Techfoot

One of my students came back to visit me after more than a year working with African refugees. During the time that he was away, he said that one of the things that he dreamed when he got back to US was drinking a tall glass of cold orange juice. When he got back his home in western New York, he headed down the the local Wegmans grocery store make his dream come true–only to find that he had to chose from more than 60 kinds–pulp, no pulp; with calcium or without; from concentrate or not from concentrate. After a year living with virtually no choice of what he would eat or drink or wear, he was so overwhelmed by the possibilities that he left without making a decision.

Most Americans assume that choice is a good thing–and that more more choice is better. Psychologist Barry Schwartz challenges central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. For a great introduction to Schwartz’s thinking on this topic, check out his Ted Talk.

We see the problems with too much choice all the time as we help users integrate technology into their teaching and research. Few users even scratch the surface in using the software they purchase. Experts find that most Word users utilize fewer than 5% of the features–even those for whom word processing is the central productivity tool for their work. One of the most difficult–but most important–tasks for those of us in the Technology Integration Program is to find the balance between unfettered choice and a unwarranted centralization that chokes off creativity. We need to take the leadership in exploring new technologies, recommending those that have the widest potential to improve learning and then developing support mechanisms that help faculty adopt new tools quickly and efficiently.

I’ll be writing more about these focused research projects as the summer goes on, but I owe Susan three posts in the next three days, so I’m going to bring this one to a close.

Worth a Listen on IT Conversations Overcoming Bias.

We live in a world of cognitive biases and polarized opinions. We consider ourselves to be largely rational, yet we are often prone to systematic errors such as overconfidence, wishful thinking, and the attraction of strong opinions. This means decisions are often driven more by personalities and passions rather than technical merits. Economic theorist Robin Hanson explores common errors, and points to innovative tools such as prediction markets which can help overcome bias and promote truth.

George Mason economics professor Robin Hanson gave this short speech at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference last year about how cognitive biases get in the way of our accomplishing goals that would make our organizations function better. Bias is the a systematic tendency to produce errors in our judgment. (One way of defining the purpose of education is to help individuals understand these typical human errors and overcome them for the betterment of society.)

Most of know that intellectually. We know that our inability to accurately estimate project times and costs creates all kinds of wasted effort, and that it’s incredibly hard to get ideas accepted on many of our campuses because of our natural tendency to glamorize our own ideas and discount those not invent here. This tendency toward wishful thinking and over optimism is so pronounced, that managers of software developers really

Most of us are passionate about something–vegetarianism, open source, the Red Sox–but, in this talk, Hanson suggests that our greatest passion should be for doing the hard work to overcome biases to come to the truth. One key to betting better at reducing errors in our judgment is to invest some time in investigating our actual track records. Most organizations would be well served by spending some serious time analyzing both failed and successful projects to establish better estimating procedures.

After one of my academic advisors worked with me for a while, she came with what she called the half-it/double-it rule. She’s ask me when I might get her the next draft, and I’d tell her 20 pages, end of next week. She’d half-it (reduce the goal to ten pages) and double-it, (increase the time to two weeks). Having goals that were tied to the time it actually took me to write–rather than speed I wished I could write–made the whole project more manageable.

IT Conversations | Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators | Jean-Claude Bradley

He believes that scientific research happens better and faster when the entire process is transparently narrated online.

New social tools can have a tremendous impact on teaching, learning and research. The emergence of Open Notebook Science has the potential of speeding up the diffusion of scientific discoveries and of helping students and others look into the nature of “real research with all it’s glitches.” In this interview, Jon Udell and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley talk about the real-world potential of blogs, wikis and other social software tools to encourage communication and speed up collaboration among scientists and students..