As I was saying, I needed to replace my PDA.  Last Saturday, just ahead of 6 or 8 inches of "a light dusting of snow," my wife and I each got the Verizon HTC Droid Eris.  (She meanwhile received a BlackBerry for work; we now have more smart phones in the house than we do smart people.) The good news is we were able to make a call on the way home from the store, so the phone part was easy to master.  That was the prelude to four or five hours during which we both tinkered with our phones. It was a good reminder that people who say "learning is fun" are usually talking about past learning, rather than future. At a particularly high level of stress, I wrote down some comments we were making: I know I came across it at one point… How do you…? How did I…? Where was…? …which helps explain my original delay in getting the phone in the first place.  Cost was one factor: Verizon’s data plan adds $30 to your monthly phone bill.  On a two-year contract, that’s $720 dollars (in addition to your voice plan, even though ours is relatively cheap). In retrospect, I think the more important factor for me was transition cost (which a couple of friends might phrase as "resistance to change").  I see three potential sources of trouble from a shift like the one I’ve made: You’ve got to learn some new things. You’ve got to learn how to do some things differently. You’ve got to leave some things behind. Of those, I think "differently" is the most troubling.  That’s the real change: to accomplish X, I used to do Y.  I knew how to do Y.  I was good at Y, so much so I didn’t have to think about it, because it had been incorporated into a larger set of behavior, the way I instinctively know when to use "the" and when not to (my sister’s in the hospital, my brother’s in college). A certain amount of stress (or perhaps challenge) can help foster learning-we’ve got a goal, we’re looking for a way to accomplish it.  Too much, though, and we see the new practice or new technology as not just a change but a hindrance-a word whose roots suggest harm, injury, or impairment. I’ve also noticed several instances of "intuitive cognitive strategies" (a term van Merriënboer and Kirschner use for "incorrect notions that newbies come up with").  For example, there are seven home screens-a phrase that confused me, since I thought of the middle one as the home screen.    The other sixe were…I don’t know, helper screen.  Subscreens.  Peripheral screens. (Why this matters: you only have so much space on the smartphone screen.  By flicking your finger across it, you can switch between the various home screens and have more real estate for applications.) Part of that confusion might have come from the concept of scenes, which are alternative sets of home screens.  (You swap in a new scene and your home screens are different-like one for work and one for play, maybe.) Got that?  Me, either, which is why I thought that you had to add a new icon to the "main" home screen (the middle one of the seven) and then drag it wherever you wanted it, like the offspring of the iPhone and a number puzzle. Going back to transition cost, the highest risk for me was that I’d have to re-enter my contacts and my calendar items if the Eris couldn’t sync with Microsoft Outlook.  I didn’t want to have to switch to Google’s contacts and calendar (see above, "learn some new things" and "leave some things behind"). Cooperative learning came into play.  I don’t recall what I was doing at the time (probably trying to create a clear path for app-dragging), but my wife made a very specific search and found a description of how to get the Eris to sync directly with Outlook on my desktop. It was a little bumpy, but I got it done-and that payoff boosted my sense of competence on the new tool.  Now I’m having fun playing with applications, and I’m more prone to see difficulties as puzzles rather than setbacks.  I just hope that the next time I’m trying to breeze someone else through "change management," I remember how frustrated I felt when my own change was getting managed. Here’s a video from  Lisa Gade’s look at the Eris (at Mobile Tech Review). You can see a demonstration of those seven home screens at about the 3:00 mark in the video: Biggest mystery about the phone so far?  It turns out that your purchase doesn’t include the 238 page user guide (PDF).  (To be fair, it’s 238 5 x 5 pages, but still…)  Perhaps Verizon has a goal to encourage discovery learning. Peculiar mystery: if you visit Android Market (the Google source for Android applications) with a computer rather than a smartphone, there’s no search function. [Here are] some of the more popular applications and games available in Android Market. For a comprehensive, up-to-date list of the thousands of titles that are available, you will need to view Android Market on a handset. No search?  From Google? Onetime English major mystery:  Eris was the goddess of strife.  At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, she lobbed a golden apple inscribed "to the fairest."  Squabbling among goddesses led to the Trojan War, an event somewhat more frustrating than switching to a smart(er) phone.

Grad student Kathleen Bogart has Moebius syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes facial paralysis: no smiling, no blinking, no lateral eye movement.  A New York Times article, Seeking Emotional Clues Without Facial Cues, looked at her experience and that of others with Moebius. When she tried working with refugees from Hurricane Katrina, Bogart often couldn’t connect with them.  They didn’t see sympathy or understanding in her face-because she can’t express those things facially.  People in conversations mirror and react to one another, and we’re usually very skilled at detecting and interpreting very small physical signals: a forced smile, a distracted glance. This is a complicated area.  It’s not necessarily the case that people with similar paralysis can’t recognize emotion, but the inability to mimic is a barrier.  Some people cope through other channels: eye contact, for example, or voice.  The challenge has turned into a research field for Bogart. I had no special interest in studying facial paralysis, even though I had it; there were many other things I could have done. But in college I looked to see what psychologists had to say about it, and there was nothing. Very, very little on facial paralysis at all. And I was just — well, I was angry.  Angry.  I thought, I might as well do it because certainly no one else is. One result was a study of how people with Moebius recognize facial expressions (link is a PDF) of her study, demonstrating that the ability to mimic the expressions of others is not essential to recognizing their emotional state.  As the Times article suggests, if the strategies that people with Moebius use to understand emotion are "teachable,…they could help others with social awkwardness, whether because of anxiety, developmental problems like autism, or common causes of partial paralysis, like Bell’s palsy." The Times website has aslide show in which Bogart talks about having a face that can’t express emotion.    

Microsoft Word for DOS appeared in late 1983.  I’d started using a word processor only a few months before-WordStar, which at one time did bestride the computer world like a Colossus.  Relatively speaking, WordStar was geek heaven; its article on Wikipedia states, apparently with a straight face, that "WordStar is still considered by many to be one of the best examples of a ‘writing program.’" That notion evidently comes from admiration of the small file sizes that WordStar produced because it didn’t fool around with things like WYSIWYG display on the screen or with formatting commands sent to the printer.  WordStar focused on text, dammit, and you were lucky it bothered doing that. I got pretty good with WordStar, but when I came across a working demo of Microsoft Word for DOS, I was more than ready to switch.  Nowadays, the differences between the two seem minor (WordStar screen shot, Word screen shot), but the move away from technoid control codes and the inclusion of a few formatting touches (on-screen bolding and underlining) was a clear advance. I use several obscure features in Word, like the seq field code, but I’m also painfully aware of drawbacks like its capricious approach to numbering paragraphs.  In general, software companies feel compelled to add features to their products.  I think that’s because they-and some of their customers-confuse "feature" with "benefit."  There’s some relationship, of course, but over time it tends to be more hypothetical (if not downright fanciful). Why?  As Naomi Dunford points out on the IttyBiz blog, "With very few exceptions (medicine and cutting-edge technology come to mind) you are wasting space and money by telling people about your features." This morning, one of the people I follow on Twitter shared this comment on feature-itis: Track Changes is, as Senator Bob Dole said of another bright idea, is one of those things that seems great until you take a look at it.  I don’t know what aspect of Track Changes was making Chris shouty, but for me it’s always been quantity: the more changes (and changers), the more you feel like you’re being trampled to death by weasels. One problem is that people try to cram several kinds of editing (for facts, for sequence, for syntax, for style) into a single Pickett’s Charge of revision.  A more dire problem is the confusion of "change" with "improvement."  Shakespeare had something similar in mind in Henry IV, Part One. GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? The number of changes tracked doesn’t equal the number of improvements made, any more than the number of features added equals the amount of benefit delivered (are you listening, Quicken?). Which points toward an inherent contradiction for training or learning in organizations.  You can almost certainly reap benefits when you help people move from "can’t do X at all" to "can do Basic Things A, B, and C" — assuming, of course, that those people see A, B, and C as benefiting them. Working further through the alphabet of features (D, E, and F…L, M, and N…) means you’re getting farther out on the long tail.  Each addition becomes more specific, which means more contextual, which means has decreasingly less appeal to most people (even though potentially more appeal to a small number of people). I rarely see much mileage for me in talking to others about customizing Word toolbars, let alone creating multiple templates for different kinds of outlines.  As for Google Docs, one less-than-obvious reason for their popularity is that the relative lack of features makes for easier collaboration among groups of people who might have widely varying levels of skill in more traditional word processors.  If you can’t add internal cross-references or sequence codes, you’re not going to frustrate or confuse people who don’t know what to do with them. WordStar box and disks image from Wikipedia.

