I came across this post on "The mythical man-month" (referring to a unit of labour) through twitter (via @finiteattention) and it really hit home. There has been a lot of complaining and hand-wringing and head-banging about the ECHOES project having grown completely out of control in a number of ways, and though self-labelled hacker-at-large Dhanji R. Prasanna wrote this post about a Google effort, it could easily have been written about all of us on ECHOES (except for the part about massive server traffic). For added fun, ECHOES also had the issue of the workers being physically in many different locations!
I would like to quote a few especially pertinent passages here:
"First, there was the dreaded endless meeting--they lasted for hours with very little being decided. Then, you started having to push people to provide...code changes that you desperately needed for your feature but that they had little to no interest in beyond the academic.
My style is to ask politely and then when I realize nothing is going to be done, to do it myself. This...does NOT work in large teams. There is simply too much system complexity for this to scale as a solution. Instead of shaving one Yak, you're shaving the entire Yak pen at the Zoo, and pretty soon traveling to Tibet to shave foreign Yaks you've never seen before and whose barbering you know little about."
So true. I'm laughing at that to keep from crying about it! Or how about this next quote? Replace "programmer" and "hacker" with "researcher" and you definitely have ECHOES again.
"And this is the essential broader point--as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria."
I agree with the author that that really IS the key point about large teams-- they kill enthusiasm. It is impossible to congratulate yourself or your colleagues about any success because it took so miserably long to get there (and has likely created a wealthy of bad feeling and OTHER problems along the way). A success doesn't feel like a success any more. ON a bad day, I find it doesn't even feel like it was worth the effort to get there at all. Researchers and other people working in teams talk about "project politics" for a reason. There is not just because of the interpersonal issues that often get the label of being politics, but also the sense of protracted negotiations, constant friction, and people fighting their own disciplinary corner to the extent that they may lose sight of broader objectives.
When mini-teams are constantly barking "Fix this now! Turn attention level up to 11!" at other mini-teams, it seriously wears people down. Like in the human body, existing in a state of constant emergency contributes to the emergence of stress-related diseases (See Robert Sapolsky's excellent and entertaining book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers). For large teams, this takes the form of constricted communication channels, attacks of angry rhetoric, and dampened enthusiasm.
All of that said.... the author is also right when he writes of the potent blend of frustration and passion that makes such a team and project compelling and unforgettable. It's true, I totally get it. You look back fondly at the complete madness and the colleagues upon whom you wished painful deaths as you slaved away late at night, trying to fix problems and finish documents. I don't know why this should be so, as it seems like a completely insane and unreasonable way to feel about anything that has caused so much stress (for everyone!). Maybe it is some kind of cognitive dissonance reduction strategy? On the other hand, maybe it's not, I have used that term incorrectly, and Leon Festinger is now rolling over in his grave.
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Monday, 19 September 2011
General reflections on the inaugural Turing Festival, Edinburgh
It is early on a Sunday morning at the end of August and most of the chairs upstairs at the Surgeon's Hall are empty. The repeated announcements that the last day of the Turing Festival was a sell-out suggest that, for many, late-night Fringe festival revelry was a more powerful draw than getting up for a third day of talks. I hoped that this third day of the festival would be more in the spirit of an amazing, geeky show-and-tell than the commercially-oriented programme of the first two days (which I had chosen not to attend out of equal parts disinterest and distaste for incessant start-up and commercialisation hype).
As the first speaker got started, I settled myself in with the hope of being excited and inspired by people doing innovative work. Ideally I would come away with some “ah-ha!” moments that I might apply to my own area of research, which is in multi-modal technologies for children with autism. Perhaps I might also get ideas for new ways to approach dissemination and public engagement. In any case, I wanted names to follow, links to click, food for thought. I had been happy to agree to provide some reflections on the event for the Interconnect newsletter,[1] and had some key questions jotted down in my notebook to guide my listening. Unfortunately, almost every single question remained unanswered at the end of the day.
