Concreteness

Here’s Google CEO Schmidt, in response to a question about whether Google is “dumbing down” kids:

Kids use [Google] all the time because it’s a new way of learning. When I was growing up, in Virginia, they made me memorize the names of all the capitals of every county in the state. Completely useless information. So kids today are going from knowing everything to being able to search very quickly. The kids need to learn how to search because they’re going to have to search everywhere. They’re going to have search everywhere on devices that they carry with them.

Schmidt is right about the cult of memorization in schools. Most teachers do a great job of making lessons come alive, but when it comes time to measure what the students have learned, out come the standardized tests (thanks to state and federal requirements). And what’s easy to test in a multiple-choice format? Memorized information. So a student’s understanding of the Confederacy’s war strategy is funneled through questions like, “In what year did the battle of Gettysburg take place?”

There are (at least) two problems with that. First, if you’re the teacher, and you’re running low on class time, what are you going to teach — what’s on the test (i.e., factoids) or the “big-picture” stuff? Obviously you’ll teach to the test, because you’ve had it drilled into your head that the test scores are THE representation of your students’ learning in your class. If their test scores aren’t solid, you’re a bad teacher. So, yes, given a tradeoff, you and I both would teach the Gettysburg date.

Second, facts fade. Very very quickly. I propose a test to lots of school administrators who are in love with recall-type tests as an index of progress. Two weeks after your kids make solid scores, give them a surprise re-test. Same questions, same answers. And get ready to weep. All of us know and experience that our memories fade quickly — just see the forgetting curve literature — and yet we’ve designed assessments that seem to presume memories are permanent, like files stashed on a hard drive.

Google is the perfect real-world memory aid for students. It makes it easy to retrieve the factoids that will inevitably be lost from memory. It makes it so easy, in fact, that it’s foolish to obsess about teaching the factoids. If a student knows that there was a battle, during the Civil War, that represented a turning point, and she can articulate why, and she can discuss the factors that led up to the pivotal battle itself, isn’t that a picture of success? Would anyone think she’s less smart, or less aware of history, if she Googled the dates and the place names?

The UK Open Memory Championships will be held next weekend in London. From the Times Online story:

To put it into perspective: on average most of us can recall between five and nine numbers in a row. The eight-times world memory champion Dominic O’Brien, 50, can remember the order of 54 randomly shuffled decks of playing cards – an astounding 2,808 cards.

Most amazing of all, several of the participants claim they’re not savants, they just practice a lot and use clever mnemonic techniques.

Pridmore’s system for remembering playing cards involves assigning a different mental picture to each combination of two cards. The ace of diamonds followed by the eight of diamonds is represented by Daffy Duck (Pridmore uses cartoon characters from Looney Tunes cartoons and The Simpsons, as well as random objects) whereas the ace of diamonds followed by the king of hearts is represented by a ladder. There are 2,704 possible combinations. These characters and objects then rapidly interact with each other as they embark on a journey. To recall the information, Pridmore reruns the story; as each character appears, he retrieves the two-card sequences.

Pridmore’s technique, like most mnemonic tricks, makes use of visualization. For more cool memory tricks, check out this article that introduces the “memory palace.”

I have mixed feelings about this series of spots from the Workplace Safety & Insurance Board in Ontario. (And if the “Safety & Insurance Board” sounds boring, well, you’re in for a surprise.)

The spots show regular workers — a sous chef, a forklift driver, a welder — who suffer rather dramatic and painful calamities due to improper conditions at their workplaces.

Positive spin: The topic of “workplace safety” puts us to sleep. It sounds boring and vaguely dorky (inevitably the solution will involve eye goggles, right?). And yet workplace safety itself is critical — people do get hurt, people do die. To break through the disinterest and inertia, you need to be bold. You need to shock.

Negative spin: It shocks alright. Even people who enjoy movies like “Saw” and “Hostel” will probably wince at this spot, about an accident that befalls a young female chef. But does the shock reinforce the core message of the campaign? If the core message is to take workplace safety seriously, maybe it works. If WSIB wants behavior change of some kind, I’m not clear what it is.

