No Text on Slides

As we progress through the semester I came across a column from 2015 that blew my mind. It explains that by putting text on slides I may be overloading my student’s working memory and actually making it harder for them to learn.

The column mentions this study from the 1990s that looked at what happens when information is presented to students verbally and visually. Here is some of the discussion:

“Human cognitive capacity is limited: we can process only a very limited amount of information at any one time. Cognitive load theory assumes that information presented to learners should be designed in a way to reduce any avoidable load on working memory. The experiments of this article were designed to test some ways of avoiding cognitive overload due to learners having to split their attention between text and diagrams.”

General Discussion

A common myth in instructional design is that repetition in any form will help retention and that just simply isn’t what this study found. The two Experiments:

“Experiment 1 demonstrated that the modality effect may be used as a means of negating the problems associated with split-attention. A dual-mode instructional presentations resulted in superior learning compared with instructional materials presented in a split-source, visual-only format due to working memory capacity being enhanced under dual-modality conditions. Three computer-based multimedia instructional formats on theoretical aspects of soldering were compared (Visual text, Audio text, and Visual plus Audio text) using participants without any substantial knowledge of soldering. The Audio text group demonstrated a lower number of reattempts at interactive exercises, a lower subjective rating of cognitive load and higher test performance scores than each of the other two groups.”

General Discussion

My first guess would be that visual plus audio text would be best here. Soldering is a visual activity! But it turns out when learning a new skill it is easy to overload working memory and crowd out information.

“Experiment 2 was performed to test colour-coding of text and diagrams as an alternative technique for circumventing the cognitive load consequences of split attention. Colouring elements of a diagram in the same unique colours as corresponding textual elements was hypothesized to reduce an unnecessary working memory load by reducing search processes. Two computer-based instructional formats in elementary electrical engineering (conventional separate-diagram-and-text and colour-coded-diagram-and-text) were compared. The conventional format included an electrical circuit with a textual explanation written beneath the circuit. The colourcoded format consisted of exactly the same diagram and text, except that by clicking on any paragraph in the text all the electrical elements mentioned in that paragraph and depictions of those elements in the diagram were converted to the same unique colours.”

General Discussion

What was found in the second experiment is that the combination of visual diagrams and text is effective but can still cause overload. So what is the solution? Let’s go back to the original column:

“Eliminate textual elements from presentations and instead talk through points, sharing images or graphs with students.”

Richard Mayer

It will take me some time to work through my current slides and eliminate text but I think the gain will be worth it. I will still keep my text-heavy slides to offer up as notes.

The Welfare Effects of Social Media

While I am not a social scientist I recognize the impact of social science findings on the areas I work in and this paper is no different. This study was conducted by researchers from Stanford and was released in November of 2019. They created a randomized experiment where some people were paid to deactivate Facebook for 4 weeks and over that time and after were asked about their well-being and news consumption among other questions.

As an older millennial Facebook came to Northeastern when I was there in 2004 and I have had an account ever since. Back then you had a wall and it was only college students, today most users (at least in the US) are beyond college age. There are tons of articles out there about the ills of social media and also how to stop using it.

I rarely look at Facebook, I don’t have the app on my phone anymore so I have to navigate their from the web. I do not miss it, which is consistent with the findings in this study. I am still on Instagram and I read Twitter daily so it is possible my social media habits are satisfied in other ways.

So what blew my mind about this study? Let’s look at the results.

“Our results leave little doubt that Facebook provides large benefits for its users. Even after a four week “detox,” our participants spent substantial time on Facebook every day and needed to be paid large amounts of money to give up Facebook. Our results on news consumption and knowledge suggest that Facebook is an important source of news and information. Our participants’ answers in free response questions and follow-up interviews make clear the diverse ways in which Facebook can improve people’s lives, whether as a source of entertainment, a means to organize a charity or an activist group, or a vital social lifeline for those who are otherwise isolated.”

Conclusion

Needing to be paid to give up Facebook is a red flag but then again think about how much I would need to pay you to give up your phone for 4 weeks. If you dig into the results of this study you see that different people use Facebook very differently but find great value in visiting the site daily, even after leaving it for a month during the 2018 Midterm elections.

Now on to the good that deactivating Facebook can do.

“We find that four weeks without Facebook improves subjective well-being and substantially reduces post-experiment demand, suggesting that forces such as addiction and projection bias may cause people to use Facebook more than they otherwise would. We find that while deactivation makes people less informed, it also makes them less polarized by at least some measures, consistent with the concern that social media have played some role in the recent rise of polarization in the US.”