The New York Times reports on research suggesting that if you really want to learn, you should take a test.  Pam Belluck’s article cites work by Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt recently published in ScienceExpress (linked article is on Scribd). The researchers looked at "elaborative studying" (in this case, working from a text to create your own concept map) and "retrieval practice"-writing a freeform essay after reading the material.  In the latter case, you’re writing without the material; hence, you’re retrieving information from memory. Here’s the researchers’ abstract: Educators rely heavily on learning activities that encourage elaborative studying, while activities that require students to practice retrieving and reconstructing knowledge are used less frequently. Here, we show that practicing retrieval produces greater gains in meaningful learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. The advantage of retrieval practice generalized across texts identical to those commonly found in science education. The advantage of retrieval practice was observed with test questions that assessed comprehension and required students to make inferences. The advantage of retrieval practice occurred even when the criterial test involved creating concept maps. Our findings support the theory that retrieval practice enhances learning by retrieval-specific mechanisms rather than by elaborative study processes. Retrieval practice is an effective tool to promote conceptual learning about science. This is is sort of thing that’ll end up on the evening news: "Researcher Says Take Tests, Don’t Study."  The reality is more nuanced, of course. As Karpiche and Blunt say, "It is beyond question that activities that promote effective encoding, known as elaborative study tasks, are important for learning."  What they were questioning, in part, is the notion that retrieval of information is "neutral and uninfluential" in the learning process. Because each act of retrieval changes memory, the act of reconstructing knowledge must be considered essential to the process of learning. I’m sorry that most reports about this study use the word "test," one of those terms (like "training") that’s a kind of conceptual rent-a-truck; people load them up with all sorts of meaning. I know I tend to.  And despite knowing better, when I hear "test," I have a hard time not picturing the multiple-guess, factoid-shackled artifact that so often is labeled as a knowledge nugget. In the world of learning at work, we don’t always consider that "test" can refer to something other than a mid-semester quiz.   This, despite the fact that the workplace is full of other, more robust examples of testing. Like load tests on a server.  Stress tests for a product.  Market testing for a new product (or for a media campaign).  Engineering testing aimed at continuous improvement in a process. Even if you’re aiming at (allegedly) objective assessment, you can shoot for more than recall of discrete bits of information.  So in Karpicke and Blunt’s research, the final testing  involved both verbatim questions (for "conceptual knowledge stated directly in the text") and inference questions that required the learner to relate different points in the original content. It’s interesting that participants in the student couldn’t predict whether their retrieval practice would help them learn: Students predicted that repeated studying would produce the best long-term retention and that practicing retrieval would produce the worst retention, even though the opposite was true. One version of the study, as part of the "final test," had students create a concept map.  Once again, students who engaged in retrieval practice produced better concept maps (by which I assume "more accurate ones") than did the students whose study included creating concept maps in the first place. CC-licensed images:ASVAB scores by Krista Kennedy.Test-box photo by Dave Blaisdale.  

I’ve been thinking about the less-than-obvious struggle we (meaning "I") have with behavior and accomplishment.  Behavior is what you do; accomplishment is what gets done.  In the workplace, people go on a lot about accomplishment. They want results: closed sales, increased share, service delivered at lower cost, and so on.  But people also tend to praise and reinforce behavior, even when its connection to accomplishment is tenuous. Let’s get something to eat Think about what you see as critical to quality for your workday lunchtime experience.  For me, at least in part, that involves: Acceptable food (Bombay Bistro is great; I don’t demand two Michelin stars) A space that’s clean (I don’t want to clean a table) Room to eat without bumping other people A wait time that’s less than 10% of total time I think many managers of cafeterias, coffee shops, and similar faster-food places would sign up for those as performance standards for their business.  That’s one reason they often have the touch-screen cash registers: the cashier can punch in items, and the machine does the pricing.  The idea is to produce a worthwhile accomplishment: fast, accurate billing. In her new book, Design for How People Learn, Julie Dirksen talks about fast-food drink dispensers.  Sometimes, she says, you get a really skillful food worker: She can start a drink pouring a the soda machine, turn to ring a customer, and know exactly how long she has before she needs to turn around and keep the cup from overfilling.  That’s the sign of an expert who really knows their job, and has internalized that knowledge over time. That kind of skill is expensive to acquire, which explains the drink dispensers with size buttons. A worker can press "large" and move on to another part of the order.  The dispenser isn’t (usually) going to overfill the cup, and so it helps him produce a high-quality result-a fast, accurate meal-with less deliberate investment in skill development. We presume accomplishment; we notice behavior We tend to disparage that button-pushing, though. We like interacting with high-skill behavior.  It’s enjoyable and maybe reassuring to have our order handled by someone who’s clearly expert in her work.   Even if we get our order just as quickly from the press-the-size worker, we almost feel as if he’s cheating.  It’s the on-the-job equivalent of "he had to look it up." If you disagree, how do you feel about cashiers who have trouble making change on their own?  Admit it-it drives you nuts, because people ought to be able to make change.  And how hard can it be? I tend to agree.  Making change seems like a straightforward application of match.  But I worked for years in a job where I had to make change, often. And I’ve had to teach people to make change accurately, for the sake of the customer and the sake of the business. If someone isn’t fluent at making change, it takes time to develop that fluency. You know the project-management nostrum: things can be fast, good, and cheap.  Pick the two you want. In the context of a fast(er) food business, it makes sense to have a cash register that does the change-computing task.  Otherwise, you have to hire people with more skill, or else devote time and energy to helping them acquire that skill.  (At the end of this post, I’ve written up one method for counting change.) Change and accomplishment You’d think that any fast-food place would want employees who can count change.  And maybe that’s true-the place wants them, but can’t always find them.  So it needs to hone in more on what the real accomplishment is: is it accurate change that’s handed to the customer quickly?  Do you need to crank in the behavior involved ( "employee calculates" versus "employee uses a tool" )? Figuring out what results matter, so you can work on delivering them, is ultimately what work is about.  It’s easy to latch onto behavior, because it’s usually observable and seems obvious.  As Robert Mager says, people really oughta wanna do this.  I think accomplishment is a better guide, though it does require you to question assumptions and perhaps discard predispositions. Change-it isn’t easy.  Take it from a guy who once said to a customer, "I’m sorry, I don’t have change for a ten, but I do have change for a twelve."   Bonus Feature: the Count Up Twice method for making change This example uses a small cash purchase, such as a fast-food meal, for which the customer is paying in cash, with one or more bills totaling more than the price of the meal. State the amount of the sale.  ("That comes to $7.32.") Accept the customer’s payment. Check the payment and state the amount.   ("Out of twenty dollars.") Set the payment down without putting it into the individual register spaces. Make change by counting up to yourself from the amount of the sale as you remove money from the register. That’s $7.32… 33… 34… 35… 7.40… 45… 50… 7.75… 8… 9… 10… $20.00. Count the change again for the customer, starting with the amount of the sale. Give the customer each coin and bill as you work toward the amount tendered.  Say the amounts out loud. That’s $7.32… 33… 34… 35… 7.40… 45… 50... 7.75… 8 … 9… 10… $20.00. Thank the customer. As the customer leaves, put the payment into the proper cash register spaces. Note that I haven’t spelled out the rule of thumb that you should move to the next coin or bill size when the total so far allows you to. And I haven’t addressed complications like what to do if the customer offers bills and coins as payment ($10.50 for that $7.32 meal).  Nor have I address cash-register use, underpayment, or attempts by tricksters to trip up the cashier in mid-count.   CC-licensed images: Cash register keys by zizzybaloobah. Generic text by Yongho Kim.

