Be the Switch
Wednesday, June 30th by Kern Trembath
There is an important distinction in academic work that I use a lot both in class and out. It's not one that I announce per se in class because doing this would unnecessarily confuse my students without any corresponding benefit to them. So when I use it, I do so silently, applying it to various claims and statements made so that I can determine how, if at all, I might subsequently encourage the students to learn.
The distinction is between conceptual literacy and performative literacy. Conceptual literacy has to do with how well one understands the totality and adjacency of ideas or concepts such that they can be manipulated in the mind. One who can do this adeptly is more than likely going to be able to visualize and verbalize the inner and relational structure of things. This may not sound like much, but imagine how much worse off physics today would be if Einstein had had to wait for experimentation before publishing his notions of general and special relativity.
Performative literacy, on the other hand, is generally speaking the ability to learn and to articulate from hands-on experience. We've all encountered people in our lives who don't have much formal education but who nonetheless are extremely intelligent. There are lots of terms for them: "school of hard knocks," "doers rather than learners," and so on. They are people who can take apart an engine, or a build a house, or wire a building, simply by watching and mimicing.
The usefulness for a teacher of applying this distinction is that it reminds us that students learn and perform in different ways. If in the process of discussing things with a student I sense that they're not getting what I'm trying to give, I switch mental modes and try another approach from whatever hadn't been working. If we're both fortunate, it is just this change that will help the light bulb to come on over the student's head.
I thought about this distinction again recently when I read an article in TheStreet.com entitled "Devices: Tech's Next Elixir." Initially I thought that it was another article on the wow factor of various electronic peripherals, and so I let my eye wander down the page until I got to the section on iPods, where the author refers to "Apple's rather mundane technology." Whoa, I said to myself, I've heard and read a lot of different assessments of my favorite computer products, but "mundane" was never one of them. What gives?
What I realized after reading the section again is that the author was actually complimenting Apple. Apple has technology that works in the real world ("mundane" comes from the Latin word "mundis," meaning "world"), he was saying, but what makes it really special is that it knows how to wrap that technology in packages that are just plain delicious. And because what we ultimately hold in our hands is the package in addition to the bits and chips, the whole thing works. In the real mundis.
A lot of the internet chatter on Apple vs Windows products divides along a single spine. Windows fans tend to emphasize that Windows machines must be great because so many people use them, and Apple fans tend to emphasize that Apple machines must be great because they do so many things both well and smoothly. (Well, not everyone writes this lucidly about "their" product. Read Bill Palmer's funny retelling of his encounter with R-a-n-d-y.) Both parties have a point. Clearly, something good is happening with the 90% of the computing world that does its work on Wintels, and just as clearly, something good is happening with the rest of us.
As Mac fans, our task should not be to diss the Wintel users. They're getting their work done. Our task should instead be to inform them (and their employers) about how to get their work done better -- beginning with our own stories. Do they work better out of the box? Are they so simple that primary school students can intuit how to burn CD's and DVD's without a manual? Are they so fast that a couple of thousand of them constitute the world's second or third fastest super-computer? Are they so stable and secure that IT consultants feel like the Maytag man? Are they so powerful that the Army and the US Government are increasingly depending on them? If so, then tell these stories.
People learn and perform in different ways. If you experience an iPod as delicious, let the person who is wondering about what kind of MP3 player to buy listen to yours. If you use FileMaker Pro because it is an intuitive and powerful way to collate and distribute important information, show yours to the small business owner who is just about ready to expand into databases. When you create DVD's, use one of the themes that show the Apple logo. If you're able to listen to internet radio at work, use iTunes playing through Altec Lansing's InMotion speakers. When you talk to your children's teachers, if they use Media Center for Windows to produce video projects, ask them if they've heard that it's been reviewed as "significantly inferior" to iLife.
There are a lot of ways to get the word out about the superiority of Apple products -- almost as many as there are people who would benefit by using them. But they all start with telling the story, one person at a time.
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