Norman (88)
Chapter 1
Ok, just as I came to terms with myself to overlook his 'folk-psychology' bashing as his philosophical orientation as a mere cognitive scientist-snobbery, DOET book is revealing more of his faults in completely overlooking the wisdom of human society and culture! (alas, he worked for Apple! I should have known.^^) As a subscriber of cognitive approach in understanding human behavior, even to me he has gone way too far into the errs of congitive revolution.
i.e. the example of scissors vs digital watches
yes, truly it is much easier for me to form a conceptual model of scissors compared to digital watch. I can easily figure out where to place my fingers and operate this tool in comparison to a digital watch. However, he is completely overlooking the 'folk psychology' of how I came to have the conceptual model of scissors in my mental model. It was 'LEARNED'. even the simplest tool such as a bar of wood to knock down on objects need modeling and learning (as seen from the classic movie 2001 space odessy) in order to form a conceptual model. A 5 year of child who has never observed anyone use scissors would have no mental model nor would readily have the ability to form a mental model of its affordances and functions. As william james says, a volutary action arises from the mental representation of the action formed from previous experience, may it be direct experience or indirect (learned through modeling). And tool use indeed is a voluntary action.
Then, what about the myth of intuitive design?Can there be such thing as an intuitive design? Well, there is a conflict of concepts here. Wikipedia defines it
"understanding without apparent effort, quick and ready insight seemingly independent of previous experiences or empirical knowledge. " In this sense, no, there can be no such things as an intuitive design. What we strive for, however, is something nearing intuition, building on top of our accumulated knowledge and wisdom, rule of trade as agreed by the society over years of practice. Our seeming 'intuition' towards a new design (of tool) can arise from it's similarity to our previous experience with tools/design that hold visible similarity with the new tool but a true intuition cannot arise for the idea of 'innate knowledge of a tool' is ungrounded.
Chapter 2
Interestingly, Norman borrows the principles of social psychology to describe human interaction with tools. Is this reflecting the Mcluhan's idea of media being the extension of us?
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Construction and interference in learning from multiple representation
Schnotz & Bannert (2003)
text VS picture as fundamentally different forms of representation
-> descriptive VS depictive representation
-> represent different kinds of subject matter VS suited to draw inferences
In a sense the learning phase did not influence the mental model in terms of adding knowledge to be accessed later during problem solving (test) phase, but it merely effected the performance through activation of mental model regarding time difference with different structure. Can this be applied to learning situation? Perhaps by assisting activation of appropriate mental model for better processing of learning material?
It is interesting to see the distinction between descriptive and depictive representation, functionally distinctive representation. Perhaps this was pointed at Clark's remark on functionally equivalent symbol systems?
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Return of the mental image: are there really pictures in the brain?
Pylyshyn (2003)
picture theory: why do we hang onto the picture theory while none of the evdence can support the picture theory? Because in terms of cognitive processes as we can consciously experience, picture theory appears to apply. Therefore, while there might be some different or similar form of representation in our brain, it might not matter for much of the cognitive process that we study such as learning and perception.
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Designing The User Interface : Information Visualization
Schneiderman & Plaisant (2005)
information visualization VS scientific visualization
2D VS 3D
task oriented visualization definitely seems to be the theme of readings for this week. however the chapter addresses the issue of task from technical perspective (from data-manager's perspective) as opposed to the cognitive processes involved with the tasks at hand.
And of course, the high learning curve has got to be one of the challenges here... couldn't make sense of most of the visualizer tools featured in the chapter!
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Multimedia Learning
Mayer (2001)
Personalization & Interactivity principles
I wonder if they have been explored further, for the principles as has been described in the book appears too simplistic. For instance, personalization principle appears to tap into the topic of motivation (more engaged in social context) without actually mentioning a word of motivation or affective construct. The studies on learner control (interactivity principle) is also widely studied topic that does not appear to be reflected in the principle as mentioned in the book.
This perhaps reflects the often made criticism towards the multimedia learning theory as being exclusively cognitive without consideration of affective constructs.
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