In my Building Job Aids workshop (presented last Tuesday at DevLearn 2015), participants analyze multiple case studies, applying techniques and using job aids to, well, build job aids. Among the skills they practice are the ability to choose the right type of job aid for a task, and the ability to use that type effectively. There’s a lot of thinking and writing: I make an effort to avoid explaining much before an exercise. Instead, there’s a minimal introduction, with a lot of what would have been explained turned into a print resource to be consulted as needed. One potential downside is that especially an hour or so after lunch, thinking and writing are conducive to dozing off. At the same time, my assumption was that participants would want and need additional practice on relevant examples. How could I give someone the chance to assess different job aids and rate their effectiveness? Did she think the samples would produce the desired result? How did they align with ideas in our workshop? The challenge wasn’t so much finding the examples as structuring the evaluation. The tradeoffs I saw (or believe now that I saw): Time constraints Relevance My desire for multiple elements in a rating system My desire for a simple, overall total Then the format presented itself in three words: I liked this title so much, I was determined to use it. But I’ve learned not to be literal about this kind of borrowing. What  makes Jeopardy!-style games in training a dumb idea (even a counterproductive one) so often is not (necessarily) Jeopardy! itself. It’s the mismatch between the content and a format best suited to recalling isolated facts. Some characteristics of dog shows that I thought suited my goals: I had widely different types of job aids, like the different dog breeds. I had limited time, which at least for me was like the dog-judging segment where the trainer fast-walks the dog in a set pattern before the judge. Plus judging. That’s where I had the most trouble.  How to get multiple points, an overall total per judge, and a logistically sane process? I started with a three item scale, rating each job aid on its fit (is this a good job aid for this kind of task?), its function (is it likely to produce the desired result?), and its format (how does it stack up against the job aid guidelines in the workshop). I could score each of those from 1 to 3, with an extra point thrown in for personal preference. No matter how I squinted, though, it looked like way too much math. Then I remembered the Apgar score - a quick assessment of a baby at birth. Five qualities like heart rate or respiration are each assigned a score of 0, 1, or 2. The total describes the baby’s physical condition on a scale of 0 - 10. So I came up with a five-point scale for Best In Show: Aptness: how well the job aid fit the task and the setting Payoff: how likely it’ll achieve the desired result Guidelines: how it fit with guidelines in general and for its particular type of job aid Appearance: overall effectiveness of the design Response: the judge’s own reaction to the job aid. As you can see, each item had a line for its score, with a box on top for the total. In the interest of time, I limited myself to six competitors. This was the score sheet: (Click to enlarge in a new window) Off to the show I was pretty sure I’d have a decent internet connection. I made a slide with links to my six examples. I explained the scoring, distributed the ballots, and showed each competitor for 30 - 60 seconds, with some contextual commentary as needed. If I’d had a large group, my plan was for each person to fold the completed ballot between the six boxes, so as to tear it into six individual sheets. I’d have had one person total the ballots for competitor A, one for B, and so on. My workshop group was small enough that I could divide a sheet of flipchart paper in six as Voting Headquarters. It was little trouble for me write down scores by candidate and then total them. How it went Best in Show was a success, both as a change of pace and as an exercise in judging job aids. It also broadened exposure: half the competitors were new; the other half had been seen only briefly, as examples, earlier in the day. An unexpected plus: everyone could see all the individual totals. One job aid received solid 10s except from one person who rated it a 7. Another participant said to her, "I want to know why you rated it a 7." The question was not a challenge but rather genuine interest in how another person applied the principles of the workshop. Aftermath Thomas the corgi, showing his best (with the kind permission of Jane Bozarth) I’m really pleased this went as well as it did. I’m thinking of ways to make it work better (one participant was confused by my instructions and rated on a scale of 1 to 3 rather than zero to 2). And if I have more time, I’ll have a follow-on exercise: Raise the Runt. The idea would be to see which job aid scored the lowest, and then talk about why and about how to improve it.  

