When do your beliefs become knowledge?

I've been reading a lot of philosophy lately -- Kierkegaard and Dawkins, Lewis, Hume, Calvin and Augustine, you name it -- for a class I'm taking, as well as for my own enjoyment. One of the interesting things about philosophy is that it's a discipline that takes the understanding of understanding seriously. As a teacher, that's fascinating to me; has education -- specifically, the way we in 2009 are trying to educate -- really examined what knowledge is? Have educational systems considered what the wealth of literature says about knowledge, and responded to it responsibly?

[A few important insertions: I'm not supposing that to respond to philosophical ideas about knowledge, education needs to change. I am suggesting, though, that a responsible response entails understanding the arguments, and either adhering to them, or forming a sound counter-argument to explain abandoning them.]

Two theses in particular caught my attention. First, Thomas Reid makes this astounding statement (cited from Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays (1975), p. 275):

Another first principle is--That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious.

What does this say? It says that our natural senses don't tend to fail us. Now, I know, many of you are freaking out over this quote, especially in light of particle physics or molecular biology. And we can argue that over a good cup of coffee. But I will suggest that Reid is right in the macro-world.

I see a piano falling, I rightly assume several things:

1. It is indeed falling, and I am not instead rushing up toward it.

2. That piano is dangerous to be under, given that it's falling.

There are plenty of other observations, but you get the idea.

So why does this matter? Well, how much do we allow the learner's senses (and by senses, I don't mean "ears listening to 90 minutes of lecture") engage in a typical learning environment? How much do we allow the natural faculties to assert themselves, create knowledge, and then refine and provide context for the knowledge already gained?

I think it's an important question. I think Dan Meyer is a master at this (check out his blog for some amazing examples of using pictures to stimulate learning). How are you doing this? What effect on education would an increased (as in, significantly more than you're currently doing) amount of sensory learning create?

Let me know what you think. Oh, and as for my other philosophical quote that I think is important? More on that later this week...

Your brain really is forgetting... a LOT

I'm currently reading Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Dr. Sandra Aamodt and Dr. Sam Wang. The enormity of the title notwithstanding, I'm enjoying the book, and ran across this rather amazing quotation:

There is good evidence that we "erase" and "rewrite" our memories every time we call them, suggesting that if it were ever possible to erase specific content, playing it back first might be an essential component.

This is a staggering statement. Consider the implications: when you recall a memory, you are capable of - and prone to - rewriting that memory in some form. I find this particularly fascinating in terms of teaching in a spiral method, something I continue to find effective and even critical in highly technical topics.

Take memory management in any programming language. It's simply foolish to unload the truck on an unsuspecting learner, dumping out everything there is to know about memory management at one time, in one place, with little or no functional motivation. The better approach is to incrementally teach the topic, adding additional resolution, detail, and expansion only when new functionality is needed or additional understanding is required. In this way, you're catering to the learner: each piece of information you're unpacking is motivated by a need in that learner. This results in greater internalization of the information, and less information is categorized as "I don't really need this. I'll dump this."

But with the quote by Aamodt and Wang, there's another component at work here: earlier memories are potentially being rewritten as new learning takes place. This is intuitive, even: consider how often we mix up events that are very similar, but not the same. Have you eaten at Chuy's 10 times in the last month (I'm about there)? If so, I'd suspect you'll have a hard time distinguishing at which instance in 10 a certain conversation happened, especially without other mitigating details (a really close friend attended only one meal, or something particularly disastrous happened at another). Is it possible that the brain is trying to shove these similar events into one giant event, because we're recalling an earlier (similar) event, replaying it, and rewriting it with the new one?

What this seems to suggest -- and I grant that there's a lot of theorizing and speculation happening, but what else is Radar good for if not some provocative thought -- is that we must be extremely careful with context. When you recall an earlier mental model of something, and then augment that model, you may be rewriting the earlier model. In other words, you're not just adding to an in-place model, but in fact replacing an earlier model with a newer, expanded one. So what are you doing to ensure the foundational models stay intact? Are you repeating the earlier model, and adding resolution? Or are you just writing about the "new stuff" without regard for the existing material?

I think most textbooks and technical books continue to heap on, assuming that pre-existing models remain in place. Foundational concepts never die, these books would assert (if not implicitly, then by the manner in which they teach). But perhaps those concepts do die! Perhaps this is why you may be adept at releasing memory or allocating memory, but would flail about helplessly at explaining what's really going on. Is it possible that your original mental model has been overwritten, or even functionally replaced?

It's an interesting thought. Context becomes critical, not just as a reminder of pre-existing material, but actually to ensure that pre-existing material is not lost altogether.

C'mon teachers, you must have thoughts on this... let's hear them.

