For powerful examples of adult capacity to multitask, I would cite (without any evidence, other than my belief that it had to be so) the example of airline pilots. Surely commercial aviators  have to be able to handle a dozen different inputs coming at them at the same time. And military pilots, whose carry high-tech munitions and whose ability to deal with a hundred things at the same time or lose their life to an enemy missile or gunfire, have been taught some secrets to multitasking; secrets that the masses could also be taught and passed along to our students.

Okay. So I’m wrong. Not the first time, nor will it be the last.

My pilots theory was publicly blown by two Northwest airline pilots who overflew their Minneapolis destination by 150 miles because they were “distracted.” In the book The Multitasking Myth, handling complexity in real-world operations by Loukia D. Loukopoulos, R. Key Dismukes, and Immanuel Barshi, the authors point out to airline crash investigation that indicate that where pilot error is to blame, multitasking is often behind the error. So if our most highly trained experts can’t multitask effectively, how can we expect children and adults without their training, checklists, and thousands of hours of experience to do any better?

We can’t expect them to better, and trying to teach them the “ten tricks to better multitasking” (assuming they exist) won’t help.

So what are we to do? Perhaps we can start by setting better examples ourselves. In this case, fewer simultaneous actions on our part may speak louder than words. We can engage in non-lecturing, non-blaming discussions with kids about multitasking, and the challenges it presents. We can demonstrate what it means to be fully present for them when they talk to us, not distracted by the phone, TV, iPod, or something else and let them experience the feelings that come from being really appreciated and listened to.

Living in California I see perhaps more than my share of road construction, and every once-in-awhile I’ll run into a road sign like the one to the left: “Use Alternate Route.” Sometimes my reaction is one of irritation, especially if I know where I am going and the most efficient way for me to get there. But I am in a new area with only a vague sense where I am supposed to go, I simply follow the signs and hope that there will be enough road marks along the way for me to stay on track to my destination.

Alternate routes often apply to computer applications as well, but I am continually surprised by people who know only one way to get from Point A to Point B, and are really irritated when there’s a technical roadblock along the way to the point of just stopping what they are doing altogether and waiting for the Help Desk ( a “tow-truck” of sorts) to arrive instead of finding an alternate route.

Take, for example, the simple task of opening a document. Let’s say that a user always opens a document by double clicking on it. And 99% of the time double-clicking works just fine. But when double-clicking fails, they’re stuck, even though several alternate routes are immediately available:

• drag the file icon on top of the application icon
• open the file from the File menu of the application
• right click on the file and choose “Open With” from the contextual menu

For every means of doing something on a computer, there are almost always two or more other ways of doing the same operation. And yet time and again I encounter frustrated users who know only one way and seem fearful of alternate routes, and promptly forget them even when you show the alternate route to be safe, quick, and easy to take. What’s with that?

My unscientific observations have lead me to posit that greater experience leads to greater flexibility and willingness to experiment, and a deeper faith in the fault tolerance built-in to hardware and software that will help prevent users from making drastic mistakes that lead to data loss.

Think back to when you were a teenager. If you were like me, you couldn’t wait to get your driver’s license and once you had it, you were more than happy to borrow your parents’ car to run errands for them, take siblings places, and so on. You just longed to get more behind-the-wheel experience. If you were a two-car family, you didn’t mind too much. The “UI” for the two cars was similar enough that you could easily switch between the two. As you gained more experience. it was no problem to get into any car and drive it competently. You loved driving. The thrill of simply driving around town with no particular place to go was enough to occupy hours of your time. Heck, I even loved reading the car’s manual in the glove compartment while riding shotgun while someone else drove.

But for many people, that love of experiential learning, discovery, and sheer joy of teenage driving did not translate very well to the world of computers. Many approach computers warily, not wanting to spend any more time with them than is needed. Or they see computers simply as utilitarian machines to get from Point A to Point B, with no reason to go exploring, or even to try alternate routes. Where did their sense of adventure go? Have we made computers into the anti-car experience?