Conclusion

What blew my mind here is that people had reduced demand to go back after leaving Facebook. The other findings that people feel better and some of the squishier social science factors are also interesting. The takeaway here is that if you feel Facebook isn’t good for you then just stop and it will get easier. Remove the app from your phone, delete the bookmark in your browser, etc.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance behind the scene shot

If you have never heard of the Dark Crystal you aren’t alone. It is a fairly obscure film from 1982 although it was a commercial and critical success. It is not an animated film but it also has no human actors. Every character is a puppet or more specifically a Muppet as this was what Jim Henson did after the first two Muppet movies and working on Yoda. I remember watching it when I was young on VHS and being struck by the high fantasy, weighty themes, and world building. However, the movie itself is not the subject of this post, the ten part prequel on Netflix and making-of documentary are. They released last August but I watched the series over a few nights recently.

You don’t need to have seen the movie to understand Age of Resistance as it is a prequel and I think going in cold may heighten the mind blowing effect. Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. Ok now watch the documentary. Great, let’s talk about how they blew my mind.

First let’s talk about the setting and the world. This is a prequel so it is an earlier version of the world of the movie which is based on the art of Brian Froud. The rich forests, living creatures, faeries and magic of the world is both rich and surprising. It has rules and cohesion while lightheartedly making little sense. That they had to build all the sets allowing for puppeteers to be able to move through them makes it all more impressive. Watching this made me want to look at Froud’s art again and go camping in some deep woods.

Next has to be the puppets themselves. The craft of creating these creatures is baffling. Single hairs, complex articulation, multiple versions, the technologies and skills needed to bring these characters to life is an awesome feat which is obvious in their uniqueness.

Last has to be the puppeteers and voice actors. Frank Oz, who co-directed the movie and may well be one of the most talented puppeteers to ever live was on-board for this and it shows. During the documentary you can see the work that was put in to get some of the shots and the emotion and feeling of these bundles of cloth, hair, silicone, and metal comes from them.

Enough being a fan boy of the world and work, I did enjoy the story but it is not mind blowing itself and the series does end bluntly due to the movie picking up the story. None of this diminishes the uniqueness of this project and in a world of green screen and motion capture seeing Muppets take on mature themes and high fantasy is refreshingly different.

Slow Motion Multitasking

Charles Darwin and his worms.

Tim Harford is someone who is likely to come up a lot here. Between his writings, his podcasts, and his TED talks he blows my mind regularly. His latest TED talk from nearly a year ago is a great example. I came across it this week by way of his podcast Cautionary Tales (which I am sure will come up again another week). In the talk he defines and then explores the idea of slow motion multitasking, where exceedingly creative people seem to keep many projects at a slow boil over a long period of time shifting between them based on frustration, desire, luck, and other factors.

This is a fascinating idea but it isn’t something he discovered, it has been a subject of study before just with a different name, hobbies. Now someone could argue that Darwin’s fascination with earthworms expanded beyond being a hobby but the mechanics are the same. Spending effort at being good to great at something else can pay large creative dividends (among other advantages).

However, time is a zero sum game. There are only so many hours available and if you dedicate significant time to another activity you are making a choice to not focus on the job at hand. Harford would argue that this shift is worth it, assuming you don’t lose your job. But I think another person has some good advice in this area, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. In his book “Let my people go surfing” he says that he never wants to be better than 85% at any one outdoor activity because the work and focus required to get above that isn’t worth it. A lot of time is spent praising unicorns or 10x people, 99% people and certainly in some roles I think it might be worth it. But consider the information here and pick up a hobby, the power of context switching, slow multitasking, or whatever it is termed is real and it may be a powerful force in some of the most creative leaps forward.

The Grey and White Books

Screenshot from the Fellowship of the Ring

Sir Ian McKellen recently released something he is calling the The Grey Book and The White Book, which is his journal about his time as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film Trilogy and beyond.

The Lord of the Rings flim trilogy blew my mind when I saw them all in the theaters nearly twenty years ago. I read each of the books in the lead up to the film being released. Beyond the cultural impact of the stories themselves and how they were able to come alive on screen it is worth pointing that they laid the ground work for future film franchises. Filiming all three at once, the advances made in effects, the sheer length of the flims, all impact films released since. Without LotR what would the Harry Potter films or the Marvel Film Universe look like?

