Serendipity35

When my daughter began learning to drive a car, her only experience with the mysteries of automotive technologies was from the passenger’s seat. Experience had taught her that the only things that propelled and directed the vehicle were her assertions that I was driving too fast (rarely), that I was driving too slowly (often), or that I had missed a turn and we were getting lost (all of the time). Her first time in the pilot’s seat she nervously asked what to do, haltingly put the key in the ignition, stepped on the brake and started the car. After a few deep breaths (hers and mine), she placed the shift lever in “D” and began her driving career.Then it was my turn to sit in the passenger’s seat and blurt out the same assertions she used to make.

The user interface for driving a car is a remarkable example of a transparent technology. The driver sits and turns a wheel to move in one direction or the other and depresses and releases small levers with the foot to make the car speed up, slow down, and go where mostly intended. Meanwhile, under the hood, such complex things as fuel delivery, ignition systems, charging systems, hydraulic systems, and combustion occur in lockstep synchronization, completely transparent to the mostly oblivious driver.

So what does this have to do with Educational Technology? Just remember the first time you tried to use PowerPoint. If you were anything like me, you probably managed to get the computer started, probably managed to get PowerPoint running, and then sat there and said, “Now what in heck do I do?” The technology that was available for me to get me where I needed to go with my planned presentation was about as transparent and daunting as a plugged sewer pipe.

So why isn’t the simple user experience of performing a complex task like driving a car reflected in the application and productivity software we use on our computers?

Wesley Fryer has some interesting ideas:

“New teachers laugh at the prospect of "overhead projector training." Technology in the classroom should become a transparent part of the learning process, a tool like a pencil or overhead that facilitates instruction rather than distracts or becomes the focus of instruction.”

His Texas Computer Education Association presentation on “Transparent Technologies in the Dynamical Classroom” is available (as a pdf) for download.

While education is certainly necessary (for everyone) to learn new tasks and technologies, it is not the same key to performing a skill that my daughter placed in the ignition switch on her first driving day. She didn’t have to pop open the glove box, dig around for, find, and Read the Friendly (Owners) Manual to learn to drive a car. She didn’t even have to extend her vocabulary with a new jargon dialect.

Not all computer programs have learning curves that require mountain boots and oxygen masks to climb. My wife, who sometimes finds herself opposing anything with a micro-chip in it, needed no training to comfortably sit at the console of my UNIX server at home, log in to the K Desktop Environment, find and play Spider Solitaire, open a web browser, and visit whatever web site interested her.

Certainly, using a UNIX console to play a game and browse web sites is not the productivity task that designing a presentation is, but the degree of difficulty between accomplishing both tasks doesn’t reflect the impossible learning curve difference between them, either. It is the responsibility of education technology professionals to teach the authors of complex and powerful programs how to make their tools intuitive and less opaque to their end-users. While we still will need to teach the users how to use the tools, the larger task will be to teach the toolmakers a better way to make the tools.

I know that if I need a reminder about why intuitive tools are necessary, I’ll go out and drive my car around the block.