Knowledge Work

Practice makes perfect

Barry Campbell — Mon, 08 May 2006 15:09:22 +0000

The Freaknomics boys are at it again, with an article in the Sunday New York Times about “expert performance.”

Simply put, research shows that people who are very good at what they do — star ballet dancers, soccer players, neurosurgeons — are not born with “natural talent,” but acquire their skills through ruthless discipline and practice.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

A Star Is Made - New York Times

Nuvvo - Web-based eLearning

Barry Campbell — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:47:08 +0000

A new site called Nuvvo offers Web-delivered e-learning to both teachers and students. If you’re an instructional designer, Nuvvo provides a pretty spiffy toolkit for course development.

Nuvvo is your way to teach on the web. Everyone knows a little bit about something, and this free, AJAX-enhanced eLearning web service is designed to bring out the teacher in all of us. Sign up and build a course in minutes; advertise your course on our eLearning Market to get the word out. Get teaching with Nuvvo, Web 2.0’s answer to eLearning.

Nuvvo Free On-demand eLearning

Yahoo releases User Interface, Design Pattern code libaries

Barry Campbell — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:45:21 +0000

Attention, web interface designers:

Yahoo! has released two resources, the Design Pattern Library and the User Interface Library, which basically give you access to Yahoo!-level design and code for free.

mediabistro: UnBeige

Digital Web Magazine:Practical Usability Testing

Barry Campbell — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 11:55:38 +0000

The most critical aspect of user-centered design, usability testing breaks down the wall between the designer and user, and allows us to see how real users do real tasks in the real world. There are many benefits of usability testing, including uncovering pitfalls in a current system before a redesign and evaluating the usability of a system during and after design. Usability testing should be an iterative practice, completed several times during the design and development life-cycle. The end result is an improved product and a better understanding of the users that we’re designing for.

Digital Web Magazine - Practical Usability Testing

Why would you want a technical communicator on your staff?

Barry Campbell — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:53:00 +0000

Not too long ago, a senior manager asked me to write a short page of talking points explaining why it was a good idea to have professional communicators–in this case, technical communicators–on staff. Here’s what I came up with. Maybe you can use it too (or refine it–comments are welcome!)

What do technical communicators do?

Research, write, edit and refine technical and marketing documentation, either as lead authors or as team participants.

Policy and procedure manuals
Proposals and RFPs
Training materials
Web pages
Product manuals and online help
White papers
Reports and presentations
Project documentation

Research and recommend best practices for communications.
Set and propagate documentation standards and style guidelines.
Manage your documentation library and collaboration tools.

Why should you care?

An experienced technical communicator can help you save money, make money, establish and maintain a competitive advantage, and comply with legal and regulatory requirements.

Save money

Reduce support and overhead costs by delivering improved training material and reference documents.
Increase buy-in from colleagues and clients by delivering persuasive and easy-to-understand policy and procedure documentation.
Help your staff “do it right the first time” by providing clear directions, reducing the necessity for costly rework and revision due to ambiguity and misunderstanding.
Bring new employees and client staff up to speed quickly by providing clear documentation and training material; they will become more productive, faster.

Make money

Win new business by crafting more compelling proposals and RFPs.
Add considerable value to the services that you deliver and the processes and tools that you support by being able to offer high-quality training and documentation and turning it into a selling point.

Establish and maintain a competitive advantage

Clear communication helps you align business and IT goals and practices to improve your organization’s effectiveness.

Comply with legal and regulatory requirements

Stay out of the liability zone by clearly documenting your policies and procedures and communicating them to clients and staff.
Comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and related global and industry-specific statutory requirements.

Eight PowerPoint mistakes to avoid

Barry Campbell — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:04:32 +0000

Here’s a good overview of how to avoid some all-too-common mistakes when constructing a PowerPoint presentation: 8 mistakes when creating PowerPoint presentations (SympleByte.)

Thought for the day: Socrates on Writing

Barry Campbell — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 01:07:38 +0000

Socrates. He would be a very simple person… who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

Phaedrus. That is most true.

Socrates. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.

(Plato, Phaedrus - translated by B. Jowett)

Creating Passionate Users: A Crash Course in Learning Theory

Barry Campbell — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:59:31 +0000

If you ever have to teach anyone anything–as part of your job, on a volunteer basis, for any reason at all–or if you ever give presentations, or write user documentation, you could do worse than spend fifteen minutes with this blog post:

…[H]ere’s a crash course on some of our favorite learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science, learning theory, neuroscience, psychology, and entertainment (including game design). Much of it is based around courses I designed and taught at UCLA Extension’s New Media/Entertainment Studies department…

This is not a comprehensive look at the state of learning theory today, but it does include almost everything we think about in creating our books. And although it’s geared toward blogs/writing virtually everything in here applies regardless of how you deliver the learning–you can easily adapt it to presentations, user documentation, or classroom learning.

Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory