Affordances and Apple

Affordances-

         Very rarely has one term been embraced by so many and redefined by almost every discipline that uses it. The concept of affordance is very important in all areas of design- whether it is design for a computer interface, design of a commercial building, or the design of a writing course. These areas often use the term affordance with different meanings, but underlying it all (in my humble opinion) the basic concept of affordance is essential to successful design of everything. To me it is much like Einstein's Unified Theory, there should be some basic principle that holds everything together in successful design. However, like the Unified Theory- it should be there, but somehow it hasn't been found yet. Even though Norman's interpretation of Affordance is quite different from Gibson's, they both have important elements of truth that shouldn't be overlooked. And because of their importance I wanted to offer a few more thoughts on the subject, even though our major focus on this topic was last week- it should be in the back of our mind in all the technological choices we make.

      In Donald Norman's article, “Affordances and Design”,  the goal of the educator- their affordance- should be apparent to the student (or user). If the affordance of the activity is to encourage interactivity among students with a group writing assignment, then the tool that is chosen to accomplish this task should not only really do the task, it should be apparent that this is the way the task should be accomplished. This is especially important for educators preparing the environment for our students. The technologies we use should facilitate the learning and not offer barriers and frustrations that are not necessary to the learning process.

Norman's guidelines-

1. Follow conventional usage, both in the choice of images and the allowable interactions
2. Use words to describe the desired actions
3. Use Metaphor
4. Follow a coherent conceptual model so that once part of the interface is learned, the same principles apply to the other parts.

      The tools that we use to accomplish our goals should be following a “coherent conceptual model” to make sure that our real goals are met. Unified interface helps tremendously in allowing the student to focus on the learning task and not be distracted by simply struggling with the interface.

         This philosophy of User Interface was fully embraced by Apple in their products. Their philosophy is that users should be able to accomplish their task in a way where they don't really feel like they are interacting with a computer, it should flow intuitively. For many years I was a whole hearted Windows person. I programmed with Windows products, I understood what was happening in my computer, but it took years of serious study to get to the point where I could load a program and be able to find out what was happening when the computer got slow, needed to be reformatted, or just needed to be taken apart to fix. Finally I tried a Mac because we had to use it for my computer graphics class, it was amazing. Within a few minutes I was able to figure out the interface and adjust. Drawing with it was so smooth, and the user interface responded effortlessly to me. After my new Windows laptop broke down three times in the first year I had it, I started getting all Apple products (along with the rest of the world). I grew to really love the ease with which I could accomplish my tasks.

       As we choose technology and design interface- it should DO what we want it to do, and it should be intuitive in usability. As with any writing project, I always ask my students- WHO is the audience. If we don't write in a way that speaks to the audience, then we need to rewrite. If we design and choose technologies that the students can''t understand or use, then we need to redesign and rethink our choices. Each item we choose should make sense and be accessible for the users. Learning a new way to do things will always be resisted, unless the user sees a benefit in learning this new task.

This adds a new layer to get to our affordance, we need to convince the user that it is worth the effort to learn how to use this tool to get the goal accomplished. This is where metaphors and storytelling can help people adapt to new technologies. Much like the Apple iPad ads- “This is what we believe. Technology alone is not enough.  Faster, thinner, lighter -- those are all good things.  But when technology gets out of the everything becomes more delightful, even magical.  That's when you leap forward.  That's when you end up with something like this." (Apple, 2011, iPad2 commercial).

Hopefully we can get to that point, where our classes become "delightful, even magical".

Jennifer's App if she Could Build One

If I had the skill I know exactly what I would build. Now let's see if I can describe it :) It would be called "MYOB - Managing your own Budget" 

It would be a scanner/ accounting/ tracking application.
Most receipts now have a bar code at the bottom which contains 1) the amount you spent 2) what you bought and 3) when you bought it.

What I want is an application that will extract that data and put it in a spread sheet. This way you can 1) have a basic electronic checkbook - you scan the receipt and it calculates how much is spent and subtracts it from your total. 2) It also will track what you buy categorically- so you can look at how often you buy milk, or how many times you   caved in and got the expensive chocolate instead of the cheap. 3) It also then gives you the data to figure out spending habits- such as if you spend more in the morning hours or evening hours.  If you spend more on a Tuesday or Friday.

As with most technology- most people would probably use it only for the accounting application but it would carry the potential for behavior modification if you used the whole thing.

