Zero-teen, One-teen, … and the Importance of Pattern Identification

My three-and-a-half year old son, Divyanshu (who became Divi to help people at least pronounce his name), knows the numbers 0 through 10. Last week, I got a set of flash cards to teach him 11 – 25. As an utterly clueless father, I don’t know how other children at this age react to learning, but Divi is a very avid learner, with an attention span of five seconds.

I started teaching him trying to relate the new larger number to the smaller numbers he already knows:

Say one and one eleven.
One and two twelve.
One and three thirteen.
… and so on.

After 25, I started again from zero. In this round, he somehow figured out that if you insert ‘teen’ after a number, it becomes another number – four-teen, six-teen, seven-teen, eight-teen, and nine-teen. And when I reached 20, two and zero, he said ZERO-TEEN. However, I continued and so did his idea of the new numbers. After zero-teen came one-teen (21), two-teen (22), three-teen (23), four-teen (24) and five-teen (25). I smiled, corrected him, and restarted from 0. To my horror, he didn’t identify 10 by ‘ten’, which he knows but ‘zero-teen’. This is when I realized that he had identified a pattern, to suffix the number at units place with a teen. And this round resulted in yet hilarious ‘new’ numbers. So both 11 and 21 became one-teen, 12 and 22 became two-teen, and so on.

Divi might have developed misconceptions by identifying a pattern in the numbers, but pattern identification is what differentiates an expert from a novice. By pattern, I mean the underlying principles, meaningful arrangements, and logical reasonings.

If a chess board with some randomly placed pieces are shown to a chess expert and a non-expert for a few seconds and then asked to arrange the pieces on another board from memory, both persons fare poorly. However, when the pieces are arranged in a meaningful way, as in an actual game of chess, the expert chess player is able to arrange most of the pieces correctly, while the non-expert fares as poorly as before. The expert, in the second case, is able to identify the pattern of the pieces on the board.

Similarly, expert students are able to identify the appropriate laws of motion in word problems while novices try to plug in variable values in formulas and do not know the underlying principle on which the problem is based.

Divi’s is an oversimplified case (and resulting in a misconception) but … you get the idea.

The Problems with Technology-based Learning? The Technology Itself.

I’ve been working in the technology-based learning industry for many years now, initially as an instructional designer on Computer-based and Web-based training courses for information technology users and school children and later managing technology-based products and projects for higher education.

Technology has been in use since times immemorial. Leaves, rocks,  and paper are the earliest forms of technology. These days technology has become synonymous with the Internet, though other electronic devices such as audio and video tapes, projectors, and mp3 players are examples of technology too. Technology solves a number of problems, most notably convenience and learning. You can use technology to make your life convenient (ebooks) or you can use technology to learn a subject matter (online videos). The problem arises when one is confused with another. A still bigger problem is the perception that technology will help people learn a subject no matter how poorly designed or presented the content is. A case in point is the conversion of  a physical book into a pdf document or a Web site and the conversion of a pdf document to a Web site. Having a Web site instead of a book has its benefits such as searching or anytime, anywhere access, but a static Web site does not help with learning any more than a book.

Many people believe that multimedia elements such as podcasts, PowerPoint presentations, and videos will help people learn effectively irrespective of the design, context, or structure of the online materials. Unfortunately, learning is a very complex and time-consuming endeavor. Even more difficult is the transfer of that learning to new contexts. The developers of online courses mostly focus on learning, that is, scoring on quizzes. The quality of quizzes is definitely a factor in learning but again, assessment itself is a difficult task.

Do online videos on real-world situations help people learn and transfer that learning to new situations? May be, may be not. It depends on a number of factors. But the perception that technology solves all learning problems is a myth. And learners pay the price.

President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Address

Finally … My New Year Resolutions

After procrastinating for almost three weeks, I’m getting down to writing my new year resolutions for 2009. As it happens in every year, I break some resolutions before I can write them down,  some during the course of the year, some I postpone until next year, and I definitely keep the rest of them.