While almost every speaker was passionate and knowledgeable, giving the audience plenty of food for thought and links to click, even talks in the same section of the programme felt entirely self-contained. There was little common ground between speakers, and little interaction with the audience. This audience was visibly varied and, from their questions, seemed to hail from many different disciplines and career trajectories. Their ages varied from postgrads to pensioners, and there was a better gender balance than I expected (about 1/3rd were women). Doubtless, the event might have been more dynamic if the audience were allowed more chances to interact with the speakers and content. Instead, there was a furious stream of #tfest tweets throughout the day to give some insight into how the politely applauding audience was really reacting. As I only got myself a “research Twitter” this summer (@a_m_alcorn0131), it was the first time I had attended an event that was being “live tweeted” as it happened. It was fascinating and frankly addictive[2] to be having a silent real-time conversation with the other audience members through the magic of smartphones and hashtags, and to see what complete strangers thought was most noteworthy about the presentations. Their tweets ranged from tweeting pithy direct quotes from David Britton, Tom Chatfield, and David McCandless, to arguing with Fraser Speirs over ipads in classrooms to the broad consensus that if only the Persuasion API speakers would stop giving us a boring and confused rehash of undergraduate social psychology, we could all go get some lunch.
As the first speaker got started, I settled myself in with the hope of being excited and inspired by people doing innovative work. Ideally I would come away with some “ah-ha!” moments that I might apply to my own area of research, which is in multi-modal technologies for children with autism. Perhaps I might also get ideas for new ways to approach dissemination and public engagement. In any case, I wanted names to follow, links to click, food for thought. I had been happy to agree to provide some reflections on the event for the Interconnect newsletter,[1] and had some key questions jotted down in my notebook to guide my listening. Unfortunately, almost every single question remained unanswered at the end of the day.
While almost every speaker was passionate and knowledgeable, giving the audience plenty of food for thought and links to click, even talks in the same section of the programme felt entirely self-contained. There was little common ground between speakers, and little interaction with the audience. This audience was visibly varied and, from their questions, seemed to hail from many different disciplines and career trajectories. Their ages varied from postgrads to pensioners, and there was a better gender balance than I expected (about 1/3rd were women). Doubtless, the event might have been more dynamic if the audience were allowed more chances to interact with the speakers and content. Instead, there was a furious stream of #tfest tweets throughout the day to give some insight into how the politely applauding audience was really reacting. As I only got myself a “research Twitter” this summer (@a_m_alcorn0131), it was the first time I had attended an event that was being “live tweeted” as it happened. It was fascinating and frankly addictive[2] to be having a silent real-time conversation with the other audience members through the magic of smartphones and hashtags, and to see what complete strangers thought was most noteworthy about the presentations. Their tweets ranged from tweeting pithy direct quotes from David Britton, Tom Chatfield, and David McCandless, to arguing with Fraser Speirs over ipads in classrooms to the broad consensus that if only the Persuasion API speakers would stop giving us a boring and confused rehash of undergraduate social psychology, we could all go get some lunch.
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| By the afternoon, the audience had filled in considerably for Tom Chatfield and David McCandless's talks. Apparently they have greater name recognition than many of the other speakers. |
Overall, the quality and impact of the Sunday programme suffered considerably because it lacked cohesion and clear themes. Catchy but vague session titles like “Open Innovation at the Bleeding Edge” had little to do with the speakers' content. For example, the “Open Government” section of the programme might have been better titled something about personal data management. Although the speakers made interesting points about how much of administrative systems and data management are difficult to reform and streamline because they are indirectly—even accidentally--specified by other legislation, they were not government representatives. They promoted possible options for simplifying data management for both the government and citizens, but gave no information on what the government is actually doing (if anything) and what kind of results they aimed to achieve. These speakers might have been much more informative in chaired panel discussions on the title topics than they were individually, as was the case for most of the speakers all day. Only a few talks successfully stood alone--notably Sita Popat on robotics/dance, David McCandless on data journalism, and David Britton on the Large Hadron Collider—and seemed to have as their goal the celebration of innovations and collaborations which I had expected when signing up for the Turing Festival.
Dr. Sita Popat's talk on “Digital Bodies and Dancing Partners” succeeded especially well accessibly presenting fresh, interdisciplinary, and novel technology. Trained as a dancer, Dr. Popat entered academia after an injury and works at the intersection of dance, choreography, robotics, and performance. One video sequence showed a robotic arm as a dancing partner, which analysed a dancers’ movement and responded to its qualities (matching, opposing, following, etc.) to create a true impression of dancing with the human partner. Perhaps the most striking video examples showed how dancers have contributed to robotics research: engineers drawing madly as a dancer lay on the floor, moving her stiff limbs in an effort to imitate and extend the movements of a large insect-like robot beside her. The goal? To find out if the robot could use its legs in such a way as to stand. The exercise had been very successful, showing the engineers that their existing design was perhaps capable of much more than it had first appeared. Unfortunately, Dr. Popat said very little about how she arrived at (or created) this unusual field, and less about her personal views on these projects or involvement in science/technology more generally.
