Electronic Paper

Answering an electronic interrupt with a paper response

Jackson, The Cost of Email Interruption

The Cost of Email Interruption - group of 10 »
TW Jackson, RJ Dawson, D Wilson - Journal of Systems and Information Technology, 2001 - drthomasjackson.com

This research has found that the interrupt effect from emails is more than generally believed. Employees at the company studied allowed themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently (every 5 minutes) as with telephone calls. The common reaction to the arrival of an email is not to delay response to a time that is more convenient to the user but to react within 6 seconds, again almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls. This means the interrupt effect is comparable with that of a telephone call.

The contrarian approach to dealing with electronic interruptions is to move the response to paper. When someone sends you an email, compose a postcard in return. There will be considerable delay, but the result may indeed be more memorable because of its unexpectedness. Less radical ideas involve reacting to an interruption in a "hot" medium with a reply in a more "cool" one, e.g. reacting to an instant message with a wiki post. The goal is to move from a one line poke to a reasoned reply.

The coolest approach, of course, is to ignore the interrupt and hope that if it was important it would be resent.

(yes, this blog is still alive)

Handwriting, from Deborah McDonnell

Writing in the weblog scribbling damselfly, Deborah writes:

For some reason lately, my brain wants to compose longhand. Once upon a time, I composed everything in longhand. I would get up before 5 and write the next scene of my novel; usually on unlined paper, scrap printing paper I brought home from work, that sort of thing. That night, after work and dinner and rudimentary life, I'd type up what I had written.

I can't actually remember my reasoning at the time. I do remember being quite cold in the morning, wrapping myself in a blanket, poring over the desk with its solitary lamp. But I don't remember why I wasn't using the computer; perhaps it was normal for me to compose longhand. I remember writing most of my university reports, including my theses, by hand. I found it easier to think of the writing, to structure the prose; the computer was the polishing and publishing and finishing part.

Good comments on this one - including this one from Greg:

Let's face it — flowcharting by hand is very much a physical experience :-) .

(seriously, I think that the problem with using a computer program here is that for me, at least, flowcharting is often one of those Eureka moments — seeing the relations, ideas fall together and BAM! And you just can't find the different tools in a flowchart program fast enough for that…)

What computer tools are slower than their equivalent paper based efforts?

Computers vs. paper for math education

From "A Hundred Dollar Laptop for Hungry Minds", MIT Technology Review:

Seymour Papert, an emeritus MIT mathematician and educational theorist who has spent decades promoting the use of computers for learning, told Technology Review earlier this week that he believes the laptops will help students enjoy subjects such as math, which is typically less engaging when done with pencil and paper. And while students will be able to play electronic games, they'll also be able to write their own games, honing their planning and reasoning skills in the process.

From the ABC (Australia) Sunday Profile:

Geraldine Doogue: So that if you had your druthers and you were designing a curriculum, I know you have been involved in particularly leading edge work with young children who we have to equip in a certain period of time where they sit at school rooms for the world they’re about to enter. How would you change what you see in most schoolrooms, in say the US at the moment?

Seymour Papert: Well I think that about 90 per cent of what we teach in mathematics in schoolrooms I’d throw out, it’s not really of any use in the modern world. Some of it was useful in an ancient world, like the 19th century or maybe the early 20th century and some of it was only useful as the way you could get kids to adopt a certain mathematical way of thinking when all you had to work with was pencil and paper. Think about the stuff that kids learn, knowing that a third is less than a half yeah that’s important, but everybody who’s worked in a kitchen knows that.

Knowing how to add fractions by taking the common denominator and all that manipulation – nobody in the world does that. It’s not a practical thing that you need to do. Nobody need to know the formula for solving a quadratic equation – B +…

Geraldine Doogue: (laughs) sorry, this is coming very home to roost

Seymour Papert: But 90 per cent of what we teach in school math is irrelevant today. A lot of it is about how numbers are written. It’s the influence of a paper based learning. Yeah you think of all that stuff you spent hours and hours, you write the numbers…. It’s about how you write numbers, it’s not about understanding numbers. It’s not about using numbers.