When giving presentations, the only rule that matters is the rule of attention

Recently I was discussing presentations with a friend who is a student. Although being asked to make a presentation is a fairly common part of the student experience, and he has a reasonable idea of what’s involved, nobody has ever taught him or his peers how to do it.

Because I spend more time thinking about presentations than is strictly healthy, I offered to write my friend an email, summarising my thoughts. But once I got started, it very quickly turned into a monster email, the kind that people tend to skim once and then write a quick one-line reply along the lines of “Thanks, that looks really interesting — I’ll come back to it when I have more time,” maybe because they’re intimidated by the sheer volume and content of it all. (Yeah, okay, this is really about me and how I procrastinate over reading emails that look like they will be hard work. You’re listening to WKLJ — the sound of guilty conscience.) Plus, numerous URLs turn email into hyperlink soup.

So instead of sending my friend an email, I wrote this blog post. It’s ostensibly about the mistakes students make when they give presentations, but really it’s about how the only rules you need to know about giving a good presentation are the ones about human attention.

Here are some common mistakes I see in student presentations:

* Not having practiced the presentation enough.
* Not knowing enough details of the story, including germane technical details/terminology/pronunciation.
* Not picking a topic that they actually find interesting
* Confusing slide preparation with presentation preparation.
* Putting too much information on each slide.
* Not thinking about what it will be like to be the audience for this presentation, rather than the presenter

Notice how ‘being nervous’ is not on that list. We understand that students will be nervous about giving a presentation — being nervous about doing something fairly new in front of other people is completely understandable, and aside from one or two freakish individuals who take to presenting as though they’ve been doing it all their lives, everyone’s in the same boat. So relax :)

None of those mistakes are really about what happens during the presentation: they are all about how students prepare for the presentation beforehand. My impression from several years of watching students give presentations is that they are quite relaxed about the preparation, then get scared when it comes to the presentation itself. But by the time you are ready to give your presentation, it’s too late to be nervous — because by then, you’ve either put in the work, or you haven’t. Preparation is worth being nervous about; standing up and talking isn’t.

Ignore all the ‘rules’ about how to structure your slides. For every rule, there will be at least one instance in which it is not valid. Knowing which rules to follow and which to break is mostly a matter of practice and experience — which you may not have. So ignore, or at least treat with extreme suspicion, anything that sounds like a rule. Common rules include:

* Use X lines of text/bullet-points per slide
* Plan one slide for every N seconds of your talk
* The 10/20/30 rule

These all sound perfectly sensible, but the trouble with rules is that people cling to them for reassurance, and what was originally intended as a guideline quickly becomes a noose. My opposition to putting reams of text on slides is well documented, but I bet there are presentations out there where that’s exactly what’s required — at least, on one or two slides. Likewise, having more than ten slides might be exactly what you need; hell, you might need a hundred. Rules stipulating the number of slides you should have, or how fast you should transition between them, conveniently ignore that these aspects of your presentation depend on (a) what you are talking about, (b) what’s on your slide, and (c) how long that takes your audience to apprehend. Rules about slides are rubbish, because they stop you from thinking critically about what — if anything — you need to show in support of the point you want to make.

Ready-to-fill slide layouts are just another kind of rule. When you open Powerpoint and Keynote, they instantly start making suggestions about the layout of your slides. Bullet-lists feature prominently. When was the last time you enjoyed a presentation that had page after page of bullet points? Once you’ve figured out the story you’re telling, think about how each point could best be conveyed visually, and about whether you even need slides or visual aids at all.

Concentrate on the rules of attention. The thing you most want during a presentation is people’s attention, so everything you do and say has to be about capturing that, and then keeping it. The rules of attention are more or less universal, easier to demonstrate empirically than rules about specific slide formats, and can be neatly summarised as follows: people get bored easily.

Some specific rules of attention are:

People can really only retain about four bits of new, unrelated information — and sometimes not even that many. Don’t overstuff your presentation, and take care to signpost the key points — visually, verbally, however you want.

It’s hard to process spoken and written words at the same time. Integrating your spoken words with pictorial slides makes it easier for the brain to process these two streams of information efficiently. This also helps your audience remember more of what you said.

A story will keep people’s attention, because they will want to know what happens next. At Playful ‘09 last week, Tassos Stevens talked about the compelling nature of indeterminacy, and asked the question Once a ball has been thrown, is it possible to look away before you know whether someone catches it? If you don’t know what your story is, or don’t convey that story clearly to your audience, they won’t stay focused; as Hitchcock knew very well, it’s all about suspense.

People really like looking at screens. If you’ve ever been in a pub with the TV on and the sound off, you’ll know that screens are an attention-magnet. This is great when you’re giving your presentation and there’s something on the slide that you want people to look at, but not so great if they are still looking at the slide while you are talking about something else. There’s an easy fix — press B or W while in Slideshow mode: the screen will go black or white, respectively (this works in both Keynote and Powerpoint), and people’s attention will focus on you, because now you are the moving, shiny thing in the room. Toggle the same key when you’re ready to direct the audience’s attention to the screen again.

Sustaining audience attention requires frequent changes. Simon Bostock once tweeted something great about how flow is when you stop noticing the joins between one parcel of attention and the next; this is the state you want to induce in your audience. Paradoxically, in order to get them to concentrate on something for a long time, you need to keep changing the thing they’re paying attention to, or they will get bored. Change stuff mindfully: I don’t mean adding clip-art or unrelated animations to your slides, I mean introduce something seriously astonishing. (Unexpectedness is a brilliant tool for wrangling people’s attention.) Less dramatically, you could use changes in your tone of voice, speaking volume, or where you are standing to draw the audience’s attention to a particular point. Evaluate your slides and consider whether they could be less formulaic; consider introducing some audience participation to get everyone out of the you-talk-while-they-listen rut.

