If you’ve got five thinking hats, I’ve got five hat racks for you!

Posted: February 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This isn’t actually a post about Edward de Bono’s Five Thinking Hats, although that’s a fascinating book to describe adopting different modes for different cognitive activities. Once we get out of design week, I hope to come back to this. Part of designing any materials or object is to ensure that the information it represents or makes available is organised in a way that people can use. No textbook of any value is organised along Dadaist principles – semi-random and deliberately nonsensical organisation – they all use well-established idioms like chapters, headings and indexes (indices?) to organise the information and make it more accessible. One of the things I like about the reference I’m using (Universal Principles of Design, Lidwell et all, Revised, 2010) is that all of the design principles are organised alphabetically but, wherever you start, there is a see also section down the bottom that takes you to a conceptually linked entry. You can then, of course, use alphabetical search or the index to then locate it.

According to the Five Thinking Hats principle, there are a limited number of organisational strategies that you can use to organise information. These can be used for just about any application.

  1. Category: We can organise things by their similarity or relatedness. In teaching materials for Computer Science, we often group similar programming concepts together – loops with loops, conditionals with conditionals. Most texts are going to use categorisation to minimise the cognitive load of context switching from one area to another, and having to remember what you read before. Will your students try to search out things by category? Probably – that’s how their access to your college’s web site handles their enrolment details, most likely, by grouping all relevant courses into a common category. But why not tag all materials relevant to Assignment 2 under a search item ‘stuff for Assignment 2’? That’s an easy use of categorisation.
  2. Time: Lecture recordings are a natural fit for time-based organisation because they present a set of events that are dependent upon each other and evolve over time. Yes, you could put them into a folder sorted by lecture name but, unless your lectures are really not connected at all, no-one is going to thank you for that. Schedules and historical timelines are also fairly obvious candidates for temporal strategies.
  3. Location: Grouping things by their geographical or spatial reference helps people successfully orient themselves to work with your materials. While it may seem that this is of little use to people who aren’t teaching geography, what about making a clear distinction between things that students need for lectures and those that they need for tutorials or practicals? Wherever your students are – what do they need when they get there? Is it clearly identified wherever your materials are or do they need to search through everything to find out what they need?
  4. Alphabet:  You didn’t think I’d leave this one out did you? The alphabet is always a good fallback when people will be using your work as a reference and not reading it sequentially, or you want to be able to leap around the work efficiently. If you can’t think of any other way – go for the alphabet. Of course, this assumes that whoever reading your work is familiar with your alphabet. This must be a consideration if you’re working with people who have your language as their second, or third, language.
  5. Continuum: Some things can be grouped by their magnitude – students are all familiar with this if you’ve ever posted a list of grades from top to bottom, rather than by ID. Best to worst, highest to lowest, largest to smallest. This kind of organisation can be handy for electronic materials where you have a variety of recording types and some produce larger files. Providing a list to students can be organised by type or by size. If you know that students prefer the smaller, faster to download, ones, sort to put them up there first. If you’re comparing things across one key measure, think about how you could group along that measure to make the information easier to access.

Now, this may explain why I try to put these blog posts into some sort of context by talking about ‘opinion’ and ‘design’ as weekly themes. The posts are already ordered by time but I add a categorical overview because the actual categories and tags are used for people finding these posts, not necessarily for people who are already reading my blog. This loose organisation, that I usually make at least an oblique reference to at the start of each post, helps you to categorise the information in the post. How do you group your ideas and materials?

Access All Areas: Getting Your Knowledge Into Everyone’s Head

Posted: February 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

This is another design post, as that’s this week’s (loose) theme. Again, the reference is “Universal Principles of Design”, Lidwell et al, Revised edition, 2010.

If you’ve used a modern lift (you might call it an elevator) recently, you may have noticed that lifts now have larger buttons than they used to, have Braille on the buttons, provide audible feedback when you press buttons and, on a lot of occasions, as they move – and they’re bigger, with wider doors.