Perhaps that just means I’m a slow learner. I hope not.

But recently I was thinking about user interfaces and why it is that some people are able to sit down at a computer and start using an unfamiliar piece of software right away, while others struggle for hours and hours, and may eventually need step-by-step cheat sheets to survive. The traditional response is that some UI’s are simply more intuitive than others. Well if that’s the case, does that mean that certain users are lacking in intuition? I don’t think so. After all, intuition is supposed to be instinctual, perhaps even primal. So an intuitive interface means that everyone should be able to use something right away.

A quick Google search disabused any illusions I had about my thinking as original. UI guru Bruce Tognazzini talks about this on his web site, and points to a 1997 article by his former colleague Jeff Raskin entitled Intuitive Equals Familiar that describes the problems with using “intuitive” to describe human interfaces. A better term, he argues, is “familiar,” as “Intuitive = uses readily transferred, existing skills.” A UI that allows users to mimic previously learned tools or skills allows for easy transfer of knowledge.

So if UI designers are introducing an entirely new product line, they are best served by using analogs.

Recently, I have been reviewing electronic book readers from Amazon and Sony. As a new type of electronic device, the UI designers for these products have attempted to mimic the book experience how people use real books: page turning, underlining, highlighting, and writing in margins. Digital rights management rights (DRM) is stricter than in the analog world, so there’s some things you can’t do with an e-reader. For example, you can’t Xerox a page, or easily lend the book to a friend. And book burning takes on a whole new meaning!

Fast forward 10-20 years, when a whole generation of children may know books primarily through digital readers, or another fifty years when paper books are found only in museums and libraries. The new “analog” is the e-reader. Will UI developers still be relying on the original book as its paradigm for e-reading, or will e-readers evolve gradually (or suddenly) to an entirely new experience that would be unfamiliar to someone from 2009? Perhaps reading in 2059 will occur in 3D space, supplemented with sound and other sensory inputs. Perhaps readers will be “jacked-in” through a neural implant that transfers information to the brain more efficiently than what the human senses could process alone.

What will be the  intuitive/familiar UI for computers and other devices in fifty years?

1. Invitations to meetings in the calendar view are too subtle. I mean really, do you expect me to see that tiny question mark?
2. I like that you add email addresses automatically for me. That’s cool. What would be even cooler, would be to scan the message for additional address-like data (like that in most signature files), open a window in my contacts, and add that data too, allowing me to edit as needed.
3. When you add a new document folder in Google Docs, the list should automatically refresh to reflect the new alphabetical order.
4. There’s no way for end users to see who is in an enterprise-wide email group, so what we do is to maintain a separate Google doc which, of course, needs to be updated every time we make a group address change. We shouldn’t have to do that. Let the administrator determine who has rights to view the members of an email group.
5. In Google Sites, you should offer a report to the site owner about dead links, and automatically fix links to other Google sites within the enterprise if and when they change.
6. While you’re at it in Google Sites, allow the webmaster or users to tag individual pages, to then crate tag clouds.
7. All, and I mean all, of your K-12 Google docs customers would benefit from a better calendar. Start with allowing the administrator to setup a daily schedule for the school that can be toggled on-and-off by users so they can easily schedule events by time of day or by period of day.
8. Any color (labels, calendars, and so on) would benefit by being able to control their transparency. Solid color are not only passé, they hinder multiple calendars within the same view.
9. Google To Do lists are lame. See Remember the Milk for some ideas about getting it better.
10. Appreciate the fact that we can upload PDF documents into Google Docs. Now, make them editable!

What’s on your mind about Google docs?