Dr. Sita Popat's talk on “Digital Bodies and Dancing Partners” succeeded especially well accessibly presenting fresh, interdisciplinary, and novel technology. Trained as a dancer, Dr. Popat entered academia after an injury and works at the intersection of dance, choreography, robotics, and performance. One video sequence showed a robotic arm as a dancing partner, which analysed a dancers’ movement and responded to its qualities (matching, opposing, following, etc.) to create a true impression of dancing with the human partner. Perhaps the most striking video examples showed how dancers have contributed to robotics research: engineers drawing madly as a dancer lay on the floor, moving her stiff limbs in an effort to imitate and extend the movements of a large insect-like robot beside her. The goal? To find out if the robot could use its legs in such a way as to stand. The exercise had been very successful, showing the engineers that their existing design was perhaps capable of much more than it had first appeared. Unfortunately, Dr. Popat said very little about how she arrived at (or created) this unusual field, and less about her personal views on these projects or involvement in science/technology more generally.
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| Dr. Sita Popat describes how dancers have informed research into the potential movements for Zephyr, a stiff-legged and insect-like robot. |
This idea of the STEM disciplines turning to the arts and humanities to inform their work was later continued persuasively by David McCandless, former TED-talker and self-professed data journalist of www.informationisbeautiful.net. His colourful and beautifully designed graphics and animations relate datasets to one another, so as to illustrate the differences in government spending in various areas, national debts, the relative size of countries’ armies, and other numbers that are usually presented in isolation from one another. This focus on the visual is not incidental, but the key to making sizes and relationships tangible and thought-provoking in a way that more traditional data presentations often do not. As McCandless noted, “Design is a powerful way to create trust and authority.” It is clear that regardless of your precise field or role, grasping how to deliver data in this way is an invaluable asset for communicating with colleagues, students, investors or the general public.
As a first-time event, Sunday’s Turing Festival had high points of insight, inspiration and humour, but was ultimately dragged down by uneven pacing and its complete lack of cohesion. Festival organisers, there are trade-offs between trying to have something for everyone and trying to have everything for a much narrower audience. For subsequent go-rounds, I hope that the organisers will either have a clearer and more obvious target audience, or will group (and name!) their content intelligently so that some sections are more clearly focused on development and commercialisation, public sector and non-profit groups, arts-related work, more “pure” research/science... etc. Subtitling your event “Edinburgh International Technology Festival” is so broad as to be in danger of foolishness: There is no way that everyone’s expectations can be met and interests can be catered for, unless you grow to be as big as the Edinburgh Science Festival. And that already has a lot of technology-related events.
As a first-time event, Sunday’s Turing Festival had high points of insight, inspiration and humour, but was ultimately dragged down by uneven pacing and its complete lack of cohesion. Festival organisers, there are trade-offs between trying to have something for everyone and trying to have everything for a much narrower audience. For subsequent go-rounds, I hope that the organisers will either have a clearer and more obvious target audience, or will group (and name!) their content intelligently so that some sections are more clearly focused on development and commercialisation, public sector and non-profit groups, arts-related work, more “pure” research/science... etc. Subtitling your event “Edinburgh International Technology Festival” is so broad as to be in danger of foolishness: There is no way that everyone’s expectations can be met and interests can be catered for, unless you grow to be as big as the Edinburgh Science Festival. And that already has a lot of technology-related events.
[1] Interconnect is an organisation for women in Scotland who are studying and working in STEM subjects. They put out a request on Twitter for someone to provide feedback about the Turing Festival event and I said I was happy to do so. Stay tuned to hear what happens to this piece and if it gets published!
[2] This second layer of the event was so addictive, in fact, that when my cell phone started dying I walked all the way across town on the lunch break in order to get my charger. In the rain! True story.
Thursday, 15 September 2011
Commonplace books, blogs, and collected texts
I was delighted to click over to this short piece earlier today, which described a prevalent feature in the intellectual life of the enlightenment era: the commonplace book. This book was not "commonplace" as in ordinary, but the physical record of a practice known as commonplacing, in which readers copied out striking or important passages of work that they read, ideas, comments, and eventually, insights built up from this whole corpus of material. In a sense, it is engagement through appropriation into one's own personal corpus.