Your audience will tell you when their attention is wandering. Hopefully not out loud, and hopefully not by harshtagging your presentation. But you will know from looking at their faces where their attention is, and if it isn’t on you or your visual aids, you will know that you need to change something. Don’t be afraid to go a bit off-road in the service of keeping people interested; it’s a kindness and a courtesy to stay with your audience, and a presenter on auto-pilot is not a pretty sight.

There are so many more things I could write about attention and presentations, but this is already overlong. So yeah, last rule: short is good. Like I said, rules are for breaking.

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Edit: There are some great additional points in the comments below.

[Marginalia: (1) Aesthetic is not a rule. Having a consistent look-and-feel (good colour palettes, consistent use of fonts and text size) can really elevate a presentation. (2) Constraints are not the same as rules. Obviously, most presentations will have a time-limit, and you need to respect that. And if you are doing Ignite or Pecha Kucha, there are some very specific constraints about slide timing (and, necessarily, about what goes on the slide, since viewing time is so short). But constraints are great news for creativity.]

Everything is upside-down: turning lectures into homework with problem-based learning

The other day, I stumbled (via Tony Baldasaro) on this gem:

How much more could happen in our classrooms if we created more opportunities for students to learn basic skills and content outside of class? … Class, rather than being a time when all kids sat and received instruction, could be the time when they reinforce skills by doing problem sets, worked on real-world application projects, collaborated with teachers to reinforce concepts, etc…

The post is called Inversions; go read it, it’s only short.

This is such a wonderful, simple idea. And of course, many good instructors and educators are already doing just that — as Chris Lehmann points out, this is essentially what happens in English class when kids read a book as homework, then discuss it during class time. Students use out-of-class time to acquire content, freeing up class time for process. Because processing, doing, is how we learn, and students can get instant feedback from the instructor. Dialogue happens; moreover, students have the opportunity to learn vicariously from other students’ participation.

But this isn’t happening enough in universities, for reasons I have written about before. Big classes and a student body working to pay university fees — or to be able to afford food — mean that often, lectures become an info-dump, because you can’t guarantee that the majority of students have done the reading — and in my view, good teaching takes up from where the student is, not where they should be.

And I do get tired of the sound of my own voice in a two-hour lecture. Oh, I can teach for two hours; this post isn’t coming from a place of laziness. On some level I am probably even a bit of a show-off, or I probably wouldn’t enjoy teaching as much as I do. But, you know, no matter how enthusiastic I am, just talking for two hours is going to lose even the keenest student for periods of time, as their attention ebbs and flows. Estimates of attention span vary wildly, and a big chunk of that is about whether you are in flow.

Passive listening probably does not encourage flow in our students.

Attention span also varies as a function of ability, which is one reason why it’s so important to teach in a way that reaches everyone. And it’s unreasonable, I think, to expect anyone’s attention to last for a two-hour lecture, which is why so many of my colleagues are currently trying to think of ways to break up the time a bit. (The university schedules two-hour lectures in the way that many people schedule one-hour meetings: it seems to be a convenient and universally-understood unit of time, but may not be exactly what is needed.)

So how about we approach this problem from the other direction: make the classroom about practice, and perhaps we can nurture people’s curiosity in the topic and encourage them to pursue the more detailed background content afterwards?

Obviously this strategy is not without risk. Techniques like problem-based learning (PBL) have been found to improve students’ engagement and critical thinking skills, and students who have used PBL seem to hold their own against students educated more traditionally. But I have heard many concerns expressed that PBL can lead to patchy subject knowledge, though I am having trouble digging up much in the way of evidence for that (if you can help me out here, please leave a comment!). Wikipedia has a nice section on the cognitive load issues around problem-based learning; the key thing seems to be to start gently and gradually withdraw support, with the instructor increasingly becoming more of a facilitator.

I wouldn’t necessarily have tried this with first-year students, who perhaps haven’t acquired enough basic subject knowledge. But final-year students have been up to their elbows in the subject for long enough that I figured I could probably meet them halfway.

So, I rewrote my lecture.

In fact, my slides didn’t actually need a great deal of reworking, though I took some more of the text off them. I made lots of duplicate slides: the first with an image, and a question or two; the second, with simple labels. It was a pretty basic format: here’s some stuff — now figure out what you’re looking at.

And then, when they’d had a few minutes, in small groups, to try and work out what was going on, I’d ask for suggestions, and we’d talk a bit about those, and then I’d show them the second slide:

… and we’d talk about that for a short while. I started off with some basics, and then we got into more and more complex stuff. Occasionally I would remind them, “start with what you already know.” Students had a worksheet that duplicated the images and questions, so they didn’t waste time and attention copying things down, and could concentrate on the what and why.

We did this for two hours (with a break), in a warm lecture theatre, in the afternoon, and nobody fell asleep. Students asked questions, made guesses. It was genuinely interactive.

In many ways, I was lucky. This lecture was all about the visuals: pictures of brains with stuff wrong with them. Had I been discussing highly abstract and theoretical concepts, it may not have worked well. Further, the lecture theatre was pretty much exactly right for the size of class: small, with about 60 seats and an aisle up the middle. I could, and did, reach all the groups; had we been in the 450-seat lecture theatre with people sprinkled everywhere, much of that class dynamic and atmosphere would have been lost.

Of course, not everything went brilliantly. There was a little too much content, and what I should have done was set the remainder as homework, rather than trying to cram it all in. I lost one group at the break, though this isn’t uncommon and you never really know why they’ve left; often it may be nothing to do with you and everything to do with their personal circumstances, and I never like to ask, in case it really is the latter and they are mortified that you’ve brought it up, or noticed their absence.