I suspect we have talked about this before, but we’re looking for a new calendaring program that:

1. will easily schedule resources, meetings, and parent conferences
2. will automatically find open meeting times & reserve needed resources
3. is cross-platform, and web based
4. will automatically adjust to schedule changes as they are made
5. will send meeting changes and to-do list reminders via email, SMS, or Twitter
6. will allow for meeting agenda and other documents to be attached to in the invitation
7. is very user friendly
8. is available 24 x 7 x 365
9. supports a variety devices both online and off-line, with automatic synchronization
10. has flexible, easy to use security, with various levels of permissions to allow access to certain events by role
11. is compatible with ical and other web calendaring standards
12. prints a range of attractive, easy-to-read formats
13. allows for secure access by administrative assistants
    
14. allows for easy analysis of meeting and task loads and responsibilities by individuals and groups, and FINALLY
    
15. is free, with high quality technical support and, low maintenance, and requested features added in a timely manner.

Aah. The holy grail of calendars. A fortune awaits the company that can create one, though point #15 suggests it will be a very, very small fortune.

Over my career, I have tried a range of calendaring solutions in search of the perfect system, including Meeting Maker, Outlook, FirstClass, CalendarMaker, Web Event, Google Calendar, and iCal. In some ways these are all great programs. But in some fundamental way, each of them also sucked.

The companies that make calendaring software focus their products on individuals and businesses. Schools are a secondary market, and they don’t understand us.

To start with, schools operate in two different time spheres: (a) the time observed by the rest of the world and (b) school time. School time is normally meant to be class periods. Such as a period 1, period 2, period 3, or period A, 1A, nap time, math time, reading time, block 1, block 2, and so on. No one outside of the school has any idea how these times correlate to real world time, and even those inside of schools often have to rely on cheat sheets to make the translation. Think of these different time spheres as our equivalent of the metric versus the English measurement system.

So right out of the starting gate calendaring programs made for the real (metric) world are incompatible with time as observed in the school world.

But wait, computers are smart. Can’t they bridge the gap? A computer can instantly convert metric to English units and back in measurement, why can’t a computer convert between different time spheres?

Computers could do this of course. But there’s this niggling little problem of no two schools using exactly the same class schedule. Plus schedules change, often by the day of the week—and let’s not forget special schedules that are used for planned events such as assemblies and sports, or unplanned events such as school closings or late starts do to weather.

So now the problem has become much more complex, because you must allow the end user to be able to enter the information peculiar to their school’s schedule, with the ability for it to be instantly updated, with these updates recalculating real-world time, checking for conflicts with people’s schedules and resources, and then synchronizing across devices.

It’s enough to make even a Google engineer weep.

Schools are not likely to change to real-world time anytime soon (pun intended). This leaves us at the mercy of benevolent calendar makers who will listen to our plea and come to our aid. If I had to bet on who that might be, I would lay my money on Google (who has a burgeoning number of K-12 schools using their Google Apps for Education) or Rjenda (a new company that has taken assessment calendaring to a new high).

I’m curious to know what readers may think not only of the list of 15 requirement for school calendars that I listed above, but also what solutions you have found that work best for you.

1. school superintendents or heads of school could be paid no more than 3x that of the lowest paid school employee?
2. someone designed a school from the ground up having never set foot in one before?
3. the ratio of students to teachers was no more than three to one?
4. educators were free of all copyright or patent restrictions?
5. teachers, students, and parents regularly visited one another’s homes?
6. if school administrators were elected by the faculty?
7. no school could house more than four hundred students?
8. students called teachers by the first names?
9. teachers were not allowed to use PowerPoint, Keynote, Impress or similar presentation tools?
10. mastery was the important variable for student learning instead of time on task?
11. faculty and staff had to demonstrate current knowledge and skills in their field very few years?
12. faculty and staff could take fitness classes along with the students?
13. college of education professors had to regularly teach in K-12 schools?

What we'd all like to do sometimes to those who print too much!

My tech team and I were having a discussion the other day about printing. Specifically, we were trying to figure out ways to encourage people to print less, enforce accountability when they choose to print, and make the process as easy as possible for both us and the end user. We know that we are a long ways from becoming a paperless school, but we believe we can become a less paper school.

