Mr. Watkins points to Kathy Sierra’s the clueless manifesto (which isn’t really a manifesto, but has a cool title, nonetheless.)
Obviously, I’ve thought a lot about this and related issues. I like the terminology reclamation, but I think Sierra oversimplifies the continuum of optimism/willingness to learn and pessimism/disengement (and I would say desire for ease). I find this behavior very hard to predict. For example, some of my students can make Myspace and Facebook do backflips. They know the interfaces inside and out, and can talk at length about their peculiarities. The same folks—English majors—don’t know how to use any advanced word processor functions. Not even find and replace. You’d think being required to write in nearly every class would create the exigence to learn a few things about OpenOffice or Word. But not for everyone.
This cluelessness (Sierra’s term) or lack of interest in learning is the reverse of the “programmer laziness” Larry Wall describes: while a lazy programmer might spend two or three hours writing a script so hand-processing a bunch of text takes just a few minutes every time the same problem reappears, the students who find and replace manually are spending minutes, over and over again, for the sake of saving a few hours.
I agree with Sienna (and Jeff) that inquisitive, motivated, ignorant users are extremely valuable. But figuring out how to keep and create that inquisitiveness and motivation is very difficult—perhaps the biggest challenge we face when asking students to experiment with new media.
Not knowing how to use any advanced features of Word will save you a lot of pain and suffering. The more serious problem is not knowing how to turn off the “auto-correction” disasters enabled by default.
I also think that the etymology of “clue” is worth thinking about here. Cluefulness as mnemonic technology, repetition and invention.
I’ve never quite agreed with Wall about “lazy programmers”. There’s no *way* I’d ever spend hours writing a script to automate minutes of work. How do I know the investment is going to pay off?
Actually, I’ve always suspected Wall’s “lazy programmer” bit was just a more polite way of describing a fuck-about programmer. I’d fire any programmer who worked for me that exhibited this behaviour. Well, maybe fire is too strong a word… But there’d be tremendous pressure for that tool to pay off.
I’d *much* rather buy a good tool (like BBEdit) that makes doing the work easier (seconds instead of minutes) to investing an hour on the mere speculation that I’ll need this tool again. The opportunity cost is just too great.
If you had a resonable expectation that those minutes would be repeated often in the future, it’d be worth it, which is what I always understood Wall to be talking about. Furthermore, I have often written a script to do something that would have taken me less time to do by hand in a series of mind-numbing repetitions; but the satisfaction, diversion, and possibility that it could be used in the future were always worth it.
Humans should not have to become like computers to use them.
It seems like what would make either the write a script or the use bbedit approach a good choice is more like situational awareness than cluelessness. At the risk of sounding argumentative, I really don’t buy the cluelessness paradigm. The analogy my friend uses is improvisational jazz, with musical expertise supporting whatever creative offshoots emerge. It’s the background, or closeness, or whatever else would make one not clueless that makes it possible for the offshoots. Of course, there are those great accidents and outsider insights that mix in, but how those events emerge is really what’s in question. Probably in a handful of ways. Out of what? Mappings. Analogies? Nothing?
Auto-correct or whatever it’s called is a perfect example. I have watched students repeatedly re-type capitalization Word “fixes” instead of shutting the damned thing off. And the way Redmond mauls indenting is shameful.
Wall doesn’t advocate writing a script for every problem, though admittedly he often acts as if that is his argument. And when I patch together code from my .history when a problem reappears, I sometimes wonder if it would make sense to generalize everything!
However, that’s a little beside the point. I think Dan is correct to steer us back to context and awareness. Really, cluelessness is less relevant than curiosity, willingness and/or ability to improvise, and willingness to experiment. To cast it in comprhet terms, willingness to play Elbow’s “doubting/believing game.” Ignorance just isn’t that important: yeah, it can help ensure that somebody approaches a problem without jumping to conclusions. But I have a hard time believing my students are unaware of find and replace. Rather, they just aren’t motivated to learn how it works. Why?
But I have a hard time believing my students are unaware of find and replace. Rather, they just aren’t motivated to learn how it works. Why?
That’s a damn good question. I’ve often wondered that for myself. Knowing what tools you have to make your job easier is a key to getting things done.
Although I’m not qualified to speculate, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has to do with focus. Your students are focused on the task of writing, but have never focused on the task of learning the writing tool. When we compare writing with a text editor (or gods forbid, MS Word) to writing with a pen or pencil, the idea of find-and-replace simply slips out of their mental working set.
This is exactly where a feature like the much maligned Clippy could be incredibly valuable. “I see you’ve just replaced ‘widget’ with ‘sprocket’ again.”, Clippy says, “Would you like me to replace all the other places ‘widget’ appears?” But this would require actual artificial intelligence, because I’m not talking about you hunting through the document to do a find-and-replace yourself. I’m talking about you happening upon ‘widget’ and changing it to ‘sprocket’ then 10 minutes later, happening upon another ‘widget’ and again changing it to ‘sprocket’.
That’s a hard task.
Something I have noticed among my employees is a lack of intuition thinly veiled as this cluelessness of which you speak. Even more disconcerting is the fact that they don’t seem to care when this shortcoming is pointed out to them.
I think, in essence, it’s a generational thing. Maybe the Gen Xers grew up with a strong curiousity to how and why things worked…thanks to the simpler things we played with (like building houses out of Legos or busting open a transistor radio). The following generation(s) was thrown a lot of information and data and never forced to interpret it into their own lives. Teachers simply ask them to regurgitate it on demand. Those differences in rearing and education have created strikingly different skill sets for the modern world.
I also wanted to point out that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can shed some light (in terms of motivation) on this issue.
Jeff, the complexity of the task is exactly why I think a technological solution to this problem is not worth chasing, at least not now. Instead, I’d prefer to remedy the lack of curiosity through some other means (e.g. pedagogy). Maybe Chuck is right, and over-saturation with this sort of stuff is the problem. Certainly, my earliest work with ease considered that problem: why do so many folks insist on the technological or systemic solution? And why, paradoxically, do those solutions collapse under their own weight? I don’t buy the 37 Signals or 43 Folders or 99 Whatevers argument that lack of simplicity is the central problem here; again, turning to Facebook and Myspace, those suckers are both textbook examples of “overcomplicated” or “featuritis” interface design, both visually and semantically, yet they are clearly being used. A lot.
Maslow seems familiar. I can’t remember if I’ve looked at it before. I don’t have notes on it, which makes me believe I haven’t seen it in primary sources. Off the cuff, it seems oversimplified; certain behaviors cut across the hierachy, especially where safety is concerned. And I don’t think aesthetics is really less important than knowledge. But I need to look at the real thing, not secondary simplifications, before I pass more judgment.