Archives for category: Social Media

Tools do not a master – or failure – make

July 26, 09 //

I’m working on a new post to address the question “Is modern technology ‘dumbing down’ America’s youth?“, as posed in the most recent edition (22 July 09) of the local news weekly - West News Magazine. (The html version of the article isn’t available as of my writing this, but you can read it here.)

This question seems to come around every year about this time as everyone is preparing for the annual back-to-school ritual and teachers, parents, and others lament the sad state of our children at the hands of modern technology. Going all the way back to when I heard this discussion about allowing calculators in math class, I’ve never quite understood how a tool, especially one as broad as “modern technology”, could be given the blame or credit for anything that an individual or group achieves (or fails to achieve).

Along that train of thought, here is a reprint of something I wrote back in August 2006 that looks at another much maligned tool – Microsoft PowerPoint – while I work up a “long answer” to the question.

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Tools do not a master make

No tool of modern technology is as universally used, and almost as universally reviled, in the world of business and government as is Microsoft PowerPoint. Perhaps most famous of the PowerPoint bashers is Edward Tufte, writer of several books and essays on information design. (I was fortunate enough to attend one of his courses in the late ’90s, his poster of Napoleon’s March to Moscow still hangs on the wall in my office.)

Tufte has described his issues with PowerPoint in magazine articles (such as PowerPoint is Evil in Wired magazine), in a self-published essay entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, and in a chapter in his latest book Beautiful Evidence. In the past week or so a few others have also lambasted PowerPoint, including Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge in a couple of posts (Festival of Bureaucratic Hyper-Rationalism and Tufte and PowerPoint) and Scott Adams (via Dilbert).

Don Norman, of the Nielsen Norman Group, has a different take on PowerPoint. In his essay In Defense of PowerPoint, Norman places the blame not on PowerPoint but on those who use it improperly. “Don’t blame the problem on the tool.” Or, put another way – PowerPoint doesn’t bore people, people bore people. Cliff Atkinson is another who believes that PowerPoint can be used effectively. For some great ideas check out the Beyond Bullets blog or Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points.

Of course, this problem is not limited to the world of business. One of the big promises of ever faster and more powerful consumer technology (if we are to believe marketing campaigns) is that everyone will be able to perform like an expert. Take, for example, the following pitch for Apple’s GarageBand software (emphasis is mine):

The new video track in GarageBand makes it easy to add an original music score to your movies. And don’t worry about your musical talent — or lack thereof. Just use GarageBand’s included loops, or try a combination of loops, software instruments, or any previous audio recordings you created.
— Apple – iLife – Garageband

Don’t get me wrong, I love GarageBand (and the whole iLife suite for that matter, I use it almost every day). It is very easy to create a ’song’ using loops, like my First Song. Once I got comfortable with the GarageBand interface, it only took me a couple of hours to browse through the loops, pull some together so it sounded good, and export it to iTunes. The ’song’ is listenable, but doesn’t reflect any real musical skill on my part. I didn’t apply any knowledge of time signatures, keys, tempo, or anything. I just dragged-and-dropped.

I guess my point is don’t get pulled into a false belief that a tool, any tool, can make you an expert at something or give you expert results. Remember, good tools are nice to have, but in the hands of a master even the simplest of tools can create wonders.

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As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, my “short answer” to the question is an emphatic “No, modern technology is not ‘dumbing down’ America’s youth.” More to come.

Toy today, tool tomorrow

May 28, 09 //

This is a repost of The toys of today, the tools of tomorrow, which I originally posted in April 2008.

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The toys of today, the tools of tomorrow

At the end of a brief history of human communication, Dave Gray of XPLANE gets to what he sees as the future of communications: visual communications.

Today, we are free once more. Paradoxically, now that everything has been reduced to zeros and ones, our only limit is our imagination. What’s interesting is that we continue to constrain ourselves to the grid, even when it is no longer necessary. The conventions of printing, which once liberated ideas by making them mass-producible, have now become a prison.