Whether it is incompatible print drivers, fonts that don’t print correctly, mechanical failures and jams, or the constant feeding of paper, ink, and toner, printers are the bane of every IT department’s existence. All this trouble for a pieces of cellulose that often end up being thrown away or recycled within a few minutes, days, or weeks of being used. In my organization alone, about 1 million sheets of paper go through our copy machines every year; a few hundred thousand more through our printers. According to GreenPDF.com, each ream (500 sheets) of paper is equal to about 18.5 lbs. of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through the harvesting of the tree and the manufacturing process. 1,000,000 pages = 2000 reams of paper, or 37,000 pounds of CO2.

There are abundant ways for IT departments to encourage less paper use:

1. force duplex (two-sided) printing. One sheet is better than two.
2. provide economic disincentives for printing by making users pay for each page they print.
3. provide economic incentives for print savings, perhaps by using cost savings for professional development programs for faculty and staff, or a beer bust. (Which would YOU choose?)
4. provide printer release stations so that people have to walk to the printer and release the print job, thereby cutting back on print hobs that are never picked up.
5. provide ubiquitous access to non-printing alternatives, such as electronic document exchange, markup, collaboration tools and e-readers.
6. guilt. Yeah, there may already be enough of this in the world, but sometimes we should feel a sense of guilt for what we’re doing to the planet.

But at the end of the day the overuse of paper is not an IT problem, it’s a human factors problem.

People are addicted to paper. That means that anything that is going to supplant paper has a long row to hoe, and it darn well better give us a bigger and better fix than paper.  Criminalizing the use of  paper won’t work (when paper is outlawed, only outlaws will have paper). Perhaps we need a 12-step program, or a paper-patch.

Sarcasm aside, if schools want to get serious about reducing the use of paper, the place to start is not with technology, but with people. Just as our school has decided not to filter internet content, perhaps we should restrict printing in any way, shape or form. Instead, we could engage our colleagues and students in a discussion of printing, and help all of us make mindful decisions about the use of paper and other printer resources.

Mindful printing. What might that look like?

Well, it might entail thinking about the soil, the rain, and the sunlight that grows the tree that provides the pulp. Thinking about the lumber workers who harvest the tree, the truckers who bring it to the mill, the mill workers, chemists, and other laborers who manufacture, transport, and stock the warehouse.s Thinking about the electricity to power the printer, the factory and the workers that made the printer and the toner. All these people. All this electricity. All these chemicals and raw materials. It’s a lot to think about. And in that brief moment when you think before you print, perhaps you’ll decide that you need fewer copies, or that you can print two-sided, or that a PDF or Google Doc is just as good as paper.

Parker Palmer is one of my heroes, and his book, The Courage To Teach, is one that I recommend to all teachers and friends of education. I don’t recall how I ran across this video snippet, but watching it reminded me of how much I am missing deep conversations in learning communities that address the uncertainty that we all live with. Some people respond to uncertainty with what Palmer calls “corrosive cynicism.” You know the type: always blaming “them,” the eternal pessimist, the glass half-empty person who has seen it all before and knows for sure that no good deed goes unpunished. These are the naysayers to any and all talk of change or innovation, who believes that everything is going to hell in a hand basket and so to hell with everyone else.

The counterpoint to corrosive cynicism is irrelevant idealism. Idealists operate in a world not connected to reality. They dismiss real-world problems and challenges flippantly, and exhort people to simply try harder or believe more deeply for things to get better. You can make Tinkerbell—and the world—well by simply clapping loudly enough. The live in a delusional world without evil, without pain, and without mistakes.

Most of us live between those two worlds, in “the gap.” And it is in this gap that we deal with the tension of ambiguity, the paradox of both/and. In the gap, it’s okay if you are uncertain and wavering. It’s okay to make mistakes. And it is in this gap that we need to work and play with others in community as you find your own answers, your own place.

This is not an easy task. And it is a task which rarely is addressed head on in schools, among students, or among faculty and staff. To address it in community requires to permit a vulnerability that few are willing to risk. Academics are in the knowledge business, we are supposed to know are we not? Actually, I think it is more important that we know we don’t know. Only then can the real conversation begin, in the gap, within a community of others who also know they don’t know.