I have seen plenty of tracking applications for various things but nothing like what I detailed.  Most require you to manually input the information- which of course is why I don't use them.

I'm all good to learn how to build it- if I have the skills, I just have no idea how right now.

Finding Balance - Meeting Competing Needs Through Multiple Testing Modules

As promised, here is my analysis of the two types of exams we use as a part of bcpLearning: traditional multiple choice exams and situational exams. In my post from Tuesday, I mentioned that, because many of our customers are companies seeking to train their employees, we've discovered a bit of a competition between the employer's need for quantifiable results and the employee's (student's) need for confidence in their new knowledge and their ability to apply it on the job. In an effort to meet the needs of both parties, we've begun using two different testing tools.

I. Multiple Choice Exams

These are your typical, run-of-the-mill, graded multiple choice exams. The questions are designed to cover the range of topics discussed throughout a particular course in order to provide a quick assessment of the student’s retained knowledge of those topics.

Affordances

• Assess-ability. The employee (student) either passes or fails. If the student gets 80% or more of the questions correct, they get a passing grade and their manager is sent a certificate to keep on file. If the student fails, they have to retake the course.


• Cheating block-ability. We’ve put a number of tools in place to assure employers that the employees are actually taking the courses and passing the exams fairly. For example, a student’s access to the course is cut off when an exam window is open, keeping students from clicking through the course for an answer. Also, the exams can automatically shuffle questions through a larger database, creating a different exam every time. Employers can also print out reports to track each employee’s usage. If the employee spends five minutes just clicking through everypage and calls it good, the employer will know. Employers can also set the amount of exam attempts allowed. If someone wants really wants to cheat, they can find a way…but at least we make it pretty difficult to do so.


• Easy Assemble-ability and Maintain-ability. From the developer’s end, these exams are incredibly easy to build and maintain. Just create a new exam, enter the number of questions, type in each of the questions/answer choices, select the correct answer, click submit, and you’re done.
  

Disaffordances

• Student Automaton-ability. These exams ask students to spit back a series of facts mentioned in the course, without thinking critically about the information as a whole. Students can easily learn what they need to get a passing score and then forget everything immediately afterward.
  


• Lack of Feedback-ability. During the exam, there's no opportunity for immediate feedback and growth. After the students finish the exams, they get to see which questions they answered correctly and sometimes an explanation, but that’s about as far as it goes.
  
  
• No Practice-ability. Students aren't prompted to think about the information in the course as it applies to their work. They may not be able to take what they learned in the course and convert it from a series of facts to actual job-related skills.

II. Scenario Exams
These exams constitute our attempt to combat the cons presented by Multiple Choice Exams. Here we present a series of situations where the information from the course can be used to solve legitimate, real-world problems.

The following description/images will give you a good idea of how a question works in a Scenario Exam. First, the student is provided a scenario description that will provide the context. Then, the student is presented with a series of questions that might pop up as a result of the posed scenario (See Image 1). If the student selects a wrong answer, he is sent to a screen that tells him why he was wrong, provides a hint for solving the problem, or both (See Image 2). Because this is a tricky question, the student is given a hint telling him where in the government databases he might look to find the answer. After receiving the hint, the student is sent back to the question to try again. If the student selects the correct answer, he is congratulated and given a detailed explanation of why the answer was correct and the easiest way to find it (See Image 3).

Affordances

• Genuine Applicability. Students are asked to think about what they've learned and use the information as a new skill set to solve a series of problems that are taken from real-life situations. (In this case, using the new skills to classify an imported article for the student's company.)


• Immediate Feedback-ability. If a student gets a question wrong, he is immediately told his answer was incorrect and given either an explanation or a hint. Then he's sent back to the main page to tackle the problem with the help of the additional information he just received.


• Confidence-ability. By learning how to apply the information to their work instead of just learning the information in order to spit it back at the end, student's gain the confidence they need to turn the information into a new skill set. Guiding students to actually apply their new training not only helps the students improve their job performance, it meets the employer's overall goal of actually training their employees and achieving better work performance.

Disaffordances

• No Grade-ability. Because everyone eventually gets to the solution and there's currently no way of tracking a student's progression through the exam, we have no way of measuring a student's skill level or retention through the situational exam.
  
  
• Avoid-ability. Because these situational exams are not graded, they are not part of the course certification process. Students can choose not to apply themselves by just guessing randomly until they finally get through the exam.


