Playing with the Understand – Make – Invent hierarchy in the previous blog entry where I was coming up with example web literacy skills, I ran into a problem.
It seems like “understand” can run pretty deep, even deeper than the beginning tasks in “make”. For example, understanding man in the middle attacks. (No, I don’t think this is a core web literacy skill, though I wish I lived in a universe where it could be.) Understanding man in the middle attacks is clearly more “advanced” than “learn how to use anchor html tags”. That’s fine.
But it feels like “make” is a strict pre-requisite to “invent”. Which makes me wonder if we need the two categories at all, or if some of them are just tagged more advanced than the other? Poking Mark Surman to see what he has to say. Mark? 
Good question.
I don’t think we need to strictly stick with understand – make – innovate hierarchy, especially if we’re talking about hard skills (e.g. HTML, CSS, JS). And it could be that every hard skill is a ‘make’ badge. I’m thinking that more and more.
However, there is a qualitative difference between cooking from a recipe and cooking from scratch that I do think is important to us. It’s at least about confidence, ingenuity, risk taking, experimentation, knowing what tastes good and what tastes bad. And, for making stuff on the web, it’s probably also about collaboration.
While these are all soft skills, they matter to us alot. And, they matter much more once you are trying to make something without a recipe. Or, on the flip side, you can make something good from a recipe without these soft skills, but you’re unlikely to cook well from scratch until you have these skills.
There is also a piece in here about empowerment. I was talking to a magazine editor friend last night about learning wordpress. She had been totally lit up when her programmer friend taught her how to edit CSS. She’d been able to change alot of things before w/ the forms interface, but editing the CSS made her feel way more confident and empowered, like she was out there without a net. Not a huge difference in hard skills between the form and CSS — mostly she was just editing colour — but a big shift in attitude and confidence.
I’m not sure what this means for badge hierarchy, but I do think we want to find a way to map these soft skills into badges. Erin will have some opinions on this as she’s already tried bits of this.
One other thought:
The ‘innovate’ level will matter if we’re badging for *achievement* and *contribution*.
e.g. while they both require the same skills, there is a big difference between doing a demo of your CSS skills that no one will ever use and creating a PopcornMaker template and checking it into the template repository. One is a real achievement and contribution to the web maker world, the other is just a school assignment.
I think we’ll want to recognize these kinds of achievements. Both when people contribute something real and then (even more) when other people use it. In fact, this may be one objective way to recognize soft skills as these are things we can track.
This is a great discussion. The first thing that struck me is that the model understand-make-innovate is a similar metaphor as the read-write-execute – the namesake of this blog!
But, I think Michelle is right in that understanding is something that is woven into all pieces of the learning pathway, in make and innovate as well. In some cases, understanding could be more like simple awareness but in other cases be closer to mastery.
But in its most simple interpretation, this model will provide one pathway of learning for many skills – first there is basic understanding (what is CSS, when to use it/when to not, etc), then you use it yourself (build a site using CSS), then you build on it (do something innovative and release the code). But the lines might not be so clear for other skills. I think this is especially true when you get to more complex skills or higher level skills where you are often talking about an aggregate of things, including the softer skills Mark mentioned.
Speaking of, Mark brings up a great and important point about “soft” skills. We know from talking with employers and peers that it is these more elusive skills that really set people apart. We also know these are harder to both teach and demonstrate. While an employer might be looking for someone to build something in html5 – it’s easier to teach how to use html5 than it is to teach someone about the importance of an open standard or how to collaborate with their team. So in this case, the understand-make-innovate is not a step-by-step process but different pieces that are aggregated to get to the whole. And we may find that for a lot of skills we care about, its really the combination of the hard and soft that get us to what we might consider mastery. Or, in terms of the model, perhaps for many skills the understanding and making are not linear steps, but parallel learning tracks that are then aggregated to then be able to innovate. But the good news is that we can badge things along the way so that we can capture the incremental pieces.
In terms of the badges, these are the exact right questions to be thinking through. They will effect how we determine leveling, prerequisites, etc. – all things that will ultimately define what we think the learning pathways are, so they are obviously pretty important decisions/assumptions to think through.
Side note on soft skills – these are really important and absolutely should be in an Mozilla badge system (or any badge system in general, in my opinion). We have an opportunity with badges to rethink how skills are perceived, weighted and recognized and its time to give softer skills the attention they deserve. Within web development and making, these are especially important because this is inherently a social discipline. We share code, build on each’s other’s work, etc…
I love the bucketing of activities into “understand – make – innovate”, perhaps it is the challenge of putting them into a rigorous hierarchy where I feel a little stuck. There can be advanced levels of understanding on a topic that will be at a higher “level” than the most basic of making skills, but they are still inherently different activities.
I could see someone attaining mastery of understanding HTML for example, without ever entering into the innovation space. Back to Mark’s cooking example, some folks read, write and discuss the finer points of cooking without actually doing much of it themselves, they have advanced understanding, but perhaps no actual execution skills; some people become world renown station chefs in charge of a particular area of the production of world class food, but never invent; and others may create entirely new dishes (but not be great at producing them for consumers).
All of those different activities relate to each other, and there could be a typical progression from understanding, to making to innovating, but it feels more fluid than a strict hierarchy.
Yep, see: http://rwxweb.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/understand-make-invent/
Looking at Mark Surman’s diagram at http://rwxweb.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/understand-make-invent/, there are only two poles on the ladder: school/scholar and lab/fellow. I might re-characterize them as knowing vs doing. Clearly make and innovate are on the “doing” pole, but I’d add “teaching” to “understanding” on the “knowing” pole.
Jeff, can you think of examples of skills that are pure “knowing” and pure “doing”? (ie: that you can’t do, or that you can’t learn by doing, etc.)
I think your “understanding” examples are generally “knowing”, while your “making” and “inventing” examples are “doing”. Certainly you get better at doing things by knowing their foundations, and it’s easy to go off the rails if you “know” something without testing it in practice, but neither really requires the other at low levels.
To elaborate with some examples:
Knowing:
* Being able to explain why this HTML looks the way it does might not imply that you can create the HTML from scratch.
* Being able to read Javascript doesn’t mean you can write it.
* Saying what happens when you click a link probably implies that you’ve clicked some links, but it doesn’t mean you can implement a browser or a server.
Doing:
* Refusing to type your password into a site without an SSL icon doesn’t require knowing how someone could steal your password if you did.
* Exporting a Google/Word Doc as HTML, publishing it to a web site, and even finding some Javascript snippets on the web that define an on-hover menu and integrating them into the page, don’t require knowing what’s actually going on, or even knowing that the page now exists independently of your laptop. It still produces something other people can use.
I guess to specifically answer your question, no, there probably aren’t skills that are “pure” anything, but many of them still feel “mostly” one or the other. Or maybe I mean that many of the “doing” skills should be recognized without evidence that the person doing them knew what exactly they were doing, just like we often recognize knowledge without insisting that it have been used to build something. We often make fun of cargo-cult programming (i.e. doing without knowing), but it’s important to remember how much actually gets accomplished that way.
Yep, those are good examples and help me see what you mean. Thanks!
(And I think a reasonable analogy is that many people can fry an egg without understanding the protein coagulation that happens. And some people can be expert food scientists and unable to warm soup in their microwave without catching their kitchens on fire.)