The Tipping Point Review

Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" attempts to explain why certain sociological events are subject to dramatic and often unexpected changes. He opens with several examples where he observes that these phenomena, (teen smoking, crime, & Hush Puppies sales), do not follow a slow and steady decrease or increase as easily definable predictors could explain. Instead they reach a sort of critical mass where the idea, behavior, or product suddenly explode and begin to spread much like a disease or, more specifically, like an epidemic. This point of critical mass he calls The Tipping Point.

In order to explain these social epidemics, Gladwell defines three rules of epidemics:

1. The Law of the Few
2. The Stickiness Factor
3. The Power of Context

The Law of the Few states that there are special types of people in the world who are crucial to spreading certain ideas and defining popularity and trends:

• Connectors are the "social butterflies" of the world.  They know a lot of people from very diverse fields and backgrounds.  They are responsible for spreading ideas from subculture to subculture because they belong to and feel comfortable in all of them.  In the language of epidemics they are the "carriers".
• Mavens are the experts of their fields.  They may not know a lot of people, but they know a lot of stuff.  While connectors may collect acquaintances, mavens collect knowledge and information.  But they can't just collect a jumble of facts and figures, they also organize, internalize and share their information.  Many mavens may appear as "know-it-alls" but the best ones derive just as much pleasure from sharing their information as they do in collecting it, often in trade for any morsels of knowledge you may have.
  
• Salesmen are the persuaders of the world.  The maven may have collected a great idea and know what to tell others, the connector may know who to tell, but the salesmen know how tell others so they will be convinced of the wisdom or benefits of the idea.  Most conversations are a dance of facial expressions, gestures, and body language and that accompany words and Salesmen always know how to instinctively take the lead in that dance.  Between 50 and 70 percent of communication is determined by nonverbal cues and Salesmen are masters of nonverbal communication.

Teachers must master all three of these to be most successful.  They must connect to students from all types of backgrounds and experiences.  They must be mavens of their particular field of study in addition to modern educational theory; constantly gathering new information and data from all sources (including their students).  They must be salesmen to successfully convey both their new knowledge as well as its value to truculent students.  But rather than specialize in any one ability, the best teachers should learn to balance all three abilities.

The Stickiness Factor states that some ideas are more interesting, engaging, or memorable than others.  Gladwell uses several examples to illustrate the subtle differences between ideas that stick, and others that fail.  From his examples I have identified four different elements that contribute to the "stickiness" of an idea:

• Clarity: A message cannot be remembered and passed on if it is not understood.  The best ideas are often simple ones.  The makers of Sesame Street discovered this while studying the relationship of the attention spans of preschoolers to the contents of their show.  If the skit was too clever or abstract, then the kids would look away from the show or get frustrated.  The same goes for any student from pre-school to adult education.  New ideas and concepts must be clearly explained using concrete examples. The learner must be able to connect this new idea with existing knowledge and integrate it into their world view.  Metaphors (even bad ones) are paramount for communicating new ideas. 
  
• Repetition: The more times a message is repeated, more of it is remembered. Gladwell describes how adding a map and hours of operation to a tetanus pamphlet was best able encourage college seniors to get vaccinated.  The seniors should know where the clinic is located after 3 years, but the reminder more than doubled the number of appointments.  Any math teacher will attest to the effectiveness of traditional "skill and drill" exercises in helping students remember basic concepts and processes.  But there is also a familiarity and comfort level that is established with repeated actions and experiences.  Eventually these good feelings are attributed to the message directly and confidence in the idea is built.
  
• Interactivity: A message is better remembered if the recipient is challenged and rewarded for getting the message.  The television ad campaign described by Gladwell was wildly successful because it asked viewers to complete a particular task, namely find the "Gold Box" with the free CD in the TV Guide magazine.  This approach was effective for a couple of reasons: 1) viewers had to get up and accomplish something and 2) viewers were then rewarded for their success.  Active participation in the delivery of the message creates a sense of ownership.  Successful fulfillment of the task builds confidence and the reward reinforces those positive feelings.
  
• Sequence and the Power of the Narrative: Messages are best remembered when expressed in the proper order.  Gladwell describes the "Narratives from the Crib" project that discovered the importance of stories to preschool children.  Storytelling is one of humankind's oldest art forms and was the primary means of recording history in pre-literate societies.  Anecdotal evidence often outweighs pure statistical data because the listener understands and relates emotionally to a concrete story despite the accuracy of abstract numerical proof.  

