By Gordon Rugg
Old inventions seldom die; usually, they fade into the background, and then hang around there for a surprisingly long time.
In this article, I’ll look at how this happens with physical inventions; how it happens with innovative ideas; at what is going on underneath the regularities; and at what the implications are. A lot of those implications are important, and counter-intuitive.
I’ll start with pointy sticks.
Image credits are at the end of this article.
By Gordon Rugg
There’s a widespread belief in education that getting students to reflect on their learning is a Good Thing. Whether this is actually true or not is another question, for another time. The key point is that if you’re a student, you might well end up having to write a reflective report.
This experience can be challenging, especially if you’re in a discipline like computing, where you might not have expected anything quite so introspective. It’s particularly challenging if the reflection is about a piece of groupwork, as numerous memes about “What I learned from groupwork” will testify.
Many students under-perform when doing a reflective report. However, if you follow a couple of simple principles, then writing the reflective report becomes a lot easier. As an added bonus, there’s a good chance that you’ll get better marks, and even learn something genuinely useful from the experience.
So, what are these principles, and how do you apply them? They involve systematically describing choices. Here, by way of moral support, is a picture of someone making a choice. You may be reassured to know that the choices you’ll be working with are a lot more encouraging…
By Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov – The knight at the crossroads
By Gordon Rugg
Sooner or later, most students end up having to give a presentation. Most students hate giving presentations, with good reason.
The usual process goes something like this. Well before the date for the presentations, there is a lecture on how to do presentations. This lecture is usually worthy and well meaning, and consists largely of things that you knew already, plus advice like Make the presentation interesting, without telling you just how to do that. The lecture is usually accompanied by links to some of the many resources for doing presentations.
A lot of those resources are excellent in what they cover. However, they’re usually not so great in terms of what they don’t cover, whether because of space and time, or because they assume you already know it, or whatever.
In this article, I’m going to look at those absences. I’ll start with the big picture, then look at how to handle structure and content, and end with the practical stuff that makes the difference between doing it well and doing it not so well. Before I do that, here’s a picture of some hats.
By Gordon Rugg
Other types of content analysis
In a previous post, I gave a brief overview of a widely used, vanilla flavour type of content analysis. It’s far from the only type.
There are methodological debates about most things relating to content analysis, which have been running for the best part of a century, and which don’t look likely to end any time soon. There are, in consequence, numerous different types of content analysis, and many approaches to content analysis. The following sections give a very brief description of some of those other types. I’m planning to write in more detail about them at some point, when there’s nothing more exciting to do…
By Gordon Rugg and Amy Martin
There are regularities in human desire. Often, though, the actual regularities are subtly but profoundly different from the apparent regularities.
In this article, we’ll look at one of these regularities. It starts with a significant insight from an article whose title neatly sums up a key finding, and implicitly raises a key question.
The article is a 1991 paper by Alley and Cunningham in Psychological Science. The title is: “Average faces are attractive, but very attractive faces are not average.” The implicit question is: “Why?”
There’s been a lot of work in this area. In this article, we’ll examine how a simple change in the way you represent the data can give powerful new insights into what’s actually going on, and into what you can do about it.
By Gordon Rugg
Academic writing is very different from most other types of writing. There are sensible reasons for this.
Unfortunately, not many students have been taught about those reasons. The result, predictably and understandably, is that most students, and most members of the general public, think that academic writing is dull and heavy because academics either don’t know how to write in an interesting, accessible way, or because they don’t care.
So, why is academic writing deliberately dull and heavy, and what are the implications, and how can you use academic writing style to your advantage? That’s what this article is about.
By Gordon Rugg
Every year, students in assorted non-artistic disciplines have to produce a poster. Every year, students who don’t view themselves as artistic complain bitterly about having to do this.
In this article, I’ll look at some of the issues involved in practical poster design at taught degree level, and at how they can be tackled systematically, without needing any artistic skills. The results aren’t likely to win any design prizes, but they should look competent enough to be presentable, and should save non-artistic students from a lot of grief.
In case you’re wondering why I’ve specified taught degrees, the answer is that in research degrees, students often have to produce posters for conferences. The guidelines for these are very different from those for taught course posters, and from publicity posters in the commercial world. This article is just about taught degree posters, and even for those, it comes with the disclaimer that your department may have very different ideas about how to do things, in which case, go with what they want, since they’ll be doing the marking…
I’ll also look at some broader issues in user-centred design, such as the concept of functional distance, which takes us into the origins of the classic command: “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes”.
By Gordon Rugg
Many problems in life are caused by misunderstandings. Misunderstandings take various forms. These forms themselves are, ironically, often misunderstood.
In this article, I’ll look at ways of representing misunderstandings visually, to clarify what is going wrong, and how to fix it.
I’ll use a positive/negative plot to show the different forms of misunderstanding. This lets you locate a given statement in terms of how positive it is, and how negative it is, as in the image below. This format is particularly useful for representing mixed messages, which are an important feature of many misunderstandings. There’s more about versions of this format here and here.
By Gordon Rugg
In a previous article, I looked at the belief structures of the archetypal “crazy uncle” worldview. It’s a worldview with a strong tendency towards whichever option requires the minimum short-term cognitive load; for example, binary yes/no categorisations rather than greyscales or multiple categories.
One theme I didn’t explore in that article, for reasons of space, was premature closure. This article picks up that theme.
Premature closure is closely related to pre-emptive categorisation, which I’ll also discuss in this article. Both these concepts have significant implications, and both involve minimising short-term cognitive load, usually leading to problems further down the road. Both tend to be strongly associated with the authoritarian worldview, for reasons that I’ll unpack later.
So, what is premature closure? In brief, it’s when you make a decision too early, closing down prematurely the process of search and evaluation and decision-making. This takes various forms; knowing these forms improves your chances of stopping at the right point. For clarity, I’ll use examples within the context of common “crazy uncle” arguments.
By Gordon Rugg
There are often problems when a concept has a name which looks self-evident, but which is actually being used with a specific technical meaning.
This is the case with the terms User Centred Design (UCD) and Person Centred Design (PCD).
So what are these approaches, and why are they so different from other approaches to design, and why do these names lead to confusion?
In brief, User Centred Design and Person Centred Design with uppercase are names for methodologies containing specific methods and concepts. They’re terms of art, used with specific non-obvious meanings, hence the common confusions relating to them. So, what are the reasons for these approaches having arisen, and what is in them?
hyde and rugg 