This year I will:

1. Stop procrastinating (this should be priority number one every day of my life).
2. Spend more time with my kids, engaged with them, not just being home.
3. Resume exercise, after a four months break.
4. Write a post on this blog every week and focus on what interests me most – technology-based learning.
5. Learn PHP.
6. Learn Economics (I manage the technology projects for Economics in my company so it makes sense to know the subject matter).
7. Work on the prototype for a Web 2.0 learning product.
8. Improve focus (on personal as well as professional things).
9. Not waste time (I don’t waste much time anyway but …)

Victory or Defeat: Two Graceful Gentlemen

Barack Obama – Presedent-elect of the US. A very inspiring speech by a charismatic leader.

John McCain – A humble and graceful acceptance of defeat.

In Search of Heroes

Heroes don’t emerge out of the blue in day-to-day life. Heroes are created or are born in times of crisis or, in movies or technology world, when a villain sets out to rule the world.

For a relly long long time, Microsoft rule the technology world, minting loads of money, creating new products, rolling out newer versions of existing products, and killing competition in the process. And in due course of time, it became a villain (and as Mike Arrington of Techcrunch says, Europe’s ATM). There was no other company that could compete with Microsoft, not becuase of the alleged monopolistic practices of Microsoft, but because none of the companies’ products were a serious competition to Microsoft. If you develop a crappy product, forget about competing with MS, or any other good product, for that matter.

The early 2000’s saw the rise of Google and more recently, Apple. In a world tormented by a villain, the rise of two heroes made the entire media and blogosphere blindly hail the new heroes and their antics. While MS, for many years, focussed on making money and not so much on improving it’s products, Apple, slowly and gradually, under the stewardship of Steve Jobs, developed great products and started capturing market share. The phenomenon started with iPod, Macs went mainstream, iPhone wowed people, and every other minor announcement from Apple was greeted with enthusiasm. Mostly because it deserved it, and partially because it was percieved a hero, in the fight against MS.

There were a few glitches in Apple’s way too. The activation of iPhone 3G had issues, developers apps were rejected without any apparent reason, and in some cases, because they tried to compete with Apple, MobileMe gave users a lot of trouble. But at the end, everything was forgotten and forgiven. Apple is a hero.

Google, another media hero in the war against Microsoft. Google is growing like anything, earning billions of dollars in revenues, and launching new products and taking new initiatives. But it’s also true that Google is still a one-product wonder. Google has not been able to replicate the search ads business model for any other product, not even close. But many people laud every effort made by Google in launching half-baked products, the most recent one being Chrome. People, including me, gave Chrome a try for a few days and went back to using IE, Firefox, Opera, unimpressed.

The day Chrome was launched, Techmeme was flooded with test reports from all tech-centric blogs. Many of them kept driving home the point how Chrome was the faster than all other browsers. Michael Arrington even went to the extent of calling it a desktop operating system and a Windows killer. That was really embarrassing from a person writing on a technology blog. But the speed of a browser is the not the only winning factor. After using it for two weeks, I felt that the overall user experience of Chrome was not satisfactory enough for me to continue using it. The best feature, the Omnibox, was perhaps the worst thing. May be combining the address bar and search box was not such a good idea after all.

Microsoft’s newly launched ad campaign was again a target of media attacks. The ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld were pointless, many claimed. The ‘I’m a PC’ didn’t impress many people. But the ads did their job and were liked by the common people as was evident from the comments on many blogs. Had the same ads been launched by Google or Apple, many people would have called it the best thing to have happened to the world since the invention of the Internet!!

Poor Microsoft. I feel bad for Steve Ballmer. Not that I’m a Microsoft fan (yes, I like Bill Gates), but it’s not getting fair treatment from the media. And that makes me root for them. I own an iPod, I’m planning to buy a Macbook, and I use gmail and Google maps, but I can’t imagine life without MS Office either. Microsoft is not a villain, no matter how many heroes are born (or are made).

Want to Have a Great Body? Follow These Tips

I have been going to the gym regularly (well, almost) for the last one year. And I have lost about 19 lbs too. Considering the fact that I was not overweight and weighed 145 lbs, that’s no mean achievement, losing 13% of my body weight.

