robbysmind

WriteMinds is a Good Duck: Focus on Process not Product

Animacy — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:27:27 +0000

In elementary school, I remember bringing home written assignments for my parents to read and respond. The teacher would then also respond and I would write another short entry to be subjected to the same steps. Through this cycle, a learning process occurred where small tendencies in my spelling, grammar, semantics, and so on were observed and I became aware of them. This awareness itself was the source of learning. It gave me the power to consider my own behaviors and with the help of others determine what was effective and what was not.
A couple of months ago, I discussed WriteMinds with some high school teachers at a private school. They were, unanimously, most intrigued by the ability to view, review, and comment on the student’s entire writing process. One teacher jokingly asked, “So if I see the student writing something really atrocious I can interject right then and say, ‘noooooo!!’ Well, yes. More reasonably, the teacher can look back through the progress of the document and then ask the student important questions about process rather than solely evaluating periodic draft submissions.
This could fundamentally change the grading process in writing-focused classes. Teachers, through this new technology, could for the first time grade process more than product. The whole grading process becomes more honest. A student’s ratio of effort to improvement takes priroity. Writing style becomes more apparent and its effectiveness, even if it deviates from norms, could be observed and respected. The teacher him or herself would also have to prove that he or she is a capable writer that understands process and not simply the issuing of dangerously subjective and reductive grades.
There are challenges, though, that emerge from far more fundamental aspects of the environmental structure surrounding most students in the US. At my small elementary school and in this small high school, teachers have the luxury of the energy and time to work directly with students and engage the learning process. After speaking to some college professors, I found that even those who teach writing courses, feel intimidated by or deem unreasonable the possibility of being involved more closely with the student’s writing process due to time constraints and the volume of material to be reviewed. Of course, by college students ought to be refined writers. However, shouldn’t writing specialized courses be exceptions where the only real activity is engaging writing process? There are simply too many students stuffed into most schools for a teacher to truly educate each one. In such situations, the students and teachers alike (not to mention the entire institutions) must struggle to be more than standardized products interacting mechanistically and without thought connected realities. The craftsman brings understanding of purpose and context to each the process of creating each product. The gear exists in relation to the other gear mechanistically and without regard for context. The gear exists when an overwhelming quantity of things need to be produced in the same way. The same can be true of the relationship between students, teachers, institutions, and their contexts and environments.
Standardized grading of products (papers, exams, projects, etc.) eliminates the need for process to be considered in most educational settings. Yet process, the way the student relates to information and the medium of assignment over time to create a finished piece, provides the only legitimate opportunity for education. When I learned to walk my parents did not observe from a distance and then submit comments for me to review and apply next time I attempted to stumble-run across the room. This surely can be helpful. But, it shuns the resposibility of recognizing that learning is a process – that everything is a process with a local context. To treat anything otherwise is simply inaction and irresponsibility.
Innovations force people to confront realities they have been living. If that reality is objectively irresponsible, as in the product-focused structure of American education, then participants in the reality will mostly be defensive before they step up, take accountability, and make changes to be more accountable and to improve the overall system.
I do not like simply presenting negatives: it is a useless endeavor. In ecological design, any problem is considered opportunity to perceive the source of instability, to address it, and to improve the whole system. One of my favorite designers said of the gardener who complained of slugs, “You do not have a slug problem, you have a duck deficiency.” Ducks eat slugs turning the slugs into fertilizer and, one more advantage, add a new source of poultry food. A pesticide would fix harmful toxins into the garden vegetables that will then enter and damage your body and will contaminate the soil for future generations. Worst of all, the pesticide means the gardener does not need to think or consider the context of the slug problem. That is how a product-focused approach eliminates thought itself and degrades a system – usually at a compounding or exponential rate.
The problem WriteMinds can pose to product-focused grading is exactly the same, an opportunity. It is an opportunity not only because it poses the problem, but because it is like the duck. The product itself is the result of a process that took into account context and addressed the sources of current instabilities. I hope that more educators and more writers than not, can recognize WriteMinds for the good duck that it is.

Unique Competence, Trust, and Assembling a Team

Animacy — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:41:34 +0000

My brother made a post a few days ago called Be a Professional, Know Your Limits, which stemmed from his reflections on his personal role in MillionsofMinds and turning WriteMinds into reality. I in turn reflected on my observations as a member of the team who has been somewhat of a wild card, at many times observing from more of a birds-eye-view.

The strict link between professional status and institutional credentials that we are all used to is a far cry from even as short a time ago as the early to mid-twentieth century when individuals like Colonel Sanders could pass as a lawyer without a law degree and deliver babies without medical credentials before beginning his poultry empire. Everyone knows that institutional training is often necessary and preferred. But, everyone also knows that there are those who possess a unique competence that enables them to self-teach, to organize, to manage, and to innovate without the necessity of legal “professional” status. In fact, all of my greatest mentors (many of whom did possess credentials) were also exceptional self-educators and observers of complex patterns in their environment.

