Knowing the Place of Technology

2013 was a bad year for technology and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are just one more example. Not only was there a backlash among faculty (which I heard echoed on the UCR campus), but there were big failures like San Jose State. They don't seem to be working out well, except for students who are already highly self-motivated. They also don't seem to be more cost-effective.

Part of the problem may be that we're still figuring out how to do a good job of educating people. This is hard to do. It's even harder today because society and technology are changing so fast. We're educating a greater portion of the population, which is good, but this is also revealing the ways that education falls short and fails to serve segments of our society.

Another part of the problem is that we're still figuring out how to make technology that's easy to use. When an application developer or an engineer designs a machine or program to automate a job, a good machine or program is intuitive to use for a person who already has a conceptual understanding of the job that they are doing.

However, learning is far more free-form than other tasks we can automate. Also, overcoming the barriers to learning usually involve activities that machines don't do well - i.e., empathy and creative problem solving. We can find ways to use technology well in education, but technologists need to understand the big picture.

Programmers and engineers sometimes overstate the scope of what technology is capable, partly because they tend not to look beyond that scope. It's important to understand what machines are good at (repetitive tasks, following logical sequences reliably) and how that fits with what people are good at (empathy and creativity).

A good example of this is UserVoice CEO Richard White's recent statements about the BART worker's strike this week, and his interview on Marketplace. He said first the BART employees should be given what they want, and then their jobs should all be automated.

However, as you can hear in the interview, there are aspects of these jobs that White is overlooking. Also, the idea that the BART worker in the interview would be freed to follow her dream career after she gets laid off is pie-in-the-sky idealism. The alternative jobs she lists don't have benefits, and provide unstable income.

White might think that these are the kinds of problems that technologists can't solve on their own. However, these are exactly the kind of problems technologists should be tackling. We should be looking at how technology can be used by the worker to alleviate tedious tasks that machines do well and that people do poorly.

How can technology be used to make the worker more satisfied by their work? By making the worker happier, the technologist makes the worker more productive.

Enders Game Movie Sequel?

Ender's Game took the number one slot at the box office over the weekend, and I watched it with a bunch of 8th graders, only one of whom had read the book. It blew their minds, and they thought it was great. (Spoilers ahead.)

As an adult who has read through to about the middle of book seven in the series (at which point I became too disturbed by his in-book comments about homosexuality to continue reading), I thought the film was very good, but not great. It hit all the major plot points I was expecting and felt true to the original story.

Battle School was the core of the story, and I think that was great. The space combat was greatly truncated compared to the book, but how many space battles can you watch when the key characters are just watching a projection above their heads and remote-controlling the battle above them?

Observation on User Interfaces for Computers: Gestural control was very dramatic when Ender is zooming in and out, changing perspectives of the projected space battles, but I still feel unconvinced that a computer interface with gestures is comfortable/workable for the end user without a lot of haptic feedback. The one-handed typing interface was interesting to watch - Ender was able to hold his tablet with one hand and use some sort of sign-langauge-esque typing technique.

One reason I say it was not great is because I had to explain so much about the ending to my group of moviegoers, not just the 8th graders, but also the other adults. When the movie isn't clear to those who have not read the book, that can be a problem. But it wasn't so confusing that it ruined enjoyment of the story. It's a complex story, and some events at the end were just a little too rushed to fully take in.

Even though the movie took the top slot, some analysts have suggested that it didn't do well enough to warrant a movie sequel. However, that doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of people from speculating about it. In fact, it was one of the first things to be discussed by my group of moviegoers after the lights came up. It's probably too early to know if there will be a sequel. Overseas sales are at least as important, if not more important than US sales these days.

The three likely paths a movie sequel might take are:

1. Speaker For the Dead - the next book in the series which shows Ender 30 years later. There's not much action, and it's a very different kind of story.
2. Ender's Shadow - Which is Bean's story, and mostly concurrent with Ender's Game. It might be good to make this while the actors have not aged too much.
3. Fleet School - first in a new series of YA novels by card that picks up right after Ender's Game to show what happens to the Battle School after the war.

When you look at the fact that the Ender's Game novel has been back on the Best Seller list (mass-market paperbacks) for a year, and has held the #1 slot for the past few weeks, and a handful of other weeks over the summer, it's clear that Card is profiting from the movie indirectly, despite the fact that he does not profit directly from the movie (he got a flat fee for these film rights years ago).

I don't know about the film rights for the other books. It seems likely that Card would not sell the Fleet School rights for a flat fee if he thought he could profit more from the movie sales.

However, this Q&A from 2010 indicates that Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow were almost combined as one film. This suggests to me that the rights for Shadow might be in the same category as Game. However, that's just speculation on my part. It is equally possible that Card was hoping to work in Shadow so that he could sell additional rights that would be tied to the movie's earnings. Again, just my own speculation.

That said, if a sequel is made, I'm most interested in seeing Ender's Shadow. Bean is a great character, and we didn't get to see much of him in Game, even though he's clearly an important player.