mike's web log

Only mostly true/lies to children

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 23:33:19 GMT

The other day I was taking an introductory training class for some technology at work. There was a slide that outlined the technology, and one of the bullet points had an asterisk next to it. At the bottom of the page was this footnote:

Most strong statements like this are only mostly true. Don’t worry about it.

I had to stop for a while to ponder the pedagogical implications of this footnote.

There's an inherent problem in trying to describe something complicated to a newbie: how do you start? If someone knows absolutely nothing about, say, playing bridge, or verbs in Spanish, or physics, or grammar, you have to give them a large-picture, broad-stroke overview of this thing they're about to dive into.

This is hard. One reason is that people who are familiar with some domain frequently have difficulty coming up with sufficiently high-level overviews that make sense to a beginner. I've had a couple of people attempt to explain the game of bridge to me, but they could not come up with a simple, comprehensible explanation of the bidding process.[1]

A closely related reason is that experts often cannot let go of details. For example, in your first week of Spanish class, the teacher tells you that the verb hablar means "to speak," and that to say "I speak" you cut off -ar and add -o: hablo. And that this is the pattern for any verb that ends in -ar. So to say "I take," you use the verb tomar and turn it into tomo.

Easy! Powerful! Also, of course, only mostly true: there are irregular verbs and reflexive verbs and other fun. But throwing those additional details at you in the first week of Spanish 101 is counterproductive. There will be time to sort out the exceptions later, [more]

Things I learned from my presentation feedback

Tue, 17 May 2016 08:23:20 GMT
At the end of March I gave a presentation at the ACES conference on "Tips and Tricks for Using Microsoft Word Styles." For years I've taught a class about Word styles at Bellevue College. My experience is that even people who use Word don't necessarily know all the ins and outs of using styles, so when the call for papers for the conference came out, I submitted a proposal. It was accepted, and I was given a 60-minute slot.

I spent a lot of time preparing for the session, agonizing about what material to include. Much of my indecision was because I simply didn't know who my audience would be. Would there be people new to styles? Were all of my tips already old hat to an audience of experienced editors? Plus I only had an hour, which I know from experience seems like a lot of time, but is nothing. (My course at BC runs 6 hours.)

I ended up presenting a quick overview, and then a lightning tour of how to apply, create, and manage styles. Along the way I threw in tips that I reckoned could be useful to even people who had worked with styles: keyboard shortcuts; tips for naming styles; style inheritance; styling TOCs; taming multi-level list styles; and more. There were about 60 people in the room.

Presenting about styles. (Photo: Lindsay Lelivelt)

I got the evaluations back recently. There was enough positive feedback to suggest that yes, it was a useful session and that people got good information from it. Big relief! A number of commenters indicated that they liked "technical" sessions, which I hope means I'll have another shot at a session like this.

[more]

Roundup

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:14:02 GMT
Tired. So tired.

Kafka for the Kindergarten Set. Aaron Swartz with another dispatch about our educational system. He doesn't like NCLB-inspired testing:
Every year, a couple months before school ends, a kind of controlled experiment happens in NCLB schools: The principal remains the same, the teachers remain the same, the students remain the same. The only thing that changes is that the test is over, forgotten until next year starts. And suddenly everything changes: test prep boards come off the wall, students start writing poetry, they go on field trips and do science experiments, they work in groups and do real reading.

City Museum Photo Tour. Sabrina visited St. Louis over the weekend and sent me a link to this. Looks amazing, I'd love to go.

Fox Says, "Smile, You're Under Arrest". Summary: “It’s COPS as comedy and no one’s ever tried it before." Reality TV: it's a race to the bottom. (Hey, maybe that's a new show: Race to the Bottom.) [via naum]

It's Lovely! I'll Take It. Subtitle says it: "A collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings." Everything from bathrooms with underwear hanging up, to bedrooms with guys lounging on the bed, to $500K houses with plywood in the windows:

Ya know, the bar is very, very low for real-estate listings.

[via Kim]

Blog class, part 5

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:13:44 GMT
And as promised last time, the class itself. As I had said at the beginning, we were thinking that the target student:

Has some notion of what blogging is, but
Has not blogged before, and

Wants to start blogging for a job or business (i.e., "in a professional context"), and
Wants some guidance on tools and techniques for starting.
And that’s pretty much exactly who we got. A couple of the people in the class read blogs; one guy has blogged before. The rest, tho, met this profile pretty much exactly.

For example, there was a manager from Boeing who was investigating blogging in her group. There was a translator who thought that a blog might be good for her business. A program advisor at school thought blogging might be a way to communicate directly and rapidly with students. A woman who has a business and already has a Web site was scoping out how blogging would enhance that. And some of the people were just curious about blogging in general.

What was great for me was that everyone was more-or-less at the same level (or close enough), and that they brought a variety of interests and questions to the class. For example, one person was particularly interested in the mechanics of a blog site, whereas someone else had lots of questions about legal issues.