• Difficult Assemble-ability and Maintain-ability. Currently, these exams are incredibly time-consuming to build and even worse to maintain. Each exam can require hundreds of individual pages that have to be carefully linked together. Building a new exam can take over a week. Even making a small change to one question can require hours of work. There are also a lot of limitations on flexibility within the exams.

In Conclusion
As Bill described it the other day, the goal of combining "summative" and "formative" evaluation to meet the needs of both employer and employee (student) is an important one that we've taken a positive step towards achieving by utilizing this "double testing" approach. While the situational exams present extensive logistical difficulties and it would be much easier to just focus on a results driven training module, I feel 1.) the situational exams represent an important step in improving our testing procedures and 2.) the value added for the employees and, as a result, their employers, far outweighs the difficulties and should not stop us from moving forward with these projects.

SecondLife Remixed

Exigency

Don’t get me wrong: I think SecondLife is a forward-thinking, innovative online writing laboratory. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved, and it starts, at least to me, with SL's infrastructure and ethos.

At MSU, our online writing center is open to anyone: distance learners, residential students, people who can’t get appointments otherwise, etc. But, I think its core audience -- at least theoretically, at one time -- was distance learners, people studying from afar, often times non-traditional students. Folks working on their Masters of Social Work while working full-time, for example. The picture above is the outside of our Writing Center which is managed by folks outside of Michigan State University. Our center is located on an Island.

SecondLife, as I’ve mentioned has a lot of affordances: see-ability, hear-ability, movability, malleability, etc. But, SecondLife isn’t first and foremost an educational software. Rather, it was an online community/game interface molded to meet the needs of educational situations. Of course, this doesn’t inherently rule it out. But I do think the sort of after-the-fact way that the education-SecondLife marriage came to be does yield some shortcomings. It’s for this reason, I’d like to theorize a SecondLife alternative for synchonrous, identity rich, multi-modal consultation-style learning.

Monies and castes

Second Life’s a weird animal. It’s got its own economy (the currency is called Lindens and actually corresponds to real money). It’s got its own political structure. There are people who build and lease spaces and who set rules and parameters, effectively creating a caste. If you’re like MSU, you’re subject to this caste system and are forced to lease your space under someone else’s rules. Even individual avatars have to wade through Linden’s economy: though some things are free, many items used to personalize your appearance cost money, meaning that identity-creation ain’t free (go to marketplace.secondlife.com at your discretion as there are some strange accoutrement on SL).

Also, as I previously mentioned, in order to even gain access to the MSU Writing Center on SL, you’ve got to be approved (tagged) by one of our landlords, a sort of SecondLife knighting. Though this is a simple and fairly innocuous process, it’s still time consuming. Taken as a whole, these elements might deter a writer from seeking consultation with us, which, I’d guess is especially true for people unfamiliar with gaming culture and SecondLife-esque programs (possibly a large segment of our target demographic).

My proposal

I think there’d be some utility in creating a web-based, non-downloadable space where writers can go, easily access and manipulate an avatar, and talk about their writing. In this way, the application would maintain the perks of SecondLife (quasi-embodiment in the form of an avatar, synchronous communication, multi-modality {text, sound motion, etc.}. By removing some of the gatekeeping mechanisms (getting tagged, paying for stuff, etc.), this application might be more approachable for leery writers. Since writing is such a deeply personal process and seeking help can be a tough decision, we shouldn’t make it any more difficult than it has to be. The screen-capture above shows the red-tape associated with SL. Because we're not in control of our space, we're told where we can and cannot go.

Not to get greedy, but it’d also be useful to have a Convore-esque chat feature that allows chats to persist and writers to continually access topics of conversation. Likewise, a voice recorder might be nice so audio conversations could persist for later access (or a voice-to-text recognition software that allows for a “log” of what transpired in a given session). I think such additions could be beneficial for both writer and teacher. The writer obviously benefits from a record of questions and answers, but the teacher can benefit from the ability to reflect and retrace. As of now, conversations in SecondLife are fairly ephemeral, sticking around only for a few minutes.

I am sure this is a coding and programming nightmare and it’s awfully idealist, but I think building off the strong foundation SecondLife has laid would be useful in opening up the Writing Center to people from afar.

I’ll keep thinking about this and edit/elaborate as the week progresses and this concept marinates a little.