I won’t really be able to gauge the success of the session until the exam results, and student module evaluations, are in. But overall, it felt right. It felt like a good way to teach, and I really, really hope it inspired students to tackle the background reading. The explicit feedback I have had from students so far has been pretty positive, and a colleague who sat in on the session to observe seemed to really enjoy it, and said some very nice things. All of which gives me a little more faith in my own experience and enjoyment of the session.

Next stop: trying this again, with a bigger class. Anyone want to play along?

Show me the evidence! Why education needs more science interpreters.

In his otherwise laudable Really Bad Powerpoint, Seth Godin writes:

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data. When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain.

This assessment of the hemispheres’ respective functions is about right, albeit oversimplified. But my problem with the above quote is that the relative locations of the factual and emotional centres of the brain have no real bearing on the argument, and come across as window-dressing to make the whole argument seem more scientific. (I am not suggesting that Seth did this deliberately, merely pointing out how it reads.) Seth asserts that people want to be entertained (that is, be stimulated emotionally) as well as being given the facts, and I doubt any psychologist, educator or presenter would disagree. But what he needed to say was:

1. People respond to emotional as well as factual arguments.

2. The emotional and factual centres of the brain are in opposite hemispheres.

3. There is evidence that arguments which increase activity in both hemispheres are more persuasive.

(I don’t know if there is any evidence for (3), but I think you would need some to make this point convincingly.)

This might sound picky, but it’s important: people see the shiny science bit and their critical faculties just switch off. We don’t ask how, or why, and we don’t demand evidence, because we are persuaded and reassured by the presence of an ‘expert’. (This is perhaps best typified by Milgram’s infamous obedience study of the 1960s. The 50s, 60s and 70s — a period I like to think of as B.E., Before Ethics — were a golden era in terms of understanding human behaviour but then people realised that it was perhaps a bit mean to do this or this to people without some serious questions being asked. How the wheel turned again and we got from the post-60s ethics backlash to Big Brother, I’m not really sure; I guess wheels just do that.)

Anyway, this abdication of our critical faculties in the face of ’science’ is regularly exploited by advertising — look at the proliferation of ‘experts’ in commercials for things that clean, or that claim to protect you and your family from harm. But as the man in the white coat has deservedly become an advertising cliché, so people with something to sell have begun to look for a newer, shinier, more cutting-edge science with which to hawk their wares.

Enter neuroscience.

Neuroscience-as-sales-tool is huge. At face value, it doesn’t represent much of an advance over old-school advertising: “Look: science!” But in fact, its value is extraordinary: “Here’s a picture of the brain of someone using our product!” Think about that for a moment and realise the awesome power of being able to say This is what’s happening inside someone’s head while they experience our product. That’s pretty amazing.

Advertisers have quickly realised the potential of neuromarketing. Some movie distributor or other wanted us to use it while I was doing my PhD, but we couldn’t turn the images around quickly enough for their deadline (fMRI takes time — or used to, anyway). Coca-Cola did it, though I’m not sure they controlled for the fact that caffeine is a vasodilator. Anyway, get used to those images of brains, because they’re here to stay — at least until we find the Next Shiny Thing.

Here’s my sad realisation of the week: education, which has been a bit slow to adopt technology but is finally waking up to neuroscience — education is taking advantage of our human weakness for experts and shiny-looking science.

The other morning, I worked myself up into a fine old froth over a website* written by someone with impeccable educational credentials, that seems to exist for the sole purpose of encouraging people to consider neuroscience (and related fields) when constructing the educational experience. I mean, this site is clearly out to make the world — and education in particular — a better place. A place informed by science.

Criticising this site would be like kicking a well-meaning little old lady, right?

Well, I’m gonna.

(Disclaimer: I would never kick old ladies, and what you do in your own time is your business — but if I find out you are spending it kicking little old ladies, I am going to come over there and Have Words.)

The big, insidious problem at the interface between neuroscience and education is that there are many people talking the talk, but not so many walking the walk. Like the old Far Side cartoon, when I see websites like this, all I hear is:

blah blah blah blah neuro blah blah blah blah education blah blah blah neuro neuro neuro!!!!!111!!11! education education neuro blah blah blah blah neuro!!

This specific website was a prime example: lip-service to informing education through neuroscience: pages and pages. Evidence and specific examples of how this can be done: zip. Nada. Nothing.

This little old lady’s been feeding the urban pigeons, a kindly but perhaps misguided act. She’s been siphoning off her pension to fund an underground fascist group on whom she dotes, because they seem like such nice, polite boys. She looks so sweet, but she’s actually perpetuating harm, because educators everywhere are losing their grip on the need to use science and evidence responsibly. If their role models don’t do it, why should they?

It would be okay — and so would my blood pressure — if this were an isolated example (goodness knows the ‘Net has its share of crazies), but it isn’t. Online educators are obsessed with neuroscience, but often don’t clarify the relationship between the educational practices they espouse and the neuroscience fairy-dust they are currently sprinkling over everything. Evidence, people. Evidence and concrete examples.

In a crankier moment earlier this week, I wrote:

You don’t get to co-opt my science without following its rules.

And the #1 rule of my science is this: show me the evidence.

Maybe this is too harsh. There are issues here about elitism and the availability of expertise: if neuroscience isn’t your background, isn’t it a bit unreasonable to expect you to understand it and write about it coherently?

Well, maybe. Certainly it seems unfair for the taxpayer to fund education and get nothing back — we need to make academic findings easier to access and easier for the layperson to understand, rather than hiding everything behind a journal paywall. But also, I think it’s incumbent on those of us who do speak neuroscience to educate those who don’t — not just about our findings, but also about responsible interpretation of those findings.