What’s happened? Legislation across many states and countries now require that any public environments be as widely accessible as possible – that disabled and able-bodied alike can use the lift, that people with prams can get in, that those who are larger don’t have a problem.

If you’ve looked at older lifts, in converted European hotels or pensiones, you’ll find tiny little boxes, with hard to read or unmarked buttons, zero feedback and an experience that is akin to travelling in a shoebox on a string. These were barely usable for the able-bodied and, despite the additional space consumed and the extra cost involved, it appears that the accessible elevator/lift is now with us for the foreseeable future.

When we consider accessibility, we think about how can we design our materials and teaching spaces so that the greatest number of people can use them – without any additional modification. This is the secret of the new lifts. A very large number of accessibility options are now standard in lifts so that they can be installed and used without further modification. Now this is certainly not a disabled/able-bodied divide because many of our teaching spaces are hard to work in at the best of times! As we’ll see, you might be surprised how often these issues can affect any or all of your students.

There are four fundamental principles of accessibility, which I’ll touch on here, and draw into teaching examples.

  1. Perceptibility: Everyone can perceive your content or design, regardless of their abilities. For teaching purposes, this means having redundant delivery methods such as ALT tags on HTML images, audio recordings for visually impaired students, full text version for text-to-speech synthesis and so on. This, to me, also includes the colour blindness checks that I’ve mentioned before. From a delivery point of view, can everyone in your lecture theatre see what you’re doing?
  2. Operability: Everyone can use what you’ve produced. In the knowledge area, perception and operation are closely aligned, but think about things like scratch-off cards. Do you have an alternative for someone without fine motor control – or a broken wrist? Do you require your class to rearrange themselves for group work? How will that work with a wheelchair or crutches? I once ran an exercise that required students to flip coins – which turned out to be really, really dumb on my part. This was a set of repetitive actions, with a high probability of dropping the coin. This was almost inoperable for people with no issues because of the confined space in the lecture theatre. (Another teaching application is the open book exam – have you given the students enough desk space to open books?)
  3. Simplicity: Make it easy to understand and use what you’ve done, whether students have seen either your work or an example of this type of work before. If you’re using a commonly used format – think carefully before you make subtle changes to it or people will get confused with the new complexity. Be clear, consistent and remove as much unnecessary complexity as possible. Don’t throw everything on to the screen at once but consider the use of staged delivery to provide simple blocks that go together to form a more complex whole.
  4. Forgiveness: Reduce the impact if students do something wrong while working with your material and, from a design perspective, put things together so that it’s hard to go wrong in the first place. Designing your materials so that there is only one obvious way to use them (using good affordances) will mean that students will find it harder to go wrong in the first place. Being able to recover easily reduces the impact of accidental error – which can negatively reinforce behaviour and encourage students to disengage. Scratch-off cards have simple use and easily recovered error conditions, depending upon whether they give instant feedback or not. These can be high affordance/high forgiveness materials and, because of that, very, very useful.

I’ve given you a number of examples but I want to give you an example of bad accessibility, from a recent hotel stay. I went to grab the shampoo and conditioner mini-bottles to put into the shower and I realised that the text on the front was identical for both bottles. I wasn’t sure which was which. I turned the bottles around and, in type so small that I had to squint, I could just make out the text. Turning the bottles around, I had noticed that there was Braille on the bottles – which seemed a bit odd, given that they’d done such bad design on the back. I realised that the Braille was the same on both bottles and all it said was the brand name.

This is, possibly, one of the most irritating things they could have done. Assume that you’re blind. You’ve made your way to the bathroom, finally found the sink, located the bottles, picked them up and (hooray!) they have Braille. Annnnnd,  it’s completely useless. You ask your sighted companion to help you but he or she are long-sighted. Together, angrily, you mix all the bottles up and make Shamditioner. More seriously, this fails Perceptibility (you can’t see which one is which), Operability (the bottles were hard to open as it happened) and Forgiveness (as it was easy to use the wrong product). I’ll give it a pass on Simplicity, only because you don’t really need instructions for Shampoo – putting it in a bottle is sufficiently simple. I may be being generous.

