I often present on various subjects but often the subjects contain abstract concepts that you can’t convey with a simple photo. I hate bullet points because they don’t visualize the subject and make the story more abstract. So through my different presentations I developed a style of graphics that could be build with the basic drawing tools in Keynote. (Most are also present in powerpoint)

The Ingredients

I mainly use gradients with the same color but different hues. As shapes I mainly use circles, rectangles, arrows and stars. I finish it with some shadow and glows.
With these tools you can convey numerous kinds of abstract concepts. The power is to use people as the center of the visualization and to keep it simple.

The Slides

These are from a presentation of the new strategic values of the educational institution I part time work for. I hope they can be an inspiration for abstractions you need to visualize.

Results in summer 2007

Knowledge + Practice = Competence

Competence based: Assessment & Portfolio

7 subgroups work on plan

Practice based

Use of new media

Related:

• Top down vs Bottom up – Slides from another presentations build on same concept.

We are heading to a new social revolution. People communicate differently these days. With mobile phones, e-mail, chat, online socializing sites, hyves like myspaces, blogs and wikis we have a whole new kind of society growing in the world. People that are connected and free roaming, they are well informed and can filter good stuff from crap faster. They no longer believe in authority but instead in what they see themselves. They combine information quicker and look differently to the world.

Most of this generation still has to go through an education system that is runned by the previous generation of people who are less connected. But more and more educational institutions begin to favor andragogy.

Andragogy

Andragogy is a newer kind of education focused on what the student wants to learn instead of a predefined path by a teacher. The student learns to make it’s own choices and adapt to what is needed in certain situations. This learning only works if the student is connected to real world projects. The projects asks of the student to delve into the matter to find the best solution. The project is watched by a tutor who gives comments to inspire the students to get even better.

Social learning

The old way was a one way process where the teacher with his preselected books formed the learning path. If he was boring the students would be less passionate.

Andragogy is based on inspiring each other. If a student does not know how to solve a problem, a fellow student could be asked. If nobody knows or can’t find the information inside the learning community an outside expert can be asked for an open lecture.

The main grading method is reflection. Every student has to log his learning ambitions and followed path inside a kind of blog or diary. Sharing his findings to fellow students, tutors and assessors to follow. One students failures is a lesson for another. Knowledge is collected onto a wiki so future students can save themselves from some hard searching.

It is all about exploration of the material. Each student can find his/her own path that fits his/her ambitions and qualities. There is no longer a single perfect student and route. Our education system will produce more diverse people to solve more diverse problems.

A new society

Education is the foundation of society. It creates our future. A new social, free and more diverse education system build on passion will create a new generation that is no longer focused on the road defined by the elite but expanding knowledge and experience in every direction. People will be more open to new solutions. All will be more about passion and less about hate.

I want to end with sharing this great TED presentation on the subject by Ken Robinson:

Once this post would be written. My big unification post. What am I searching for…

Well I was searching for the ultimate goal of design. Design has only one goal. To improve, to construct, to unify, to become one and simple.

Design works with improving what already is. So it communicates better, so it works better, so it feels better. Our sense of beauty is based on better design. What feels better and simpler is more beautiful. Our sense of beauty selects better candidates to mate with so we have better designed offspring but it is also the selection method for what we create. We want to create something more beautifull, something better, something smarter.

Design movements are a big indicator. Design works on improving the parts until a part becomes better and rearranging attention and parts becomes necessary. Thats why a design movements become a hype. It is the celebration of a new insight.

We constantly learn, and learning is the basis of better design. Our information gets stored faster because it is simpler and more beautifull. The new learning is a step to better learning which also creates better design.

Then there is the us religion. Us is all about unification. About making things better as a whole. To improve ourselves. The us religion is the end vision of design. The dark side is about destruction, fear and hate. By design we could erase our dark side.

Design is about bringing us to a higher level. And this will never end.

Ted released a real cool video today on the multitouch displays I talked about in the earlier days of this blog. For those who don’t know, TED is an event that brings together thoughtleaders, movers and shakers to share their ideas. I recommend you to check out some of their videos.

These multitouch screens are really the future I think. They remove many of the current GUI and makes manipulating data much more intuitive. If you combine it with the latest intuitive data visualisation you can begin a whole new future in information navigation and manipulation. With some of trial and error it is maybe finally possible to get rid of the keyboards and mouses.

I see a world with much less abstractions in interfaces and languages and a future were direct manipulation gets closer and closer. I see new ways of getting insights into patterns in data and processes. I see new ways of learning, creativity and inspiration. I hope these tools become common soon.

