Bret Victor

worry dream

I wasn't aware of Bret Victor but have looked at Seymour Papert and Alan Kay in some depth previously. I've now read a few of BV articles and looked at a few videos and see that he continues and develops in that tradition. I'll be promoting his material with enthusiam.

For those not familiar with this lineage perhaps Bret Victor's article about the hand would be a good place to start since that correlates well with the Engel's essay on the hand which would be familiar to those who follow Marx: A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design

From a digital world behind a screen we are emerging into tangible, haptic or physical computing with more varied human inputs and interactions becoming available. Bret Victor's examples of a more intuitive user interface for programmers are breathtaking. eg. Inventing on Principle

(Historical aside: Seymour Papert co-authored logo programming / turtle geometry as a way to make powerful maths ideas more accessible to those who found them difficult).

Following some technical wizardry at 35:40 of that video he begins to explain his motivation to his audience of software engineers:

"Ideas are very precious to me and when I see ideas dying it hurts. I see a tragedy. It feels like a moral wrong, an injustice. If there is something I can about it then it feels like a responsibility for me to do so. Not an opportunity but a responsibility"

The computer is now emerging from being a relatively expensive, large closed box and transforming into a miniature capable of interacting with a variety of sensors to create the internet of things. BV goes beyond the predictable and usually mundane commercial hype (Apple watch etc.) and informs us how a more intuitive user interface (“One of the greatest user interface design minds in the world today.” — Alan Kay) can promote creativity. ie. he explains how creativity can be enhanced, not just uses it as a nebulous hype word. The principle he argues for is immediate connection between the creative process and its visualisation or appearance. He has the skill and knowledge to implement that principle, as part of a team, in the real world.

I've been developing a curriculum around the BBC micro:bit and was looking for a theorist who continues to develop the Papert / Kay tradition. Bret Victor may be that theorist.

I'm also impressed by the Yin / Yang sidebar of his Bio.

Sir Ken Robinson: silver tongued charlatan

Alternative titles:
(1) it takes 10 years of very hard, effortful, intelligently directed work to become a genius
(2) why does Ken Robinson refuse to debate his many informed and articulate critics?
(3) I too am a creative person who doesn't like formulas but if there is a formula it would be hard work + supportive, mentored environment is what leads to genius, more so than the random variations of the gene pool

Much to my annoyance Sir Ken Robinson won't go away. I guess I'm just jealous that I don't have a TED talk with 25 billion hits. Or maybe I just can't get enthusiastic about 103 different ways to poke a paper clip into his eye. It doesn't matter where I go, I'm eventually subjected to someone lecturing on the importance of creativity (that rather fuzzy buzz word) and how we should all take notice of Sir Ken Robinson (referred to below as KR)

Sir Ken Robinson:

“all students have tremendous talents”

What does Sir Ken say? That children have tremendous natural talents and these are crushed by School (the capital S signifies the institution of school) because School favours one sort of learning (academic head learning) above other sorts of learning (the multiple intelligences).

My goal here is to look at KRs thesis through the prism of what is required for genius. I argue that genius does not depend primarily on tremendous natural talents, so this key premise of KRs argument falls flat.

I am not arguing that Schools are great places. The reason KR appeals to many is that he is critical of School and many have had negative experiences in School, "it's boring", where their abilities were not encouraged or developed. I agree that school reform is required. But this requires more depth of thought than that provided by KR. I am arguing that children do not have tremendous natural talents. I am arguing that talents develop through a supportive home or other educational environment and hard work.

I use genius as the prism through which to view the debate because to puncture or deflate the mythology surrounding genius - that there are individuals amongst us with extraordinary natural talents that we can't hope to emulate since they are born with it - does at the same time deflate KRs core argument.

This article (How to be a genius by David Dobbs) is one of my chief weapons. In summary it says:

1. hard work, focused effort (effortful study), is most important
2. supportive environment, mentoring is also very important
3. natural ability (genetics) has some importance but is not so important as the first two

A family I know well have home schooled their three children and their youngest, Connor, has become a unicycle "genius". He busks on a regular basis and has raised a shitload of money to fund a Scout trip to America. The older girls have won awards and qualifications for their community service efforts and involvement in the Scouts.

The parents were also impressed by the KR talk and I can see why. Regular school would never have thought of developing Connor's unicycle skill to the extent that this family has pushed it. So, it does illustrate a part of KRs thesis that non academic talents are not recognised by School to the extent that they should be.