Ask... no, wait... TELL Tim

Yes, there he is... our glorious thought-leader, riding a jet ski. But Tim needs your help... seriously. Here's the problem:

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with Tim. He mentioned that he'd recently taken his first ride on a Jet Ski. Several torturous minutes later, he got off, still alive and capable of detecting faint signals. But his back was suffering... badly.

Tim, as Tim is prone to do, let the ski rental place know of his pains. The instructor/rental guy looked at Tim, and simply said, "Oh. You need to lean forward."

At this point in our conversation, Tim rolled his eyes, gave a half-wave of his hand, and said, "Oh, thanks. That would have been nice to know before I got on the ski." Obviously, if the instructor had told TIm to lean forward before he took on the Old Man of the Sea, Tim's back would have been saved a lot of hardship.

Or would it?

Along with all the other instruction Tim would have received, he'd have been told, "Oh, and be sure and lean forward." Would this have stuck with Tim? Would it have been held up in his brain as important as, say, "Keep a tight grip on the handlebars?" Would it have competed with, "Look here... this is the ignition key. Turn it to start, turn it again to stop."

Would simply telling Tim ahead of time to lean forward been enough to save Tim's back?

Better yet, how would you have prevented Tim's back pain? Here's the question, broken down for easy answering...

1. WHEN would you have told Tim, "Lean forward?"
2. HOW would you have told Tim?
3. Free response: what else would you have done/not done to ensure Tim got off the jet ski happy, healthy, and not hurting?

Come on... Tim's back is counting on you figuring out how humans learn... how best to communicate... and what our brain does with information that is important, but maybe non-obvious in application or significance.

Our brains are sort of... well... stupid

I've long heard people complain about how commercials represent the basest forms of humanity. Yesterday, I was reminded of this again, as Twitter was all ablaze with people in outrage over the latest GoDaddy.com commercial run during the Super Bowl.

All of this tends to make me roll my eyes a bit, and go, "Well, duh... of course commercials represent the basest forms of humanity. That's why they work!"

Science has long told us that the brain is largely indiscriminate in terms of forming and retaining information (what we tend to simply call "memory.") For instance, if you like and remember the song that played when you proposed to your wife, you'll also tend to remember where you were when you heard the song, what the weather was if you were outdoors, details about what your intended was wearing, maybe even what you ate. That's because along with the song itself, your brain carried along all the accompanying context.

The thing is, the brain's not really that smart. It doesn't realize that the two eggs on your plate in the diner really aren't as important as the beautiful girl sitting across from you when you heard that new Norah Jones tune that made her go wild and accept your marriage proposal. In theory, those eggs don't matter... nor does the awful plaid shirt you'd spilled coffee on. But the brain can't discriminate. Instead, it just throws everything into "memory."

Super Bowl ads prove this, once and for all. With ad revenue topping 206 million bucks (in a recession!), we were hit with ad after ad, all having next to nothing to do with the actual products in question. That's because, well, the ad guys are smart. They payed attention to all the available data, which essentially says it's better to trick the brain than to appeal to it rationally.

What works better? Slapping a logo across a stretched t-shirt, curving around some surgically enhanced porn star's chest, or lauding the wonderful features of hosting at GoDaddy.com? Getting everyone to laugh at the fire-breathing/belching dude on a date, or trying to convince the world that the Budweiser hops are better than the Michelob hops?

It's a trick. And, once again... duh!

So here's your "the brain is stupid" exercise for today. Call it a little reverse engineering.

1. What Super Bowl commercial from this year do you best remember?*
2. What product was being advertised?
3. What Super Bowl commercial from last year do you best remember?
4. What product was being advertised?
5. What Super Bowl commercial do you best remember from any year?
6. What product was being advertised?

* Note the question: "best remember" as opposed to "like the best." This becomes self-evident as you think back a few years. We remember things we don't like in many cases.

I'll bet good money that you'll easily recall the answers to (1), (3), and (5), and that the products attached to each answer come pretty quickly after. Only in the poorest ad placement situations do the product lines not get carried along by our brains in the "making memory" process, due to our brain being indiscriminate about what is carried along by a memory.

Last question, and this is the important one:

Why did these commercial stick out? What made them "memorable?"

More good money says the commercials you remember have no correlation to products that are important to you, except by dumb luck. You're reacting to the commercial, which in most cases has almost no relation at all to the product.

Let me re-ask the question like this: taking the three commercials you came up with above, what's common? What do you think grabbed your brain by the throat (yes, the metaphor is breaking down. Just roll with me, here) and said, "Remember me!"?

How would you make a good Super Bowl commercial?

Choose your own adventure... er... learning path

There's a lot to be said that's positive about our declining economy. (Yeah, it's an odd beginning. But hang in there with me.) In the publishing industry, for example, we're having to be a lot more careful about what products we release. We're also having to be more efficient in our products; people want more for less.

