Flow: A dichotomy in two Apps

I have a weekly ritual on Wednesdays: I browse the App stores to see what’s changed. Usually I find something intriguing or worth playing around with, but these are seldom really significant ‘Wow, my life has changed’ Apps. In fact, what often grabs me more about the Apps is the concept they’re exploring rather than the programme itself. Take ‘The Mesh’ for example, which is the current Free App of the Week on iTunes. The beauty and power of the App lie in its simplicity. It’s not complicated, and yet it’s immensely engrossing. I found myself spending hours trying to up my score, and then suddenly I realised I was doing mathematics. To add context to that statement, you need to understand that mathematics and I are like estranged family members: we know we can’t really ever escape one another, but if we never have to engage in conversation, that’s just fine. Nevertheless, at 23:00 last night, there I was, propped up in bed trying to work out how 7, 5, 3 and 2 were going to get me to 4. As it happens, I couldn’t work it out, and my streak ended on a measly final score of 32. I will persevere again tonight!

'The Mesh'

Now, what intrigues me so much about ‘The Mesh’ is the fact that I became completely engrossed in a very short space of time. The nature of the game means there is no ‘undo’ button, and an incorrect pairing can be one’s complete undoing for the levels to come. As a consequence, one must spend time assessing the whole scenario, planning moves and anticipating outcomes. The mental arithmetic is not complicated (well, it hasn’t been for the levels I’ve managed to reach), but having to work out multiple scenarios in one’s head becomes a challenging prospect. For the example above, there are a number of different things I could try:

7 - 3 = 4; 5+2 = 7… doesn’t work

7-5 = 2; 2+2 = 4, 3… doesn’t work

3-2 = 1; 5-1=4; 7… doesn’t work

You get the idea.

Before even starting to play the level, one has to run all these simulations in one’s head. The feeling of triumph when one gets it correct is intoxicating and I’m left utterly engrossed. And it’s maths.

The second App which has caught my attention this week is ‘Flowstate’ on the Mac App store. While I’ve not yet taken the plunge and purchased the App, it’s premise is certainly food for thought. Basically, Flowstate creates the perfect environment in which to create written pieces by preventing the clutter that so often prevents us from actually completing what we’re writing. The creators posit that forcing separation between the creation and editing processes encourages the completion of tasks. The App works by asking users to select a time period to be ‘locked’ into the App. Once the time has been selected, the user must write continuously. A pause of more than 5 seconds will delete everything that has been written during the session. Furthermore, trying to exit the session before time is up will also delete everything. Quite an unnerving prospect for those of us who are used to agonising over just about every sentence we type. I’m certainly guilty of spending ages and ages staring at the screen trying to figure out the way forward. With Flowstate, there’s no time for that—at least not while you’re writing. You have to keep going, even if it’s not going to make it into the final edit. 

And that’s the whole point: it doesn’t have to be perfect. So often we get utterly caught up on ensuring that the end product is a work of perfection that we end up not finishing it, or, even worse, not starting in the first place. Flowstate prevents that from happening by forcing action, but making us let go of the obsession with perfection and simply getting us to write write write and think later. Working on a finished piece and making small tweaks here and there is far less daunting than staring at a blank page for ages, and the prospect of everything vanishing before one’s eyes means we keep pushing onwards until we have something with which to work.

Both of these Apps look at the idea of focus and flow in a different way: the first requires measured, thought-through selection, because there is no going back while the second is almost the polar opposite: go for it without reservation and deal with the aftermath later. I think both of them have a place in education. Our students should know when to apply themselves to one task with utter focus and careful consideration, especially when it comes to dealing with other people, because often we cannot take things we’ve said back after they have been said (or tweeted). Conversely, we should also be encouraging our students to dive into tasks with a sense of abandonment. Increased digitisation means that we can undo just about everything we create within Apps or programmes and our work can be altered if and when it needs to be. We need to give students the freedom to fail and not be too perturbed by this, because refining is often a better learning experience than the initial creation is. I’ll look at the culture of refinement and criticism in another blog, but for now, I think it’s worth pondering how we can use these two kinds of flow in our teaching and indeed, in our own lives. 