I think that I (and most actively reading, actively writing people that I know) engage in this process to some extent. Aside from hoarding journal paper printouts and PDFs, we rip out interesting magazine articles, may tape up inspirational or grounding quotes over our desks, and maybe write out or photocopy passages as well. Most of us also likely own many books which--perhaps unlike the enlightenment era thinkers--we view as disposable enough to mark up aggressively without confining ourselves to marginalia.
A quick googling of "commonplacing" directed me to a short article from the University of Chicago Library. Besides some pictures of commonplace books, it makes the important note that "While the commonplace book allowed readers to personalize their reading by making it useful, this process of textual engagement was also highly prescribed, "common" in the sense that it filtered one's reading through social norms that determined what was textually significant and what not." What I would be very interested to know is to what extent this modern process of appropriation and accrual is also mediated by social norms about textual significance. For example, might it feel embarrassing to copy out some lines from a paperback romance novel (however meaningful they were to you), in a way it would probably NOT be embarrassing to write down lines from Martin Luther King? What about jotting down passages from Harry Potter, a series that is very important to me and many others around the world? Despite its emotional resonance and cultural embeddedness, I think most of us would have a unspoken sense that Harry Potter is somehow "less significant" in terms of literary merit and ideas contained than are works in the established literary canon...regardless of whether we find this hierarchy of values personally true or not.
Questions of significance aside, I think that this practice of collecting, digesting, and re-arranging bits of text is very important for solidifying the ideas you have already encountered and preparing the ground for new ones to sprout. I would argue that this practice is perhaps even more important in the sciences than in the humanities, partly because it is so damn easy to waltz through a dense or technical text without absorbing very much of it. And then, you can't later find that key passage that you remember as phrasing a difficult concept so perfectly... Despite my trying to reduce the amazing quantity of paperwork that I drag around with me, I have gone back to keeping small notebooks full of passages and quotations for just this reason. I am sifting out the pieces that I think are useful to me as ideas, independently of the pressing pieces of project work that happens to be in front of me today.
I disagree with the author of the piece in the first link ("Bring Commonplacing Back to Education") that a blog is the modern-day commonplace book. To be frank, that kind of aggregation of readings and thoughts had been my initial intent for this blog. However, I am dismayed to find that others cannot read my mind and discern my intent in a giant posted list of all the links I read today. While there is nothing to prevent me from posting this, it seems unsatisfying and frankly a bit pointless. A blog is generally written for an audience. While each individual post may be small, there is an expectation that it will convey some comprehensible message; random fragments of thought are seen as seen as hurried or thoughtless as best, and deliberately pretentious at worst. The modern commonplace book in the form of personal reading journal or research journal or folder of clippings has the creator/curator as its only audience-- no justification is necessary for the inclusion (or exclusion!) of certain content. Ideas do not need to be fully formed, and can be annotated directly onto existing material as the writer sees fit. I think that a strength of this tool is its privateness and lack of audience, especially in higher education (or any realm, really) where there is continuous pressure to crank out ideas and arguments. Even worse, there is often enforced compartmentalisation of ideas with little demand for broader synthesis. Out of the spotlight, understanding has a chance to evolve at its own pace and crossbreed between genres as it will. Inviting public commentary on these processes, as possible in a blog, seems only to be replicating the type of environment to which the author hoped that the virtual commonplace book would be an antidote.
In conclusion, I now have a clearer picture of what I had already suspected: for peace of mind and productivity, it is wisest not to conflate this public blog with the private role of my scribbly, tatty notebook and its slips of paper!
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Heriot Watt named Scottish University of the Year for 2011/2012
My current employer, Heriot Watt University, was recently named Scottish University of the Year for 2011/2012. Check out the university press release here.
I think my view of HW is always heavily coloured by having spent time at Edinburgh University first—it is certainly smaller in terms of the number of people/the name recognition, and it can be easy to forget that it has many first-rate people doing influential work (in my own main area of technology-enhanced learning, I’d like to give a shout-out here to Ruth Aylett and Judy Robertson, both of whom I greatly admire). Unfortunately, it is impossible to forget that it is dominated by extremely unfortunate 1960’s architecture.