I laid out the class in what I suppose is a typical format of lecture-demo-exercise.[1] As I said, I wanted there to be as much interactive work in the class as possible. Here’s a sampling of what we did.
We discussed as a class possible reasons why people do business blogging.

[more]

Blog class, Part 4

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:35:06 GMT
Continuing the saga of the class. As much as I’ve blogged (too much, some might say) and in spite of my apparent willingness to throw myself in front of a group of people to talk about blogging, it was certainly clear when I was planning the class that I’m hardly the ultimate expert on All Things Blogging. The solution, of course, is to get help from people who really know what they’re doing.

As soon as I got the go-ahead to do the class, I went on a bit of a blogging-book shopping spree. Blogging exploded in the early 2000s; books on business blogging exploded in 2006, it seems, and I rounded up a nice selection. Debbie Weil and especially Nancy Flynn wrote for the POV of the company considering letting its employees loose on blogging. Shel Holz & Ted Demopoulus and DL Byron & Steve Broback wrote for the person inside the corporation who was going to be doing the blogging. Tom Masters [more]

Blog class, Part 3

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:34:26 GMT
As I noted before (Part 1, Part 2), an interesting aspect of teaching blogging is that there are no formal rules. This does not, as further noted, prevent people from coming up with all manner of guidelines and opinions. In most cases, the guidelines are sensible; in fact, they are often the same guidelines you’d have for any sort of writing, blog or otherwise.

And there are what seem to be a pretty common set of guidelines for blogging specifically. For example, pretty much eveyone who dispenses advice about blogging suggests that you keep blog entries to a reasonable size – say, 500 words. Similarly, pretty much everyone agrees that you should post frequently; you’ll see suggestions like daily or several times a week. The idea is to keep the blog fresh so that return visitors are rewarded, and to not tax your readers with oceans of text. In both cases, this is good advice, I think, for someone who’s still developing their blogging persona, let’s call it.

But. Counter-examples abound. Steve Yegge writes lo-o-o-ong (5000-word) essays, really, that he posts maybe once a month. And people love his stuff, because it’s fantastic. Scott Guthrie posts full-length articles on the latest and greatest in ASP.NET, and he's in approximately the Top 1 of Microsoft bloggers.[1]

[more]

Blog Class, Part 2

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:20:17 GMT
What exactly do you teach in a class about blogging? As I said in the last post, we just don’t know what the students will already know and what they hope to learn. Our best guess for this first class is that the student:
Has some notion of what blogging is, but
Has not blogged before, and
Wants to start blogging for a job or business (i.e., "in a professional context"), and
Wants some guidance on tools and techniques for starting.
I mean, ya gotta start with a persona of some sort, right?

Thus I’ve come up with the following as a very high-level outline:
Introduction to blogs – anatomy, examples.
Purpose of professional blogging – why people blog in the non-feelings-and-kitties sense.
Setting up a blog – planning, research, blog engines, how-to.
Writing for professional blogs - topics, writing conventions, ideas, tips (dos and don’ts).
Comments, links, and feeds – protocols (and mechanics) for dealing with comments, same for links. All about feeds and trackbacks[1].
Blog ethics, etc. – ethical and legal considerations for professional blogs.
Measuring success – comments, traffic, referrers.
A couple of things I’m not intending to cover in the 6-hour class: search-engine optimization and keyword strategies, and monetizing a blog. If the class is ever expanded into the long version, those would be suitable topics. Or, as might happen, if it turns out that people in the class don’t need a lot of detail about some of the other stuff in the proposed outline.

I have exercises or activities planned for all of these areas. I’ve requested that we get a computer-equipped classroom so that the students can do all this hands-on. (I sure hope they don’t have to just watch me, gah, how uninteresting that would be.)

[more]

Blog Class, Part 1

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:26:47 GMT
In a couple of weeks I'm going to teach a one-day class on blogging at Bellevue Community College. When I mention this to people, I tend to see eyebrows go up followed by some variation on "People need to learn ... blogging?"

In fact, the class is "Blogging in a Professional Context." This isn't a class about expressing your innermost feelings and posting pictures of your cats. The idea is that we'll discuss the ways and means of how blogging expands on the types of communication already used in corporations and by professionals. (Perhaps it clarifies to note that the class is being offered through the technical writing program at BCC.)

The idea was not originally mine. One of the people who has taught in the program at BCC for some time approached the program coordinator about the idea, which piqued the coordinator's interest. However, the teacher became unavailable to flesh out the concept. At the time, I was observing editing classes, and one of the students happened to mention to me that a class in blogging was being considered. I went up and discussed it with the coordinator, wrote up a class proposal, and here we are.

This will be an experiment. In this, its first manifestation, it will be a one-day (6-hour) class. If the experiment looks successful, it's possible that it can be expanded out to the usual 5-week (1 day/week) classes that are the norm for the program.

[more]