dy/dan

I just finished facilitating "WCYDWT: The Workshop" over four days in Kannapolis, North Carolina. Maybe this should've been easy. I had three years of posts and a handful of presentations to draw upon for material. I had to condense the former resource, though, and expand the latter while adapting both formats for a workshop. The preparation lasted the first half of 2010 and was — hands down — the hardest work of my professional year. The facilitation was the most fun.

I learned a pile, both about facilitating workshops and about a model for instructional design I thought I had pretty well figured out. This is my usual debrief, then: notes that are useful to me, posted on the offhand chance they're useful to you.

How We Used Our Time

• 1.5 days — towards better conceptual problems
• .5 days — towards useful tools for creating better conceptual problems
• 1.5 days — towards better skill development problems
• .5 days — towards lab work, as you like it.

Sessions

I can clarify that schedule and save myself some bandwidth at the same time by directing you to the session sites, which include more detail.

• Day One
• Day Two
• Day Three
• Day Four

The Opener

If we did nothing else right, we opened our time together well with some highly combustible mathematics. Per Brian Lawler's suggestion, we began with the ticket roll and the water tank (which, for the record, I had never attempted to solve until last Tuesday with those teachers in Kannapolis).

I tried to lead them through those problems as the best version of myself, by:

1. asking them what questions interested them about the multimedia,
2. soliciting their intuitive guesses towards those questions and encouraging a competition around those guesses,
3. asking them to describe an answer they'd reject as too low or too high (ie. "give me a wrong answer.") in order to set their parameters for an upcoming error check,
4. asking them to tell me the information they'd need to solve their question,
5. checking in with groups as they worked, bringing student work beneath the document camera, asking them a lot of questions that began with "why,"
6. asking them to check their obtained mathematical answer against their error parameters from [2],
7. comparing our mathematical answers to our intuitive answers and then to the actual, no-joke real-life answer,
8. discussing possible sources of error, since nobody's answer was exactly correct,
9. extending the problem and differentiating between learners by offering what we came to call "sequels," (eg. "what would the ticket roll's diameter measure if it had 1,000,000 tickets?" or "how long would it take to release all the water from the tank?", a problem which every group missed by a margin well above 200% but corrected quickly, which was awesome to witness. (Thanks, Steve.)

The moment of combustion came when I asked them to create the comparable problems they might assign out of a textbook. It's always been true for me that I grow most as a teacher when I try to reconcile the exhilaration I often experience, personally, as a learner, with the tedium I often inflict upon my students, professionally, as a teacher.

The product of the first day was a sturdy rubric describing the beginning, middle, and end of "great application problems," a rubric that arose naturally from those opening activities, a rubric by which we navigated the rest of the workshop.

What I Learned About WCYDWT

• In terms of technical skills relevant to this kind of instructional design, a black rectangle and the pause button will take you 70% of the way. Exemplar forthcoming.
• Storytelling is the technique by which one problem can be made simultaneously more engaging and more challenging than another problem that assesses the exact same content standard. For instance, consider the difference between "What is the area of the circular lawn?" and "How long would it take you to mow this circular lawn?" The difference between the two is an instructional bonanza. You're getting so much for so little. (Thanks, Kyle.)
• Graphing Stories is really boring, again, except for storytelling. Consider a fixed shot of a math teacher walking down two flights of stairs over fifteen seconds. That's boring. But attach to that boring video the framing device "graph height against time" and suddenly we're throwing pencils at each other, arguing over the effect of the curb at the thirteen second mark, etc.

Do Better

• Send along a list of required software in advance. Day two slowed down quite a bit when we couldn't install Handbrake, QuickTime, or Geogebra due to access restrictions on the teacher laptops. I should have made that list known to my liaisons a lot sooner. (Any experienced facilitators have a tip for me here?)
• Lecture less. I initially tried to lecture my way into the rubric for great application problems and into the connection between storytelling and teaching. Clearly, I should have packaged that material as fodder for table discussions and then share-outs.
• Stick tighter to the rubric. We had a good list. By the last day, we were evaluating every product against it, even ones I brought to the workshop. That should have been our m.o. all the way through.
• Develop a rubric for great skill development problems. Those techniques are more abstract. The rubric would have been much shorter. It would have been a useful exercise, though.
• Do more math. Do more teaching. During our lab time, I should have insisted that we actually teach each other and actually solve the math because a) that's the fuel, teachers exhilarated by learning in a way that their students should be also, and b) merely describing a lesson or describing a solution allows you all kinds of fictions that only become obvious once you try them out.
• Clarify misconceptions about my own WCYDWT workflow sooner. Unless you correct them explicitly, your workshop participants will assume you do all the awesome stuff you're describing every period of every day. One participant called that effect "demoralizing." I need to put it out there as soon as possible that this is a model for instructional design that I only aspire to every day.
• Find an opening for Google Reader and Delicious. That's the Swiss Army Knife right there. I couldn't find the right moment, though.
• What do you do about error? I reckon this question is worth half a day on its own, and I'm nowhere near qualified to answer it. What do you do when you see a student in the middle of an error in reasoning or computation? The answer to that question is somewhere central to this WCYDWT thing, but we didn't address that one directly at all.

Meaningful Quotations

Paula, a workshop participant:

I don't know if I'm creative enough for this. I think it probably just takes practice, though.

Dr. Tom Sallee, not in attendance:

A good problem announces its constraints quickly and clearly.

Naturally, I feel all kinds of conflicted over the content of this trailer. My personal shame aside, this is top-shelf infographic work from Buck.

Participant Media – Pledge To See This Film from CypherAudio on Vimeo.

BTW: Referencing My 2009 Annual Report.