The spots are so brutal that I wonder how the campaign can be (or whether it should be) sustained. I would love to be a fly on the wall at those creative discussions. (“Hey, what if we spotlight someone who’s dismembered by a rogue meat slicer…?”)

[Via a friend at McKinney] If you want some practice at making ideas stickier, I have a great case study for you. Rope aside 30 minutes and follow along with the process below. It concerns the work of a group called The Girl Effect. Here’s the game plan:

1. Start here. It’s a pdf document with statistics demonstrating the value of investing in girls in the developing world. (For example: “When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man.”) Print out this document (and the instructions for step 2) and slowly move away from your computer.

2. With PDF in hand, give yourself this mission: To boil it all down. No one is going to read all these stats, and even if they do, they won’t remember them. They certainly won’t be moved to action by them. So how can you get people *excited* about “girl investment”? Imagine that you’ve got 2 minutes of the audience’s attention to make your case. How would you translate the data into something simple, emotional, specific? (By the way, just by thinking about this, you’re already ahead of the game — most social enterprises I’ve worked with would have simply published the PDF and declared victory…)

3. No, really, take a minute and think about it. It’ll make it more fun to compare your approach to theirs.

4. OK, now watch their 2-minute Youtube video and come back here for some postgame analysis.

5. This is a textbook sticky idea. (Forewarning: At this point, I’m going to geek out and deconstruct the video piece by piece.) If you’ve read Made to Stick, you’ll notice the elements. It starts with a schema violation (“So what else is new?”). Then there’s a curiosity gap: “What if there was an unexpected solution… Would you even know it if you saw it?” Then, there’s the surprise: “A girl.” The cumulative effect of these elements is critical: They’ve got our attention. We’re on the hook.

They’ve “paid” for our attention, and now they’ve got to cash it in to explain what they want. How do you explain “girl investment”? They make it concrete by asking you to visualize a specific girl. They tell the story of what the investment does for her and the people around her. (Notice, by the way, that they manage to make it concrete despite using only text blocks — an impressive feat.) The concrete elements build up (the husband, the school uniform, the loan, the cow, the village council). Suddenly, they’ve explained a complicated idea to you without making you feel like you’re receiving instruction. (BTW, the team wisely didn’t assume that it would be self-evident that investing in girls is “the solution.” They took the time to explain their logic, in a simple, but not oversimplified, way.)

At this point, they’ve got a credibility problem. You now understand what they mean by investing in girls, but why would you believe that the “girl effect” can make a dent in big global problems? The approach they use is “micro –> macro”. First, they paint a picture of a single girl. They show how the investment has cascading effects in her family and in her community. Then, they shift to the macro. “Multiply that by 600 million girls in the developing world…” [The zooming-out effect with the dots is a nice touch to make this more concrete.] This micro/macro approach also works well for entrepreneurs — I’ve often seen entrepreneurs highlight a single, vivid customer situation and then switch to the macro (“Our market research shows that there’s a $1.2 billion market made up of 181,000 customers with the same needs as this one.”)

Then comes the wrap-up. ideally, this will inspire you and move you closer to action. I love the line: “Invest in a girl and she will do the rest.” It makes you feel like you’re on a team — you do your part and she’ll do hers. Which brings me to my one (and really only) quibble: I don’t like the closing line … “It’s no big deal. Just the future of humanity.” To me, this line was a bit jarring … just when you’re feeling positive and empowered, all of the sudden you’re hit with a tinge of guilt. (“It’s on you, pal — the future of humanity.”) I think it would have been stronger to end with the “Invest in a girl and she will do the rest.”

But let’s not quibble. This is a brilliant video, and I predict it will be seen by lots and lots of people. Even better, it will motivate action. [Here’s The Girl Effect web site.]

Some students in Bob Sutton’s class on “Creating Infectious Engagement” wanted to persuade people to upgrade, not replace, their computers, for the sake of the environment. But where’s the emotion? Where’s the story? Well, voila: “Love the one you’re with.” With a star turn by Dan Wilson as the computer. (Doesn’t he worry about typecasting?)