Last thing. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at TCUK09 about how bullet-point-loaded slides might be less memorable than sparser slides . (Olivia Mitchell has a great summary of the research here).

Reponses to our work have been either:

1. “Fantastic — finally evidence for something we’ve known or suspected all along!”

or

2. “Hi. I work for X, selling Y, and I wonder if you can tell me/are interested in … “

But overwhelmingly, it has been (1).

I think this is really positive — that people do actually get excited about evidence. And I think we can, and should, build on that willingness to be excited by scientific data, until it becomes unremarkable that non-experts are capable of critically evaluating scientific arguments.

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* I won’t link to it here, because I don’t wish to offend anyone or start some kind of internet tiff** — and besides, there are many such sites out there, so why single one out?

** tiff, for those of you younger than 30, has other meanings besides ‘a graphics file format you almost never use’.

Stealing From Geeks, Part 2: Educators need to geek out, big time

Other people’s presentation slides used to drive me crazy. “You’ve got Arial and Times New Roman and fifteen lines of text in 14-point font! Those colours are hideous! Stop with the serif fonts already! Are you going to read aloud every point?”

Then I gave up caffeine.

No, really — about two years ago, a casual conversation with my colleague Andy about minimalist slide design in teaching suddenly sat up and grew legs. We went from idle discussion to brainstorming ideas to me going home over Christmas wondering if I would get my brain to slow down to less than 1,000rpm. We managed to secure funding from the Centre for Research-Informed Teaching, and for the last 18 months, we’ve been exploring the effects of using minimalist slide presentations on people’s memory for information. I blog about it, think about it, and chase down ideas that might relate to it. I have even — *shudder* — acquired new skills to pursue it.

In short, I have well and truly geeked out over my research. And it feels great.

I posted last(ish) time about how education can learn from the technology sector by growing its own storytellers and role models, but I think there’s plenty more to take away from the home of geek, starting with trying to become one.

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you in school: your inner geek is the most powerful learning resource you will ever have. It’s the thing keeping you at your computer or from putting down your book until well past bedtime; the thing needling you with “Hey, that’s interesting …” It holds your attention when you’re unfocused; delights or enrages you in the face of apathy or exhaustion. Your inner geek won’t rest until it consumes you in the fire of your own attention.

Harness this awesome power, and you can do nearly anything you want: a geek illuminated from within by the source of their own geeky pleasure is one of the brightest lights in the universe.

Geek, should you need to know how to get there, is basically a place where your interests and your strengths meet:

(And since we’re on a Venn diagram jag, why not check whether you’re a dweeb, a geek, a nerd, or a dork?)

Getting in touch with your inner geek is the fast track to achievement. Over the last two years, I’ve worked harder than I ever worked in my life — yes, even during my Ph.D. — and I’ve loved every minute. Hard work isn’t all that hard if it’s doing something you love. I also got to take our work to conferences in San Francisco and Corfu; being a geek comes with some pretty cool perks. (Okay, so I also got to go to Milton Keynes. This was a useful exercise in humility.)

Geeking out provides students with good role models, giving them permission to indulge their own intellect and curiosity. Show me a good educator, and I’ll show you someone whose teaching involves some variation on “Hey, look at this — isn’t that cool?” Students need to see that geeking out can lead to rewarding careers. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters have become poster-boys for scientific curiosity, but they also get invited to the Emmys. I want to give them both a big hug for making being a geek cool; the cooler being curious and knowledgeable becomes, the easier it will be for students everywhere to own their inner geek and move forward in the world.

Education can help shape a culture in which geeking out is not just socially acceptable, but actually desirable. One of the big lies often peddled about geeks is that we’re happiest alone. I don’t think that’s true: the internet in its current form basically exists because geeks liked talking to other geeks. (Or at least reading about them from a safe distance.) When geeks hook up and reinforce their shared geekiness, amazing things happen. You see this in academic departments and at conferences where conversations blossom into full-on nerdouts as two or more people realise they have an interest in common, often kicking off with “Hey, do you know if … ?” It happened to me; you wouldn’t be reading this if it hadn’t.

Most technological developments of the last two decades (centuries? millennia?) were created by geeks who didn’t care whether people knew they were smart; who didn’t worry about looking cool, because they were too busy chasing down their idea. Education needs to reclaim that indifference to what’s “cool” and set about showing that growing and following a passion is one of the most rewarding — and genuinely cool — things you can do.

We don’t geek out enough; we certainly don’t let our students see us geeking out enough. Understanding and enjoying focused obsession is far too good a thing to keep all to ourselves.

Geek out, and don’t look back.

Retweet Culture

This week, my Twitterstream brought me the very wonderful Little People art project, so I retweeted the link.

Then I get a message from Harvey: One of my favourites. But hey, I already sent you that link, after our first ever meeting. And you liked it.

This is actually pretty funny, because Harvey and I have been chatting about how everything is being ‘re-found’ and retweeted instead of people actually making new stuff*. Ooh, new thing! Pass it on. Ooh, new thing! And because it’s interesting, we do pass it on, and so do others. BOOM — information explosion.

And because there is just so much information out there, everything old is new again. It’s like those chain-letter emails you get from your mum, warning you about something that everyone else on the Internet knew was a hoax like six years ago. You’d think that everyone would know by now and nobody would press the FWD button, but no, here it comes again, that one about how if you don’t forward this to five friends RIGHT NOW, Barack Obama will come over there and saw the legs off your hamster.