1. teachers had to pay for textbooks just like their students do, semester after semester, year after year?
2. schools spent as much money on professional development to use new technology as they did on the technology itself?
3. teachers were asked to pass the exams they had to take when they were in high school?
4. school employees were given grades on their performance evaluations of A-F, just like students?
5. teachers were asked to spend 10% of their day innovating?
6. schools had a profit sharing plan based on reducing their use of paper and toner, saving power, reducing carbon emissions, and conserving water?
7. we spent a day, or a week, without using email?
8. there weren’t subject matter departments or grade levels?
9. each class met out-of-doors at least once a week?
10. faculty and staff swapped jobs for a day?
11. what if new faculty were given a reduced teaching load their first year?
12. what if there were no “front” to a classroom?
13. you laid all of the sacred cows to rest.

Have reports of the death of newspapers been exaggerated?

I’ve been thinking a lot about student publications. Newspapers and literary magazines mostly. Yearbooks are a different beastie.

Print publications by and for students maintain a strong hold on our student writers. Perhaps because they are so used to seeing their own words (albeit in the a very different form) in their social networks, that having their name in a print publication carries more gravitas. Be that as it may, we are obliged to prepare students for their future, not our past, and I think we would all agree that print publications are undergoing major change.

As an environmentalist, I am also mindful of the resources consumed  by print publications. True, it may be argued that electronic communication is simply a matter of shifting the burden from producing paper to producing servers, but in my view the servers win out.

To date, most high school publications have had a very limited reach: other students, faculty, staff, and parents. These groups comprised the writers audience, there was little opportunity for feedback, interaction, or for reaching a broader audience.

I believe that as young scholars, artists, writers, journalists, videographers, photographers, composers, musicians, and performers, students can gain insight and invaluable experience by interacting with a  diverse audience of readers. New technologies enable students to reach national and international audiences, readers of all ages and occupations.

Students will write differently for a broader audience and, I think, they will write better.

There are some issues to deal with when moving from a small, “in-house” audience to a global audience, and from a print-based publication to online.

• Privacy. Many schools have guidelines or policies about the use of student names and photos outside of the school. The fact that a print publication could, in theory, be snail mailed to people outside of the school seems to have not crossed the minds of some policy makers. The Internet, however, puts the issue right before their eyes.
• Audience. If your audience is broader, than the use of in-house humor, jargon, and so on renders articles that use such language less accessible to some readers. This means that editors need to step up and determine when such language is appropriate and when it obfuscates meaning.
• Interactivity. Why have an electronic publication if there is not a means for the readers to provide feedback? And what will become of that feedback? Are the editors willing to engage in conversation? Who will moderate the comments, and do they need to be moderated?
• Rich media and COLOR. ‘nuf said.
• New production roles. Currently, all one needs to produce a decent paper or lit magazine is a word processor, maybe a page layout program, and a copier. Electronic journalism has roles beyond copy writing and editing, to audio and video production, web site design, and even custom coding.
• Publication schedules. Since there is no longer a print publication to create—which means that content is released all at once—online publication allows for a more varied and timely schedule of publication. To draw readers to the site on a regular basis, content can be refreshed as it becomes available, and not held hostage until everything else is ready to go.
• New types of “news.” Papers and lit magazines can expand their repertoire of content to include exemplary scholarly works. Or perhaps schools can launch a research magazine highlighting some of the best academic work of students. Instead of only being read by student and their teacher, the student’s work can now reach a a broad group of scholars.

There are many among us who fear for the demise of the “paper.” Personally, I am more concerned about the consolidation of professional journalism in to the hands of a few media giants. And while I no longer subscribe to a daily paper, I do like picking one up at my local Peets when I stop for coffee. But when a paper isn’t available, I happily turn to my iPhone where I read the NY Times—for free, and without a single wasted tree.