So what’s next? Watch the kids. In the 1970s we started playing video games, and although we didn’t know it at the time, we were learning how to interact with digital technologies. We were learning the hand-eye coordination skills we would need to operate the computers of the 1980s.

The toys of today are the tools of tomorrow: blogging, podcasting, photosharing, videoblogging – these are all early indicators. People are making their own movies and publishing their ideas to the world. With every passing year the technology gets cheaper and easier to use.

As Dave alludes to, we all learn how to use tools when we are young, by playing with them as toys. How many of you had toy trucks and played at construction. How about “play” carpenters? (I’m a guy, so please excuse the boy bias.) Using the “toys” of today is much the same, with one key difference being that the “toys” that kids play with are often the very same “tools” that adults use. (No plastic saw blades here!) This obviously presents some dangers, and how kids play with their digital “toys” needs to be watched, but it makes the process of gaining literacy go that much faster.

So next time someone asks you why you’re “playing around with those toys”, or why you let your kids spend so much time on the computer or playing (or designing!) video games, just tell them you’re not “playing”, you’re learning how to use the tools you’ll need to be successful tomorrow.

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This is as true, if not more so, today than just a year ago. To Dave’s list above I would add Social Media in general as a “toy” that today’s kids are “playing” with that will become a very powerful tool for them in their future, and that many are actually using as a tool today.

In my experience as a rookie FIRST Robotics mentor, I was amazed at the extensive use of all types of social media by other mentors and, especially, of the kids involved in FIRST. In fact, the kids are using these tools in a way that most of the mentors (myself included) would likely never dream of.

By playing with the toys available to them, these kids are teaching us adults how we could – should – be using the incredible tools that are right at our fingertips.

Just because that’s the way it is, doesn’t mean that’s the way it has to be

April 22, 09 //

In a tweet earlier today, @Think_Better makes the following suggestion:

Next time someone says, “That’s just the way it is,” try asking, “What would be an alternative?”

It is all too easy to get stuck in the rut of doing things the way they’ve always been done just because that is the way it has always been done. This one little question can make all the difference, if you just take the time to ask – and answer – it. Just think of the possibilities.

This brought to mind something I wrote back in Aug 08 (on my now shut down 29 Marbles blog) that I thought would be appropriate to repost here.

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That’s just the way it is (but don’t you believe them)

Frequent readers of this blog know that in my attempt to understand autism better, I have a tendency to see connections in things that aren’t always directly related to autism. A lot of times this will come in the form of a song, a TV show, or a main- or sub-theme in a movie (like the X-Men trilogy).

My post yesterday brought to mind Bruce Hornsby’s (excellent) song, The Way It Is (from the album of the same name).

They say, “Hey little boy you can’t go
Where the others go
‘Cause you don’t look like they do”
Said, “Hey old man
How can you stand to think that way
Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules”
He said, son

That’s just the way it is
Some things will never change
That’s just the way it is
Ah, but don’t you believe them

“Don’t you believe them.” Don’t listen when someone tells you that you can’t change things, that this is how it was meant to be. Nothing is “meant to be”, that is the wonder of being human, that we determine what is for ourselves.

Well they passed a law in ‘64
To give those who ain’t got a little more
But it only goes so far
Because the law don’t change in another’s mind
When all it sees AT the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar

That’s just the way it is
Some things will never change
That’s just the way it is
That’s just the way it is, it is, it is, it is

Note that in the chorus after the last verse, Hornsby never says “don’t you believe them”. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it is definitely true. You can make a law, you can tell people what they have to do, but you can’t tell them how to think about others. That takes education, persistence, and persuasion.

And that, I believe, is the challenge we all face in gaining more understanding and acceptance for autistics, indeed for all people who are different.

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When was the last time you asked yourself, or someone else, “Why is it this way? Is there another way that is better?” When is the next time you’ll ask?