I’m working on a checklist for myself, because I try and consider all this but doing it from a list this long isn’t actually following the rules themselves! When I get the checklist finished, I’ll post it up on the blog.

 

Don’t Pull on a Door Marked Push! (Affordance is not the same as affordable!)

Posted: February 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

If you came up to a door that had a handle on it, what would you do, if there were no sign on it?

You’d pull on the handle. Of course you would! It’s only when there’s confusion about doors, we have to label them push or pull. (Okay, some of you are thinking ‘aha, I’d look at the hinges’ and, indeed, some of you would – but most of us would just pull on that handle.)

This is affordance, where “the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function” (Universal Principles of Design; Lidwell, Holden and Butler; Revised edition, 2010)

See a door handle? Pull on it. See a door plate – you’ll push it. Ever wonder why Lego blocks don’t come with instructions? Because they only afford a certain set of composition actions – the design of the shape tells you how to use it.

By taking advantage of this property, we can reduce the amount of instruction that we have to give. If the purpose of the object is assisted by its construction and design, in terms of the user, then we will immediately achieve better and more effective use when someone does come to use it. We can even borrow the affordance of an object and use it somewhere else, building on our natural disposition to use it in a certain way. Ever wondered why graphical user interfaces (GUIs – the way that you interact with modern computers and devices) have button images on them? People know how to use real buttons – they stab it with a finger – and this, transplanted to the GUI domain, allows the user to reuse this familiar knowledge and turns what should be something complex (I’d like you to engage any of the pixels in the range (200,100)-(250,15) with your finger and apply light pressure) into ‘stab!’ without having to write one word of explanation.

From a teaching perspective, when we do develop materials to support our teaching, we implicitly use affordance all the time. Those ‘fill in the blanks’ spots we leave? There’s only one place to write and that place has a context inside the knowledge of the current sentence. Have you ever wondered why government forms have ‘do not write in this space’ or ‘for official use only’ in spaces? It’s because when we see spaces – we want to write in them. That’s what spaces are for? If you leave space around your printed lecture notes, you are saying “Please write on me!”

For me, this is why those ‘scratch-off the silver bit’ cards are so easy to use. You want to scratch it off – you’re (pardon the pun) itching to do so. If your rubric simply explains that you have to read the question and scratch off only one, that’s it. No complicated ‘COMPLETELY FILL THE CIRCLE WITH 2B PENCIL’ instructions or ‘tear off this strip after you’ve written down an answer’ – and no handwriting problems.

When we do try to take advantage of affordance, we have to make sure that the students we’re teaching are going to understand what we mean. If we’re using borrowed affordance, like the GUI buttons, we have to make sure that they have the original knowledge. The best way to test that you have the basics right is to give it to a colleague, without instructions, and watch what they do. Your own interpretation of your materials is biassed by your cognition. You know what you’re supposed to do – rather than listening to the material to see what it wants you to do. When your colleague picks up your quiz, looks at it, and starts joining dots on your scatter plot – it may be a sign of lack of coffee or no sleep, or it may be a sign that this is what your work is screaming at people to do.

I’d love to hear from people if they have examples of work that they think really exemplifies this.

This is Five Minutes Work.

Posted: February 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

This post has a definite time limit imposed upon it. Having set up categories and tags, I gave myself five minutes to write down today’s post, including thinking about what I was going to say.

Obviously, today’s point is that having a limited time for an activity is going to shape the nature of the activity. But it’s not the only point. I’ve had to make a decision as to how much editing I will allow and basically, once a line is complete, I have to leave it alone. This makes this (usually at least semi-edited) blog into something that is much closer to an in-class exercise.