I will just continue to play with my DS untill the time is here.

What is it about academia that they want to abstract everything? Why are there so many abstract articles and books that are incomprehensable for normal people? I hate it when I discover a needlessly abstract article on a nice subject.

Boring stuff

I went once to a dutch academic institution for a computer science study. They began the study with lots and lots of the most abstract math and learning you many abstract programming techniques with little real world connections. When do you really need to calculate a sinus by hand? As I look back they weren’t preparing you to be a good programmer. They made it as abstract as possible. It was like they wanted to proof they were an academic study. There were no fun assignments and there was no inspiration. They wanted to filter the people that could go through boring stuff.

I still speak to friends that have chosen the academic road. They have to study hard through thick books and get little to no real life practical knowledge… Why do so many people accept so much abstract knowledge? (It is common here in Holland that many students enjoy life a bit more and add more years to their study) Half of the knowledge is forgotten after the study in the hope that the essence will remain after practical experience. But reality often teaches you much quicker…

Mind sucking abstractions

Well I know some abstractions are essential and in some studies it cannot be avoided. But information could be presented a lot easier and with a lot more fun. There are other methods than dull books. Not everybody learns best by extracting structures of knowledge out of text and boring presentations…

Academic institutions mostly fail to inspire people… They create people that can delve through complicated information and can solve certain problems but it fails mostly on creating people with a vision. By their abstractions it leaves little room for creativity and or alternative thinking… Just because people are first ‘brainwashed’ by lots of knowledge and authority of the past. They become zombies of current educational authorities.

But well, our whole society is based on it. You get the highest prestige if you studied at an academic institution. Many people want to get to that spot and want to go through the
trouble of learning big abstractions.

Past vs Future learning

Academia are a thing of the past. It consisted of people who wanted to make their terrain of knowledge important. Teachers wanted to hold their fame by abstracting their knowledge. Let’s make education open and democratic!

We do not need abstract books and dull self centered professors….

I think the whole educational system needs a rethink. We need to switch to self-exploring learning fast. We need people with vision and creativity. We need people that love what they do. We need people that love to explore the boundries of our knowledge. We need people that can share information quickly and clear. We need people that can inspire others!

Lets make our knowledge comprehendable and inspiring for everybody!

Related this site:
The new learning: Andragogy

Related offsite:
h3h.net: The tired pretense of academia
Ted Talks: Sir Ken Robinson – recommend watch

As humans who grow up, discover things and die we must share our knowledge to let it survive. Every human has to go through education to learn all the basics of being in a civilisation and enhancing our existing knowledge. Knowledge is passed on to evolve the human race.

Through time we as a human race constantly redefine our ways of living: sometimes we improve and sometimes we go downhill. Just look up some history and you will see many changes of thinking and their effect on society. There is not one set in stone kind of thinking, our ideas of the world change every generation. We as a human race are in a constant state of flux and learn along the way.

Pedagogy

The thing that did not change that much is how knowledge is conveyed. Knowledge is abstracted into books and many teachers will go through the same order through the knowledge and are using the books as guidance. At the end of a series of lessons most students are tested to see if they are ready for the next lesson. This kind of learning is pedagogy.

But this kind of learning assumes all people are the same and learn the same. Students have to go through the curriculum as drones. School is mostly regarded as a dull place with exceptions of schools with inspiring teachers. The teacher and his/her social skills decide the affection of the students. Students with different interests are considered disfunctional and are sometimes thrown out.

Andragogy

Well lately a second type of education is gaining popularity: Andragogy. This kind of education focusses on the student itself instead of the curriculum. Students themself decide what to learn and in which way and coaches inspire and guide them. You still need to acquire the basic knowledge but how and in which order is not important. The process is all about one thing: inspire the student. Give the student emotional binding with the subject. This can be enabled to give the student a choice, to let him free and explore.

This new learning also calls for new learning methods. Books are just abstracted knowledge of which people remember only small bits. (10% is rembered according to research) People only remember the written information by repetition.

Something that works much better is learning by actually doing it. (90% of information will be remembered) If a student sees the consequenses of his actions in practice he/she will remember it for life. A practical situation where errors can be experienced works on the emotions and emotions trigger the brain to directly record the information.

Knowledge is about processes

Almost all knowledge is based on processes and understanding the workings of it: Math as ultimate meta language to describe everything, history and psychology to understand human actions, languages to understand and formalize communication, biology/physics/chemnistry to understand how the world works etc. We learn to understand those processes to form or interact with them. So knowledge is all about processes and if doing is the best way of learning we have to be directly in control of the factors of the process to best understand it.