A sense of style

Wow, these just seem to get tougher every day. My brief is to talk about style and fashion, but I don’t really think that’s all that pertinent to what I want to write about here. Don’t get me wrong, I love clothes and dressing smartly and all the rest of it, but I don’t think this is the forum for that really.

What I have decided to do in a bid to twist this topic to suit my purposes is talk about the art of presentation. It’s kind of related to style, so the link is not quite as obscure as it might seem to be.

One of the difficulties I face on a fairly regular basis is getting students to take pride in their work. I have had so many semi-crumpled bits of scrawl handed to me that I could wallpaper a room with them. I’ve seen students deliver presentations accompanied by slide shows that could not have taken more than 10 minutes to design and I’ve had term projects that are woefully short and not thought through correctly submitted to me.

When I was a student, and in fact even today, I cannot bring myself to hand in something that does not look good. I wrote about worksheet and assignment design a few days ago, and that same mentality applies: it’s not just a case of putting a picture on the page and choosing a funky font to ‘zhoosh’ (wonderful South African word) it up a bit, it means making sure that the picture helps to draw students in and provide a bit of context. The font needs to be appealing, readable and suited to the purpose. If I use colours, they have to work together, there needs to be a sense of blending. If you look at my pages on the web, you’ll see there is at least some sense of aesthetic going on there. Now I’m not claiming to be an expert designer, but what I mean is that I’ve taken time to decide how things work together to create a final product. It was like this in school too.

However, it seems that the majority of students either couldn’t be bothered to do all this work, or they lack the necessary skills to do so. My suspicion is that it’s more the latter than the former. I was never taken through designing an effective PowerPoint presentation or taught how to make a poster appealing. There was a mark for it on the rubric, but no actual teaching ever happened. And that’s a big problem.

My rant here is not just because I’m dissatisfied with lacklustre work, it’s because of the ramifications this has beyond school. Sure, handing in a mucky essay or poster in Grade 9 is not going to mean the end of the world, but beyond the school walls it is. Writing emails in a professional context and being unable to structure sentences coherently or express oneself properly is going to be an enormous handicap, but students don’t know anything about that world and it’s pointless going on about it. The second any person over the age of 20 says, ‘When you’re out of school…’ they’ve switched off, so don’t waste your breath.

I think the solution to getting this to work is a layered one. Firstly, the idea of taking pride in what one is doing needs to be instilled. This can only happen if students buy in to what they’re doing, which brings me to my next point: perceived value. If students feel that what they’re doing is meaningful and has value, then they are more likely to want to put an effort into it. The next layer is incentive, and this one leaves a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth.

I am highly critical of the culture of ‘marks and grades’ that has developed. Any teacher will, at some point in his or her career hear, ‘Is this for marks?’ If you say it’s not, many students immediately lose interest and if they do anything at all, it will be with minimal effort. There’s no incentive to work, you see. Very few students will want to do something without there being some kind of reward, and the line ‘This is going to help you to understand the work,’ doesn’t quite cut the mustard it seems. This culture has been bred from years and years of being graded on just about everything to the point where the grade becomes a currency. Do well, and the teacher will reward you with stickers, or a free lesson, or special privileges and your parents will respond similarly. Don’t get the marks, and it’s extra work, tutors, extra lessons, being punished etc.