Technical

1. Specs. Hardware: Mac Pro / 2.66GHz Quad-Core / 8GB ¶ Software: Excel 2004, Photoshop CS4, After Effects CS4, Final Cut Pro 7.
2. Workflow. I sketched an outline on paper, then ordered it in Google Docs and turned that into sixty Photoshop compositions. That took about two weeks. Then I sequenced those compositions into a slideshow of still images and synced them in Final Cut Pro to a Creative Commons track. After Effects doesn't play nicely with music so I spent the next two weeks working deaf, working exclusively off the timecodes from Final Cut Pro. (ie "Okay, the pie graph needs to finish its rotation at 2:41:20.") The first day I saw it with music was January 31, the same day I posted it.
3. Music. I'm not saying I did anything fantastic to the music track, but I did have to sync the slides to the rhythm, making adjustments for longer segments (any of the "top five + other" bar graphs, the travel maps), cutting and blending the song so it complemented the content of the video. I am saying that Animoto won't do this automatically. iMovie won't do this automatically. And teachers consistently overrepresent the capability of those tools.
4. Data Sources. I maintained active records in Google Tasks before transferring them to an Excel sheet biweekly which I backed up fastidiously over the course of the year. Perish the possibility I might lose it. ¶ I collected all music records passively through last.fm, which became significantly more accurate after I outfitted my car with a 30-pin iPhone cable and began tracking car audio. ¶ I also collected my mobile phone statistics passively through AT&T's online billing system, which kindly exports data to Excel.

Mathematical

I don't see any of my students buying this pitch but here it is anyway: I would have had to release this video somewhere in April if I didn't have a working knowledge of a) the degree measure of angles, b) proportions, c) percents, d) coordinates, e) 3D space, f) modular arithmetic, and g) linear interpolation. I even calculated an integral.

Here's just one example. You noticed the little animated counters running all throughout the project? Problem: you want the counter to read "0″ at 773 frames into the composition and "44651″ at 795 frames:

Solution: a linear equation!

Math.round(timeToFrames()*2029.59-1568872.77)

Miscellaneous

1. Guilt. I watched a continuous 20 days and 23 hours of television and movies. I could slap qualifiers all over that statistic but you're still talking about nearly a month spent proximate to a flickering light.
2. Battlestar Galactica. Not worth it.
3. Guilt II. 18 gallons sounds like kind of a lot of beer when you put it that way.
4. Margin of Error. I'll put the average margin of error for the project somewhere below 1%. And I'll wager the sleep statistics are the worst. I had to remember to take a screenshot of my iPhone's clock wallpaper twice a day at the two times of the day that I was the least likely to remember to take a screenshot of my iPhone's clock wallpaper.
5. 2.5 Minutes. I'm really happy with the length of the piece. That's, like, 2.4 days per second!
6. Editing. For every statistic I included there were two I cut. There were albums and songs; incoming calls, outgoing calls, outgoing messages, fastest rising message recipients as well as fastest falling; places where I drank beer, number of people with whom I drank beer; repeat vs. first time movie viewings, number of people with whom I watched movies; plus a host of Twitter statistics and a Wordle visualization of my 2009 text message content which were, predictably, pretty dull. ¶ The most poignant graph that I cut for length was this one, which features both my father's cancer diagnosis and, relatedly, the fact that I drove the length of the US in one month without leaving California.
   

   What a strange project.

7. 2010. It's been two years and I can't see quitting this kind of introspection. I'm already anticipating my decade retrospective where I hope I'll see a lot of huge life changes reflected in microscopic daily statistics. That'll be great. ¶ My goal for next year is to post my completed annual report video no later than January 1, 2011. I don't think this is impossible. Andrew Kramer recently composed a convincing tutorial explaining dynamic bar graphs in After Effects, where you just enter the final data and Javascript recomposes the entire project. The trick will be extending that process across an entire video and several different infographics. In any case, I need to publicly throw down this gauntlet.

Throughout 2009, I recorded several dozen statistics about a) the pop culture I consumed, b) the people I talked to, c) the beer I drank, d) the places I visited, e) the vehicles I took to those places, and f) the amount of sleep I enjoyed each day. Those statistics spread across several thousand cells of a spreadsheet, which I then condensed and animated into the 2.5-minute video clip embedded below. That process took about a month, all told, which isn't a ratio I'm proud of, even if I'm happy with the result.

Dan Meyer's 2009 Annual Report from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

I'll add a post shortly after this one that will address some technical notes I made throughout the process.

BTW: My 2009 Annual Report — Behind The Scenes

Nicholas Felton's 2009 annual report has already been widely linked. I pass it along, though, with my recommendation that it's the best of his four reports. He relinquished his usual role as data collector to the friends and acquaintances he met in 2009, asking them to respond to the same web survey and answer questions about Felton's mood, location, activity, and conversation.

Felton's technical feat here is astonishing. It's challenging enough to track a data set in a spreadsheet of your creation, organized according to your own tastes. This year, Felton had to organize and visualize data no matter how his friends decided to submit it. And in spite of that loose chaos he has designed some exceptionally lucid visualizations while also experimenting a bit with form. (He used topographical maps to represent New York instead of his usual cluster plots.) I couldn't quickly decipher his cover-page infographic but realized eventually how he was graphing the duration of his relationships across time and found the whole thing vivid and melancholy.

Felton stocks the sidebars of every page with his collaborators' exact reports ("I think it's funny that Nick carries a backpack."), which is an affectionate design choice. If his previous work could be described as a staggering act of introspection, this is their equal in extrospection, a study of friends and relationships. I suspect, in ten years, this will be the one he returns to first, and most often.

BTW: See this interview with Nicholas Felton.