ChaosScenario

Is Our Children Learning?

Here's an interesting video about fully utilizing the technology that is available today to disrupt and break through the restraints of the traditional classroom environment in the hopes that it will enable our kids to learn. There are going to be a lot of people who reject the concept because it's not what they had to do to learn.

Before we go off on a tangent about how stupid our kids are and so forth, we need to check ourselves first. Are we willing to challenge our own assumptions?

The world is different than it was 30 years ago. Shall I list a few significant ways this world come together to evince a design to compete for the attention (and the education) of our kids?

1. We didn't have satellite TV.
2. We barely had portable music players, and certainly not anything that could store hundreds of hours of music at once.
3. Cable television was not widespread. Mostly it was just the big three networks, and if they didn't have something on that you wanted to see, tough luck.
4. Nearly 6 in 10 mothers stayed at home to ensure the kids (the students) did what they were supposed to.

Don't look at this as a plea for a return to a bygone era. That's not the point. It isn't that kids aren't learning, anyway. It's that they're not learning what we want them to in the manner we want them to learn it.

The point is that, for good or ill, the world has changed, and we'd best be prepared to deal with it. Today's tools give us the ability to play in the same space our kids want to play in. We have the technology. We have the wealth. Why are we withholding it?

Thanks to Mike Sansone for the video. Thanks to President George W. Bush for the quote that just keeps on giving. And most of all, thanks to the teachers who won't quit on their kids and who won't quit learning. - Cam Beck

For more information on learning, please see my brother's article, "Your Education Plan," in which he also pays tribute to one of our learning heroes, George Cressman - our grandfather.

Innovation by the Hour

While I enjoy performing research, one of the most rewarding parts of my job is finding interesting solutions to business problems that the research uncovers. The process itself can be at once both stimulating and tedious. You have to enjoy the process, though, because you're not always going to be able to apply solutions you might dream of because budgets, timelines, and narrow-minded thinking might prohibit it.

Here's the dilemma: Agencies typically bill at an hourly rate, not at the rate of innovation. So if in the process of developing and selling a solution that is workable within the scope of the project, you happen to make a highly innovative but simple connection of two disparate ideas that will help you more quickly solve a different problem you might encounter on another project, for another client, to whom does that idea belong, and what can you charge for it?

The Client Owns the Idea
You could make the argument that the company that you billed the time to while you made the discovery owns the idea, but in some cases it was never even presented -- it was just one of the paths you went down when you were looking for something else.

The Agency Owns the Idea
And you can also say that the agency owns the idea, except many times key stakeholders aren't really aware that the idea exists. All they are aware of is the final outcome, which they may or may not be satisfied with, either of which they can usually live with if the client is happy and pays their bills on time.

Plus, since the innovation initially occurred on someone else's dime, the apparent cost may be disproportionate to the time billed on it. Since the idea is far more valuable than the time spent on it (for this project), how can the company in good conscience bill another for an idea when they have agreed to pay based on time spent? (Answer: They can't.)

The Employee Owns the Idea
Companies provide resources and create an environment where connections can be made, but ideas are not promulgated apart from people.

If the idea is that innovative and the employee recognize it, the enterprising employee may look to advance himself by assuming the risks, breaking off to form his own company and sell the idea on the open marketplace.

Or he may use the idea to advance the company for which he works (and his own status within it). This is especially attractive if

1. The person is confident that his company will sufficiently reward him for the innovation and
2. More risk is entailed in launching the idea than he is willing to assume.

Learn, Practice, Practice
Lewis Green includes this anecdote in his email signature. It represents an exchange that allegedly occurred between Pablo Picasso and a patron who commissioned Picasso for a sketch that Picasso quickly executed:

And what do I owe you?" she asked.

"Five thousand francs," he answered.

"But it only took you three minutes," she politely reminded him.

"No," Picasso said, "It took me all my life."

Reflecting on this recently, I started to wonder: In a marketplace where ideas, not time spent, are the chief source of prosperity, why do we bill hour time hourly?

Rather than measure our success by number of hours billed and the rate at which we can bill it, a more telling metric would be to measure the number of useful ideas generated and cataloged per project.

I suspect that the company that established a way to catalog, recognize, reward, and recall such ideas as needed would eventually build a surplus of useful innovations in the course of a project that would benefit them and their clients tremendously.

The Copycat Web
The truth is that ideas are promiscuous anyway, so claiming exclusive ownership of them is problematic. The guy who first called the home page the home page is not living a life of luxury because he collects trademark fees from everyone who has a home page.

Ideas aren't spread because you spent a lot of time on them.

They aren't spread because you bill a high hourly rate.

Ideas spread because they're useful.

So why do we continue to bill by the hour? Maybe because that's the most reasonable accord clients and vendors can reach.

Or maybe it's because we lack the imagination to think of something better. - Cam Beck

Happy Mother's Day

It's a day late, but I wanted to make sure we really sit to reflect on just how many lessons Moms teach us in a 24-hour period. Enjoy!