The wildly popular children's show Blues Clues was able to incorporate all of these factors to create the ultimate "sticky" message.  They simplified the message of the show by embracing a literal and concrete language. They called the blue dog Blue and the chair used for thinking the Thinking Chair.  They utilized repetition by playing the same show five days in a row and structuring each episode identically.  They encouraged interaction by challenging the audience to solve puzzles directly and inserting extra long pregnant pauses to allow children an opportunity to think and interact.  This structure was always built around a single story where the puzzles were constantly increasing in difficulty.  Blues Clues mastered the art of building intellectual confidence in the kids while also building emotional confidence in their product.  To create engaging and memorable lessons teachers can just as easily apply The Stickiness Factor to their lectures.

The Power of Context states that our environment, conditions and circumstances affect the impact and nature of an idea on its recipients.  Again Gladwell employ's his own "sticky" methodology of specific examples to illustrate several concepts:

• The Broken Windows theory states that if a window is left broken on a street then passersby will assume that no one is watching or in control.  So a relatively small amount of vandalism will embolden opportunistic criminals to commit increasingly heinous crimes.  This also means that crime can spread from street to street, much like an epidemic.  The city of New York took advantage of the Broken Windows theory by cleaning the graffiti off of the subways and arresting fare-jumpers.  By cracking down on these extremely minor (seemingly innocuous crimes), NYC police were able to actively prevent crimes because they created an environment where absolutely no criminal behavior was tolerated.  This approach was also highly effective because criminals who are bold enough to commit muggings or murder are much more likely to have already committed a low-risk crime such as fare-jumping. 
  
• Transactive Memory states that some memories are stored outside a person, often through relationships with other people who are best suited to remembering certain types of information.  This phenomenon explains why social constructivism is so effective.  Students working in groups develop relationships and use the knowledge about each other to determine which members of the group are best suited to remember which types of knowledge.  This same concept can be found in "The Wisdom of the Crowd" or The Law of Large Numbers.
  
• The Magic Number: Gladwell also discovered that most people are only able to establish functional relationships (where transactive memory can be used) with at most 150 people.  The Hutterite religious sect discovered this magic number of 150 in their communities.  Whenever a community reaches that threshold of 150 members, clans begin to form and relationships begin to weaken and falter.  So classes or any sort of learning community must consist of less than 150 students in order take advantage of the benefits of transactive memory and social constructivism.
  
• The Impact of Peer Pressure in these small, well-connected groups is then a much more effective way of maintaining high quality and accountability.  In small groups peer pressure is often a greater motivator than any sort of pressure applied by an authoritarian figure or boss.  Once the relationships and peer groups are established, individual members will self-police to correct themselves and live up to the group's expectations.
  
• Concrete Examples always have more impact because our brains are better equipped to deal with real life situations than abstract concepts.  However we still fall victim to the Fundamental Attribution Error. This means that humans will always place greater value on other humans than the situation or environment.  Gladwell's examples imply that the opposite is in fact true.  Small key changes to an environment can create a snowball effect (for better or worse) so even minute details must be scrutinized for their value to the environment and the group.

Malcolm Gladwell makes good use of his theories in reaching out to connectors, mavens, and salesmen and translating his work between all three.  His book is very "sticky", using simple language and repeatedly using stories to illustrate his ideas.  In fact the greatest testimony to his ideas is the success of his book, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference".  The pedagogical implications of epidemics is every bit as salient as selling TV shows and reducing crime. 

Why Google Docs Fail

Anyone familiar with the history of computing recalls power of the "Killer App". In fact PCs would not exist on everyone's desktop today were it not for this funny little app called VisiCalc. And despite the growing prevalence for mp3's and portable players prior to the iPod, it was the sleek design and intuitive interface that helped Apple dominate the market. So the difference between extraordinary success and abject failure can and often does boil down to some small detail. A seemingly insignificant "bug" can spell absolute disaster and bankrupcy, while attention to detail and usability leads to absolute market domination and a privately funded space race.

Which leads me to my point: I was trying to send feedback to my students last week about their discussion posts. As always I try to be a little tech savvy even in my grading procesdures and had created this brilliant spreadsheet with a post-by-post breakdown of the student's grade and individualized feedback on what was missing from their assignments. When I was working full-time in the office I could take this Excel spreadsheet, merge it with a Word document and then use Outlook to e-mail it to all of my students. They each see a customized break-down of their grade with personalized feedback and I only have to write 1 message. Brilliant right? It's fast, easy, and valuable to my students.