At best, rapid circulation of ideas can be massively stimulating: I find it exciting to be bombarded by quality content that makes me think about my teaching; exciting, and sometimes even inspirational. But there’s a danger that our culture is so obsessed with the next new thing that we are in danger of losing our appreciation of depth. If you want to be shallow in your leisure hours, who cares, right? But it’s switching off that mindset that’s hard, and I think we need to be wary of anything that precludes in-depth analysis or reduces our capacity for critical thinking. Look at the shiny shiny! [video; contains language NSFW].

Whether resources like Twitter actually contribute to our alledged attentional decline is open to debate. A much-cited study this week purported to show that Twitter, text-messaging and YouTube don’t stretch your working memory the way Facebook use can. From the Telegraph’s coverage:

[The study's author, Dr Tracy Alloway] said there was evidence linking TV viewing with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) while extensive texting was associated with lower IQ scores.

To be honest, I’d feel a lot happier if this whole story didn’t smack of correlational data being interpreted as causal in yet another attempt to show how society as we know it is circling the drain. Sure, I imagine if you use Twitter for nothing but exchanging 140-character messages, then it probably isn’t giving your brain the full workout. But what about those of us who use Twitter to pass along information about longer articles? I’ve read 10,000-word articles linked to from Twitter in a single sitting. Again, it’s all about how you use the software, a nuance that seems to escape the mainstream media most of the time. I really think that networking culture of the kind fostered by Twitter is a potential goldmine: there’s something there for everybody, and knowledge flow within a network is the future of training and education.

But we do need to consider whether the constant tweeting and retweeting of information might erode the time people used to spend making stuff. To avoid this, I think we need to get serious about blocking out time away from the infostream. There’s a huge temptation, if the tap is always running, to keep holding a bucket under it, but I think that way leads to madness. Step away from the tap and do stuff, don’t just punt ideas around. Otherwise you’re not an expert, you’re a dilettante (Trust that link and stick with it; it’s a good ‘un. Again, probably contains language NSFW.)

For me, the hardest part is finding the right balance between being stimulated by retweet culture into creating new stuff, and spending enough time away from it to actually do the creating. We’re going to have to move to a way of thinking in which infostream management is taught in schools; at the moment, most taught skills focus on how to find what you need, but I suspect that increasingly, what people will really want/need to know is how to manage the flood.

I saw a great tweet recently, but of course I can’t remember who it was, now (if you know, please tell me so I can attribute it appropriately). Someone was showing Twitter to their mother. The mother looked at it and said, But how do you make it stop?

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* Only this week, my brain re-found the term attentionomics. Of course, I didn’t coin it; a quick google will show that I am not in any way the first person to identify this term. Nevertheless, I am going to start using it when explaining what I do, because it’s a good word.

Stealing From Geeks, Part 1: Educators need heroes too

When I was at school, geeks were social pariahs. They were clever, but not usually overburdened with social skills. Being a geek was pretty uncool, a fact only slightly ameliorated by the general loveliness of my final-year physics class.

But at some point over the last ten years or so, geek went mainstream. Sci-fi movies mostly stopped being referred to as sci-fi movies; they were just movies, and everyone went to see them. Superhero movies likewise flourished; it became socially acceptable to know who Peter Parker was. The Buffyverse demonstrated that geeks could not only be hot, they were also pretty adept at saving the world. (Yes, I know it’s not real. Hush.)

It has helped, I think, that the Internet makes it easier than in any previous time in history to find other people to geek out with, whatever your interest. If you want to find others with whom you can discuss the finer points of sculpting a model of your own cerebral cortex using only condensed milk, duct tape and that weird ash residue left over from setting fire to your entire manga collection after your girlfriend left you that fourth time, there has never been a better time to be alive.

Educators, who are themselves often pretty geeky, are starting to understand how to make the internet work for them, and there is phenomenal growth through platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn as people establish personal learning networks (PLNs) to connect with other educators, with the chief aim of sharing the challenges of communicating knowledge and keeping learners engaged — though naturally there is some socialising and social networking along the way. Hey, we’re humans too.

But, because a lot of educators have come relatively late to the internet, I think we’re doing this networking in often amateurish ways: fumbling around in the dark, trying to find people who can educate us.

Educators need role models, but there hasn’t been time to grow them organically, because as a sector we’re relatively new to the internet, and the idea of using it for our personal and professional development is similarly recent.

Consider the emergence of role-models in the technology sector, the spiritual and often actual home of bona fide geeks. What happened, roughly, was this:

● The internet was born
● Geeks (the only people using the internet at the time) started using it to talk to each other
● A shared culture was born around the technology industry and the internet
● A culture of commentary on that subculture emerged (which I’m sure happens with all subcultures, but geeks are particularly notorious for their analytical skills)
● Some high-profile commentators emerged
● Those high-profile commentators became role models within the technology subculture
● Geek went mainstream
● The same high-profile commentators are now role models to many people outside the technology subculture, because so many of us use technology.

Then consider educational subculture and its relationship with the internet:

● Education emerged several thousand years ago.
● An education subculture emerged and stayed largely unchanged for a very, very long time.
● The printing press was invented, so it became easier for people to get their hands on educational materials, but education subculture was largely unaffected.
● Literacy became more widespread, and seen as desirable; education started becoming less elitist, but still its subculture remained largely unchanged.
● The internet was invented. Most educators didn’t really notice, except for the additional demands placed on them by their email inboxes.
● As the proportion of educators with some degree of ‘net literacy increased, educators finally started using the internet to grow and modify their subculture.
● Now what?

I’m not saying there aren’t role-model educators out there, but they’re not there for me like technology role models are there for me. With rare exceptions, I can’t find them like I can the tech guys, because their stories aren’t woven into the fabric of my life and work.