Now, I’m lucky in many ways because this task is not overly challenging. I have freedom of topic (so I probably have enough in my head to work out what I want to say), I have good tools to use (I can type quickly and get something legible) and I’m not actually being watched. If you’re reading this I thought the final result was interesting enough to post.

2.5 minutes.

In a classroom, if I give students an assignment to complete, I have to be aware of the fact that writing legibly takes longer than scrawling, that typing may not ever make it to me because the artefact is locked onto someone else’s machine and that the sheer thinking time involved for a student to be able to engage with my desired context could eat the entire five minutes.

So the next time that I think about setting a five minute in-class exercise, I’m going to have to consider the following:

  1. Have I provided enough context or guidance that the students can start almost immediately?
  2. Is there an easy first thing to write down?
  3. Am I only expecting less than 100 words (4:20 and this is about 295)
  4. Am I setting a task that is really too hard? Should it be a 30 minute exercise out of class.

Well, my time’s running out so I have to come to a close. I found this really interesting to do, and I hope that you found something useful from it as well. 4:59.

Two Slides Enter an Alleyway – Only One Returns!

Posted: January 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | 6 Comments

One of the commenters asked for examples of what I thought were examples of (relatively) poor material design and (relatively) better design. I’m not trying to weasel out here by using (relatively). These things are relative. Both slides I’m going to show you have good and bad points. From my experience, one is less well-received than the other and I can list some reasons for it.

Both slides are from first year courses, one taught in 2006 and one taught in 2011. The first is Powerpoint, the second is Keynote. (All copyright and page number data has been removed.)

Here’s number 1, which is a ‘not so great’ example.

An example of a cramped slide which is confusing.

And here’s number 2, which is probably better:

An example of a better slide.

So, what are the major differences? To me:

  1. Slide 1 is cramped and hard to read. Following the long yellow lines, despite the fiendishly good contrast, is difficult.
  2. Slide 2 is simple and pretty easy to read. To be honest, it’s also covering much less ground but its intention is clear. The little node structure, which graphically links this slide to all previous work on linked lists.
  3. Slide 1 is not a relaxing slide to look at – imagine that dominating a darkened lecture theatre.
  4. Slide 2 has clear separation between English and not-English, very easy on the eye.

Slide 1 is a multi-stage proof, an extended working piece that takes multiple slides. Slide 2 is a revision slide and summarises the core of a previous concept in one slide, allowing the lecturer to add information, question the class and embellish. The class will have read Slide 2 in a short time and then be able to concentrate. People will be starting at Slide 1 for some time, trying to follow the lines and work things out.

So there are, as promised, some examples for you. Do you agree with my assessment? There are many other things to say about both. What do you think?

Ready to roll (or teach)

Posted: January 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yesterday I mentioned CS Unplugged. Today I’m helping out, somewhat last minute, at a CS Unplugged event that I didn’t even know about yesterday! Perhaps I should write a post about “Nick gets lots of free money given to him” and keep my fingers crossed?

This does actually segue into something semi-useful and blogworthy in that my general principle in my career is “always be ready to seize a new opportunity”. I stick my hand up for a lot of things but I never stick my hand up if I don’t think that I would do a good job. The price to pay here is that you must always know what you can do, what you have time to do and, harder, have a good enough vision of the future to have the right skills.

I don’t pretend to be an expert here but I have a short list of things that I do that help me to do this:

  1. I prepare myself for the idea that opportunities could come along and think about how and why I should accept them.
  2. I talk to lots of people. I attend events, talk shop, listen, contribute, write several blogs, read just about everything I get sent, send a lot of things on and, generally, try and stay as connected as possible. Why? Because then I know what is happening in my own discipline, in my own Uni and in my own country. Very few announcements are surprises to me because the (much more informed) people I’ve been speaking to have seen it in the wind and suggested it as a possibility. Other people think that I may be able to help them, which means that they may get in touch with me later.
  3. I write down my ideas and what it would take to make them happen. When I have a good idea, I generally discuss it or write it up as a possible funding opportunity – or just sketch out a plan for it. If you came to me tomorrow and said “Nick, I have 10K/30K/100K/1M for a project” I can have an outline to you in about 10 minutes. Wow, that seems a bit… creepy. Why are you planning for money you don’t have? Aha, it’s because…
  4. I have a long term focus. Research this year turns into papers next year turns into grant applications the year after that. Teaching plans for next year have to start now. I don’t naturally have a long term focus! I like to work day-to-day like normal people but I kept finding that I ran out of time because I never really knew what to do next. I referred before to the joys of the pipeline and admitted that I’m naturally not good at this. But that leads me to point 4.
  5. Not being good at something isn’t an excuse. It’s not an excuse for our students (there’s a lot of difference between ‘not enough practice’ and ‘zero aptitude’) so it’s not an excuse for us. This is especially true if it’s part of the job. It’s a hard job. It’s a great job. It’s being responsible for the provision of knowledge to the next generation of scientists, teachers, educators, people, parents, children – it’s the whole human race that we’re working with here. Not being good at something is an opportunity to get better.
  6. I work out when I should say no. I am a hopeless overcommitter but I have now reached a level where I can’t fit any more in so I say ‘No’ more often. I have no kids and my wife is another academic so she has the same time pressures – I have a great deal of time flexibility at home. But I still need to hang out, relax, eat and sleep or I will go mad.  But some things are time critical. While I was writing this a mail came in asking if I could have something (that didn’t have a solid deadline) ready in a week. I thought about it and decided to say ‘Yes’. If I work on this tonight, I can do it. It’s definitely worth it to do this and I want to do this project so I can spend a couple of hours in front of the computer instead of watching Doctor Who re-runs. It’s a delicate balancing act but some of the best opportunities have no initial load or money associated with them – they are overtime eaters until they pay off. If they pay off…
  7. Not everything pays off but take enough opportunities and one probably will. This is the big one so I’ll finish with it. The more things you try (which you have any chance at success with) the more likely you are to succeed. This is often demoralising, time consuming and, until something does pay off, it often makes you feel that you’re wasting your time. Look at this blog. It’s eating at least half an hour a day and for what? This has no pay off associated with it!

    Or does it?

    Well, it does. It forces me to focus for at least one part of a day that could be filled with admin and research on my teaching! On thinking about how I teach, how I learn, how I think my students learn and what I want to share with the world on this. Every post I write makes me a better writer. Gives me more ideas. Focuses me on teaching as I lead back in to first semester. No-one’s going to give me any cash for this, or load relief, and none of my jobs require this – but working here helps me think about how to manage other opportunities. Something here may one day head off into a seed grant idea. Some of your feedback may make me think about things in a different way.

    Working on this blog prepares me for other opportunities and makes me open to share and receive new knowledge. It’s like a workout for my opportunity muscle.

What do you think? What are the best ways to prepare for an opportunity?

 

Can you read what I see?

Posted: January 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m going to touch on an area that I don’t have a great deal of experience with but that I’ve thought about a lot: making teaching material available to students who are visually challenged. My terminology here is important because I don’t want to ‘deal with’ these students, mainly because I think that it sets my mind into the wrong framework. You ‘deal with’ parking tickets. You ‘deal with’ onerous problems. What I want to do is to make teaching material available to everyone but, if I’m using a visual focus, I have to consider alternative delivery mechanisms for people who don’t have that capability.

(I should note that, when I first wrote that paragraph, autocorrect decided that I wanted to make material available to students who were visually challengING. Proof reading is really your friend, sometimes.)

Let’s talk about one of the first issues you might encounter: people who are, to some degree, colour-blind. How many people do you think are colour-blind?

1 in a million?

1 in a thousand?

1 in a hundred?

8 in a 100 men are colourblind, compared to 1 in 200 women. Get 64 men in a class, you are 99% likely to have someone who is colour-blind. Most of these people will have red/green discrimination issues. The most extreme will see no colour at all.

