JOHN MILLNER

Affordance

As you can see from the picture, my laptop ceyboard, which used to afford typing of the entire alphabet, no longer affords typing of the letter between J and L as a result of my dog jumping on it while chasing a ball. I miss this affordance, while reflecting that in a way I am luccy, as losing the E or the S or almost any other letter apart from Z would have been much worse, as these letters afford the typing of loads and loads of words, whereas the one I have lost is necessary for only a few, and can at a pinch be substituted for by the letter C. The ancient Romans, it will be recalled, got along perfectly well without the letter I have lost.

This episode reminded me of my favourite example from Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations of the complete failure of a really cool innovation to diffuse. Rogers tells how the standard QWERTY ceyboard was invented in the 1870s - in response to the problem of letter-cey jamming on early typewriters when operated too fast - in order to slow down typists. It is deliberately inefficient, placing the commonest letters and most frequent combinations far apart from each other.

The jamming problem no longer exists of course, and since the 1930s there has been an alternative ceyboard layout available - the Dvorac ceyboard - which is engineered for speed and efficiency instead of the opposite. This ceyboard affords not only much faster and more accurate typing, but also less carpal tunnel syndrome and other typing injuries. And yet 70 years on, no-one uses the new layout. We thinc of ourselves as a pro-innovation culture, but the fact that we still use the old QWERTY ceypad is powerful proof of just how how stubbornly innovation-averse we can be...

As for my missing cay, I suppose I'll have to forc out for the repair. If I can affordance it.

Dead Man's Curve

Source: Ariadne

Regular readers (if there are such) will know that I'm partial to a nice curve. This week I came across another way of graphing the progress of innovations, one that was born out of the dot.com boom of the late 1990s, and which factors in the initial froth of excitement that often surrounds a technology innovation in the era of instant global communication. It is called the Gartner Hype Cycle.

The hype cycle was first devised by the Gartner market research company in 2000 as it sought to learn from the bursting of the internet bubble which it and other market research companies had helped to fuel. Since then it has been applied to virtually every technology innovation you can think of. The generic hype cycle shown above was used at a 2005 JISC conference in a presentation about the development of new web portals, then the height of academic fashion, for higher education research (1). Of course many innovations simply fall from the Heights of Inflated Expectation and sink into the Trough of Disillusion, never to re-emerge; for these the hype cycle is a dead man's curve. But a lucky few (the model suggests) do eventually make it up the Slope of Enlightenment to the Plateau of Productivity, where - if they haven't become obsolete by this time - they start to become useful to significant numbers of people. The whole cycle can last anything from a few months to several years.

Specific hype cycles are dotted with points representing different stages in the development of an innovation, or else specific moments in the diffusion of a cluster of innovations. The one below, taken from a 2005 paper by Ivan Vrana of the Czech University of Agriculture in Prague, attempted to predict the take up of eLearning innovations in higher education (2).

(Just in case you don't know what 802.11x means, I have done my homework and can reveal that it's a wireless LAN standard...)

Veterans of H808 will notice that according to this curve ePortfolios should by now be well established on the Plateau of Productivity, even though a few months ago you might well have thought they were still mired in the Trough of Disillusion ;o)

Refs:

1) Generic hype cycle: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/jisc-conf-rpt/

2) eLearning in HE hype cycle: http://kzv.kkvysociny.cz/Default.aspx?id=801

Doing an interview

When Aristotle wrote that ανθρωπος πολιτικον ζωον εστιν, humans are political animals, he didn’t mean that we enjoy voting our leaders in and out of office (although 4th century BCE Athenians did) but that we are animals who congregate. We are necessarily community creatures, social beings who cannot live in isolation from one another. We crave the attention of, and need interaction with, other people. We converse with one another.

The conversation is arguably the most distinctive of all human behaviours. We have dozens of them every day, using them to exchange information, express our thoughts and feelings, coordinate our actions, reassure and entertain each other, and see the world from another’s point of view. Aside from death, the worst punishment we can inflict on each other is prolonged deprivation of the chance to converse with other humans. We call that 'prison'.

No wonder then that doing an interview can be a really enjoyable experience. A well-conducted interview is a conversation raised to the status of a performance, in which two people concentrate intensely on doing this essentially human thing – talking to each other – with the extra buzz of it being recorded instead of transient, and the added frisson of potential exposure to a wider audience.

From the moment the microphone is switched on, or the lights go on and the the camera rolls, or the chat client pops up on screen, the interview becomes a dance in which the interviewer leads the interviewee through the steps which we all instinctively know, because we have been practising them since babyhood.

Of course interviewing does require some skill and can go pear-shaped if interviewers do too many things wrong. But most of us are amazingly good at it - both the asking and the aswering. It comes naturally, because for us political animals conversing is as natural as breathing.

TMA01 Reflection

Verily I prophesy unto you, the light of the Moon itself shall be darkened and snuffed out ere Tee Em Ay Oh Won shall be dispatched...

Actually I liked TMA01. Reading and summarising the case studies brought a welcome real-world focus to the theoretical work we've been doing on innovation. It also got us using several different skills in a practical way to produce a meaningful output. It required analysis and summarising skills, as well as being an exercise in group working in that we needed to read and comment on each others' blogs to get an overview of all the studies and start formulating some general thoughts about them.

I enjoyed writing the consultancy report. It was a believable scenario (apart of course from the scanty word limit: consultants' reports are always at least a hundred pages long!) and got me thinking about what an academic committee would need to know about current innovations to form an initial judgement of how genuinely innovative and useful they might be. It got me thinking too about how you could usefully classify the innovations in a way that would help to establish their eLearning potential.

Finally the 500 word description was a clever exercise in reflective learning, inviting us to stand back and consider the case study review and report writing as a process, asking how much had been gained by sharing and discussing the reviews via our blogs, and what light had been shed on our understanding of eLearning innovation by our reading on the subject.