Understanding Expertise

Have you watched an expert at work? You can sense  a level of comfort and fluency. I often watch expert programmers code, debug, fix problems in software.  I get the same sense watching painting shows on TV. A stroke here, a stroke there and suddenly you have a beautiful creation taking shape, right in front of you.

I always wondered what makes experts experts. I thought it was intelligence or just a lot of experience. It seems to be a lot more than that. I never dug deeper into the subject and suddenly I stumbled into this, while exploring a completely unrelated subject.

People who have developed expertise in particular areas are, by definition, able to think effectively about problems in those areas. Understanding expertise is important because it provides insights into the nature of thinking and problem solving. Research shows that it is not simply general abilities, such as memory or intelligence, nor the use of general strategies that differentiate experts from novices. Instead, experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, and solve problems.

… the study of expertise shows what the results of successful learning look like…

We consider several key principles of experts’ knowledge and their potential implications for learning and instruction:

1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.

3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.

4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.

5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.

6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.

Now we know. Or at least, have some theories to explore. The fragments above, were taken from the second chapter - How Experts Differ from Novices of a really fascinating book - How People Learn.

When You Solve Your Own Problem…

When you solve your own problem, you create a tool that you’re passionate about. And passion is key. Passion means you’ll truly use it and care about it. And that’s the best way to get others to feel passionate about it too.

This and other great ideas in a book called Getting Real. It is a book about smaller, faster, better ways to build web applications. Some great ideas about building software. Here is a list of my favorite ones.
Build Less
Less Features means you can get the product out earlier into the hands of the customers. You get to hear what they really like and what they would like. This can be invaluable.

Fund Yourself
You can focus on doing something good instead of spending time looking for money. Meebo did this and so did lot of others. In fact, this is the norm in many of the Web 2.0 startups.

It Shouldn’t be a Chore
I love this one. If the app does not get you excited, it is not worth building. It should be fun to build. You need to enjoy every bit of the process. And if you built it for your own use, make sure that the experience of using it is fun, as well.

Seek and Celebrate Small Victories
Build incrementally. With each increment, make it more useful.

Check out the following advice.

Hire Less and Hire Later
You Can’t Fake Enthusiasm
The Blank Slate
Context Over Consistency

Open Doors
Ride the Blog Wave
Promote Through Education

Feel The Pain

Language - Not Just the Transfer of Ideas

About Semantics from The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it is also the about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world. It is about the relation of words to a community - how a new word, which arises in the act of creation by a single speaker, comes to evoke the same idea in the rest of the population so people can understand one another when they use it. It is about the relation of words to emotions: the way in which words just point to things but are saturated with feelings, which can endow the words with a sense of magic, taboo, and sin. And it is about the words and social relations - how people use language not just to transfer ideas from head to head but to negotiate the kind of relationship they wish to have with their conversational partner.

I Love Elephants

I love elephants. I got a pleasant surprise when I found this great collection of Elephant pictures in Mark’s blog. Thanks Mark. For outstanding books (I recommend your Dive into Python to anyone interested in learning the language), an entertaining and informative blog and now all these fun collections. Thanks to all those people who uploaded those lovely elephant pictures  in Flickr.

Design Patterns for Parallel Programming: Learning to Think Parallel

This is an awesome video and must watch if you are interested in parallel programming.

In this video Tim identifies Design Spaces for exploring parallel programming patterns

• Finding concurrency
• Algorithmic Structure
• Support Structure
• Implementation mechanism

Cool Tools/Resources - May 5th 2007

I changed the title from Cool Tools for the web to broaden it a bit and include the date in the title.

Wink - Tutorial and Presentation Creation Software
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
People Search
This is a great way to search for people. If you want to know more about them, check out ZoomInfo too. I only wish they added another field to the search where you can add keywords in addition to name, city etc.

listible - list of web 2.0 products and services
They call it a complete list. I would say “comprehensive list”. Some of the resources listed here come from this list.

Rolobiz - link to your contact information
Make your business cards as vcard to work for you and be remembered by your peers. Your business cards will not go wasted anymore. I like the idea of creating one card and keeping links to it everywhere. vcard is a good choice since it can also be imported/exported from/to several popular address books. But then there is FOAF which in addition to getting your contact information, can also provide a friends network.

Wikibooks
a Wikimedia project that was started on July 10, 2003 with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Since our founding, volunteers have written about 25,219 modules in a multitude of textbooks.

An Innovation to Diffuse Innovation

Eric Von Hippel likes to share his work on Innovation. In this interview, he explains why.

I’m trying to diffuse my work and ideas, much the way MIT does with OpenCourseWare. Society is already paying me for my work via my research funding.

So what does the author do? Takes the two books he has written on Innovation and makes them available as free downloads. I have seen other similar moves from authors like Mark Pilgrim (Dive Into Python) and Bruce Eckel (several programming  books).

In this interview Eric says that this experiment proved that making books freely available on Internet, in fact, improved the sales.

Here are links to download Eric’s books - Democratizing Innovation and The Sources of  Innovation.

Found the article through : Google Alerts

An Interesting Preface

I liked the reading the preface in this book which makes some good assumptions. I like the idea of project based learning, chunking and progressive disclosure.

This book was written with a few simple assumptions in mind: that even if you’re a beginner, you are relatively intelligent and motivated, you have a general familiarity with typical graphics programs and web browsers, and you have some basic HTML experience.

You will never find yourself overwhelmed by unnecessarily complex exercises or dry, labored discussions. At the same time, however, you will be inspired to create in new and different ways.

Information in this book is grouped together in small digestible parts. This process is known as chunking. To see how this works, try to remember the following nine-letter sequence: pnggifjpg. Not too easy. Now try to remember the chunks PNG, GIF, and JPG. Simple, eh? The difference is in the presentation. Chunking makes it easier for you to understand broader ideas, instead of just repeating things by rote.

As previously mentioned, this book doesn’t try to teach you everything about a given topic before you’re ready. Instead, it features “progressive disclosure,” in which a topic is revisited in more depth as your knowledge and needs grow. For example, don’t be concerned if a specific chapter doesn’t describe all of the settings in a particular dialog. You may learn about portions of the dialog in one discussion and revisit the options in the remainder of that dialog later. This reduces the chance that you’ll feel overwhelmed.

Design Process

From Designing Interfaces:

When doing design, a sound process is critical. You need to have certain elements in a design process:

• Field research, to find out what the intended users are like and what they already do

• Goal and task analysis, to describe and clarify what users will do with what you’re building

• Design models, such as personas (models of users), scenarios (models of common tasks and situations), and prototypes (models of the interface itself)

• Empirical testing of the design at various points during development, like usability testing and in situ observations of the design used by real users

• Enough time to iterate over several versions of the design, because you won’t get it right the first time

I like the language and tone of this book. And the approach taken to identify patterns of interaction and documenting them. It is now in my Safari bookshelf (reading list). Will post more as I go through it.

A Mathematician’s View of God and the Goal of Life

Here is a fascinating piece I read in My Brain is Open. I made a simple substitution of one word to be politically correct.

When asked what is the purpose of life, Erdos would reply: “To prove and conjecture and to keep the God’s score low”. He imagined that humans were constantly engaged in a deadly serious game with God in which, “if you do something bad the God gets at least two points. If you don’t do something good which you could have done, the God gets at least one point. And if you are okay nobody gets any point. Humanity cannot win this game, so that the goal of life is not victory. “The aim is to keep the God’s score low.”

It is simple enough. I especially like the part about “if you don’t do something good which you could have done”.