August 30, 2010, 10:03 am
Teaching Many Many People in a Leveraged Way
by Henry Woodbury
My title is Bill Gates talking. He is talking about Sal Kahn, Harvard MBA, former hedge fund manager, and now the one man show behind online learning site Kahn Academy. Here is Gates at more length:
There’s a web site that I’ve been using with my kids recently called Kahn Academy, K A H N, just one guy doing some unbelievable 15 minute tutorials…. He was a hedge fund guy making lots of money and he quit to do these little web videos and so we’ve moved I’d say about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category and so that was a good day — the day his wife let him quit his job.
Kahn’s YouTube videos feature his voice and an electronic blackboard that present bitmap images and (mostly) Kahn’s notes and annotations. Here’s an example, Basic Multiplication:
This approach is extremely efficient and extremely effective. Speaker and blackboard (or whiteboard). That’s all.
When Gates talks about “leverage” this is part of what he means. The pedagogical simplicity of Kahn’s approach makes his materials very accessible and allows him to develop his lectures quickly. Their succinctness allows him to tailor each one to a specific level of ability. The other aspect of “leverage” is technological. By using the common YouTube video format, Kahn can reach anyone and everyone with a decent Internet connection. There are no additional distribution barriers. Makers of educational software should take note.
August 25, 2010, 3:10 pm
Data is the New Soil
by Lisa Agustin
TED offers up a talk by journalist/designer David McCandless, who we’ve written about before. McCandless sees himself as a “data detective,” creating beautiful diagrams (“flowers of information”) that expose new insights in the process. Check it out for a fun walkthrough some of his creations.
August 25, 2010, 9:32 am
Egg Cracking Technique
by Henry Woodbury
A friend linked me to the delightful They Draw and Cook web site (thanks Katy!). Here you have simple recipes rendered by artists and illustrators. Many are no more than decorated recipe cards, but some clamber over the illustration fence into visual explanation territory. An example is Alex Savakis’s egg cracking technique:
In this one, the text is superfluous.
August 16, 2010, 1:46 pm
Hello E. Coli, You’re Looking Large
by Henry Woodbury
Start with a coffee bean and zoom down to a carbon atom. That’s a journey in scale from millimeters to picometers.
To experience that journey, try out the interactive Cell Size and Scale application created by the University of Utah’s Genetic Science Learning Center. It is a tool of elegant simplicity. Move the single slider to the right and sets of increasingly tinier biological objects come into view. At micron scale, you’ll encounter the E. Coli bacterium with its friends lysosome and mitochondria. A gang of viruses make their appearance. And you’re only halfway to the atom.
August 10, 2010, 11:54 am
The Dugout Canoe Description of My Job
by Henry Woodbury
The Edge Annual Question for 2010 goes out to a bevy of deep thinkers:
How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
Is it? That’s up to you. Editor and Publisher John Brockman anticipates the point:
We spent a lot of time going back on forth on “YOU” vs. “WE” and came to the conclusion to go with “YOU”, the reason being that Edge is a conversation. “WE” responses tend to come across like expert papers, public pronouncements, or talks delivered from stage.
Science historian George Dyson offers an evocative response:
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
Give us a tree and we’ll carve your canoe. That is what Tim Roy is talking about.
(h/t to Andrew Gilmartin who linked to Dyson’s quote on Facebook. Andrew blogs here.)
Update: I rewrote my lede, up to the Dyson quote, to add context and incorporate Brockman’s “you” vs. “we” statement.
August 10, 2010, 9:42 am
Global Reach, Local Recognition
by Henry Woodbury
Recently Providence Business News ran a profile of Dynamic Diagrams, based on a visit to the company and an interview with our president, Tim Roy. Here, Tim explains the importance of our information architecture and visualization practice:
“People are dealing with 100,000 words per day coming at them,” Roy said, “and they spend on average almost 12 hours consuming information every day and most of that takes place in front of screens, whether it’s a computer screen, a smart phone or a television set.
“We believe this is too much information coming at people and what we’re really trying to do is help folks simplify the story, take all of this data and transform it into knowledge,” he said.
From our founding in 1990 by Krzysztof Lenk and Paul Kahn, we have been proud to call Providence home. We’ve been fortunate to work with many dynamic organizations in the city and region. And we’ve found this city a great base from which to take on projects from around the world.
July 29, 2010, 12:26 pm
Historic New England’s Collections Online
by Kirsten Robinson
The Portsmouth Herald has published an article about Historic New England’s new web site and online collections project, for which Dynamic Diagrams provided web strategy, information architecture and design services, as well as project management for the site’s development.
You can view the web site at www.historicnewengland.org or dive right into searching and browsing the online collections — full of photos, artifacts, and reference materials having to do with 400 years of New England History.
We’re currently in the final stage of the project, conducting usability tests on the new site.
July 27, 2010, 3:05 pm
The Asynchronous Barista
by Henry Woodbury
Say you’re a software engineer trying to explain asynchronous processing to people with a general interest in software. You might use Starbucks as an example. Over to you, Gregor Hohpe:
Starbucks, like most other businesses is primarily interested in maximizing throughput of orders. More orders equals more revenue. As a result they use asynchronous processing. When you place your order the cashier marks a coffee cup with your order and places it into the queue. The queue is quite literally a queue of coffee cups lined up on top of the espresso machine. This queue decouples cashier and barista and allows the cashier to keep taking orders even if the barista is backed up for a moment. It allows them to deploy multiple baristas in a Competing Consumer scenario if the store gets busy.
This is a quirky article that introduces a number of programming concepts in an accessible and entertaining way. Hohpe throws in the occasional deep dive — as with the “Competing Consumer” link in the quote — but even there the analogy helps you guess where such a link might take you.
Analogy speaks to shared experience. It provides a way — one way — to turn abstract concepts into visual explanation. I can almost see the coffee cups lined up in front of me.
July 22, 2010, 9:01 am
Fastball, Cutter, Slider
by Henry Woodbury
In an appreciation of New York Yankees’ closer Mariano Rivera, the New York Times has put together an impressive animation that shows how he pitches. Even if you are not a baseball fan, this is worth a look for its artistry and integrity. By modeling and animating a season’s worth of data the visualization connects process — how Rivera throws the ball — with outcomes — a scatter plot of where his pitches cross the plate.
One highlight of the visualization is the comparison of three pitches — fastball, cutter, slider. Each is distinguished by a different spin, created by a different grip and release.
Credit for the visualization goes to Graham Roberts, Shan Carter, and Joe Ward.