A great quote by Tom Robbins

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything – one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them – it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don’t have to put it together Christmas morning.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it too. Sometimes they’d rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated.

Tom Robbins

No surprises

While scrounging around in old files yesterday, I came across this from Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Learning to Give, Take & Use Instruction by Richard Saul Wurman -  another fascinating writer. (His Information Anxiety is also a classic.)

Life on mahogany row is complicated further by the reluctance of most employees to bear bad news to their bosses. No one wants to be responsible for delivering disagreeable tidings to a superior. So lower-level employees will tend to gloss over negative information. As the information moves upwards in the company hierarchy, it tends to be cast in a more positive light.  Information may get so filtered or distorted by fear or even just by retelling that if it ever makes it to the top, it is likely to be out of date, exaggerated, or patently wrong.

improving...
needs adjustment
needs fixing
problematic
bad
Very Bad
Terrible
HORRIBLE
CATASTROPHIC

I think CEOs ought to have a placard behind their desk that reads No Surprises.  No surprises means getting the bad news as well as the good. ... The lack of computer knowledge fosters isolation. Computers used to be for engineers. Ten years ago, people could afford the luxury of being technologically illiterate. They could brag about not being able to turn on a computer, work their answering machines, or program their VCRs. Now they find themselves isolated from their most effective and up-to-date source of information. And while the capabilities of their employees were enhanced by computer literacy, their own are diminished.

This observation really hit home after having just finished reading Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and listening to continuing new stories on NPR in which the death toll in Iraq continues to mount while the Bush administration continues to say how much better things are getting there. Is anyone telling President Bush the bad news?

Enough politics - that's not what this blog is about. But I've long been advising library media specialists that one key to a good relationship with their principal is the "No Surprises" rule.  Keep your supervisor apprised of both your program's problems and successes. A principal never wants to feel left out of the loop. S/he should never hear about what is happening in the library from someone before s/he hears it from you.

No surprises this year, OK? 

Donald Norman - Worth Reading

I've used this quote before, but it is worth re-posting:

“The final result is that technology aids our thoughts and civilized lives, but it also provides a mind-set that artificially elevates some aspects of life and ignores others, not based upon their real importance but rather by the arbitrary condition of whether they can be measured scientifically and objectively by today’s tools.” Donald Norman, Things That Make Us Smart, 1993.

The quote is a good example of the humanity Norman brings to technology use.  His books The Psychology of Everyday Things and Things That Make Us Smart were probably as influential in shaping my own views toward technology and how to improve our ability to use it as anything I've read. I have his newest book, Emotional Design, on order. He makes humans, not machines, the focus of technology implementation and use. And rightfully so.

So I was delighted to see that Norman weighs in on the PowerPoint controversy in In Defense of PowerPoint. (Also check out Norman's very cool, very long annotated recommended book list.)

Here's a quick way to tell if  you are machine or human focused (as an AV director in Iowa once suggested to me): If someone comes up to you saying his computer doesn't work,  is your first thought is:

There is a problem in the chair.

or

There is a problem on the desk.

If your automatic assumption is that the problem is a SUD, you'd better grab one of Norman's books.