So naturally I want to find a way to translate this process into the cloud. So let's see I have a spreadsheet app, a word processing app, and an email client that all have to play nice together. Hmmmm who else has a spreadsheet, word processor, and email within a single service? Google!! And since Google is always about being slick, bleeding edge, and easy to use surely they'll have gmail and google docs fully integrated, right? Right!? RIGHT!!!?!?!?!

No.

After doing extensive searches, surfing through help docs, blogs, groups, dog piles, etc. the best answer I found was just simply No. Or somewhat if you use openoffice.org, or this crazy convoluted idea about spreadsheets and formulas that had nothing to do with email at all.

This isn't to say that Google docs is a complete failure. After all they did manage to master the astounding feat of integrating forms with spreadsheets. Something Microsoft still has yet to master despite Infopath's wholehearted XML-ean attempts. So which is more important? The ability to push data into your spreadsheet, or the ability to pull it back out again. And why the hell can't I find a tool that can do both!

This Space is NOT for Lease

After abandoning my blog due to overwhelming time constraints from holding down 3 jobs, I've decided to try to pick back up where I left off. The time away has been well spent. I've been reading the blogs of some of my peers and I've come up with some good questions to explore here in the future. So to keep me motivated and you interested I'd like to give you a quick sneak preview of what I have in store for you in the coming weeks:

1. Finish my 4 point evaluation criteria of cloud computing products with the last requirement: Security.
2. A case study of how I used google's web services to run my tutoring sideline business.
3. Start exploring some pedagogical issues that I have run into in my teaching.

I'll explain #3 a little better here because it's what I've been thinking about most recently. (Pop it off the stack!) So this is the 3rd semester that I've been teaching Quantitative Literacy and I've got the lecture and testing bits down pat. But my familiarity with the material improves my student's performance only so far. After the 2nd time teaching this I've found that I can now foresee the pitfalls that a lot of my students fall into and head them off at the pass before they go plunging down a cliff (just because dramatic metaphors are fun!).

But that doesn't necessarily solve the problem of students who have been trained by a lifetime of public schools to just study for the test and avoid independent thought at all costs. Which as a math teacher and critical-thought-enthusiast frustrates the crap out of me! So my next thought is this: "Do we really want a society FULL of critical thinkers?" (After all somebody has to take out the garbage). And that leads me down a whole laundry list of questions:

• Should we be preparing EVERY student for a college degree?
• What makes a successful student?
• What makes a successful teacher?
• What makes a failing student?
• What makes a failing teacher?
• What is success?
• What is failure?
  
• Which set of students is better to teach: straight A students, C/D borderline students, F students?
• Does teaching need technology to prepare the future student? Or does technology need more pedagogy applied to it to adapt the machines to the way humans think, work and live?

If you have any answers, good. If you just have more questions to add, Better. If you're just confused and think I'm a little crazy, Perfect! Let me know in the comments.

Requirement 3: Maximize Productivity

As much fun as it is to play with gadgets just for the fun (nerdiness) of it, the only gadgets worth mastering and using are obviously the ones that can actually "do" something. And really gadgets only exists to help you "do" something in your life. This is the effective definition of productivity. The cool thing is that you get to define just what that something is that you're doing. If you're a surfer, then a tide widget is actually useful to you. If you're living in landlocked suburbia, then you probably have less use for something like that. The good/bad/complicated part is that each individual has to define what is useful to them in their life. To help me evaluate different products I need to create a system that is both broad enough to accept every one's "working style/needs", yet still narrow enough for the evaluation to mean something. Luckily there are a few things that every gadget must fulfill for it to be useful to anybody.

Firstly, it needs to be user-friendly. Apple really latched on to this idea and leveraged it to create the immense popularity of their i-line of gadgets. There were many mp3 players on the market before the iPod, but Apple made it easy enough for my grandma to use. There were many multi-function cell phones on the market before the iPhone, but Apple made it fun enough to spend hours staring at that tiny little screen. Much as I loathe the plethora of "i-Gadgets" that have spawned since, I have to give credit to Apple for doing something really right. (Hey, even Hitler knew what he was doing some of the time ;P)