Serious Games replacing books?

In the past lots of knowledge could not be tested in a practical environment without damage. With the computer age we could easy single out steps of those processes people have to learn and simulate them so people can work on them without consequenses. It is possible to explore, find the edges of the process, find what damages the process. This much more active learning will inspire the students much more than trying to describe abstractions of the knowledge. This new kind of study materials are serious games, games that lets students learn through exploration and testing, thus by doing.

By letting loose the strict paths of pedagogy you also let loose creativity. People can explore the knowledge but also redefine it and turn it upside down. It will create a new wave of innovation and a much more active thinking society of people.

Are we saying farewell to the books as a way of educating people?

Well it has been an interesting trip. Not only because of the conference but also all things I encountered there and my one day stay in Amsterdam. You meet a lot of interesting people when you travel alone.

Well the Apply Serious Games conference was very interesting. I did not know what to expect there since it was the first. The location was nice, the SCI building felt like a real classic English location and had a nice auditorium where all thye lectures took place. Just outside of the auditorium was the Garden Room where we could eat and talk to people on the breaks.

The lectures themselves where great. They confirmed some ideas we where already having and also let me rethink about things we took for granted. It was also refreshing to see some applications of serious games.

Some of the main themes that continued through the conference:

• Learning in Serious Games. A very interesting note on Pedagogy vs Andragogy. Something I touched earlier in this blog in my ‘getting it‘ post. Serious games is the ultimate tool of letting students explore their own learning paths instead of preformed paths. A type of learning I happened to experience for the last 4 years but which I did not connect to serious gaming yet as a big issue as I took it for granted.A main theme was that doing is the best learning. It is more expansive than easily outputting text but people will learn the most.

• Designing Serious Games. A lot of developers took us through the key issues. Many ideas that were adapted from the games world but looked at with a new perspective. It was all about the user experience and selecting stuff that enhanced the learning and eliminate the stuff which distract of the main learning goals. For example things like controlling the users headspace by selecting which actions can be controlled by the player and which are simulated and which are ignored and take care the user is not bored or overwhelmed.

• Application of learning games. We saw a lot of examples. It was notable that many were military oriented, but I think that many games are already based on combat so it is more logical and easier adapted. The other fields will follow and it was nice to see some medical, political perspective and social examples. Cisco had some nice examples of serious games that made clear by doing what was the core business of Cisco, improving productivity with networks.

• Serious games Content Management Systems. Because knowledge evolves the games themselves have to evolve. In the case studies were multiple learning CMSes which made it possible to set up scenarios by teachers for students to solve. This will prolongue the lifetime of the serious game and make it more flexible but it costs a lot more to build the flexibility. There were some nice game frameworks that made it possible to create learning games by the famous wysiwyg concept. (2 examples: Thinking Worlds & MissionMaker)

• The current state of Serious Games. It is still in the early stages of adoption. There is not yet that killer application. There was a nice lecture by prof Bob Stone on reflecting the serious games movement with the VR movement of the eighties/nineties with their Caves and VR-headsets.

• The business side of Serious Games. Topics on getting the project and dealing with the gatekeepers vs users. The gatekeepers are the people who decide and look at savings and do not always decide what is best for the users. Also some interesting notes on recycling your serious game for the more profitable commercial market.

This was the conference in a nutshell. I got a lot of insights in the market that we are now getting into with LucidMedia. Serious Games is still new but a very exiting and diverse industry. It was fun to meet new people from all kinds of disciplines looking at the same subject. I was a bit overwhelmed with how everything fitted with what we were doing and all the applied knowledge but I think I will be back next year and to also share some of my experiences and ideas.

You can discover more about a person in a half an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

Plato

(from the lecture of Paul Hollins)

]]> http://jurmo.us/2006/06/apply-serious-games-2006-london/feed/ 0 http://jurmo.us/2006/05/getting-it-some-raw-basics/ http://jurmo.us/2006/05/getting-it-some-raw-basics/#comments Tue, 16 May 2006 17:14:31 +0000 Jurriaan Mous http://jurmo.us/2006/05/16/getting-it-some-raw-basics/ Why getting it?
Multimedia, the stuff that I have learned to create, is all about getting the message/fun/information etc. accross. Getting it is the state you want your user to reach. Understanding getting it is needed to understand other users. So as a designer you have to get it first.

Growing knowledge cloud.



