WILL go where you said you wanted to go. Then there is the actual ride, which if taken in solitude gives one the opportunity to note the lack of any floor-select buttons, which I find somehow constricting. What if I needed to get off before I get where I'm going? Yes, I probably never would, but the lack of that ability discords.

An aside: I had a very chic phone in the kitchen. It was brushed stainless steel (actually brushed stainless plastic) in the shape of an old style wall phone. The touch tone buttons were shaped like an old rotary dial. It looked very stylish, but I couldn't use it to call people very easily. All my numbers had been stored internally in geometric patterns – the round shape made me stop and think explicitly about what number I was calling. It slowed me down and it was very annoying. Again, the thing worked perfectly, it was just odd.

So, what does this have to do with training?

I have been reviewing a large number of web based modules for a class I am working on. I have seen a large number of interfaces of late. Some are better, some are worse. The interesting ones are those that are consciously attempting to be better, but like the elevators at Harrisburg University, have not prepared me for their improvement, and which conflict with my user expectations. They lead me to ponder the differences between progress and status quo, expectation and innovation. And how to quantify intuition.

 

 

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