What can be learned in three hours?
Jared Schiffman
March 8, 2001
MAS712



What can be learned in three hours? In order to answer this question, I will draw on my own experience both taking an teaching a one-on-one class which lasted approximately two hours. I will then generalize from these sessions and discuss the potential and the limitations of a three-hour class.


I took a two hour class on yoga from fellow Media Lab student Elisabeth. Prior to the session, Elisabeth asked me what I wanted to learn from the class, and what my background was with respect to yoga. This helped her in structuring the class and deciding what to teach, and helped me understand what I was specifically going to learn in the context of all yoga exercises. At the beginning of the class, Elisabeth gave me a brief history of yoga and its purpose in Eastern culture, as well as how it has been adopted by the West.

She then demonstrated a serious of stretches, sitting positions, and sequences which I observed. After each demonstration, we both participated and I would watch her and attempt to mirror her movements in realtime. This proved somewhat difficult since many of the positions involved turning my head away from her. The solution seemed to be to orient myself in an optimal position, and repeat the exercise several times until I did not need to observe at all.
Throughout this process, I would make mistakes in mirroring her and she would correct them. These mistakes seemed to occur in a kind of physical blind-spot, such that even when I was cognitively aware of my propensity to make a mistake, I would still be unaware when the mistake occurred.

When the sequence became complex, Elisabeth referred me to a series of instructional references which she had printed out. These proved quite useful both during the session to clarify the process, and afterward when I wanted to repeat the exercise.
Overall, I believe that the class was a success in introducing me to the basics of yoga. However, there were several pieces of knowledge which were not learned, and perhaps could not have been learned, during the class. One such piece became increasingly clear on the following day: I became unexpectedly sore in my legs and neck, from what I had thought was not strenuous exercise. I also did not learn how to best accommodate yoga for myself, both in terms of which stretches worked best for me, and how to fit yoga into my daily schedule. Certainly, these are things which I could only teach myself, and so it is not surprising that I did not learn them in class.

I think that with yoga there is as much implicit knowledge as there is explicit knowledge. While one can explicitly talk about the different positions and explicitly assume those positions, the path to doing correct yoga requires the internal generation and understanding of implicit knowledge—that is, knowledge which exists in ones internal self language, and cannot be passed directly, like facts or images, from one person to the next. This implicit knowledge must come from practice over a long period of time.


In addition to taking the yoga class, I taught a two hour class on the mathematics and programming of information visualization to fellow Media Lab student Casey. Prior to teaching the class, I learned from Casey that he was proficient at math, and relatively new to C programming. Given that mathematical proficiency was more than what I had expected from a student, I decided to cover the mathematics in a more cursory manner. I discussed which mathematical functions are useful and tied them to the geometry that was represented in the code. Casey continually nodded as I progressed from one-point to the next. In retrospect, I should have either skipped this section entirely or cut it down to a bare minimum. Unfortunately, covering the mathematics took more time than expected.

Following the math review, I presented a quick overview of the OpenGL graphics commands that we would be using in the computer code. Casey perked up at this point and had many questions to ask. Talking about code on paper was initially beneficial, but proved to be cumbersome when the code became complex. So, we moved to the computer and I explained to him how setting up an initial project was sometimes the most complex task involved. Explaining the intricacies of setting up a code project with correct libraries was simply too complex and too non-linear a process to describe during the time allotted.

When testing the code that I had set up before class, we discovered that it did not work as expected. Ultimately, this was a happy accident since it gave us a chance to explore together in the debugging domain. It forced me to think twice about the underlying code foundation, which I had not thought about for a long time. During this debugging process, I had to look up a function in the OpenGL reference pages on the web. Casey was happy to see that the documentation was online and was presented in a straightforward manner. By the end of the session, we had a bit of working code, which produced some simple shapes on the screen with adjustable lighting.

Unfortunately, after getting caught in the technical web, we did not have time to discuss the design aspects of visualization, nor did we have time to go through the code of a real information visualization program. Ultimately, I think that a combination of insufficient time management and poor assessment of the student’s ability led to a class which was only mediocre. Still, even without these detriments, I believe that there are some things which could not have been learned during the two hours.

The topic that I was teaching lay at the intersection of three major subjects: math, computer science, and design. Simply covering the very basics of each of these would have required several more sessions. Fortunately, the student already had a great understanding of the math, and a good grasp of computer science. Conveying the full-breadth of the context would have been impossible. Even with more time, there are ideas about programming, math, and design that only come through practice. For example, I use vectors everyday in my work and so I understand them intuitively and use them almost unconsciously. While Casey mathematically understood vectors before the class, he would have to use them every day to come to a similar understanding, at least with respect to computer graphics. Likewise, developing a sense of design cannot be realized in the classroom in three hours.


Although taking the yoga class and teaching the visualization class were entirely different experiences, several strands tied together the learning process in both situations. First, I will discuss the issue of context of a topic and how it is established. Then I will state what I believe can and should be learned in a three hour workshop. Last, I will assert what I think cannot be learned in three hours, and why that is so.

The establishment of context is essential to the success of a three hour class. In a prolonged, multi-session class, the context is allowed to arise naturally. However, in a short class, the context must be made explicit and must make reference to events and ideas with which the student is familiar. This process of familiarization is absolutely necessary to learning, since without it, the student will be unable to make strong attachments to his current knowledge base. He will be unable to extrapolate or make inference. During the yoga session, the context was grounded in the brief history lesson, and in relation to my own experience with work-related stress. In the visualization class, the context was assumed and should have been made more clear. Examples of my research group’s work as well as external examples of information visualization could have sparked specific questions and provided more direction. These also would have helped to focus the lesson more on design and less on math.

Once the context is understood, one may begin to learn basic principles or methods. Almost every skill set has some notion of first principles. In some cases, they exist as a matter of pedagogical history and culture, such as the famous “hello world” program, while in other cases they truly are fundamental to the subject, such as in physics. Fortunately, these very basic skills can be acquired for most topics in a three-hour session. In other words, a student can be transformed from a complete outsider with no experience to an official novice in the culture in a mere one-hundred eighty minutes. What is also fortunate is that usually these first principles can take one quite far. For example, when a student learns how to read guitar chords and map them to finger positions, the entire realm of popular music is available to him. I think that a lack of established basics in the field of information visualization hindered my teaching experience.

One basic skill which exists in almost every domain is the ability to browse and understand reference material. Yoga has its set of books and videos. OpenGL has its an online reference manual. Even popular guitar music has its own online reference library. Students are generally proficient at browsing. The more important information to be conveyed to the student is where one can find the reference material, and how to read its notation. In the case of Yoga, the iconographic pictures of people were simple to parse. In the case of OpenGL programming, however, the function definitions, due to their extreme compactness, proved difficult to comprehend quickly.

I believe that in addition to understanding what can be learned in three hours, one must understand what cannot learned in three hours. Obviously, retention of the material is an important factor. A teacher should expect that at most one-half of all material presented will actually be remembered one week later. However, beyond retention is a deeper issue—internalization. Internalization is the process of transforming explicit external knowledge into implicit internal knowledge. This transformation can be thought of as a translation of the external knowledge from an explicit language into a more compact, though convoluted, internal language. The result is knowledge which is both personalized and intuitive, and which can be mixed with other knowledge. Juggling is a perfect example of an internalization process, since there is such a clear distinction between knowing theoretically how to juggle and actually being able to juggle. Both involve knowledge of juggling, but in the latter case, the knowledge one has been internalized. While one can learn the basics of juggling in a three hour class, it takes years of practice just to juggle the basics.