Problem or Mismanaged Opportunity?

The broadcaster Discovery Communications Inc. … has launched a site, called Cosmeo, giving students access to more than 30,000 video clips, interactive educational games and other tools. Discovery says the resources were selected to comply with the curricula and education standards of all 50 states.

The company, whose television networks include Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel, says it already provides a similar product to about 70,000 public schools that have broadband Internet service. AP via Yahoo.
----
Speaking of homework problems: A problem is just an opportunity that is being mismanaged.

Here Discovery Communications obviously sees homework as an opportunity that it can manage. Profitably. The view of the entrepreneur.

Other web sites offer homework help. They may be useful. But they are hard to evaluate. We have been evaluating Discovery Channel and Animal Planet for years. The content is popular enough to survive on cable. The content has already been evaluated by the target audience for Cosmeo, school children. Better yet, many families have access to these channels and can get direct evaluation from their own children.

Brain-based Education. Video clips. Animations. Interactive games. The world is to see. The world is to do things with. To do things with and to see what happens. Too often, education sees the world as something just to talk about. The potential is huge.

How well do they execute? The cable channels are for entertainment. They do entertain. Some of the content would be appropriate for educational purposes. I can’t evaluate much of the online content without becoming a member. I could do that for 30 days without cost, but I probably won’t. I don’t like that marketing model.

I think the marketing model used by Second Life is better suited to the web. Earlier, they charged about $10 (one-time charge) for a basic membership. That let you access the game and try out everything. Indefinitely. You could upgrade to a paid membership for extra benefits. That was last year. They had about 40,000 members. Then they dropped the charge for basic membership. Now they have 166,922 members (as of today).

Old-fashioned thinking will say, “Of course. You can get lots of customers if you give away your product.” New-fangled thinking will say, “I have 170,000 potential customers coning to my site. Some of them are buying. Others haven’t bought yet. But they are still here, so I can still market to them. “

I am sure Discovery's execution will be variable and open to improvement. Evaluation and improvement of educational materials present another problem for educational psychology. Or they might present an opportunity. If there are psychologists smart enough to manage opportunities.

Have we done something wrong?

That was the question the National Geographic Society put right I front of me, on the envelope. My answer was “Yes!” But I did not give it t them.

This is about brain-based marketing. A subset, you will recall, of brain-based communication. The catch phrase here is:

Market with the brain in mind!

The opening move was good. A quest question (= a question that sends you on a search through your brain.) That’s what made me open the envelope. I suspected, of course, that this question was just a marketing device to get my attention. But I was curious about how smart their marketing support was. Turned out they used up all their smarts on that opening line.

The back story on this is that I have been subscribing to National Geographic for more than 25 years. This year, I decided not to renew.

Turned out, this was just a membership renewal form. The letter opened with a description of the good things about National Geographic.

You can see the smarts shortage right there. I had been a subscriber. I had ample opportunity to experience these good things. Why would they now need to tell me about them?

Now, back to that opening question. You could have expected (if you were new to marketing schemes) that they wanted an answer. But, of course, there is no place for an answer. Instead, after telling me about those good things in National Geographic, the copy goes on about how they are not used to losing members and about how good they are.

A belief in Word Magic seems to be an occupational hazard of writing ad copy. Somehow, if you just say the right incantations, you will enlist the powers of lightness to get people to do what you want. Now let's try a little brain-based analysis.

This communication comes to me as part of my experience. The opening line would attract my attention because generally try to answer questions. But I quickly find that they are not interested in my answer. They simply want to tell me how good they are. They use the question as a device to get me to look at their mailing. And they think I am not smart enough to figure this out.

Try it for yourself. Ask someone a question and then walk away before they can answer. Or better yet, ask them what is wrong with you and then, without letting them answer, start talking about how good you are. You won’t do either of these things. You will run the story in the theater of your mind. You will probably cringe at the reaction you get from the person you conjure up in your imagination.

The marvel is that the people who wrote this copy are quite capable of doing the mental test I just described. And they would get the results I described. So why did they write it? My theory is that if you can’t write copy that sells, you write copy to suck up to management. I use that theory as a game sometimes. Is this copy a seller or a suck-up? Management gets to be the judge.

Now what does this have to do with homework? I’ll leave that as a quest question.

Tongues in Trees…

… books in running brooks, sermons in stones… (Shakespeare. As You Like It)

Brain-based communication? Product design as communication? Shakespeare as a Great Communicator?

All of these are quest questions. Brains evolved to help us (all us animals) use the world to our benefit. Brains are always collecting and organizing information from the environment. You could say, as Shakespeare did, that the environment speaks to you. And you brain is built to listen.

Vulcan analysis: A logical place to start understanding brain-based communication, then, is with the environment. Here I am focusing on intentional communication, the situation in which a sender explicitly intends to produce a specific effect on the behavior of another person (the receiver). In that case, the sender will do something to the environment of the receiver as an act of communication.

