17

sparkline

Thursday, July 4th, 2024

Teaching and learning

Looking back on ten years of codebar Brighton, I’m remembering how much I got out of being a coach.

Something that I realised very quickly is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to coaching. Every student is different so every session should adapt to that.

Broadly speaking I saw two kinds of students: those that wanted to get results on screen as soon as possible without worrying about the specifics, and those who wanted to know why something was happening and how it worked. In the first instance, you get to a result as quickly as possible and then try to work backwards to figure out what’s going on. In the second instance, you build up the groundwork of knowledge and then apply it to get results.

Both are equally valid approaches. The only “wrong” approach as a coach is to try to apply one method to someone who’d rather learn the other way.

Personally, I always enjoyed the groundwork-laying of the second approach. But it comes with challenges. Because the results aren’t yet visible, you have to do extra work to convey why the theory matters. As a coach, you need to express infectious enthusiasm.

Think about the best teachers you had in school. I’m betting they displayed infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter.

The other evergreen piece of advice is to show, don’t tell. Or at the very least, intersperse your telling with plenty of showing.

Bret Viktor demonstrates this when he demonstrates scientific communication as sequential art:

This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell.

It works remarkably well. I remember how well it worked when Google first launched their Chrome web browser. They released a 40 page comic book illustrated by Scott McCloud. There is no way I would’ve read a document that long about how browser engines work, but I read that comic cover to cover.

This visual introduction to machine learning is another great example of simultaneous showing and telling.

So showing augments telling. But interactivity can augment showing.

Here are some great examples of interactive explainers:

Lea describes what can happen when too much theory comes before practice:

Observing my daughter’s second ever piano lesson today made me realize how this principle extends to education and most other kinds of knowledge transfer (writing, presentations, etc.). Her (generally wonderful) teacher spent 40 minutes teaching her notation, longer and shorter notes, practicing drawing clefs, etc. Despite his playful demeanor and her general interest in the subject, she was clearly distracted by the end of it.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a 5 year old’s short attention span, but I could tell what was going on: she did not understand why these were useful, nor how they connect to her end goal, which is to play music.

The codebar website has some excellent advice for coaches, like:

  • Do not take over the keyboard! This can be off-putting and scary.
  • Encourage the students to type and not copy paste.
  • Explain that there are no bad questions.
  • Explain to students that it’s OK to make mistakes.
  • Assume that anyone you’re teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence.

Notice how so much of the advice focuses on getting the students to do things, rather than have them passively sit and absorb what the coach has to say.

Lea also gives some great advice:

  1. Always explain why something is useful. Yes, even when it’s obvious to you.
  2. Minimize the amount of knowledge you convey before the next opportunity to practice it. For non-interactive forms of knowledge transfer (e.g. a book), this may mean showing an example, whereas for interactive ones it could mean giving the student a small exercise or task.
  3. Prefer explaining in context rather than explaining upfront.

It’s interesting that Lea highlights the advantage of interactive media like websites over inert media like books. The canonical fictional example of an interactive explainer is the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age. Andy Matuschak describes its appeal:

When it wants to introduce a conceptual topic, it begins with concrete hands-on projects: Turing machines, microeconomics, and mitosis are presented through binary-coding iron chains, the cipher’s market, and Nell’s carrot garden. Then the Primer introduces extra explanation just-in-time, as necessary.

That’s not how learning usually works in these domains. Abstract topics often demand that we start with some necessary theoretical background; only then can we deeply engage with examples and applications. With the Primer, though, Nell consistently begins each concept by exploring concrete instances with real meaning to her. Then, once she’s built a personal connection and some intuition, she moves into abstraction, developing a fuller theoretical grasp through the Primer’s embedded books.

(Andy goes on to warn of the dangers of copying the Primer too closely. Its tricks verge on gamification, and its ultimate purpose isn’t purely to educate. There’s a cautionary tale there about the power dynamics in any teacher/student relationship.)

There’s kind of a priority of constituencies when it comes to teaching:

Consider interactivity over showing over telling.

Thinking back on all the talks I’ve given, I start to wonder if I’ve been doing too much telling and showing, but not nearly enough interacting.