This is why when I say students need incentive, I say so with a sense of wariness and reservation. We need to work on moving away from this mentality. Students need to want to work because they can see the value in doing so. One of the suggestions I have here is upgrading aspects of the curriculum which we cling to because of some sense of inherent value these things have. When was the last time you had to write a formal letter to a newspaper complaining about an article? Even if you did write to a publication, I’m pretty sure you sent an email anyway. What I’m getting at here is you need to take the content and move it forward. Yes, it is important for students to know how to write formally and how to deal with an issue in a way that is respectful, but which communicates one’s opinion clearly, but there are so many ways this can be achieved. Getting them to sit quietly and write a letter complaining about the broken gate to the park is hardly going to inspire creative genius. What about sending each student an email from an upset customer and having them draft the response? You can include all the steps that would be involved in the process too. Suddenly the work seems a bit more relevant.

I don’t know if this is the solution, but it’s a solution. Getting students to see the value in what they are doing is sure to increase the likelihood that they’ll put effort into producing work of an excellent standard. And if we teach them how to go about doing this, I’m sure we’ll all see more engaged and thought-through work.

Once we’ve got the basics done, then we can move on to developing each student’s personal style, and that is something really exciting, because it will be helping them to reach their full potential, and isn’t that what this is all about after all?

Reading Material

And so begins the first day of using the writing prompt book, and the topic for today is ‘Reading material: how do you pick what to read?’ This is one of those instances where I found myself marvelling at the fact that I’d never really considered this before. I didn’t know I have some set of criteria I apply when I’m looking for new things to read, but of course this has to be the case. We need some set of filtration device otherwise we just read everything. In the past this might have been possible, but with the wealth of information out there now, there’s no way any person could read all of it.

So what do I do when I decide what to read?

I must be honest and say that when it comes to fiction, I’m a sucker for a catchy cover. If it looks appealing and draws me to select it from the shelf before something else, then it’s already going the right direction towards getting read. This has changed somewhat with the introduction of eBooks which cannot lure me in with beautifully embossed covers or specially-cut pages, but the graphics and the general aesthetic still play a huge part. That being said, some of the most amazing books I’ve ever read have had completely nondescript covers. ‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley springs to mind immediately. Even ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern has a fairly bland cover, but its contents are anything but bland. I suppose I’m proving the point of the old cliché, but regardless of this fact, a beautiful cover still draws me in. ‘The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet’ by Reif Larson and ‘Cloud Atlas’ by David Mitchell both have gorgeous covers with content to match and I was enthralled immediately.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule and there are a number of novels with amazing designs that just don’t do anything for me at all, because the writing is, as far as I’m concerned, dull and lifeless. And I suppose that’s the real truth of it all: while appearance might lure one in, it’s the actual content that matters most. The design definitely works to get me interested, but to sustain that interest, there needs to be more than glossy and pretty pictures.

It’s much the same when it comes to digital content, I suppose.

When I come across a site or a blog that has been poorly laid out, where I have to dig to find what I’m really looking for or that doesn’t do what it claims to do, then I’m out of there. However, if the designer has taken time to think about how the elements on the page work together, has put more interesting things for me to follow if I’m interested, has avoided the urge of having endless things pop up at me, then I’m more likely to stay for a while and keep looking. Sites like www.edudemic.com and www.fashionbeans.com will have me going back again and again, because they have what I want and they give it to me in a way that makes accessing it a pleasure. Time is precious on the internet and if I have to spend time learning how to navigate a site, it had better not be too long. If I can’t find what I want in a minute or so, cheers. I know I’ll find something better without too much digging around.

I think this same principle applies to assignments and tasks I create for my students. If they are not visually appealing, it makes engaging with them different. Likewise if it takes my students too long to get to the bottom of what needs to happen, they’ve also failed.

It’s important to remember that our students are consumers who are growing up in a culture of mass consumerism. If teachers don’t buy into that mentality by making an effort to make their work stand out and be noticed, then it’s unlikely students are going to be all that interested in engaging with it. However, it’s also important to remember why we’re setting the work in the first place, and if your assignment is just a bunch of pretty pictures, you’re unlikely to keep them engaged and interested for very long.

A final point to note is that if there’s too much, people also tend not to want to read, and I suppose on that note, I had best end today’s thought.

More tomorrow, if you’ve been drawn into reading this, that is!