I would argue, however, that Connor's natural kinesthenic talent, whilst undeniably, is not the key factor here. The key factor is mentoring. The parents saw an entrepeneurial opportunity and encouraged and facilitated Connor to put in the hard work to develop further in that direction.

I'll add some quotes from the genius article to further elaborate on the theme that the key factors are hard work and mentoring

99 percent Perspiration

...as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration.

Five times the effort

Anders Ericsson:
"These people don't necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort. ... it's a bit overwhelming to look at what these people have to do. They generally invest about five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent. It's not something everyone's up for."

Practise, Pracise, more Practise

So what does create genius or extreme talent? Musicians have an old joke about this: How do you get to Carnegie Hall from here? Practise.

A sober look at any field shows that the top performers are rarely more gifted than the also-rans, but they almost invariably outwork them. This doesn't mean that some people aren't more athletic or smarter than others.

The elite are elite partly because they have some genetic gifts - for learning and hand-eye coordination, for instance - but the very best rise because they take great pains to maximise that gift.

It took Mozart 10 years to develop what appears to be effortless natural ability

This has led scholars of elite performance to speak of a 10-year rule: it seems you have to put in at least a decade of focused work to master something and bring greatness within reach... Mozart was playing the violin at 3 years of age and received expert, focused instruction from the start. He was precocious, writing symphonies at age 7, but he didn't produce the work that made him a giant until his teens.

Supportive learning environment and mentoring is of crucial importance

Study so intense requires resources - time and space to work, teachers to mentor - and the subjects of Bloom's study, like most elite performers, almost invariably enjoyed plentiful support in their formative years.

Bloom, in fact, came to see great talent as less an individual trait than a creation of environment and encouragement. "We were looking for exceptional kids," he said, "and what we found were exceptional conditions."

He was intrigued to find that few of the study's subjects had shown special promise when they first took up the fields they later excelled in, and most harboured no early ambition for stellar achievement.

Rather, they were encouraged as children in a general way to explore and learn, then supported in more focused ways as they began to develop an area they particularly liked. ...

Finally, most retrospective studies, including Bloom's, have found that almost all high achievers were blessed with at least one crucial mentor as they neared maturity ...

When Subotnik looked at music students at New York's elite Juilliard School and winners of the high-school-level Westinghouse Science Talent Search, he found that the Juilliard students generally realised their potential more fully because they had one-on-one relationships with mentors who prepared them for the challenges they would face after their studies ended.

What it is that high ability performers learn? Answer: Pattern recognition of the important bits

So what do elite performers attain through all that deliberate practice and sensitive mentoring? What makes a genius? The creme de la creme appear to develop several important cognitive skills.

The first, called "chunking", is the ability to group details and concepts into easily remembered patterns.

Chess provides the classic illustration. Show a chess master a game in progress for just 5 seconds and they will memorise the board so well that they can recreate most of it - 20 pieces or more - an hour later. A novice will be able to place just four or five pieces.

Yet chess masters don't necessarily have a better memory than novices. Their clustering skills begin and end at the chessboard. Show a master and a novice a random list of 20 digits, and a few minutes later neither will be able to recall more than seven or eight of them in sequence.

In a chess game, by contrast, the master sees not the 20 pieces that confront the novice but clusters of pieces, each of which is familiar from experience.

Interestingly, the chess master will remember about as many clusters - four or five - as a novice will individual pieces. The better the master, the larger the clusters he'll remember.

We all exercise such clustering skills when we read. Learning to read means coming to recognise chunks of letters as words, then chunks of words as phrases and sentences, and - at a deeper level - sentences and paragraphs as components of a work's larger meaning.

This chunking puts individual words into logical, recallable contexts. As a result, we'll remember almost all of a logical 20-word sentence and only four to seven words from the same 20 words ordered randomly.

Apart from chunking, the elite also learn to identify quickly which bits of information in a changing situation to store in working memory so that they can use them later.

This lets them create a continually updated mental model far more complex than that used by someone less practised, allowing them to see subtler dynamics and deeper relationships.

Importance of repetition, repetition, REPETITION ...

Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York, who won a Nobel prize in 2000 for discovering much of the neural basis of memory and learning, has shown that both the number and strength of the nerve connections associated with a memory or skill increase in proportion to how often and how emphatically the lesson is repeated.