Then again, I think that talks aren’t quite the same as hands-on workshops. I think of giving a talk as being more like a documentarian. You need to craft a compelling narrative, and illustrate what you’re saying as much as possible, but it’s not necessarily the right arena for interactivity.

That’s partly a matter of scale. It’s hard to be interactive with every person in a large audience. Marcin managed to do it but that’s very much the exception.

Workshops are a different matter though. When I’m recruiting hosts for UX London workshops I always encourage them to be as hands-on as possible. A workshop should not be an extended talk. There should be more exercises than talking. And wherever possible those exercises should be tactile, ideally not sitting in front of a computer.

My own approach to workshops has changed over the years. I used to prepare a book’s worth of material to have on hand, either as one giant slide deck or multiple decks. But I began to realise that the best workshops are the ones where the attendees guide the flow, not me.

So now I show up to a full-day workshop with no slides. But I’m not unprepared. I’ve got decades of experience (and links) to apply during the course of the day. It’s just that instead of trying to anticipate which bits of knowledge I’m going to need to convey, I apply them in a just-in-time manner as and when they’re needed. It’s kind of scary, but as long as there’s a whiteboard to hand, or some other way to illustrate what I’m telling, it works out great.

Friday, March 6th, 2020

A Variable Fonts Primer

Everything you ever wanted to know about variable fonts, gathered together into one excellent website.

Tuesday, November 6th, 2018

How to get on the #indieweb!

As well as graciously hosting Indie Web Camp Berlin on the weekend at Mozilla’s offices, Yulia has also drawn this super-cute comic.

Sunday, January 7th, 2018

The HSB Color System: A Practicioner’s Primer – Learn UI Design

A nice clear explanation of specifying colour using HSB (not to be confused with HSL).

Monday, July 31st, 2017

The Evolution of Trust

Such a great primer on game theory—well worth half an hour of your time.

Monday, March 7th, 2016

A Design Science Primer

The Buckminster Fuller Institute has put together this collection of resources which explain the ideas behind “comprehensive anticipatory design science.”

Seems especially relevant in light of the first issue of the Journal of Design and Science from MIT.

The legacy of the Black Mountain College lives on.

Sunday, January 10th, 2016

How the Web Works: A Primer for Newcomers to Web Development (or anyone, really) by Preethi Kasireddy

This is a great reminder of the fundamental nuts’n’bolts of the internet and the World Wide Web: clients, servers, URLs, DNS, HTTP, TCP/IP, packet switching, and all the other building blocks we sometimes take for granted.

This is part one of a four-part series:

  1. A Primer for Newcomers to Web Development (or anyone, really)
  2. Client-Server Model & the Structure of a Web Application
  3. HTTP & REST
  4. Stay tuned…

Monday, March 23rd, 2015

Home · Primer

Github’s pattern library.

As always, it’s great to see how other organisations are tackling modular reusable front-end code (though I can’t imagine why anyone other than Github would ever want to use it in production).

Monday, March 24th, 2014

Council Toolkit

A reusable set of responsive patterns and templates for UK councils.

Monday, February 17th, 2014

jrcryer/generator-pattern-primer

Nice! A Yeoman generator for scaffolding your own pattern primer.

(Those are just words, aren’t they? Y’know, as opposed to a sentence that would actually make sense to most right-thinking people.)

Tuesday, January 28th, 2014

A List Apart Pattern Library

Another front-end style guide for the collection. This time it’s from A List Apart. Lovely stuff!

Monday, January 27th, 2014

Pattern sharing

Mike has written about the Code for America alpha website that we collaborated on:

We chose to work with ClearLeft because they develop a pattern portfolio (a pattern/style library) which would allow us to scale our work to our Brigades. This unique approach has aligned perfectly with our work style and decentralized organizational structure.

Thankfully, I think the approach of delivering a pattern portfolio (instead of just pages) isn’t so unique these days. Mind you, it still seems to be more common with in-house teams than agencies. The Mailchimp pattern library is a classic example.