Simon at Infinitely Orthogonal talks about the emerging culture of storytelling within the tech sector:

They write about coding – which I ‘get’ in the same patronising way that I ‘get’ Mondrian and Tarkovsky ie not in any real sense other than the purely personal, but I want to feel like I get it so I brush any misunderstanding under a mental carpet and bestow them with my attention.

But they also write stuff about work, recognisable human work. Which I totally get, grok and delight in.

These are people like Rands, Joel Spolsky, and Merlin Mann (the last better known for his work on productivity, but who still has one foot in tech culture). They got to where they are by being dedicated, hardcore geeks — but they are also, as Simon says, recognisably human. Learn why Rands is stalking your bookcase; watch Merlin Mann, dishevelled and unslept, explain that he’s writing a book. Read about how Joel Spolsky’s time in the Israeli armed forces informs his company’s product development strategy.

We — educators — don’t have role models like these guys*. Or if we do, I don’t know about them; they’re not part of my educational subculture. From where I am, I see:

● subject specialists who write about their specialism, often to the exclusion of the human element
● educators who were already famous and who are now using social networking software to grow their brands
● thousands, maybe millions, of small-time educators, each with their own tiny megaphone, all shouting “listen to me; my message is valuable.”

(I have no illusions; I’m firmly in that last category.)

We need to aspire to something; geeks already know this. It can be hard to honour your intellectual aspirations when you’re buried in admin and teaching preparation and grappling with the steep tech gradient between the stuff you’d like to use and what there is. But take a photo-tour of Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software offices and tell me that’s not somewhere you’d want to work. And now transpose that to the educational setting: I want my Twitterstream to be flooded with examples of beautiful, well-thought-out university architecture, pictures that make me stop what I’m doing and think Wow, maybe one day. Sure, there’s a funding explosion waiting to happen in higher education, and it will never have money like technology has money, but a little bit of healthy jealousy can be motivational. I want to believe that one day, that will be me, because we are constantly bombarded by messages that education, along with the rest of the world, is going to hell in a handbasket, and that gets pretty tiring after a while.

We need storytellers to remind us, on those bad days, why we do what we do. We need passionate, articulate, geeky-as-hell educators who are funny and flawed and compelling to read. People we can point to and say “I want to be like her”.

Education needs heroes and leaders. Let’s grow some.

.

* I’m not wholly happy to realise that it is mostly guys; someone please point me towards geeky, funny, tech-literate women who write about science/technology/education and how they learn from their screw-ups. Thanks.

Teaching naked in the age of big education

PowerPoint is currently making headlines in education, though probably not for the reasons Microsoft would like.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that José Bowen of Southern Methodist University has banished computers from his classrooms:

Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web.

That same article in the Chronicle cites research conducted by my colleague Sandi Mann, showing that many students find lectures boring, and that the most commonly-cited reason for this is use of PowerPoint.

So perhaps ‘teaching naked’ (sans PowerPoint, gentle reader) might cure students’ boredom and encourage instructors to write more creative, interactive classes?

Well, while I’m curious to know where José Bowen’s nebulous ‘often’ statistic comes from, it may be true that lack of confidence encourages instructors to rely more on slides: in a recent pilot study, Andy Morley and I found that of the university lecturers we surveyed, 91% said that since starting teaching, they had reduced the amount of text they used on their slides. We interpret this to mean that increased practice leads to increased confidence; the more comfortable you are with your subject, the less material you ‘need’ on the slide. However, it’s still a big leap from there to asserting that instructors routinely use slides “as a crutch”; there are plenty of other reasons they might choose to use slides, something Mr Bowen apparently chooses to overlook.

There are really two issues in play here: taking slides out of the classroom, and making higher education more interactive. They’re kind of all twisted up together, so here are my thoughts about teaching naked, and why student engagement and class size present such a knotty problem in this era of massification and McDonaldization in HE.

1. Large class sizes turn higher education into a broadcast medium

Maybe José Bowen only teaches small classes. If so, he is very fortunate, because small-group teaching is brilliant. It allows instructors to get to know their students and allows students to engage, make mistakes, and ask questions in a relatively low-pressure environment.

But try getting students to do these things surrounded by 300 of their peers — it’s like pulling teeth. Not to mention that you need a decent pair of lungs, or a microphone, to maintain order. On this scale, education is pretty much a broadcast medium, and there’s not much you can do about it except ensure that, when you are talking (which really shouldn’t be all the time), you have appropriate visual aids, since we know these benefit learning.

So no, teaching naked is not necessarily the best thing to do when you have really big classes, as many of us do. It might be appropriate, but then you also need to consider that:

2. Teaching naked is more suitable to some subject areas than others

Some of my colleagues teach slideless, and their lectures are enduringly popular, seemingly undiminished by the absence of visual aids. To take one example, material in social psychology is rarely inherently visual; what’s important is the ability to spin a decent yarn, and I am glad to know and work with people who exemplify this approach.

But when I give lectures (remember, 300 students) on neuroanatomy or the visual system, I show diagrams, because then students can see what I am talking about. I could, of course, describe the brain’s visual pathways in excruciating detail, but students would soon be adrift in a sea of unfamiliar anatomical terminology, and I expect my lectures would be bitterly unpopular. Why add unnecessarily to the lecture’s extraneous cognitive load? Writers everywhere know the answer: show, don’t tell.

Of course, I don’t have to use slides as my visual aids, but they’re a highly visible medium that I know I can use well in large classes, so I use ‘em. (Your mileage may vary.) But this then throws up a whole new problem:

3. Students expect that their classes are about information delivery.

Slides have become a big part of this expectation. Yes folks, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t: students have been known to complain when staff don’t use lecture slides, or don’t make them available. There are probably many reasons for this (ease of note-taking, knowing how to spell technical terminology, zoning out and missing something critical, or missing the entire lecture and needing a frame of reference — and no doubt there are plenty more), but I think they all boil down to the importance of possessing information.