So focused study and practice literally build the neural networks of expertise. Genetics may allow one person to build synapses faster than another, but either way the lesson must still be learned. Genius must be built.

Previous:
Challenging Sir Ken Robinson
Design for the Creative Spirit

challenging Sir Ken Robinson

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
- Speakers Ken Robinson: Author/educator

There is not just one but many Sir Ken Robinson TED talks about how the industrial model of schooling is killing creativity in our youth. Everyone loves to hear a story of a maverick but creative individual, such as Albert Einstein, who hated school and went on to demonstrate their genius. "Imagination is more important than knowledge", etc. As TED says there is "deep resonance" with this message.

Sir Ken's passionate polemic has now been challenged. Sir Ken is very popular, much loved but wrong. It's also important to drill down into the details of this argument. This corresponds to meme 5 Creativity of my current research (DI_indigenous_memes) Here are some links, with extracts:

Robinson pegs the current system as a product of the Enlightenment, but curiously the word “Romanticism” never comes up. Romanticism was an intellectual movement of the second half of the 18th century that arose in response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It elevated emotion and feeling, and also emphasized the sublimity of Nature and all things natural.

Indeed, Romanticism gained strength in reaction to the Industrial revolution, the very movement that Robinson criticizes as an inspiration of our erroneous education paradigm.

Romantic views of education, typified by Pestalozzi and Rousseau, emphasize personal experience as crucial, and decry the sublimation of the individual to conformity. More generally, progressive educators from the early 20th century to the present have emphasized instruction that follows the child’s interests, includes more real-world tasks, and more group work.

So Robinson is not suggesting a revolutionary, entirely new approach. In fact he’s tapping a very rich, very old vein of thought.

It’s not important to me that he fails to acknowledge his intellectual forbears. It’s important to me that he fails to acknowledge that many many people have tried to create schools inspired by these ideals before. A few were spectacular, inspiring successes. Most crashed and burned. And, as is so common, what made the successes work well seemed difficult to pin down, and dashed attempts to replicate the success elsewhere.

I want Robinson to tell me what’s going to make things different this time around.
Willingham: Is a paradigm shift really needed?

On reflection, creativity appears to me a grittier, tougher process than such talks imply. Thousands of hours of ‘deliberate practice’ enable creativity. It is not all ‘flow’ or organic personalisation. For example, repeating the rules of grammar with sometimes deadening repetition can actually create the mastery required for playful creativity and rule breaking. Sir Ken likely scripted and practised his apparently spontaneously witty talk over and over to create his seeming carefree confidence and fluency. The pleasure of finding ‘flow’ is replaced by the dull but reassuring knowledge that perseverance could help make a difference, in a ‘factory model’ school or not.
Why we should mistrust Sir Ken Robinson

People like Robinson seem to believe that our jobs as educators is to uncover the talents and aptitudes personal to each child, and then to elevate them. This assumes that such aptitudes exist, uncovered, undiscovered, like statues of David buried in cold lava, and our jobs are to be archaeologists of character. Who buries these statues? What fairy hand blesses each child with gifts, and then challenges its guardians with discovering them? What immortal hand or eye?
- The Second Coming of Ken Robinson- but he's not the messiah

1. Talent is not innate

A growing body of research shows that talent isn’t innate, waiting passively like a tooth ready to be extracted. Research collated in books from Malcolm Gladwell, Carol Dweck, Matthew Syed, Daniel Coyle, Geoff Colvin, Daniel Willingham, Doug Lemov and Paul Tough show that natural talent is a myth; it’s only dedicated, determined and disciplined practice that leads to great achievement.

2. Multiple intelligences don’t exist

Dan Willingham has summarised the research and shown that learning styles do not exist; on multiple intelligences, ‘for scientists, this theory of the mind is almost certainly incorrect’: ‘The fact that the theory is an inaccurate description of the mind makes it likely that the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective. All in all, educators would likely do well to turn their time and attention elsewhere.’