My observation is that the bureaucratization of professionals has to do respectively with the proliferation of specializations, population, and technology. Ideally this would create a diversity of technology and ideas that increases the potential for innovation. More realistically, I have observed a homogenization of hierarchies, management, and production in compensation for rampant complexity that erodes the necessary elements of stability and the capacity to adapt to the flux of the environment – these elements are trust and communities/teams that emerge from trust.

So what role does a “generalist” like Colonel Sanders or my brother, who possess/ed a unique competence, play in the contemporary environment? They have the ability to pull together networks or communities of trust and by doing so harness the source of motivation. The most profound ideas begin with small, esoteric groups (take Permaculture design for example). These groups are very often motivated to generate innovation by a small number of core individuals who cooperatively recognize patterns that larger, more homogenized groups of individuals are not equipped to recognize, let alone act on.

Part of what inhibits the capacity for recognition and action is a base of trust derived from what have been described as non-zero sum relationships, in which everyone involved understands the mutual gain of interacting with every other individual. Every moment I spend working with the members of MillionsofMinds, I am aware of the power for innovation we possess as a team with such a trust base and I am equally aware of the individuals that brought this team together: they do not have credentials in team building or management. They do possess a unique competence.

Adapting Old Practices to New Mediums

Animacy — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:12:11 +0000

The historical, recurring predicament that runs through this whole history of mediums is how to adapt writing to the medium rather than attempt to directly transport the form of writing in one medium into a new one. On the computer, with a few partial exceptions, two approaches have been taken toward writing and neither of them confront the new medium.

One is the Writeroom solution, which treats the computer as a typewriter. Hemingway said that, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” A typewriter is deeply personal because one must be committed to every letter pressed firmly to paper. In other words, the author is accountable to him or herself. This is inherent in the medium – no erasure (at least not easily). On a computer, this can only be mimicked. But the writer knows the medium offers another kind of composition, and that if it’s a typewriter that is needed, a typewriter should be used.

The other approach is the word processor, which in a clunky, mechanical way, attempts to restore the flexible formatting potential of pen and paper. These tools, like Microsoft Word, are almost completely committed to formatting and neglect the design of a comprehensive writing environment. They also do not functionally address the emergence of the internet as the primary venue for text.

Word processors are a step toward adapting to a new medium. They allow for necessary formatting functions that are not as easily achieved by a keyboard and screen as they are by pen and paper. But, that step was taken many years ago and personally, we do not stop at the first successful step or two. We step until we walk and keep walking until we can walk no longer.

As far as taking steps, WriteMinds is less of a step forward than it is a new dance step, a true innovation adapting the age old written word to our newest medium.

There are a number of other products out there that have pushed further in adapting writing to computers. Even the best, though, tend to synthesize the systems described above or translate one of those systems to internet compatibility without giving proper consideration to the underdeveloped aspects of the systems themselves.

One could call WriteMinds adaptive or evolutionary in that regard. We have worked hard to understand the fundamentally insufficient design aspects of existing systems and adapt them to proficiently make best use of the computer medium.

WriteMinds

Animacy — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:51:47 +0000

For the past two years I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in creating something of substance and integrity and now I have the opportunity to start talking about it. Two years ago, my brother Bill began talking about an idea for online collaborative writing that he called MillionsofMinds. I was immediately captured by the idea. I thought of the hypertext fiction movement and people working together on ever expanding stories. I thought also of the fun of working with strangers on fiction and how computers can enable such a thing. But as often happens, Bill and I could not halt our flow of ideas and MillionsofMinds started to refer to something different – a company whose products make the internet simpler and more humane in the sense of properly considering human intuition and constraints when designing programs. In the meantime, Bill sourced our snazzy and talented web/design team, Hustlewood, and our other partner Ryan and we began collaborating. After some months of deliberation Clay, of Hustlewood, came back to us with a simpler (or maybe not) proposal to just design a better writing system for computers. In retrospect, I think this proposal meshed with the general direction of our overall thought, which was beginning to address the clumsiness of many common activities on computers. So now we had a product, WriteMinds.

Most of our conceptual work occurred in one eight hour explosion a creative generation based on one and only one principle: “account for the core behaviors of writers.” The simplicity of WriteMinds, as you will all see soon, reflects the simple inspiration of its design. It addresses a common predicament in a way that has not yet been adequately addressed on computers. Written word is very old. Make no mistake, computers and then the internet are only two adaptations of the mediums available to write. They are unique adaptations in their own right, but as two mediums in a history of many, computers and the internet are just two more options. The question for WriteMinds was how to preserve the principle elements of the writing process while seizing the potential of the computer and internet as unique mediums.