As part of that, we've been doing a lot of thinking about non-book products. O'Reilly has offered books through Safari for a long time, and there's certainly the O'Reilly School of Technology. But what about folks that want traditional book topics, like JavaScript or PHP & MySQL, in a non-book form? These people don't necessarily want or need course credits, but they expect more than a PDF-style view of a book.

When you start to think about effective learning in an online medium, one the very first concerns you've got to deal with is sequencing. Web users don't live in a page-by-page world. John Lewis calls this the "disclosure sequence" in a recent post on learning paths:

In our view, the most important aspect of the design of a training course is the “disclosure sequence”: the sequence in which the topics of the subject are disclosed to the learner. This is the central issue on which all other aspects of the course design depend.

If John and his colleagues are right, there are two critical realizations here:

1. Order matters, but web users are not comfortable with linearity. People on the Web tend to skip around, looking for just the piece of information they want.
2. Again, though, order matters! Just because web users may want more freedom doesn't necessitate that as learning experience designers, we have to give those users complete freedom.

So how do you split the difference? Can learning really be broken down into small enough segments that web users feel they have sufficient control (I want to jump to "closures" in "Ruby"), while still allowing teachers and educators an ability to guide a learner through that smaller segment (You need to learn about Ruby's handling of memory, then move on to closure syntax, and then examine the pattern in play within a closure)?

One key aspect to solving this problem (or at least approaching it intelligently) is to reorganize in terms of concrete, functional goals, rather than lexical or technical topics. John Lewis again has useful observations on what you can achieve when grouping things according to functionality:

In general, a more effective guide to designing a disclosure sequence is to choose a path through the goals which the learner already has, beginning with those which can be achieved simply and progressing to those which are more complex to achieve. It is evidently not always easy to find these; but if such a path can be found, then the requirement to motivate learners along the way tends to be easier because they are achieving parts of the objective along the way, while building on what they already know.

So here's my question; it's a two-parter.

1. If/when you're learning online, do you expect complete control? Do you expect the ability to move anywhere within a course and/or topic, even to specific steps within a process? Or are you satisfied with topical/functional control, and then are willing to follow a process within that subset?
2. Does all this seem silly to you, and you think learning online is really just a fancy term for a good Google search?

Did you read the book from that movie?

New Radar blogger Brett McLaughlin is the executive editor of O'Reilly's Head First books and a Java developer-turned-author.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that media is changing the way books are viewed. In fact, video - and YouTube in particular - has already changed how books are sold. Most big fiction releases are heralded by short "book trailers" that give an almost movie-like feel to the contents of the book.

But in a recent article published by the Christian Science Monitor, I was surprised to see that there's an even more notable link between movies and the sale of books:

In the upcoming Christian movie “Fireproof”, screenwriters created a book as plot point. The movie tells the story of Caleb Holt, a firefighter with a troubled marriage. To help prevent divorce, Caleb’s dad suggests he read a book called “The Love Dare.”

The book changes Caleb’s view of marriage and transforms his life. As soon as preview audiences saw the film, they began flooding bookstores with inquiries.

The only problem: The book didn’t exist.

It does now, however.

Brothers and associate pastors Alex and Stephen Kendrick, also co-directors and producers of “Fireproof,” sat down and penned such a book in the space of a few weeks. It hasn’t hit bookstores yet but has already sold 300,000 copies and may go on to become the bestselling Christian book of 2008.

This is pretty remarkable. Keep in mind, we've long seen books-turned-into-movies re-released with movie-centric covers. We've seen movies come out, and then books released that are adaptations of the movie, in cases where the movie's based on an original screenplay. But books that happen to be featured in movies? That's a new one.

Is this an isolated case? Or perhaps a phenomenon related more to religion and self-help tomes? Not so much; from the same article:

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s the story of the “Sex and the City” book. When Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) sat in bed reading a book called “Love Letters from Great Men” in a scene in the film, women viewers everywhere decided they needed a copy.

Again: As the press was quick to report, the book didn’t actually exist. (At least not with that title.)

But there was something close enough: a 1920s title called “Love Letters of Great Men and Women” reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing. On the strength of the movie, the book suddenly became a hot item for booksellers.

So what does this mean for publishing as an industry? Even more poignantly, what does this mean for learning books; the sort of books that O'Reilly and other technology, math, science, educational, etc. publishers routinely put out?

I'm not completely sure, although I plan on positing a few ideas in the coming days... but one thing that is clear: the competition for a book sale is no longer just other good books. Movies, videos on YouTube, even the latest Metal Gear Solid game on PlayStation 3 are increasingly key competitors. They're informing buyers about what to buy, in very unique and surprising ways.

And when the competition is no longer just books, everything changes... whether we acknowledge it or not. Anyone - or any company - that doesn't realize and react is going to be hurting before decade's end.

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