Secondly, it has to actually do all the things that you need it to do with minimal modifications. This doesn't mean that it has to be the slicing-dicing-julienne fry making-sledg-o-matic, fulfilling your every gadgetry need. But it should at least do the job that it was designed for. My recent failure with my Google Docs presentation is a prime example. I need a presentation tool that can insert equations for my math students including both subscripts and superscripts. Yet in all of my searching and piddling with the presentation tool I could not find the advanced text editing abilities or an appropriate equation editor add-in. I should not have to sacrifice quality or capabilities just to use the "cloud-computing" web app equivalent of an existing "offline" gadget. Additionally, it should foster creativity and inspire you to work in new and different ways. Despite all of our technological advances over the past century sometimes the most powerful tool we still have is a simple plain white sheet of paper and a pencil. While I don't normally advocate tree-killing paper consumption, the plain truth is nothing is as flexible or open as the tabula rasa. As a mathematician I'm constantly having to stop, draw a picture of the problem, then keep going with the equation. And while there are lots (well more than there used to be) of equation editing tools, nothing beats the feel of chalk on the blackboard or pencil on paper for feel and flexibility.

Thirdly, it should take less time to use the gadget than it does to complete the task "manually" (without the gadget). This is where productivity and cost intersect. Time is an asset just as much as money is. So I propose that the definition of a productive gadget is one that actually saves you time! Example: I have a rubric that I use to grade discussion board posts for my online math class. By posting that rubric on a published Google Doc I can update it once, and instantly all of my students have access to the latest version of the grading scale for their assignments. Sure I could save it as a PDF and upload it to each and every course and section that I'm teaching, and then have to replace it every time I make an edit, but good god why? This type of efficiency is unique to hyper-linked communication and is another one of the superpowers of cloud computing. Sometimes time savings comes from good design and usability. Just as sometimes time sinks come from excessive buttons (oh delicious, shiny buttons!), dials, and blinking lights. Much as it pains me to abandon tinkering with gadgets for the sheer fun of it, I'm not actually being productive unless I'm producing something, saving time, or keeping focused on my tasks.

So the three requirements for a "productive" gadget can be summarized as:

• Usable - "even grandma can figure this newfangled gadget out!"
  
• Functional - "hey look it actually works!"
• Efficient - it saves me time, but it's not distractingly fun to use
  

I'm open to other suggestions/definitions of productivity. I'll be honest, I'm no business major so I'm sure I'm missing something.

Interesting article from Mark (Thanks!)

Looks like ye olde federal government has noticed the cloud computing phenomenon too! Here's an aritcle from infoworld that starts what I'm sure will be many more debates in the future. So what do you think? Should Uncle Sam have the same rights to your data in the cloud as he does when it's on your personal computer?

My First Failure

So in my endeavors to become completely mobile I've decided to cast off the chains of Microsoft Office in favor of more portable and universal platform friendly Google Docs.

This week I began working on my lecture notes for the Business Calculus class that I'm teaching at the local community college. Google docs does have a PowerPoint equivalent gadget called Presentation. It's very handy and allows basic edits of any presentation with slides and comes with some snazzy design templates too. What it doesn't have is all the advanced editing that comes with PowerPoint. In fact I was absolutely appalled by the fact that it couldn't create subscript or superscript font. As a math teacher I was mortified and offended to be so gruesomely excluded from consideration of my needs!

So sadly I was forced back to the pallid quivering arms of Microsoft to complete my presentation. Of course once I arrived I was again offended by Microsoft's horrendous oversight in leaving the wonderful new equation editor out of PowerPoint! Instead I painstakingly created the equations I needed in Word, then copied and pasted them into PowerPoint as flattened pictures.

I must say this is a situation where everyone failed me, both Google and M$ to some degree. So I don't really feel like I can put this one in the win column for either of them. I did complete my work in PowerPoint (although it took twice as long as it should have) so I guess I'll give this one to the desktop apps...begrudgingly.

My First Success Story

So it looks like this cloud computing experiment is working for me so far. Case in point: I'm sitting at the car dealership right now blogging from the free e-mail computer they have setup for people who are waiting on their car repairs. I brought a book just in case I got bored, but instead have spent the past hour and a half checking e-mails and grading discussion board postings for my online class. I can't work on my syllabus for the calculus class as I was planning on doing today. Although I could be if I would just get off my butt and convert everything over to Google docs. This just goes to prove that you don't need to own or invest any money in a computer nowadays to be productive. Of course I'm lucky in that this computer isn't all that locked down, security-wise. It's using a generic login that has no password (as I just found out by accidentally locking the station). There aren't any restrictions on downloading files to the hard drive (as I discovered by having to download, then e-mail a syllabud to the dept). I haven't hit any blocks or restrictions to my browsing locations. It's equally open to gmail, hotmail, blogger (obviously), as it is to my school website. Either way I'm chalking this one into the win column.