Shudoff conventional analysis: Stop beating around the bush. The sender will tell the receiver what to do. Maybe the sender will add and “OR ELSE.” As in, “Get your homework done, OR ELSE.” We Shudoffs know how to influence behavior.

Vulcan assumption check. If you want to think outside the box, first find the box. The Shudoffs are helpful in pointing out conventional boxes. Verbal systems assume that the only way to communicate is to do something verbal. So you can guess what happens when somebody starts to talk about communicating. The effectiveness of this method is illustrated by the instruction manual.

Product Design as Communication. As examples of non-verbal communication, look at the computer mouse and the Ipod. And, in deference to non-verbal communication, I will say no more about these products. They explain themselves better than I could.

Now about those sermonizing stones. Note that Shakespeare gave a memorable lecture on non-verbal communication. And he did it with ten words. That’s more than you heard from the stones. But shorter and more telling than the abstract Vulcan analysis.

There is a time for metaphors and a time for Vulcan analysis. And a time for knowing what time it is. Here, the Vulcan analysis tells us to look at communication as doing something to the environment. That can be talking, pointing, handling, or actively changing. It can also be a combination of these.

The possibilities are abundant. Just ask a tree.

You know you’re in Geeksville when…

…it takes a whole page to explain how to get the news delivered to you.

Back in the old world, people come to my door and want to start delivering a newspaper. To make this happen, I don’t have to do anything but sit down to dinner. If I wanted to have news delivered to my door every day, I would not have to read about RSS and XML. I would only have to agree to pay them money.

The newspaper would give me yesterday’s news, of course. That would be the same news I would have seen on the evening news shows, if I watched them. They would just give me the same news I read on Yahoo that morning. But if I did want to watch the evening news, I would need no instructions. Except maybe where to find the remote.

That brings me to a helpful blog: Why Aren't You Using RSS? If you want to know how to start using RSS, this blog provides readable instructions in a page.

I think the answer most people give to a question like that is, “I have to want something really bad before I will read a page of instructions on how to get it.”

What does this story have to do with brain-based communication? Or with homework? That page of instructions is a lot like homework. Except that there is no teacher to make people read it.

So what does get people to read it? Or what keeps people from reading it? Start with simple economics. Cost-benefit. Or better yet, benefit-cost. If you don’t see a benefit, you don’t care about the cost. As the blog points out, the benefit of RSS is convenience in getting web content. Automatic delivery. Like subscriptions to magazines.

So how much benefit? A little convenience, if you routinely get a number of things from the web. What’s the cost? Whatever time it takes to read the instructions and carry them out. So the answer to the question is obvious: If I am not using RSS, it is because the inconvenience of figuring out how to set it up looks bigger to me than the convenience if would provide. The best way to change that equation is to make the set-up easier and the instruction shorter.

Now I am half geek, so I do use RSS. But I did wait till the equation looked good to me. I started with Pluck, a feed manager that was adequately developed. But then Yahoo included RSS in its My Yahoo pages. Since I was already using My Yahoo, I could add RSS feeds with the same operations I had already used to add AP news feeds. Nothing new to figure out. No pages of instruction.

And no explanation needed. I want “World of Psychology” (Blog by John Grohol) for the same reason that I want the AP World News feed. In My Yahoo, I get both in the same way, by clicking on “Add Content.”

If I weren’t half geek, I probably would not know that I was using RSS. And I probably would not notice that I had left Geeksville.

Product design as communication

Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can't figure out how to operate the devices… Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as "nuisance calls", Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands.

A wave of versatile electronics gadgets has flooded the market in recent years, ranging from MP3 players and home cinema sets to media centers and wireless audio systems, but consumers still find it hard to install and use them, she found.
---
You know you’re in Geeksville when the manual is bigger than the product.

One of the ideals of product design is to replace the manual with the product. Everybody knows the secret of the instruction manual: If you want to keep a secret, put it in the instruction manual.

So why do companies continue to design products that require extensive instructions? A triumph of hope over experience.

What brain modules do you call on to process part of an instruction manual? I call on my the modules that make up my verbal system (the Vulcan). I read a paragraph and realize that I have no idea what it told me to do. That is just what I expected. My verbal system doesn’t do things. It talks about things.

If I want to do something with a product, I will need to activate the systems I use to control my hands. And the systems that I use to interpret what I see. You give me a manual that ties up my visual system with reading and uses my hands for holding a manual. And when that doesn’t help me to use your product, you think there is something wrong with me.

The problem is that instruction manuals are written by verbal systems. For verbal systems. Based on evaluations by verbal systems. And verbal systems often fail to realize that there is a whole world out there that is not verbal. It is real. Solid. To be used if you know the differences between talking and doing. (See: Keeping the Talk Modules Quiet.)

Why is the problem so hard to fix? Because the complaints are created by verbal systems and interpreted by verbal systems. It is a lot like complaining about the color of an outfit to someone who is color-blind.