But agencies like Paravel are—like Clearleft—delivering systems, not pages. Dave wrote about providing responsive deliverables:

Responsive deliverables should look a lot like fully-functioning Twitter Bootstrap-style systems custom tailored for your clients’ needs.

I think that’s a good way of looking at it: a Bootstrap for every project.

Here’s the front-end style guide for Code for America.

Usually these front-end deliverables will be password-protected on the Clearleft extranet for the client’s eyes only, but Code for America are all about openness, so they’re more than willing to let us share it with the world. That makes me very happy. I remember encouraging the guys at Starbucks to publish their front-end style guide and I’ve written about this spirit of sharing before:

These style guides and pattern libraries aren’t being published in an attempt to provide ready-made solutions—every project should have its own distinct pattern library. Instead, these pattern libraries are being published in a spirit of openness and sharing …a way of saying “Hey, this is what worked for us in these particular circumstances.”

If you’re poking around the Code for America style guide, you’ll notice that it borrows some ideas from the pattern primer idea I published a while back. But in this iteration, the markup is available via a toggle—a nice variation. There’s also a patchwork page that provides a nice glance-able uninterrupted view of the same patterns.

Every project is a learning experience and each front-end style guide gives us ideas about how to do the next one better. In fact, Mark is busy working on better internal tools for creating these kinds of deliverables—something we’ll definitely be sharing. In the meantime, I’ll be encouraging other clients to be as open as Code for America have been in allowing us to share these deliverables.

For more on the usefulness of front-end style guides, be sure to read Paul’s article on style guides for the web, Anna’s classic 24 Ways article, and of course, Anna’s pocket guide from Five Simple Steps.

Monday, November 25th, 2013

asciidisco/grunt-patternprimer

This is handy: a version of my pattern primer that can be run with Grunt.

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

Style guide round-up

Anna goes through some of her favourite pattern libraries. It’s really, really great to see this stuff getting documented.

Saturday, November 19th, 2011

Pattern primer

I’m on a workshopping roll. Fresh from running my Responsive Enhancement workshop in Belfast, I’m now heading to Düsseldorf for Beyond Tellerand where I’ll be running the workshop on Sunday (and if you can’t make it, don’t forget that you can book the workshop for your own workplace too).

As part of the process of building a responsive site from the content out rather than the canvas in, I talk about beginning with the individual components divorced from any layout context. Or, as Mark puts it, “start with the bits.”

That’s the way I’ve been starting most of my projects lately: beginning with the atomic units of content and styling them first before even thinking about layout. This ensures that those styles are extremely robust—because they don’t depend on any particular context, they can be safely dropped into any part of a page.

I’ve been calling this initial collection of markup snippets a pattern primer. To help create the pattern primer, I’ve written a little bit of PHP to automatically generate a page of patterns from a folder of HTML snippets.

In my workshop I keep promising to put that script on Github. I finally got around to doing that and you can find it at github.com/adactio/Pattern-Primer.

Take a look at an example pattern primer to get an idea of what a handy deliverable this can be if you’re handing off to other developers. It also acts like a page of unit tests for CSS—whenever you’ve been messing around in the stylesheet you can refresh the page to quickly check to see if anything looks screwed up.

Grab the code; improve upon it; share your changes.

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

PrimerCSS

This is an interesting idea: paste in some markup and this will automatically generate CSS selectors based on your classes and IDs.

Friday, March 31st, 2006

Prime yourself

Last year, there was a lot of positive hum travelling through the blogvine about the film Primer. It has finally shown up here in the UK in DVD form.

I rented and watched the movie last night. Then I watched it again, this time with the director’s commentary. Then I went online and started reading discussions about the movie. Now I’m beginning to get it. I may watch it one more time before I have to get the DVD back to the shop.

I would like to offer some humble opinion and some advice:

  1. Try to not read or hear anything about the plot before watching the movie.
  2. Watch it. It’s great. It looks great, it sounds great, the acting is great… it’s just great.
  3. After watching it — but not before — read this bulletin board discussion. It helps clarify things better than the Wikipedia entry or this very detailed diagram.
  4. Now watch it again.

You may want to just go ahead and buy the DVD rather than simply renting it.