But it didn’t take me one year to lose 19 lbs. I didn’t lose any weight in the first six months. It could be because I was not going to the gym as often as I should have, or I was not working out properly, or it could be some other reason. Then in January this year, I asked the fitness director of the club why I still have fat around my tummy. After all, I joined the gym to get rid of this fat, not to lose weight. He gave me just one tip – run faster on the treadmill, rest, run, rest.

I used to run at 5 mph on the treadmill for about 30-40 minutes. I changed my routine and started running at 6 mph for 2 minutes, then walked at 4.2 mph for 2 minutes, and so on. Then I started to gradually increase the duration for which I ran at a faster pace. Eventually, I ran 30 minutes at 6 mph, walked for 5 minutes, and ran again for 10-12 minutes. With this routine, I spned more than 700 calories in an hour. And yes, I kept increasing the incline of the treadmill, finally stopping at 3.5.

Any exercise is incomplete without cardio, strength, and stretching. So I spend about 20-25 minutes on strength trainging, working with various machines and dumbbells, and exercising all parts of my body. I lost weight in about four months, and even now, I’m losing some weight – half to one lb a month or so.

I have found the way to a great looking body and a great health. Here’s my take on what to do:

Control your diet

• Read the nutrition facts on everything you buy. Discard it if it contains any amount of saturated fat or trans fat. If the calorie count seems too high, don’t buy it.
• Calculate the calories you eat in a day. Contrary to popular perception that an average person requires 2000 calories a day, most of us need 500 to 1500 calories a day unless someone has a physically demanding job.
• Do the math. If your calorie intake is more than the calories you need, chances are you will gain weight and/or clog your arteries or both.
• Keep food items out of sight. It is easier and tempting to keep eating whatever is close by. Keep high-calorie stuff in difficult-to-reach places.

Exercise

• The best way to exercise is to make it a routine, and a routine can easily maintained by joining a gym, 3-4 days a week (3 is the minimum).
• Do the right exercises – 10 minutes warm up, 20 minutes strength exercise (yes, even if you are a woman), 45 minutes cardio (running is the best cardio exercise), and 10-15 minutes stretching and cool down.
• Don’t take your weight every day. Fat comes off very slowly and not seeing a drop in weight can be very demotivating.
• Give it at least six months before expecting any result.
• Keep the intensity of exercise high. The formula for an optimum heart beat rate – subtract your age from 220 – your heart beat rate should be 80% of this number (if you are a beginner to intermediate level) or 90% (if you have been exercising consistently for a few months).

Motivation

• The most difficuly to achiive, maintaining consistency can be very boring and hence, demotivating. Pair up with someone, especially a health freak.
• Vary your exercise regimen.
• Don’t go to the gym if you feel like staying home or doing something else (but don’t make it a habit).

I have compiled the list of tips above from my experience and trust me … IT WORKS.

Two Screaming Kids and a Canceled Flight

A week’s break from work after a year and a half, a wonderful vacation in New Jersey/New York, a relaxed, refreshed mind – what else could I have hoped for? Except the return fligh from NY La Guardia airport back to Dayton, OH on a Sunday afternoon. With my wife and two kids, aged three years and six months, it all seemed so much fun.

We reached the airport well ahead of time and the flight was scheduled to take off on time. So far, so good. There was only a minor glitch – the flight was delayed by about an hour. Not a problem, I thought. Taking off an hour late is not an issue, considering the flight would take only two hours to reach Dayton, and then it’s less than an hour’s drive home. We’d still be home by 10 pm, get some sleep, and off to office on Monday morning.

Every time I went to check the schedule on the display screen, I found the flight to be delayed by 30 – 60 minutes. The kids were getting restless, and my wife and I were getting tired and a little frustrated. As it turned out, it was just the beginning of a night-long ordeal. Finally, I learned to my dismay, the flight was canceled. And it happened because of some air traffic control issue, which I didn’t try to find out nor was I interested, the airlines was not liable to put us in a hotel or reimburse us for anything.

I started running from one counter to another, trying to find seats on any other flight to Dayton that day, exploring all options, getting confused, and calling up my brother-in-law for advice. There was a flight to Cincinnati, they said, that leaves from JFK, which was about 30 minutes drive from La Guardia. The flight was leaving in less that two hours, so I figured it was no point running to collect my checked-in luggage, catching a cab, and reaching JFK only to find out the flight was gone (or canceled).