More books, books, and more books

January 16, 09 //

Back in November ‘07 I signed up for Shelfari, the self-described “premier social network for people who love books.” Up till that point I had been keeping a book list in my handy-dandy notebook (I’m still a bit low-tech in some areas). This was about the time I was jumping into the world of social media beyond the blog, so it seemed a reasonable thing to transfer my book list onto Shelfari. I spent a bit of time getting used to the interface, and then started plugging in my books. I also used Shelfari to track my progress in the 50-book challenge for last year. But, I have to admit, I didn’t really care for the way the site worked so I didn’t use it much.

A couple of weeks ago, through a tweet from @randyholloway, I learned of GoodReads, another social network built around books. (Despite all the predictions to the contrary, books are obviously alive and well!) My first impression of GoodReads was that I liked it, so I decided to give it a try.

I can’t say exactly what it is that I like about GoodReads more than Shelfari. I do like the ability to update my status in a book, including adding comments along the way. I also like that you can use formatting and other html in the body of reviews and other text fields; the lack of this always frustrated me in Shelfari.

I also like the layout and display a bit better; I understand the shelf motif that Shelfari uses, I just don’t think it really translates that well to the web. (Cool to look at once, but not really usable over time imho.) Having RSS feeds for the different “shelves” is also nice, gives me a simple way to add my list of reading, to-read, and read to this blog (check the right column) or any other sight.

As for the social networking aspect of GoodReads, I haven’t really had a chance to take advantage of them yet. In this regard I think it may be about the same as Shelfari, with the ability to find others who are reading the same or similar books and to find other books that I may enjoy.

Of course, there was no way I was going to go back in and add 200+ books into yet another site. I’ll keep my Shelfari shelves intact as an archive of my pre-2009 reading, and my GoodReads shelves will serve as a record of my 2009 and beyond reading.

10 days of Twitter

December 18, 08 //

After 10 days on Twitter I have 31 followers, am following 19, and have posted 74 updates. As one of his 100 conversations, Tony Karrer is interested to know how I use twitter for personal learning. I’m not sure I’m to the point where I’m doing any real learning through twitter yet, but here are some preliminary thoughts on my brief experience with twitter so far.

Most of the people I am following are people I already know and had only occasional contact with. By using twitter, I am able to keep in “contact” with them even if I don’t respond to every update they make. Just knowing what is going on with them is often enough. I expect that this goes both ways, as I will get almost instant responses from these folks to some of my tweets (there, I said it) and nothing from others. It is especially nice to be able to link my twitter updates to my Facebook status; I hardly ever updated my Facebook status because I’m not in Facebook very often.

I was a bit less successful in using twitter as a way to engage in an ongoing conversation, specifically Autism Twitter Day. A bit ironic considering that event is what prompted me to join twitter in the first place. I’ve never been one for online chat sessions among a bunch of people I don’t know, and that is essentially what that event was, or what it seemed like to me. Not quite as synchronous as an actual chat, but then again not as asynchronous as an e-mail listserv (on which I typically lurk, with very little participation). Perhaps twitter is one of the social media tools that Dave Snowden sees replacing tools like listserves, but not for me. (Not yet anyway.)

I’ve also been playing around with exactly how to use twitter. I’ve used the web interface, and have twhirl running as a client, but I know there are many other options and possibilities. Not sure where that will end up.

Perhaps the best thing about twitter, in my mind anyway, is the 140 character limit. It forces me to keep things short, sweet and to the point. (You may have noticed on this blog that I tend to have recurring bouts of what my HS English teacher would likely call diarrhea of the keyboard.)

In his post What is Twitter, Shawn over at Anecdote has a very good description of how I’ve been using twitter in these first few days (not that he wrote the description specifically about my use of twitter):

It’s a mistake to think Twitter is only for reporting the minute detail of one’s life, which by the way is an important activity because it helps up create stronger social bonds. Twitter is also effective for asking questions and getting answers, sharing useful links on the web and getting those frustrations out when things are driving you nuts.

For now I think I’ll just keep on using twitter in this way, and see where it takes me.

Brett's Waste Blog by G. Brett Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at blog.gbrettmiller.com.

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