Implicit in this delivery model of education is the suggestion that students are passive vessels into which learning is transferred via their attendance at lectures, a situation which may be exacerbated by use of slide-based handouts. The Chronicle notes that:

The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods.

Of course, if students are to take a more active role than sitting in lectures, this requires that they have done some reading around the topic. But getting students to do even basic reading prior to class isn’t that straightforward; for one thing, since the introduction of tuition fees, many students now hold down part-time or even full-time jobs to pay their way through university. I have known students choose modules on the basis of what will fit around work, rather than their own academic interests, and I have found out the hard way that even when you say “this prior reading is mandatory for the session”, you either quickly reduce the number of people coming to that class, or end up adapting the session to accommodate those students who have not, despite your advice, done the reading. So here too, ‘teaching naked’, if we take that to mean ‘facilitating student discussions of material they have read outside class, in the absence of computers or other overt delivery methods’, might not work well.

So, should I kick computers out of my lecture theatre?

My honest feeling is that that teaching naked, much as I admire the principle, isn’t always compatible with how big higher education actually functions. We do have small-group teaching, and we try to keep that as interactive as possible, but plenty of our teaching is still lecture-based, and I think it’s a mistake to rejected computers (and slideware) out of hand, no matter how cool it is to diss PowerPoint right now*.

Fundamentally, it’s dogmatic to apply any hardline approach, whether that be ‘no slides’ or ’slides all the way’. Educators are supposed to be smart — so let’s act like it.

* Actually, it’s been cool for quite a while. Lincoln took some stick about the Gettysburg Address and it all sort of snowballed from there.

Let’s diss incentives: why potential rewards are killing your creativity

Yesterday I got a good start on the day. I was working by about 8:20am, getting right into that early-morning productivity groove.

And then, at pretty much 11:20am on the nose, I fell out of it. Like, gone — and you know it’s not coming back.

Cut to the other day at work. Big meeting. Big meeting. One of those once-a-year, this-is-where-life-changing-decisions-get-made specials. We were discussing productivity, because as a school — as an institution — we need to publish more research. The bottom line is that research funding, not student numbers, is increasingly going to be where we get our money from. And, you know, most of us only have about 15-20% of our time allocated for research (not 50% or higher, as is the case at some other institutions). That’s tricky when we compete against colleagues at those institutions to get our work published; level playing field, it ain’t.

But we are where we are, and we have to make the best of that. So: productivity.

At this übermeeting, the excellent suggestion was made that staff try to ring-fence, for doing research, those times when they are at their most productive. Having tried that myself this year, I now know that my best times are between about 7 and 11am, and then again between 4 and 7pm. Oh, and also between about 10:30pm and midnight. (Not exactly compatible with the traditional working day, is it? You see why it took me so long to figure out how to get anything done.)

So, great: time freed up. Let’s do stuff, already.

Except that it’s 11:20am, and I’ve lost all focus. This is a very vulnerable time of day for me, productivity-wise; I need an incentive. Okay, so focus. Potential rewards of writing this paper include fame and adulation … No, seriously — it beefs up my CV and potentially buys me more research hours next year. Who wouldn’t want to sit down and get that paper published?

But … (you just knew there was a ‘but’)

Matthew Taylor writes about why cash makes you stupid sometimes. In sum, research suggests that giving people a financial incentive to solve complex problems actually makes them perform worse. [Edit: and more evidence just popped up in my inbox. ]When there’s something at stake, even if it’s as simple as losing a thing you didn’t even have in the first place, creativity goes to hell in a handbasket. The sheer potential of what could be is enough to make many of us lose our nerve.

Of course, the reward doesn’t have to be financial — just attractive. So, that paper I’m supposed to be writing? Not so much. Instead, hand-wringing. Fear of failure. Olympic-quality procrastination.

I’ve written before about how constraints allow creativity to flourish. And what is a conditional reward if not a constraint, right? Albeit a time- or outcome-specific one.

That may be true when you’re in flow, but when you’re at a low point in your productivity cycle, incentives are the enemy of creativity. They just sit there looming over you, putting you off. “You must know the answer, surely? Oh, come on!” It’s like having your very own Jeremy Paxman.

In the end, after several hours spent doing everything except the one thing I really needed to, I solved my productivity problem by going back (again) to 43 Folders, and finding what I needed: the dash. Half an hour of ten-minute timers later, my analysis was done. I love 43 Folders*.

Conclusion: when you know you’re not at your best, don’t focus on the reward; just knowing it’s there will eat you alive. Focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Repeatedly.

(The more driven and confident among you are probably wondering what the big deal is, here: “If you need to do something, just get on with it, right?” Sorry, maybe I should have said at the start: this post isn’t for you — though I think I want to be you when I grow up. But thanks for reading anyway :o)

* Seriously, go there if you get stuck, and Merlin Mann will kick your ass. For free!

How my husband broke my brain: a user’s guide to cognitive load theory

It’s the weekend. Other couples tour Ikea, visit garden centres, wipe chocolate ice-cream off their children’s faces. My husband and I debate whether or not it matters that people don’t understand what a browser is.*

My argument is that if they can’t tell the difference between a browser and search engine technology, that’s just good design. Browsers, search engines … who cares what they’re called, so long as everyone knows how to use them?

His argument is People who don’t understand the simple fundamentals of the technology they use are only ever going to scratch the surface of what they can do with it. The full benefits of technology shouldn’t be the preserve of the few, but of the many, and people need to take responsibility for learning about this stuff.