I was standing in line behind about 10 people, when my kids finally gave us the ultimatum and started crying – or rather screaming – at the same time. Unable to leave my place in line, I watched my hapless wife, from a distance, trying to handle both kids, which is usually an impossible task even at home. Amidst hundreds of onlookers, two ladies, out of concern or pity or both, came to the rescue and handled the kids.

The unprofessional behavior of the airlines staff was on full display. The counter I was initially on was closing, so they sent me to another counter. People on that counter bluntly told me they don’t issue tickets for another airline, which the lady on the first counter did, issued tickets for another airline to a person. Baffled and frustrated, I went to a third counter. Finally, after more than 45 minutes in line, I got tickets on a flight to another city, Columbus.

After waiting for 8.5 hours on the airport terminal, our flight took off and we reached Columbus at 12:30 at night. I immediately went to the car rental’s office, got the papers, and returned to get the family and luggage. Columbus is 90 miles from Cincinnati, but I had to go to Dayton airport, 85 miles from Columbus, where my car was parked, and then to Cincinnati, 60 miles from Dayton. It was only only a matter of driving, I thought, at least we were not at the mercy of the airlines. But that was not the end of it.

As we were leaving the Columbus airport, the gatekeeper asked me who was xyz. I said I don’t know, how was I supposed to know who xyz was. Well, he said, the car’s agreement papers were on that person’s name. The car rental employee had given me the wrong papers but charged my credit card. The gatekeeper called up the employee. Fortunately, she had closed the office and had started the car, ready to go home. She didn’t know how to cancel the agreement and create a new one. She asked her colleague, who had to ask another person, an employee of a rival rental company. After about 10 minutes, I got the correct papers and left Columbus.

Five miles and the inevitable happened. I took the wrong turn and entered the city. Fortunately, I kept driving and saw the sign boards for the highway. 1.5 hours later, we reached Dayton airport. I had to park the car in the parking space, walk back to the terminal, drop the keys in the dropbox (yes, the dropbox was not located at the same place), take a shuttle to go to the long-term parking, drive my car back to the terminal, get everyone, and drive off to Cincinnati.

Finally, we reached home at 5:30 am. And yes, the crying/screaming sessions of my kids kept recurring every few hours the whole evening and night. The first thing I did after reaching home was switch on my computer and send a message to my manager that there was no way I was going to reach office before noon.

Then I slept.

Technology in Learning: The Beginning

In the early 1900s, when inventions in the field of audio and visual had started gaining momentum, devices such as radio and movie camera had found their way into classrooms, the earliest uses of technology for learning. During that period, Thomas Edison had predicted that books would be soon obsolete and instructors would be replaced with movie projectors.

“Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in ten years.”
- Thomas Edison in the New York Dramatic Mirror, July 9, 1913.

It has been almost a century and fortunately, the books are still here and instructors are teaching in the classroom. Different kinds of technology have kept finding their way into classrooms over the last several decades – overhead transparency projector (still in use), cassette audio and video player, computers, DVD players, smart boards, and video conferencing are only a few of the useful implementations of technology in the classroom. But nothing has revolutionized education more than the Internet and personal computers. Online courses are very common these days, from schools to higher education to companies. Then why have Edison’s prophecies not come true even today? Why do schools and universities still exist? And Amazon built a business selling books? Teachers are still as commonly seen in the classroom as ever?

The answer to these questions lie in the fact that the developers and implementors of educational technology understand technology more than they do how and why people learn. They succeed in identifying a use for a technology for learning, but they fail to understand that learning is essentially a social process, that the mere presence of a teacher and other students in the classroom (or even in a virtual classroom) increases the motivation and engagement of all students, that technology should be aimed at facilitating learning, not replacing books and instructors.

Will technology succeed in helping people “learn”? Absolutely. There has never been a better time for developing technology-based learning products than it is now.

Any takers?

Demons of the Past: Fight or Flight?