So how do we deal with that? Well, a number of products have modes that allow you to simulate colour-blindness to see what your work will look like. Turn off the colour or print it in black and white – how easy is it to discriminate based on the contrast of the work stripped of colour. Given those numbers, you may have a friend or colleague who can look at your work and tell you how it works for them.

Does this mean that you can’t use colour? No! What it means is that you can’t depend upon colour alone for contrast and separation. Do you have a complicated pie chart with 27 segments, using colour to separate them. (Firstly, why? Too much fine detail can distract people from your core point.) What happens if you outline the segments in black and switch off the colour? Does it look like a bicycle wheel? In motion?

Colour as a highlight or attention grabber will work for the vast majority of the population. It is, however, always helpful to think about those 8 in a 100 who will not get your message if you have depended too much upon colour contrast or a particular shade mix. (As always, keep trying, find what works, learn, evolve, start over from step 1!)

The more severely visually impaired, where part of the field of vision is lost, will have different techniques for managing things. Some will need pre-printed blown-up notes. Some will use telescopes. In my experience, most people are very straight forward about their requirements.

The one challenge, I find, is where I have a diagram that I wish to explain to someone who has no sight or has never had any sight. There’s my L&T diagram on the first and second posts of this blog (Jan 1 and 2). The text for this should be:

“A diagram showing the relationship between learning, teaching and the flow of knowledge. Two circles are placed, horizontally, so that they overlap with a small intersection. The left-most circle contains a capital L character, the intersection contains an ampersand character and the right-most circle contains a capital R character. Lines with arrows on their ends are placed around the diagram to indicate information flow. Two arrows, starting from outside the left most circle, pierce the left-most circle’s left boundary, terminating inside, with their arrow heads pointing towards the intersection to indicate the knowledge flows into the Learner. A similar pair of arrows start inside the right most circle and cross the boundary, with the arrow heads outside and pointing away from the intersection to indicate that the flow of knowledge is from the Teacher to the teacher’s environment.”

Now, even then, I’m not all that happy with this description. I don’t know what it is to not have any visual information – does right most or left most make any sense? Should I be more abstract? Am I depending too much on visual cues, still?

However, thinking about it makes me think about what my diagram stands for, how I would explain it and, to be honest, any description is better than none if it’s honest and accurate.

As always, don’t make this an excuse NOT to try this out. Think of this as one more small piece of information that can make it easier when you do decide to give it a try.

If you happen to have personal experience on this, from addressing this or living this, please throw in a comment. I’d love to hear from you, even if you are going to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong – it’s the only way I’m going to learn.

Appealing to the Viewer

Posted: January 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

In this post, I’m going to touch on something that has become an integral part of my teaching: effective presentation. I’m going to focus on visual presentation but I do realise that not every student can see to the same degree as others. However, the majority of most of our audiences can see and benefit from time spent on visual design. That doesn’t diminish the requirement to cater to universal accessibility.

Over the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about graphic design. How can I produce images that convey knowledge so well that people can’t help but learn from it? A successful piece of design is a transforming medium for the message that it carries. It enhances. It clarifies. It elevates.

The design of this blog is deliberately easy on the eye. I’ve used straightforward typefaces, soothing colours and a slightly ambiguous main image. (Am I the water or am I the rock? For reference, I am the rock but I’m laminated. Long story.) The mobile device version uses an orange-based theme, with Helvetica, because it’s a different space, less cluttered because most mobile devices only show one surface (hence I can use brighter colours) but readability is crucial, so I used straight-forward, classic, typography.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have done that. But, between now and then, I’ve been exposed to a whole range of really good books that look at data visualisation, graphic design, typography and colour. I’ve started painting in oil colour, which has ramped up my appreciation of colour, contrast, warmth and texture. I’ve started developing postcard and t-shirt designs, messing around with typefaces, started really taking notice of how colour, shape and face are used to manipulate the way that we think. I’ve redesigned an entire course with a uniform design template, as I’ve mentioned before, and seen the benefits of it.