I spent last week at DevLearn 2015, the eLearning Guild’s conference focusing on learning technology. Among my goals for attending: conducting a workshop on building job aids, finding ideas for supporting learning and improving performance, learning more about topics I don’t know much about, connecting with peers, and spending time with people energized about things that energize me. On one level, any half-decent professional conference is a kind of pep rally. It’s easy to levitate on the excitement. It’s great to hear engaging speakers and hash over their ideas afterward, especially with them. And at least for me, the company of smart people who are accomplishing impressive things helps me feel as though I can accomplish them, too. You can read virtual reams of ideas of how to prepare for a conference. DevLearn makes that pretty easy. The link above will lead you to descriptions of the pre-conference workshops, the co-located Adobe Summit, some 125 concurrent sessions… heck, just browse along the menu bar of the main page. How to turn the pep-rally buzz into personal motivation, though, especially when the event’s over and you’re schlepping through the airport on your way home? Revisiting the past One thing I did on the plane was to dig out the program guide - the day-by-day schedule. My first task was to note down the session number, title, and presenter for each event I attended. A session description from the DevLearn app For one thing, that’d make it much easier to retrieve further information on the handy DevLearn app. And recording these things in Evernote meant I could tag, search, and include links. As I worked through the schedule, I recognized my backup sessions as well. A conference is a nonstop series of choices.  I try always to have a Plan B session in case the Plan A one I choose doesn’t turn out to be what I was looking for. Even so, a wealth of options and the realities of distance mean that you can’t take in everything you’d like. I knew that with DevLearn’s mobile app, I’d have a source for materials shared by the presenters. I now had two lists: one for the sessions I’d attended, and a second one for those I didn’t see but wanted to know more about. Mapping the future This note-taking and note-revising triggered other thoughts: people I wanted to ask certain questions of, notions I didn’t want to lose, and topics I want to explore further. A third list emerged. Finally, I had a lot of notes from my workshop on job aids: things that went well, things I’d like to change, even an idea for a virtual follow-up, a way for the participants to keep in touch on the subject of job aids. One idea I may try to make that happen came from Tracy Parish’s session on using WordPress to deliver blended learning. Reflecting in the present This may have been among the best two hours I’ve spent on a plane, with the possible exception of the one time I got upgraded. I ended up with four separate notes (in Evernote, of course), along with the first draft of my last blog post. The topic wasn’t earth-shaking, but few of mine are. Writing the post was a renewal of good practice for me: being more conscious about what I do, what I’d like to do, and the gap between those things. I got far more out of my time in Las Vegas than I expected. I’ve thought a lot about how to sustain those benefits. Making these notes was a good start, and so has been the process of writing a couple of blog posts. I’m re-examining what I do, what I enjoy doing, and what I want to be doing in my career and my life over the next few years. In the short term, I have the session material to download, and some two dozen people (not counting presenters) whom I want to keep in better contact with. Dress for success I do have a day job to return to, with a fast-approaching deadline. I know from experience, though, that the material-reviewing and emails to contacts won’t happen without intention on my part. The best professional contacts, I think, are free exchanges, and almost always they include something of the personal. At DevLearn, keynoter Adam Savage talked about his fondness for costumes and how it led to jumping off a building, into a dumpster, dressed like Neo from The Matrix. That’s a bit more colorful than my choice for a workplace Halloween celebration. My immediate team - or those who were pumped up for the holiday - had the idea of being Game of Thrones characters. That didn’t really appeal to me, but the good interaction I have with them did, and so I managed to play along while letting my personality come through: And now, DevLearn’s over. Winter, as they say, is coming (except in the casino, where they don’t allow weather). Still, that means spring is coming as well, and summer after it. As the next few months roll along, I want to be rolling down a conscious path. DevLearn’s helped me map out a route.

Jay Cross died last Friday. Most people who’ll see this post know of Jay already through his books, his many-fold online posts, Twitter, his Facebook stream or some other channel he’d try out. I never met Jay in person, but about ten years ago, I signed up for an online "unworkshop" he was offering, so I could learn more about things like blogs, feeds, and what people were calling Web 2.0 tools. The unworkshop was a bit messy and bumpy. At times I found it frustrating, and at times I think Jay himself was puzzled by the reactions of some of the participants. He and I had a few side discussions about that, and I was impressed by his receptivity and willingness to at consider points of view different from his own. Prior to the unworkshop, I’d known a little about blogs but didn’t see how they’d relate to me. Jay had each participant start what I now think of as a sandbox blog - just a little place to mess around - to try things out for ourselves, to learn by doing. Most were as you’d expect tentative, because most participants hadn’t had blogged before and weren’t sure what they write (or how they’d manage what they’d written). Even so, this activity got me thinking and free-associating about my preconceived notions. As a result, next month Dave’s Whiteboard hits its tenth anniversary. That may have happened eventually, but it happened when it did because I’d met Jay Cross. (I first wrote "virtually met," but that marks a bigger divide than I want to have. I absolutely believe face-to-face meeting is ideal, but I’m pretty sure that the way Jay connected across time zones and distance wasn’t too far removed from the way he’d connect across a table.) Here’s just an example of the kind of thinking Jay was doing as recently as last week. The image links to his Internet Time Blog.  

