Below are the Twitternotes that I took based upon some of the content of Sierra's address at the Oopsala conference in 2007. I'm struck by a few details of the message that she shared with programmers and businessmen: First, her message seems as applicable to those of us in education as it was to these conference goers. You can easily substitute the words App Developer for Teachers, Community for Classes, and Users for Students. It's a powerful message--to redesign a class in terms of user experience. I think she's right on, despite the personal trainer language that she uses throughout.
You can find the full hour long keynote address at:
http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/podcasts/invited-talks/keynote0102-kathy-sierra.mp3
BEGIN TWITTERNOTES:
*No one is passionate about something they suck at. -- Kathy Sierra
*Once people pass over the suck threshold, they're happy doing things the old way...the way that no longer works.
*1ce users cross the passion threshold, yr off the hook 4 helping them, that's when they start finding ways to get better on their own.- K.S.
*No one really cares about your tool (read: subject), they're only really interested in what your tool supports (read: life).-- Kathy Sierra.
*"What can I help my users kick ass at?" -- Kathy Sierra. That's a great question to help teachers re-envision themselves.
*"Anything that we feel, any little thing that causes a reaction 2 wake up the brain is going 2 B something our users pay attention to"- K.S.
*Motivation depends on 1) student's idea about future w/this ability, 2) a clear path for getting there, & 3) a relatively easy first step.
*"We need more human interaction with the user (read: students)." --Kathy Sierra.
* Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow is essential for keeping learners motivated through the suck and barely adequate phases.
*We need to strike a careful balance of encouraging a community to give students knowledge/skill and the actual challenges of the task.- K.S.
*"Out-teach the competition, you don't have 2 out-spend them. Just make yr users kick ass. Yr community will do all the marketing work." KS
*"If you have a community that is going to help your users advance, you need to convert the community from askers to answerers." Kathy Sierra
*"Where there is passion, there is a tribe." - Kathy Sierra.
*Our brains are wired to tell stories about people. There has to be someone in your community who has an interesting story. Use it. - KS
*"If someone doesn't hate what you do, it's probably mediocre." -- Don Norman. Sure, there needs to be some love, too.
*People in Flow report these experiences to be the happiest of their lives. This is the opportunity we have 2 give 2 users (read:students).
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteThanks for all these great twitter notes. One thing that may not have been obvious from the talk if you weren't aware of Kathy Sierra's background is that her talk also encompasses not only software design, but her instructional books for programmers. She co-authored the Head First series of programming books, which used a lot of the principles discussed in this talk to teach programmers unfamiliar with particular languages: http://headfirstlabs.com/kathy.php
A software programming book is similar in many ways to a high school text book in that you have to teach some very abstract concepts which are often dry and unengaging. The principles she describes above apply to software design as well as her "reinvention" of a computer textbook to make the learning experience engaging on a cognitive level, using many techniques learnt from her research and experience in game design. There's a whole field of "game based learning" research being done to construct learning experiences - Kathy Sierra is one of the first to explain the concepts in such a concrete way. (It's not about "gamification" - a concept that's a bit of a buzzword at the moment - it's about taking the cognitive elements that are engaging in games, and bridging those ideas into a coherent learning experience.)
Hope that provides more context.
- Ian