Lacking the (sometimes totally undeserved!) name value of the University of Edinburgh, HW is working hard to be The Little University that Could. In several subjects the most recent university rankings have placed them very close to the top in all of the UK (I think chemistry is one of those). Furthermore, they are aggressively expanding their international presence, with a campus in Dubai and another just confirmed to begin construction at the invitation of the Malaysian government.
So, congratulations from me to HW and to all the people who are helping to make it successful in these times of very tough funding—the students keep coming, and so do the researchdollars pounds/euros!
I think my view of HW is always heavily coloured by having spent time at Edinburgh University first—it is certainly smaller in terms of the number of people/the name recognition, and it can be easy to forget that it has many first-rate people doing influential work (in my own main area of technology-enhanced learning, I’d like to give a shout-out here to Ruth Aylett and Judy Robertson, both of whom I greatly admire). Unfortunately, it is impossible to forget that it is dominated by extremely unfortunate 1960’s architecture.
Lacking the (sometimes totally undeserved!) name value of the University of Edinburgh, HW is working hard to be The Little University that Could. In several subjects the most recent university rankings have placed them very close to the top in all of the UK (I think chemistry is one of those). Furthermore, they are aggressively expanding their international presence, with a campus in Dubai and another just confirmed to begin construction at the invitation of the Malaysian government.
So, congratulations from me to HW and to all the people who are helping to make it successful in these times of very tough funding—the students keep coming, and so do the research
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Upcoming events: September-October 2011
I'm going to be attending all kinds of exciting stuff this fall semester! Even though I'm not officially in school (Uni, whatever), I can still work on getting edumacated. This is not to say that I don't learn anything the rest of the time-- I read academic papers and reference books for work just about every week, and have the highly illuminating the hands-on experiences of working with children + technology, and playing project politics.
Tomorrow, September 8th: SCERTS framework follow-up day
(University of Birmingham)
I am a big fan of the SCERTS framework for autism intervention, having gone to the big three-day training session last September with one of the SCERTS founders and authors, Emily Rubin, and then having used elements of SCERTS within the ECHOES project. Emily Rubin will also be leading this day, with many of the same attendees from last time. The goal is for people to present examples of using SCERTS in practice and to get feedback. ECHOES has submitted some video/written material for Emily to view and comment on later, at the end of the day. I am a bit nervous, as she will look at the ECHOES video coding scheme (which we have based on the assessment process and behavioural goals in SCERTS). As I have written almost the entirety of that document, I feel like I am somewhat on the line here-- I really hope she approves!
A few words describing SCERTS, excerpted from my intro to the video coding document:
Friday, September 9th: One-day conference on Autism Education
(University of Birmingham)
From the official conference materials: "This conference on autism and education brings together leading experts from the UK and the USA who will present some of the latest developments in education research and practice. The particular focus of this event will be to showcase and discuss some of the critical ways in which children with autism can be assessed in school settings and how these assessments of progress can be related to meaningful targets, particularly for adult life."
I am hoping to further inform one of my still-nebulous PhD project ideas. Specifically, finding out about good resources and strategies for embedding technology and other intervention programmes into classroom practice. "Embedding" technology in educational practice is a current big topic in the AIED (artificial intelligence in education) community, partly because it has been realised that the most successful project are those which are embedded, and also because that community is becoming savvier to what the education research people have known all along: teachers are an invaluable research resource in terms of contributing to what you build, and how, not just what to do with it now it's finished. Anyway, I digress.
October 12th, SICSA Workshop for Technology on Health & Wellbeing
Glasgow Caledonian University
I don't know as much about this event as yet, but I will say that I am not presenting anything, and I don't think anyone else from ECHOES will be either. However, it still might be useful/informative to me so I am happy to go along and be the attentive audience! Health technology seems like it will be increasingly important in the future, especially as the population ages. I also think it is likely to mutate significantly, along with other changes in the fields of pervasive, ubiquitous and mobile computing in increasingly "smart" environments.
Tomorrow, September 8th: SCERTS framework follow-up day
(University of Birmingham)
I am a big fan of the SCERTS framework for autism intervention, having gone to the big three-day training session last September with one of the SCERTS founders and authors, Emily Rubin, and then having used elements of SCERTS within the ECHOES project. Emily Rubin will also be leading this day, with many of the same attendees from last time. The goal is for people to present examples of using SCERTS in practice and to get feedback. ECHOES has submitted some video/written material for Emily to view and comment on later, at the end of the day. I am a bit nervous, as she will look at the ECHOES video coding scheme (which we have based on the assessment process and behavioural goals in SCERTS). As I have written almost the entirety of that document, I feel like I am somewhat on the line here-- I really hope she approves!