On several projects lately, I don’t know what I’m doing. Or at least what I’m doing next. A way to cope is to ask someone who seems to know more. I’m lucky in having smart colleagues at work who will not only share what they know, but will work with me to reshape that knowledge so I have a better understanding. I’m lucky professionally as well, because I have people I can and do consult with on issues apart from my everyday job. CC-licensed image from PublicDomainPictures Sometimes, though, I’m not quite ready to do that asking. Usually that’s because of the particular type of don’t-know I’m experiencing.  Either I don’t know what (as in what to ask, or what’s the difficulty, or what’s the domain), or I don’t know how (to take the next step, to choose the right option, to switch points of view). To that end, in a nod to the Working Out Loud concept, I’ve been making what I think of as Talk To Myself notes. (The TTM nickname just came to me, and I like it enough that it’ll become a tag in Evernote.) The idea is that for a specific project or domain, I write down what it is I can’t figure out or what I want to know. This is hardly an earthshaking idea, but it’s a concrete one. The effort to form a question, even if I’m not good at forming one for the topic at hand, gets me to run through what I do know, and I think primes me to think more expansively. Here are some examples: Sibelius First I’ve written about this music-composition software here and here. I got it so I could scan choral sheet music and produce audio files — especially for the tenor, since that’s what I sing. I think I’m at the "relatively good apprentice" level with Sibelius. I can handle basic tasks pretty well, and I’ve developed some good-enough workarounds. CC-licensed image by FNeumann One side effect is that I’m more aware of things I don’t know how to do but want to. So onto the TTM note go thoughts like these: How can I add a blank page on the end of a score so I can add text there — like block lyrics, or background notes, or even a pronunciation guide for Gaelic? Can I export the melody for just a portion of the piece (say, bars 12 - 24 for the tenors)? Is there an easy way to change the instrument for a given line? So far I only know how to add a new staff for a new instrument, then copy the notes from an existing instrument, then delete the staff they were copied from. That seems… kludgy. Forums in WordPress As a follow-up to my Building Job Aids workshop last month, I wanted to learn how to create a private online community for interested workshop grads — a place where they might share how they apply what they learned, and maybe even do some show-and-tell in a safe space. At DevLearn I heard Tracy Parish talk about how she did something similar, and I got some ideas from her. This is one of those don’t-quite-know-what situations for me. Through trial and error, I’ve installed plugins to enable forums (threaded discussions) but I still feel I lack understanding. Talk To Myself in this case means repeating questions till they make sense, at least to me. Do I have to have open registration? If I do, can I keep out the obvious spambots? What should be recording the registration (if anything)? Do I need some kind of sign-up form, and if so, where does the signing-up go? At a broader level, what’s the flow from inviting someone to that person’s reading and posting in a forum? At work, a practice database So many core corporate systems have no way for people to safely learn and practice how to use those systems. A rich, low-risk environment like Amtrak’s training trains will support and encourage learning in a thousand different ways. We have such an environment for a key system at work-but it hasn’t been used much, and the documentation I can find is sketchy. So I’m making Talk To Myself notes here, too. This is a tougher area because it involves a lot of database security and management. Borrowing from advice I received from a graphic artist, I’m framing these questions in terms of what I want to accomplish rather than how I think I should go about getting that accomplishment. For example, I don’t know the steps or the stakeholders or the timeframes needed to copy data from another environment into this practice one. I don’t know how (or if) it’s possible to search for certain types of data in the practice database. I’m pretty sure I need a conversation with one of my IT contacts — but that conversation with her will go much better because I’ve spent time Talking To Myself… and taking notes.