What are the resources for solutions? Posters, comic books, audios (talk through), videos, videos in pantomime, videos in charades. Some of these are used. But not as often as necessary, to judge by the research at the top of this page.

Entrepreneurial alert. Maybe market. Some people will complain about instructions that come with the products they buy. A few will figure out how those instructions could be done better. A few will actually do the instructions better and put them on a website. Maybe a few will make money at that. But not the ones who only complain.

What does this have to do with homework? Some people will complain about homework. A few will see homework as another kind of product. Another kind of communication.

Brain-Based Communication (2)

In the previous episode of this series, I left a puzzle. A quest: What parts of your brain were involved in processing that episode?

If you read the episode with that question in mind, you may have noticed that the writing was a bit different from most of the things I write. Abstract phrases. Long and complex sentences. Not the sort of language I would normally impose on people unless they are professional psychologists.

What I did was call on my Vulcan to do most of the writing. And what I expected was that readers would call on their Vulcans to interpret it. Now I will explain what I mean by the Vulcan as an important group of brain modules.

The name Vulcan obviously comes from the work of Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy in the character of Mr. Spock. (That is from Start Trek, the Original Series in case there is anybody left who does not know.) The concept includes these fictional characters:
The Thinking Machine Jacques Futrelle
C. Auguste Dupin Edgar Allen Poe
Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle
Mr. Spock. Star Trek, the Original Series
Mr. Data. Star Trek, the Next Generation

For an explanation of why I think popular fiction is relevant to a discussion of brain-based communication, see “A myth is not a female moth.”

With insufficient data, I will only speculate about the operation of the modules. The brain modules that correspond to the Vulcan are probably used primarily for scholarly, scientific and technical (including computer programming) work. There is evidence (The Grammar of the Modules) that specific parts of the brain are activated for processing complex language. I expect that more fMRI studies will further elaborate on the modules that support this activity.

I like to speak of activating modules for specific purposes because it establishes the viewpoint that the brain offers a set of tools and that choosing a tool is not equivalent to being the tool. Thus, for example, I am letting my Vulcan write the first few episodes in this story. The reason is that what I will be saying is moderately technical. So I expect that readers will need to activate their Vulcan modules to interpret it.

And there is the first item in brain-based learning. Don’t just know your audience by demographics. Know what brain modules you want them to use as they encounter your presentation. There is a whole head team there. Your communication will work best if you get it to the brain modules that can best handle it.

Hand waving: Not just for briefings anymore

Hand waving boosts mathematics learning NewScientist.com news service

Gestures can boost children's ability to complete problems in mathematics: The study used grade school children and three types of presentation: Group 1: Oral instructions alone. Group 2: with gestures that “copied” the oral instructions. Group 3: gestures that “complemented” the oral instructions.

The task called for solving simple equations in which one term was represented by a question mark. The oral instructions mentioned each term. The “copy” gestures apparently pointed to the terms as they were mentioned. The “complimentary” gestures, for example, signaled subtraction by a scooping motion.

Order of performance: 3, 2, 1. The work also suggested that that students who copy the gestures of their teachers are more likely to learn. Work by Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago. Presented at the 2006 AAS annual meeting .
----------------
We have long known that engineers need a lot of hand waving to brief on a project. Here we see evidence that gestures contribute to teaching. And this is obviously an example of that Vulcan creativity I mentioned before. We know that gestures contribute to communication. Once you consider that teaching is a subset of communication, you are bound to expect that gestures will contribute to teaching.

You might also suspect that “complimentary” gestures would make a greater contribution than “copy” gestures, although I am not sure that it is easy to know what the appropriate complimentary gesture is. Gestures that copy, I assume, are redundant. That is, they carry no information not in the spoken instruction. The “complimentary’ gesture mentioned as an example appears to be a visual analogy. The scooping motion would remind the students of a concrete counterpart to the abstract minus sign or the abstract word subtract.

The study also suggested that students who copy the teacher’s gestures are more likely to learn. One of the main themes of the Thinkerer is that you want to get your whole brain behind you. The more brain modules you get on the job, the better service you are likely to get out of your brain. Imitating the teacher’s gestures calls on the brain modules that control movement.

Having the children imitate gestures sounds like a better idea than saying “Sit still and don’t fidget.” My guess is that fidgeting is a symptom to indicate that the movement parts of the brain are not getting enough job-related work.

Maybe Market. Entrepreneurial alert. Gestures are familiar to people who work in the theater, cartoons (moving and still), comic books, and pantomime. They may even be familiar to some psychologists other than Susan Goldin-Meadow. Present technology allows low-cost preparation and distribution of video clips. Someone who knows a little bit about video production could make instructional video clips that use gestures to augment instruction. Such clips might be marketed for teacher training, for classroom use, or for assistance the parents.

Perhaps some parent who sees homework as a problem will figure out how to do this. And so demonstrate again that “Every problem is an opportunity being mismanaged.