Educating the Distracted

One day recently, I stood before a room of students lecturing. I was discussing a topic they had requested. I had flown to their country on a Sunday to start the class, sacrificing my weekend. Their company had reorganized their schedules, and paid muchos dolares. And yet, they all sat before their laptops, engrossed in other tasks and conversations.

I paused to see if anyone noticed I had stopped talking. Finally, getting no response, I offered: "If you guys need to do other things, that's fine. I can wait until a better time."

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I often teach training classes to technicians who work at Phone Companies and Internet Service Providers. One serious problem is that they're often very distracted.

Usually, a student will bring along his laptop, find some way to get public Internet access, and then connect his VPN back to the home office. He has usually flown in, planning a week away from his family and regular work to attend the class.

All expenses included, his company is spending about $2 a minute to be in my class. I'm up in front of the class jabbering away, and he's busy troubleshooting some urgent customer issue.

There is a pro and a con of this situation:

Pro: He may have only been able to attend my class because he believed he'd be able to keep up with critical issues while attending the class.

Con: His distraction means he won't get very much out of the lecture, and he won't be very good at anything he's doing for work.

My situation is different from a college instructor. My wife, Hayden, teaches English. If a student in her English Composition class is totally engrossed in their electronics, she can tell them to put it away.

But in my class, the students are my customers. They're usually older than me. They're fully-grown adults, and in the professional training environment, there's no legacy of "in loco parentis" that gives me any real authority over my class. I have to find ways to convince them that it's in their best interest to focus on the class at hand.

It's rare that I have to come right out and ask for some change, as I did on my recent training trip. Before most classes, I give a short speech on the importance of focusing on the lecture; I had failed to give that speech this time.

Other times, the problem seems to correct itself. I call on people to give answers to questions. Or I circle around the classroom while talking; people sometimes don't want the instructor to see what else they're up to.

Sometimes, the exercises solve the problem. I give the students some work to do, and some struggle with it. Eventually they figure out that the exercises are easier if they actually pay attention while I'm talking.

It's a shame that they bother to go to training, but still pretend they can do their regular jobs. And I'm really not satisfied with my ability to convince them to focus.

My Trenchant Trencher

I rented a trencher and dug a long hole today. Here are some observations.

1. Some trenchers, like the Vermeer RT 100 I rented, are called "walk behind" but in fact they work best moving backwards. The trencher has a corkscrew-type mechanism that tends to move dirt one side of the trencher.

2. It seems really hard to do a perfectly straight line. It's also hard to go back over the same trenched hole a second time, because of the mound of dirt on one side.

3. The trencher can grind off the edge of rock, but it's really quite slow. The machine tends to buck up and down a lot when it hits rock.


4. This may sound obvious, but it's quite tricky to drive the trencher across the trench once it's dug. This makes it really hard to dig a trench with an angle in it; if the angle is greater than 10 degrees or so, the wheels digging trench B will have to cross trench A.


5. The best and easiest results are when the dirt doesn't include any hidden boulders, and the trencher arm can be extended as deep as possible, and you can let it dig, then roll it back a few inches, then dig some more, then roll back a few more inches.

6. I survived, with no internal or external injuries.

iPhone/iPad/iPod Multitasking -- stop the silliness!

We interrupt this otherwise-productive workday to get this off my chest:

Stop mis-using the term multitasking. Most people don't really use multitasking anyway.


From CNet News:

How important is the ability to multitask on tablet-class devices like Apple's iPad? Important enough that the feature will likely be touted as a trump card for Intel-based smartphones such as a tablet-size phone from LG due later this year.

From The IPhone Blog:

iPad — What We Didn’t Get: Multitasking, Notifications, TV Subscriptions, Camera, Tethering, Textbooks, iTunes.com

Multitasking. Apple only showed one iPhone app or iPad app running at once. We’ve heard it’s running iPhone OS 3.2, and multitasking might be an iPhone (and iPad) OS 4.0 feature, but again, we wanted to see it now.

How often does a normal Windows XP or Mac OS X user actually make use of multitasking? There are two defensible arguments, because of the fuzziness of the way the terms are used:

Normal People Almost Never use Multitasking. In fact, when you're using a Windowing environment like Mac OS X, only one window is active at a time. The other programs are almost always sitting completely idle. If you don't believe me, and you actually care about truth, honesty, and the American Way use the "Activity Monitor" or "Task Manager" to watch the process state on your system. It's incredibly rare for multiple applications to actually be Runnable. In practice, most programs are sitting quietly, doing nothing, even though you can see them on your screen.

It turns out the iPhone OS can do this already. When you switch between programs, the iPhone OS retains the memory state of the application you just left.

When do ordinary people REALLY use multitasking?

• If you're waiting for Microsoft Word to do something like print, or re-format, you can switch back to some other application, such as email. In reality, you're slowing MS Word a bit, but it can continue processing in the background while you're looking at your email.
  
• When a message arrives from the network that needs to be displayed; e.g., an instant message. The task you're using is momentarily paused while the new message is processed. This is useful because your display is large enough to display both your main application, and the Instant Messenger client.
  
• If you're actively viewing incoming data from multiple data feeds. E.g., if you're watching multiple incoming security cameras. Again, this is mostly interesting because your display can display multiple sources simultaneously.
  

If "multitasking" means that we can switch between applications (as often demonstrated on the Palm Pre), then the iPhone/iPod OS does this already. They're just smart enough to know that the screen on a pocket-sized device is too small to display multiple applications simultaneously in any useful way.

And the iPhone/iPod OS can handle incoming messages from the network, and render notifications. For example, when you get a new email, the iPhone can notify you of the change.



Normal People Are Multitasking All The Time, they just don't know it.. Another reasonable argument is that people are multitasking all the time. The operating system utilities are running regularly in the background handling maintenance task.

But the iPhone/iPod is doing this already. E.g., when it synchronizes a calendar, it's doing it in the background.

From "Top Tech News" today:

Google might think Chinese censorship of the Internet is unacceptable, but Bill Gates says it's not that bad. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's Good Morning America, Gates called China's attempts to censor the Internet "very limited," and said its controls are not much different than other countries' policies.. . . The People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, trumpeted, "Bill Gates Bats for China," The Wall Street Journal reported.

Gates said it's "easy to go around" the Chinese government's system of controls. "And so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important," he said. Other countries also censor the Internet -- to ban porn, for example, or the way that Germany censors references to the Nazi Party. "And so you've got to decide: Do you want to obey the laws of the countries you're in, or not?" Gates asked.
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Is Microsoft in favor of blindly following unjust laws, or are they in favor of "going around" the laws?

It is not noble, Microsoft, to "follow the laws of the country you're in" if those laws are unjust. There is a higher standard in the world than the Communist government of China.