Some raw bits:

• Getting it is the basic concept behind communication. (learning and multimedia are for example communication.)
• Getting it is all about grasping concepts.
• Getting it is where practical knowledge combined with feelings and emotions transcend to intuition. Where it gets to deeper layers of the brain.
• Getting it is building rational/emotional/practical intelligence.
• Getting it is all about seeing patterns.
• Getting it has to be obtained by bits, most concepts can’t be told in a linear fashion.
• Getting it is never reached the same way by other users. All is depending on the knowledge already acquired and which bits are needed.
• Getting it can be reached earlier by laying out all the factors early and connecting them early. The sooner you built an overall view the better.
• Getting it is all about acquiring the basic bits but also depends on the emotional/rational intelligence of the experiencer to connect the parts.
• Getting it is easier for open minded people who can reevaluate their believes and previous knowledge.
• Getting it can’t be directly transfered to another person itself. It has to be done in indirect meta knowledge.
• Getting it is reached easier with direct information on the senses than by abstractions. (Visual over text)
• Getting it is abstract knowledge combined with practical experience and intuition.
• Getting it is the point that all acquired knowledge combined works holisically, it generates new intuitive knowledge. (its more than the sum of the parts.)
• Getting it is where raw information transfers to intuition and emotion.
• Getting it can generate the Wow-feeling when the whole is formed.

An observation on my previous getting it post:
‘Old school’ schools try to form knowledge by trying to push the student through a preformed path. ‘New school’ schools try to let students search for the missing bits so they can reach the getting it themselves. The last one builds more intelligence and passion if done correctly.

]]> http://jurmo.us/2006/05/getting-it-some-raw-basics/feed/ 1 http://jurmo.us/2006/05/getting-it-back-to-school/ http://jurmo.us/2006/05/getting-it-back-to-school/#comments Sun, 14 May 2006 16:20:23 +0000 Jurriaan Mous http://jurmo.us/2006/05/14/getting-it-back-to-school/

You get it or don’t. Somebody has laid out an experience and people get what is meant or not. It can be about getting the fun or getting the passion, but can also be about more serious goals like getting the knowledge that is teached.

It is very difficult to get somebody else to get it. The best way is to adapt to somebodies thinking and adapt your teaching/telling. But if we look at schools a stange system has formed out of the many years students are teached. Schools need to have concrete goals and they need to plan what students have to learn. They lay out plans and try to describe what the knowledge is. If it cannot be described new words and jargon is formed. The knowledge is formed into theories, history, abstract concepts with the end goal to form a strict path fot students to follow.

Many of the learning today is by getting to a class where you have to learn all kinds of abstract theories and then repeat them at tests. Think of economy/business, management, media, nursing, communication, programming, teaching etc. These are all fields of work that are based on getting it but why do lots of students have to learn all kinds of abstact ideas instead of just doing it? Of course you have to learn some of the basic rules, but there is to much jargon and abstractions in this world.

A study that makes no sense to me is the local study Media and Entertainment Management. Management is not learned by abstract knowledge on how to plan but by experience. Only with experience you really know how media works, what the technological barriers are, where projects go wrong and why, how to plan your stuff etc.

In contrast with the ‘old school’ learning I am currently in the last phase of a study that is based on practical learning. You are constantly doing projects and by doing it you see what you need to learn to accomplish your goals in the real world. My best learning experiences was by doing very big projects with over 20 students and where everything had to be managed to a end product on a strict deadline. A lot of things went wrong, but by doing it people discovered who where the managers, the workers, the socials etc. Doing big projects creates knowledge and you get how to do it better next time. We are not encumbered with books full of jargon and we try to find knowledge in new ways. Teachers do not make your lives more difficult but try to help you at the sidelines with their knowledge. The end result counts.

The main difference is encountered when you combine groups of the two styles of learning. In general the old kind works with the rules and is less creative with coming up with new different ideas while the new group of students try to reach for innovation. I see that the new kinds of students are more focused on the end user/student/patient and less on the process. The abstract type of learning seems to lose the connection with real people. The new way seems to be based more on getting it.

The old way was formed because of managers and bureaucrats. I think many in between layers of managers don’t get it. They want to see numbers and theories on why something works or not. People have to form their getting it into theories to make it comprehendable for somebody that does not get it. But can you ever get it that way? Why are there managers that manage a project/study and don’t get it theirselves? Let people do their thing and evolve a passion so we get better patients/students/users etc. It is all about the experience, and without experience you will never truely get it.

]]> http://jurmo.us/2006/05/getting-it-back-to-school/feed/ 3