While I am still reading through the Grey and White book here is a good summary of some of the entries. I find peaks behind the curtain of creative minds to be fascinating in both their boredom and their genius. It reveals the mindset of McKellen during an undertaking of this magnitude and also the very real human impacts between jet lag, love for the horses on set, and props he has kept.

CES

Consumer Electronics Show 2020

The Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is a yearly expo held in Las Vegas where all manner of technology is shown to the world. CES has become mostly a marketing event for companies to show off their wares to journalist. Many of the devices and technologies shown will never make it to market, they are demos, prototypes, concepts, and gimmicks. Due to the nature of the event many companies angle for a viral reaction so devices can range from the bizarre to the impressive to the cute to the wildly useless.

CES blows my mind in several ways, the first is just the sheer size. The show hosts over 4500 companies across 11 venues totaling 2.9 million square feet of exhibition space. This means that no single person can hope to see even a fraction of the companies there. I have never gone and I am not sure it would ever make sense to go. Teams of journalists take on areas of their beat and try their best to cover it. This is the main fuel for viral coverage because journalists share their must-sees but is still the best way to know what was being shown.

The other way CES blows my mind is some of devices and technologies that are on display. Everything from eSports to food tech to automotive. Here are some highlights:

Wearable technology has been on an upward trend since the release of fitness trackers, smart watches, and wireless headphones. More smart watches seem to be moving away from trying to be a phone on your wrist and instead are meant for giving people health data using advanced sensors. Here are two examples. This is a smart move as there will be a trend away from notifications of all kind and the strongest use case for wearable tech is health and fitness. I personally also like to see a move of watches to longer battery life.

I mentioned that many concepts or prototypes are shown at the show and the Toyota Woven City is a great example. The idea of creating a city to be a lab for new technologies is not a new idea and other companies are trying to do the same thing. Still I like to see this kind of ambitious plan to see how disruptive technologies can work divorced from the momentum of our lives and society.

On the edge of improbable and interesting was this set of chef robotic arms from Samsung. Assistive technologies come in many forms and one area with still a ton of growth potential is direct physical tasks. It is one thing to ask a voice assistant how many tablespoons are in 1/8 of a cup but it is next level to ask a robot to chop the onions while you saute in a pan. I love to cook and devote a lot of my time to cooking but many people lack either the time, knowledge, and/or motivation to cook for themselves. With trends in the food space of moving away from processed foods and with the lack of success of meal prep deliveries the answer may be other assistive technologies like this one.

There were of course foldable phones, insane TVs, and the best example of the useless but viral device was the Charmin Rollbot. Don’t worry about how it would open the bathroom door or refill its roll, just realize that there are areas of life that don’t need just-in-time inventory.

AGDQ

Screen capture of the AGDQ 2020 live stream.

What blew my mind this week was an event called AGDQ which stands for Awesome Games Done Quick. At this gaming event players come together to speedrun games for charity 24 hours a day for a week straight and it is all live streamed. Speedrunning is exactly what it sounds like, trying to complete a game as fast as possible. This event blows my mind in multiple ways.

First is that the events that this group runs generates 7 figures that goes to charity, this particular event is donating to the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Considering the age group of most of the participants (college age or younger) this is an impressive feat. 

Second is that the games being played range from the obscure and old (what even is Razor Freestyle Scooter for the Nintendo 64?) to the beloved (Super Mario Bros. 3) to the new (Control).Third is what these players accomplish in these runs. Everything from 100% complete runs that can take hours (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is estimated at over 4 hours) to Any% runs that allow players to use any glitch, exploit, or strategy for the sake of speed to complete an entire game in under 20 minutes. While the run is going there is commentary about the actions the player(s) are completing which brings them from incomprehensible to accessible and exciting.

The last thing that blows my mind about this event is the culture around it. Each of these games has a sub-culture that has explored and mined the game for speed. Bending it to the player’s will, trying over and over and over to create strategies that shave milliseconds away. Muscle memory that is forged to complete seemingly impossible feats of dexterity. Players compete in races, showing off tricks and sequences that have inside jokes for names or are references to the player who first discovered them. It is like a fractal where you can zoom from speedrunning itself with its nomenclature, rules, inside jokes (kill/save the animals!) and tight schedule to a specific game with its best runners, tricks, and strategies and finally to a specific type of run within that game, 100%, Any%, etc. These can be changed by donation incentives that can make the players do strange glitches, higher difficulties, or even complete games blindfolded. 

The result of this whole thing is people spending an incredible amount of time and effort to do a very specific feat that only a seemingly tiny amount of people can understand and it blows my mind.