I’m sure that some of you are already mumbling about “content trumps presentation” and I would be the first person to agree that a content-free presentation is useless, no matter how beautiful. However, if I can make my content more appealing, more focused, more engaging and easier to understand through the use of good design – why shouldn’t I? In fact, let’s make a stronger statement – I should use as much skill as I can to make my presentation of my material as good as it can be.

Our students are surrounded by good design, all the time. That’s how people sell things to them. That’s what their magazines and web experience looks like. That’s why TV looks the way that it does. Did you like the typeface used on the Obama campaign? That typeface is called Gotham and is so ‘on message’ in terms of the campaign it’s bordering on hypnotic. That’s what our students see every day. Those “Keep Calm and Carry On” signs that are being riffed on all over the place? Hand-drawn lettering, beautiful in its simplicity, clear in its message. (Just to geek out for a moment, the closest approximations to that typeface we have are probably Avenir or Gotham. You can forget that information if you like.)

Good design. Convincing design. Strong colour cues. Heavy image association. Making knowledge transfer better.

I’m an educator. I try to leave branding to my marketing department. However, if I can make my knowledge transfer devices (slides, presentations, movies) look reasonable then, and this is important, my lessons will not be the dullest things that my students see all day.

Here’s a slide that I inserted into the first lecture of one of my courses. Yes, it breaks my negativity guidelines but the overall message is strong and it resonated with the students:

If you don't do the work, you won't have the knowledge and you won't pass the course.

What leaps out at you? What’s the simple message? How can you do it? There are many ways to address this problem, here’s another that  iamfatamorgana developed as a desktop background (I believe, feel free to correct me):

Do your work. Don't be stupid.

The second is fine for personal motivation – we can all be this harsh with ourselves – but this is not, in my opinion, the right approach for students. It’s interesting to look at the two of them side-by-side.

If you’re interested in reading about these things, then you can check our Information is Beautiful, Doug McCandless’s site (or you can buy the excellent book). I also have a book, at much higher level, on European commercial design for data representation called Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design, which is far more detailed and really good (there’s a good review of it, if you’re curious). If you’re wondering about how to make colours work better together, you can buy colour index or palette books from art stores. Different ways that we can communicate scientifically or mathematically? Try Bret Victor’s site. Go to FlowingData or buy Nathan’s book “Visualise This”, which will also give you a good grounding in R. Want to get into typography? Go to your bookstore and see what you can dig up. The AVA library series are all pretty good, or you can pick up reprints of books by Goudy, or read books that will help you to “Stop Stealing Sheep”. Art galleries almost always have a lot of good books on this. I picked up “The Artistic Licence” at SF MOMA and I’ve never looked back.

You’ll start looking at the world through different eyes. After a while, you might realise that Arial really doesn’t look as good as Helvetica. Comic Sans really isn’t that funny (nor is it that truly awful). Papyrus is about as Egyptian as pizza. IMPACT IS LIKE SHOUTING. S p a c i n g i s i m p o r t a n t. The medium matters. The message matters more, but the medium matters.

Fall in love with it, if have the time. Try other templates. Try other programs. Keynote and PowerPoint take very different approaches, as does Beamer under LaTeX (you old school presenter, you). Find like-minded people who aren’t too smug or arrogant and share some ideas. Try stuff. Ask students. Try again. Use coloured paper if you like. Draw freehand curves of great beauty and fill them with water colours. Find a graffiti artist to generate a tag for the front of your book of notes – no, you’re not cool (and I never have been) but it will probably raise a smile or two.

The greatest thing about this whole design journey that it will open your mind to how heavy the influence of good design is on the viewer. Once you understand that, you understand why good design is now essential to teaching material design – because anything else will look bad when our students look at it.