- Cam Beck

My Media Diet: No Rest for the Weary

The brilliant and indefatigable Arun Rajagopal requested that I share my media consumption habits.

Books
I read mostly nonfiction -- focusing on business and marketing, history and current events, self-help and philosophy --, but I've been trying to break out of that by reading a little more fiction. To that end, I read The Sea Wolf by Jack London last month. I just finished The Christian Husband 2 nights ago. Currently I'm making my way through the excellent *Personality Not Included, for which I will write at least one review when I finish, and Hitler 1936-1945 by Ian Kershaw.

News
I admit it. Although I love newsprint for reasons David Reich, Bob Glaza and Tangerine Toad all expressed at one point or another, I still get most of my news online. I regularly check USAToday.com, MSNBC.com, WorldNetDaily (plus its print monthly, Whistleblower), and various news aggregation websites such as The Drudge Report and Scott Baradell's Spin Thicket, both of which often take me to news stories on websites I would not have otherwise found. I also pick up whatever is lying around here in the office. There is usually a Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Dallas Morning News, and a USA Today around here somewhere.

RSS Feeds

Podcasts

Who's Next?
Now I'm going to look to the younger generation to see what our future holds. I'm interested in what media Nathan Snell, Ryan Karpales, The Great Haw, and Mario Vellandi are consuming. And because I need some help in speaking and writing (and because I've found their contributions very helpful), I also want to hear from Lisa Braithwaite and Kristin Gorski.

Step up to the plate. Time to share. :)

- Cam Beck

Don't Break the Back Button on Flash Sites

A recent academic study conducted by researchers from the Universities of Hamburg and Hannover found that people don't use their browser's back button as much as they used to, compared to other elements of a website. The back button is still the 3rd-most used Web feature, behind hyperlinks and contextual buttons (buttons that occur within the content of the page). Be careful in how you interpret this new information, though. The back button is still one of the most important parts of the browser.

The study just demonstrates that the way people interact with websites changes as our tools for building rich user experiences become more robust. The back button is as useful as it ever has been, so if you're thinking about breaking it just because it makes it easier for you to build a Flash site, don't.

What makes the back button so special?
The back button is a classic error-recovery tool that is useful for every application. Most of the time, the ways we recover from errors are invisible to us. We just know intuitively that we can recover. When we miscalculate the ease of recovery, we are inconvenienced in some way or another.

Let's look at some common examples of mistakes in our lives and how our recovery can be thwarted by poor usability.

1. When you walk out the door without your keys, you just go back in to get them. If the door locks automatically behind you, you're screwed.
2. When a slip of the tongue insults your spouse, you quickly correct yourself. If your spouse doesn't tell you were offensive, problems ensue.
3. When you print the wrong version document, you open up the correct one and print that instead. If your documents are indistinguishable to the naked eye, you have no way of knowing which is correct and which is outdated, you can cause yourself and your company embarrassment, and you could perhaps lose important business.

The back button works in much the same way. It's one of the reasons the Web is such a low-risk medium. The easier it appears to be to recover from an error, the less risk a person will perceive when confronting a task.

If the back button doesn't work on your site the way 99% of the people on the Web have learned the back button is supposed to behave, users are forced to relearn a special interface rule for your site, which increases perceived risk and decreases adoption.

The back button naturally works well for websites built in HTML sites, but to keep them working the way they're supposed to in Flash, it requires extra effort.

Some Bad Examples
If not done properly, browsers will see the Flash site as a single page, and no matter how deep you are within the site, clicking the back button will take you off the site entirely, forcing you to find your way back to where you were (or to give up and spend your time elsewhere).

(Dig a little bit into this site or this site, and hit the back button to see what I mean.)

See aceofcakestv.com for a particularly egregious example. This site is so hard to navigate that it requires special instructions just to inform people how to use it.

I take no pleasure in pointing out that 2 of the 3 bad examples of back-button breakage listed here are actually agency sites. For more information on this problem, check out this classic piece on Web Ink Now.

Not wanting to go through the process of ensuring the back button functions the way people are accustomed to, rather than risk losing a visitor, many times Flash developers will simply prevent anyone from using the back button through meta refreshes or otherwise controlling the way they point you to the site. This makes the back button inactive.

Those responsible for making such decisions only think they're trapping a user on a site, but the truth is anyone can get out of any site at any time by clicking the close button.

The chances of losing a visitor in frustration increase exponentially the more you annoy them.

Some Good Examples
One thing I've learned over the years is that it's easier to tell people what they ought to do than it is to actually do it. No one gets it 100% right, which is why any company website should be seen as a continuously evolving project -- it is never quite done.

Here are some sites that make noble attempts to keep the back button working right.

Flash is not evil or inherently bad. But if you're going to use it, make sure you use it correctly. There are tools available (Hat tip to my colleague and Flash developer at Click Here, Shawn Scarsdale, for the information about the tool) to make sure the back button behaves on Flash sites (and Flex and Ajax) the way users have come to expect it to behave on every other type of site. - Cam Beck