A few words describing SCERTS, excerpted from my intro to the video coding document:
SCERTS is most accurately called a framework rather than an intervention programme in its own right, because it is compatible with a range of other approaches and interventions already in use with people on the autism spectrum, such as TEACCH (Schopler & Mesibov, 1995), the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS, Bondy & Frost 1994), and many others.
SCERTS stands for Social Communication, Emotional Regulation, and Transactional support, the three main areas on which it focuses for helping children to achieve social and communicative competence, and for helping social partners (e.g. teachers, parents, peers) to support the child in achieving this competence. The SCERTS curriculum targets the “core deficits” of autism which are usually an impediment to social and communicative competence by setting specific, developmentally appropriate goals. These may be both educational goals, and identifying transactional supports (changes to child’s environment, and to social partners’ interactions) which help the child to achieve the target goals. For a summary of some of the main goals/targeted areas in the SCERTS framework, see Table 1, reproduced from a paper by Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, and Laurent (2003). The curriculum is designed to be administered by a team across all of the child’s usual settings—not only the child’s teacher and other school staff, but family members and even peers. The entire team ideally uses the same methods for supporting and communicating with the child, and is aware of that child’s behavioural goals and progress toward them.
(University of Birmingham)
From the official conference materials: "This conference on autism and education brings together leading experts from the UK and the USA who will present some of the latest developments in education research and practice. The particular focus of this event will be to showcase and discuss some of the critical ways in which children with autism can be assessed in school settings and how these assessments of progress can be related to meaningful targets, particularly for adult life."
I am hoping to further inform one of my still-nebulous PhD project ideas. Specifically, finding out about good resources and strategies for embedding technology and other intervention programmes into classroom practice. "Embedding" technology in educational practice is a current big topic in the AIED (artificial intelligence in education) community, partly because it has been realised that the most successful project are those which are embedded, and also because that community is becoming savvier to what the education research people have known all along: teachers are an invaluable research resource in terms of contributing to what you build, and how, not just what to do with it now it's finished. Anyway, I digress.
October 12th, SICSA Workshop for Technology on Health & Wellbeing
Glasgow Caledonian University
I don't know as much about this event as yet, but I will say that I am not presenting anything, and I don't think anyone else from ECHOES will be either. However, it still might be useful/informative to me so I am happy to go along and be the attentive audience! Health technology seems like it will be increasingly important in the future, especially as the population ages. I also think it is likely to mutate significantly, along with other changes in the fields of pervasive, ubiquitous and mobile computing in increasingly "smart" environments.
Monday, 29 August 2011
Visiting the National Museum of Scotland, reflections on digital displays
Two weekends ago, I went to have a look round the newly revamped National Museum of Scotland (NMS) with a visiting friend and my S.O. We didn’t have a lot of time, so hit a few highlights in the Scottish history part of the museum (relatively new, not recently remodelled) and then wandered through the graceful Victorian atrium down toward the new animal hall at the far end. A combination of weekend, festival, and probably school being out for the summer meant that this central space had the general ambience of an airport terminal, complete with a seemingly random selection of large artefacts displayed completely out of context. On a quieter day, it might seem more serene and even cathedral-like, illuminated from above. Artefacts aside, it made me genuinely happy to see the museum so busy. There were clearly plenty of foreign tourists, but I also heard a range of solidly Scottish accents all over the building. I hope that the museum can keep up this momentum, and will succeed in bringing local visitors back again and again as exhibits change and children grow, rather than simply attracting people in for a look-see now that the long remodel is finally finished.
The animal hall was obviously particularly popular, and inspired an air of wonder and fantasy due in no small part to the model Tyrannosaurus skeleton inside the entrance, and the sharks, dolphins, hippopotamus, and other animals swimming playfully through the air several stories up. Balconies wrapped around this central space with additional exhibits, both digital and carbon-based. I laud the curators for figuring out ways to display taxidermied and model animals (or the skeletons of their extinct relatives) in ways that illuminated relationships between them or illustrated ecosystems, adaptations, and other points. I will digress here to say that the exact OPPOSITE of this approach would be the African Hall in the newly re-built (and otherwise state-of-the art) California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which appears to have been kept as a creepy time capsule in its same room while the rest of the museum was re-built around it. Their website describes the 1934 dioramas as “majestic” but I think they mean night-mare inducing (seriously, as a child I found them very upsetting). Anyway!