Smart and Beautiful

Posted: January 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

This week I’m planning to write a series of posts on design and graphic issues in teaching. The first thing I want to say on this is that it is possible for all of our teaching materials to be full of knowledge AND to look good: “Smart and Beautiful.”

Why think about visual design? Because, if you’re actually carrying out a design process, it’s not all that much more effort to add into the mix. If you’re not actually sketching out a design before you put a course or course materials together… urm… why? I realise that there are people out there who can put an entire course together in their heads, present it flawlessly and make it look beautiful and effortless. However, I’m pretty sure that a lot of you are like me – with work you can achieve a lot but to appear effortless and beautiful takes a lot of preparation and a looooooong run-up.

All of you who can throw it together with no planning – you’re excused, have a coffee or beverage of your choice. I’ll be talking about other stuff that will interest you tomorrow. For the rest of you, let’s quickly talk about basic design principles again: what am I trying to do, who is my audience, what do I have to work with? Your visual design comes in for the last two. Limitations of presentation should not have an impact upon your teaching (although, sadly it can if you’re resource starved). Knowing who you are writing for and what you have to write WITH tells you a lot about what your course will look like.

Let’s be clear. I’m not saying “Your PowerPoint must be beautiful”, I’m saying “Are you going to use PowerPoint? How are you going to communicate your information to a predominantly visual group of learners?” (Those of you dealing with the visually challenged have another challenging problem that I hope to discuss later this week. I’m not ignoring this issue, but I want to focus on the graphic issues first.)

May I give you a small piece of work to think about? What was the best presentation that you ever saw – do you remember it? The one where the information unrolled itself so well that a single image or slide conveyed a vast amount of information? We can’t all have stage presence and be good presenters, so I don’t want you to think about the best presenter you ever saw, I want you to think about the resources that were used.

Now, thinking about that, could you use anything from that in your own teaching?

I’ll see you tomorrow to talk about this some more.

The Pipeline (again) or “Am I really working on Sunday?”

Posted: January 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

This post will appear on the 15th of January, 04:00am, Adelaide, South Australia daylight saving timezone. Does this mean that I am up at that hour or working on a Sunday morning? Far from it! I’m writing this post on Friday afternoon, as my day winds down.

After I wrote my post on the pipeline, I realised that my commitment to a daily blogging schedule had created a 15-30 minute hole in each of my days and sometimes I don’t have that much time to spare. We’ve all had the days when, after thinking about it for 6 hours, you finally take a well-earned bathroom break. If those 5 minutes are hard to scavenge, where would I get the headspace to write something amusing and amazing on a day like that?

Re-enter the pipeline! I am now working at least a day in advance. This has two advantages, firstly, that I take the pressure off myself and, secondly, that I can adjust my posting times to maximise the chances of being picked up and read from the Education topics page. I’m not writing this for my own benefit (well, not exclusively) – I want this to be read. By having my posts ready a day in advance I can commit them for publication at a time when more potential readers are awake!

Australia is a beautiful place but it’s a long way from anywhere and a large portion of the English-speaking education community are asleep when I’m awake. If you flick on topics/Education at 9:00am every day in San Francisco – I should be in bed because it’s about 3:30am where I am. So I’m experimenting with a 4am posting time to try and catch a sweet spot for the US being awake and the UK not yet being asleep. I wouldn’t be able to do this with live update, or without a pipeline, unless I was wishing to sometimes skip a day’s post to move it into the next hot zone.

I have jumped around a bit in scheduled publication time. I’m reviewing results this weekend* to see which has been the ‘most successful’ viewing time and I’ll start using that as my default publication time. I don’t care how many people ‘follow’ or ‘like’ my posts – but I do care if nobody reads what I’m writing because that means I’m wasting my time.

You can probably tell that I’m not all that keen on wasting my time. Yes, this requires both forethought and discipline but I am finding it incredibly liberating to know that all I have to do between now and Monday is think of one cool thing and put that in the pipeline too. Hmm. I have 5 minutes left…

(*PSST: Measurement is the Key to Everything)

 

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