Most of us have, at some point in time, faced demons of the past – a terrible (or tragic) experience that has kept haunting us, refusing to go away, and keeping us terrified. Some of us are brave enough to immediately shrug shoulders and move on, while some are never really able to let go. A near-death experience or accidents are only some of the really bad experiences we’ve had in the past – one or may be two or more. Though we try to put up a brave face, the subconscious mind never really allows us to forget the incidents or fight it. The mere thought of having to face off with a similar experience would make most of us sweaty in a Midwest winter. The first action the mind wants us to do is to run away and not face the terrible situation, unlike the more analytical brain, which, when confronted by a stressful situation, might ask us to fight the situation.

In India, when a child is born, a horoscope is created by a family astrologer, which is referred to before any significant event, especially marriage, when the horoscopes of the boy and girl are compared for compatibility. However, the number of people believing in this scrap of paper is dwindling by the day. I’ve never believed in my horoscope, for the simple reason that I believe that nobody can predict the future, not even what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone years. By the way, my horoscope says I’d have two sons. I have only one son. And a daughter.

When I was growing up in a small township in India, there was only one swimming pool in a health center, and I was not allowed to go there. Our local club, where we were members, constructed a very large swimming pool, and unfortunately, a friend of my friend drowned in the pool, days before it was inaugurated. All the more reason for my family to prohibit me from going there.

One evening, when I was 16, we all went to the club, and my cousin and I entered the pool, in shallow waters, and were walking in chest-deep water, pretending to know how to swim. I was embarrassed to see little children swimming past me, while all I could manage was to walk on pool floor. After some time walking on the pool floor, my feet slipped and I went under water. That was the moment, I had to inhale air. And I did. Instead of air, what entered my lungs was only water. My breath stopped. Within seconds I took my face out of water, but the lack of oxygen in my lungs made my vocal cords blurt out a terrible sound. And then I was able to breathe again, by myself. But the feeling of drowning for those few seconds dissuaded me from entering the pool again. I have been to neck-deep water on sea beaches, but not the pool. Until last year when I took my toddler son for swimming classes. The first day I entered the pool, my heart kept skipping beats, I felt my blood pressure rise, and I had difficulty breathing. But that was it. I was able to comfortably walk in the pool, without any fear. A few months later, I enrolled in a club to learn swimming.

In March 2002, I had just got engaged to a wonderful girl, ready to get married two months later. I was driving on my friend’s motorcycle. I stopped at a traffic signal. When the light turned green, I started my motorcycle, and then I opened my eyes in the hospital, surrounded by a team of doctors. I suffered minor bruises and a broken tooth. The helmet had saved the left side of my face. I underwent CAT scan and I was fine, though the doctors kept me under observation for two days in the hospital. I had severe headache for two weeks because of the trauma.

After that day, I have not gathered the courage to drive a motorcycle again. Though I drove it once when I went to return the motorcycle to my friend. I started using public transport and then a car.

I still don’t remember how the accident happened.

After completing my master’s program at Stanford, I took up a job with a publishing company in Cincinnati. I came to Cincinnati with my wife and son in January 2007. I didn’t have a car so I bought a new Nissan Altima and drove a little for two days. The third day, while driving back from office in a snow storm, the car skidded on a curved road, hit the guardrail, swerved to the other side of the road, hit a tree, and stopped, facing the traffic in a two-lane road. I somehow maneuvered the car, brought it back in the correct direction, and drove home, this time slowly, watching other cars’ speed.

A year later, we had two continuous days of snow storm in Cincinnati. The second day of the snow storm, I had to drop my mother-in-law to the airport for a flight to India. At 5:30 am, it was dark, and there was already about 6-7 inches of snow everywhere. I drove slowly, between 25-30 miles an hour (on a highway). There were no lane markings visible, and I had a four- or five-lane-wide road all to myself. The car skidded numerous times, but it was not a problem. I hardly saw 15-20 vehicles on the road on a stretch of 35 miles. While returning at 9 am, it was no more dark. And it was my time to relive the moment when I had the accident in a snow storm. I increased my speed to 40-45 miles an hour, again skidded tens of times, but I was not scared anymore.

By the way, our family astrologer had predicted that two events could be a threat to my life – a closeness to water and a road accident. And these predictions were true.

I still don’t believe in astrology.