Of course, we’re both kind of right … so we throw some ideas around, iron out wrinkles in the discussion. He can’t believe that people might not be interested in how their technology actually works; I point out that a lack of understanding of basic physics never stopped anyone from enjoying radio, television, or a movie.

And then he drops the bomb.

“I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the benefits that have accrued from understanding of new technologies. For example …”

By the time he gets to ‘accrued’ in the first sentence, I’ve lost it. “What?“

“It’s not that complicated,” he says. (My husband is frequently smarter than I am, and most of the time he knows whether I am genuinely lost or just being an intellectual slob.)

“It is if you don’t know what the idea at the end of the sentence is,” I say, miffed. “If I’d been reading your sentence, I could have gone back and parsed it again. But this … there were like four abstract concepts before it even began meaning anything.”

“Huh,” says my husband.

“You totally overloaded my working memory!” I say.

My husband, who is used to comments like this by now, says nothing.

“It’s the curse of knowledge,” I tell him.

“It’s what?”

“The curse of knowledge. When you know what you’re talking about, but the audience doesn’t, and you can’t share their perspective, because you know it already, and you can’t put yourself in the position of un-knowing it, so it biases how you communicate. You knew where you were headed in that sentence, but I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t activate a schema until I knew what it was about, so I was overwhelmed by the intrinsic cognitive load of what you were saying.”

“Okay,” says my husband. (Not “What?” or “It was just a sentence,” or “Do you have to bring your work home with you?” Reader, this is why I married him.)

There is a pause.

“I think,” he says, “I think I tend to do that a lot, because I like making people laugh, and the punchline always has to go at the end.”

He considers it for a moment. “The benefits of understanding new technologies cannot be overestimated.”

“Perfect.” And we go about our day.

There was a point to this story, beyond confirming your suspicions that my husband and I are perhaps not the sort of people you want at your dinner party. The point is simply this:

Give your audience some context from the outset, or you will lose them immediately. This applies in general, but especially if the information you want to convey is complex or abstract.

And never underestimate the curse of knowledge.

* My favourite bit of the video is the guy at around 1:19 who says he uses Firefox “… because my friend came over to my house and erased all my other browsers and installed it and said ‘you’re using this now.’”

[Edit: My husband wasn't entirely satisfied with how I had represented his argument, so I've reworded that section since this was first posted.]

The McDonaldization of technology in education – do you want slides with that?

ICICTE is all about people who use technology in education. This is a pretty broad aegis, which I think is great — highly specialist conferences sometimes seem in danger of disappearing up their own abstracts.

So I went along to ICICTE last week to tell people about our work with lecture slides and lecturers’ attitudes to slides, but conferences are all about the exchange of ideas, and I spent most of my visit listening to other people talk about their work.

I’m always fascinated to watch others interact with slideware and their audience, and the breadth of experiences that ensue. Standing up, sitting down, talking around the slides, reading out bits from slides, skipping over the slides. One sentence per slide; 21 lines of dense text (yes, I am sad enough to count). Ten slides, forty slides; both for a 12-minute presentation. Once they know what my research involves, people sometimes get a bit twitchy about their own slides (now I think about it, not unlike the reaction when you tell them you’re a psychologist — apparently I’m building a career on making people nervous), but I try not to be judgemental: variety is the spice of life — and anyway, someone might turn my results upside-down tomorrow.

One speaker I particularly enjoyed was Kevin Burden, who talked about furthering educators’ personal and professional development using ICT. He talked about the need to filter technology by its qualities and suitability for the task at hand: for example, blogging is a great way to promote teacher reflection, but might not be such a great tool for peer interaction. Essentially, he was promoting mindful use of technology.

Mindful use of technology is a real issue in education. Kevin’s approach is much more considered than the kind often taken by institutions, which have the amazing ability to issue blanket edicts (e.g., “Thou Shalt Use Blackboard”) without necessarily considering whether it’s in the best interests of the staff or students involved. I have nothing against Blackboard, and I support wholeheartedly the emergence of VLEs, but I sometimes think their implementation would be better left to relevant teaching staff. (Then again, to get everyone on board, sometimes you just have to legislate, because nature abhors cognitive dissonance)

Kevin’s talk got me thinking — again — about use of visual aids in teaching, and why people started using software like PowerPoint in the first place. Obviously it looked much better, more professional, than scrawled or photocopied overhead transparencies — and, like other new media, it was easily editable, copyable and redistributable. All great reasons for adopting a new technology.

But how many people used the jump from one form of technology to another to pause for a moment and reflect on whether these visual aids were always the right tools for the job?

Not very many; we see that now in the near-ubiquitous use of electronic slides to support lectures. So prevalent is the notion that lectures must have slides that when students miss a lecture, they don’t ask what we covered: they ask for a copy of the slides. To students, the slides are the lecture.

Which does make me wonder what value anyone thinks we’re adding by standing there at the front and clicking now and again to make the slides transition.

Simon Schurville, in his ICICTE keynote,* discussed the massification and McDonaldization of higher education: the idea that to deliver the same experience to so many, a very simple, identical, easily-replicable product is required. He asked, Is this really what we want higher education to be like?

I thought about the McDonaldization of lecture slides. Do we honestly want students’ experience of university, the world over, to consist of staring at yet another mindless set of bullet-points? Do we really want to foster the expectation that a lecture is not a lecture unless every point is clearly laid out in 24-point Times New Roman, up there on the screen and right there in front of you in all its dead-tree reproduced glory?

In short, do you really want slides with that?

* Sadly, Simon was taken ill a couple of days before the conference; the keynote was delivered in his absence by Greg Anderson and Raymond Welch.