3. Literacy and numeracy are the basis of creativity

In the UK, 17% of school leavers leave school functionally illiterate, and 22% leave school functionally innumerate. Ask any parent what they would prefer: that their child left school unable to read, write or add up but able to dance and draw creatively, or unable to dance or draw creatively but able to read, write or add up. The reason why there’s a hierarchy of subjects is because some are more empowering than others. If you can’t read, you can’t learn much else. If you can’t do arithmetic, you can’t become a teacher, doctor, engineer, scientist, plumber or electrician. Numeracy and literacy are complex evolutionary applications of civilisation; they take a great deal of time, practice and expert guidance to master, so we dedicate a lot of time to them in school, and rightly so. Sir Ken is wrong when he says children do not need to be helped to learn, for the most part: children do need to be helped to learn – every teacher knows that. We don’t dedicate so much time to dancing and drawing because they don’t disempower you so much if you can’t do them.

4. Misbehaviour is more damaging than conformity

In any classroom, without compliance with instructions, no one learns anything. Disruptive behaviour is chronic, particularly in the most challenging schools. The problem for many teachers is not so much conformity, but rather pervasive disruption to teaching. Self-discipline is not an evil weed to be uprooted, but the foundation for effective learning. But then again, Sir Ken has not been teacher in a tough school – nor any primary or secondary school at all.

5. Academic achievement is important, but unequal

Strong academic achievement in private schools allow 96% to go to University, and in the UK commandeer 70% of the jobs as high court judges, 54% of the jobs as doctors and 51% of the jobs as journalists, despite only educating 7% of children. Yet only 16% of the poorest pupils go to University, due to persistent academic underachievement. It’s no good Sir Ken disparaging the education system’s focus on academic ability; closing the gap in academic attainment is vital for social mobility, social equity and social justice in this country.

6. Subject knowledge is vital for critical and creative skills

Decades of scientific research shows the importance of broad and domain-specific knowledge for reading, critical thinking and problem-solving skills. So it’s no good Sir Ken disparaging subject-based curricula. All over the world, mastering subject disciplines is the route to success. It’s no coincidence, no middle-class industrial Victorian conspiracy that China, South Korea, Canada and Scandanavia all organise their systems like this, as global expert Tim Oates explains: ‘In all high-performing systems, the fundamentals of subjects are strongly emphasised, have substantial time allocation, and are the focus of considerable attention’. It’s the most effective way of organising teaching and learning, because, as Daisy Christodoulou explains: ‘thinking skills are subject-specific; our working memories are limited and easily overloaded by distractions; and pupils are novices,’ not experts, and so require expert guidance.
What Sir Ken Got Wrong

I don’t completely agree with all of Pragmatic Education’s arguments (referring to the link above)

• Intelligence may not be malleable. You can learn more knowledge, and that can come from practice. It’s not clear that fluid intelligence is improved with practice.
• Learning styles don’t seem to exist. Multiple intelligences? I don’t think that the answer is as clear there.
• Creativity comes from knowing things. Literacy and numeracy are great ways of coming to know things. It’s a bit strong to say that creativity comes from literacy and numeracy.
• There are lots of reasons why rich kids are unequal to poor kids (see the issue about poverty and cognitive function.) Cultural knowledge is just part of it.

But 90% — I think he gets what’s wrong with Sir Ken’s arguments. What Sir Ken Got Wrong, and what the blogger got wrong too

Note: I haven't replicated the links in quotes from the above blogs. Many of these links are valuable. You will need to visit the original blogs if you want to research this further.

design for the creative spirit

Personal Mastery: If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual.

The point here is that the human potential manifests itself in individuals. To realize this potential, we must provide a medium that can be mastered by a single individual. Any barrier that exists between the user and some part of the system will eventually be a barrier to creative expression. Any part of the system that cannot be changed or that is not sufficiently general is a likely source of impediment. If one part of the system works differently from all the rest, that part will require additional effort to control. Such an added burden may detract from the final result and will inhibit future endeavors in that area. We can thus infer a general principle of design:

Good Design: A system should be built with a minimum set of unchangeable parts; those parts should be as general as possible; and all parts of the system should be held in a uniform framework.
- Design Principles Behind Smalltalk by Daniel Ingalls

A enormous amount of time is spent learning a new upgrade, learning the user interface (which can vary between different apps and systems), agonising about whether to use Windows or Linux (is it worth the time to learn a new OS when you are locked in at work), should I use proprietary or standard data formats? (send a *.doc attachment or an *.odt attachment?)

Smalltalk seems to be an attempt to do everything within the one program, for example, in the discussion about user interface:

Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.

Is this a good idea or grandiose? Or both? It would be nice to have less mess.