Leaving the animal hall by an upper floor, we walked into the World Cultures section of the museum. Generations of Scots brought back a selection of curiosities that have been grouped by a combination of geography and themes, mostly sensitively. Unfortunately, in the sections I visited there was not enough material from any one culture to give a very comprehensive view. Perhaps I should say ‘fortunately’ as there are always so many questions about how explorers and colonisers acquired their cultural treasures in the first place!
Then, I saw it in the middle of the floor below: something to arouse my professional interest.
At first I thought what I was seeing was a touch screen interface being used by multiple people at the same time, apparently playing some kind of game about clothing and domestic artefacts that went with the surrounding “daily life” type exhibition. I was disappointed to watch further and find that it was 1. Not a touch screen, but apparently just a regular screen (or a projection, even) with buttons, and 2. That there were four stations, and multiple people standing at some of them. Some of the users seemed to be interacting because they knew each other (a family?), but this interaction was not mediated by the interface, and the person(s) at each station seemed to be using it fairly independently of one another.
I was very disappointed—what at first glance had seemed to be a very advanced interactive display was less advanced than I thought. However, even without going down to examine the content myself, I noticed one very positive thing: Most of the people who were using the interface when I began watching were still using the interface some minutes later when I walked on. At several stations, people were collaborating to use it (e.g. two children or parent/child). Every interactive museum display is in competition for the attention of the museum patrons—there is a lot of stuff in the room, some of it will be shinier, and an interface that is difficult to use is likely to be abandoned by the user immediately. I had never thought about this much before until listening to a talk at the Artificial Intelligence in Education conference this June, in Auckland. A researcher named H. Chad Lane was presenting work about tour guide and “coaching”virtual agents at the Boston Science Museum, and pointed out that this is very different than many other types of technology-enhanced learning because the museum visitor is free to walk away from the program at any time (besides being practically unknown in terms of age, prior knowledge, and other factors). Thus, it is very positive that the display at the NMS seemed to be holding its users’ attention over a period of time. They must be doing something right!
While I definitely sympathise with the decision to choose a simpler and perfectly sufficient technology over the most cutting-edge thing possible (probably a multi-touch table plus...bells and whistles? Not sure), I hope to see more museums pushing the boundaries of what can be done with an educational display. Particularly, displays where multiple people can interact at the same time without having defined “stations,” or where locating different content in different places meaningfully links to the content or layout of the exhibit. Better yet, there could be displays that encourage or even trick the users into interacting with each other :)
One station-less display that particularly impressed me was at The Settlement Museum 871 +/- 2, in Reykjavík (Iceland). This museum is fairly limited in size and for a very good reason: it is underground in the city centre, encompassing the actual foundations of an early settlement house and some outbuildings, and displaying the artefacts associated with the site. Additional materials, artistic renderings, and displays try to evoke the landscape and even sounds of the period. Some of the materials and animations from the museum are available online. Yes, there is an English option.
One of the displays was a large multi-touch table through which you could explore the “layers” of the house and other remains a few yards away. The house on the multi-touch table was oriented in the same way as the actual house, and you reached this table after having walked all around the walls. Thus, while standing at different parts of the table allowed you to access different content, there were not rigid stations and the content mapped directly to a space/physical experience. I spent a long time at the table--partly because I literally had the museum to myself on the day after Christmas and could stay there as long as I wanted—but the fact that I remember it so clearly almost two years later also speaks highly of its design, considering how many museums I visit! Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the multi-touch table display, not imagining that it would be of later use to me.
In conclusion, do give the National Museum of Scotland a visit if you are in town—the Scottish history exhibits (about which I have not written here) are especially good. I myself plan to go back to the museum as soon as I have another free afternoon. Also, please try the digital exhibits! For anyone else interested in touch-screen interfaces and technology-enhanced learning, also have a think about how we can keep pushing the boundaries of these interfaces to make them more interesting for visitors—and to provide useful information about what works and what doesn’t.
UPDATE! (September 14th, 2011)
Interesting article about museums using cutting edge technologies to enhance visitor experiences and take content outside of the physical museum and into other contexts. Check it out here.
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| Looking down at the Animal Hall from an upper floor |
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| The skeleton of a giant, extinct deer greets visitors at the doorway from the atrium into the animal hall |
Leaving the animal hall by an upper floor, we walked into the World Cultures section of the museum. Generations of Scots brought back a selection of curiosities that have been grouped by a combination of geography and themes, mostly sensitively. Unfortunately, in the sections I visited there was not enough material from any one culture to give a very comprehensive view. Perhaps I should say ‘fortunately’ as there are always so many questions about how explorers and colonisers acquired their cultural treasures in the first place!
Then, I saw it in the middle of the floor below: something to arouse my professional interest.
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| Display in the World Cultures section of the NMS |
At first I thought what I was seeing was a touch screen interface being used by multiple people at the same time, apparently playing some kind of game about clothing and domestic artefacts that went with the surrounding “daily life” type exhibition. I was disappointed to watch further and find that it was 1. Not a touch screen, but apparently just a regular screen (or a projection, even) with buttons, and 2. That there were four stations, and multiple people standing at some of them. Some of the users seemed to be interacting because they knew each other (a family?), but this interaction was not mediated by the interface, and the person(s) at each station seemed to be using it fairly independently of one another.
I was very disappointed—what at first glance had seemed to be a very advanced interactive display was less advanced than I thought. However, even without going down to examine the content myself, I noticed one very positive thing: Most of the people who were using the interface when I began watching were still using the interface some minutes later when I walked on. At several stations, people were collaborating to use it (e.g. two children or parent/child). Every interactive museum display is in competition for the attention of the museum patrons—there is a lot of stuff in the room, some of it will be shinier, and an interface that is difficult to use is likely to be abandoned by the user immediately. I had never thought about this much before until listening to a talk at the Artificial Intelligence in Education conference this June, in Auckland. A researcher named H. Chad Lane was presenting work about tour guide and “coaching”virtual agents at the Boston Science Museum, and pointed out that this is very different than many other types of technology-enhanced learning because the museum visitor is free to walk away from the program at any time (besides being practically unknown in terms of age, prior knowledge, and other factors). Thus, it is very positive that the display at the NMS seemed to be holding its users’ attention over a period of time. They must be doing something right!
While I definitely sympathise with the decision to choose a simpler and perfectly sufficient technology over the most cutting-edge thing possible (probably a multi-touch table plus...bells and whistles? Not sure), I hope to see more museums pushing the boundaries of what can be done with an educational display. Particularly, displays where multiple people can interact at the same time without having defined “stations,” or where locating different content in different places meaningfully links to the content or layout of the exhibit. Better yet, there could be displays that encourage or even trick the users into interacting with each other :)
One station-less display that particularly impressed me was at The Settlement Museum 871 +/- 2, in Reykjavík (Iceland). This museum is fairly limited in size and for a very good reason: it is underground in the city centre, encompassing the actual foundations of an early settlement house and some outbuildings, and displaying the artefacts associated with the site. Additional materials, artistic renderings, and displays try to evoke the landscape and even sounds of the period. Some of the materials and animations from the museum are available online. Yes, there is an English option.
 |
| This is one of my rather dark photographs of the archeological site around which the museum is based (an oval house with central hearth...can you see it? Photo taken from one end of the house). |
In conclusion, do give the National Museum of Scotland a visit if you are in town—the Scottish history exhibits (about which I have not written here) are especially good. I myself plan to go back to the museum as soon as I have another free afternoon. Also, please try the digital exhibits! For anyone else interested in touch-screen interfaces and technology-enhanced learning, also have a think about how we can keep pushing the boundaries of these interfaces to make them more interesting for visitors—and to provide useful information about what works and what doesn’t.
UPDATE! (September 14th, 2011)
Interesting article about museums using cutting edge technologies to enhance visitor experiences and take content outside of the physical museum and into other contexts. Check it out here.
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Questions for teaching, questions for engagement
As sort of a follow-on to the last post, I was alerted to the following short article via a science/pscyh/education poster on Twitter (@psychoBOBlogy has brought a lot of interesting articles to my attention!). It presents itself as questions to help guide teaching and create class engagement, but I think with a little tweaking they would also be very useful for guiding public engagement, at least in a transmission or collaboration activity. Some of these certainly sound very much like what my group ended up discussing during the Vitae workshop! Check it out:
Five Questions That Will Improve Your Teaching
Five Questions That Will Improve Your Teaching
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