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Tech/Ped Corner

This month, the Tech/Ped Corner takes a leap into the theoretical. This column is about a concept called bootstrapping.

“Bootstrapping alludes to a German legend about a Baron Münchhausen, who was able to lift himself out of a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair. In later versions he was using his own boot straps to pull himself out of the sea which gave rise to the term bootstrapping. In computers, this term refers to any process where a simple system activates a more complicated system.” (Wikipedia)

The idea of bootstrapping has come to mean many things, but in the context of learning, it refers to a kind of skill acquisition in which we acquire more knowledge using the knowledge we already have. The versatility of our knowledge depends on our understanding of its context; the more we know about the system, the more 'bootstrap-able' our knowledge.

Take, for example, these two sets of directions for how to program my VCR.

• Set 1: Turn on the VCR and the TV. Using the remote, press MENU and press the down arrow twice, then press ENTER. Use the remote keypad to enter the channel you want to record, then the time. Then press ENTER on the remote again. Press MENU to exit the program.
• Set 2: To program the VCR, you need to find the “timer recording menu,” which will give you options for setting the time and channel to be recorded. In this case, you press the MENU button, then the arrow buttons to select the programming menu, then the ENTER button. From there you can enter the time and channel and follow the on-screen directions to exit the menu.

These two sets of directions, while essentially the same, exhibit different levels of context. The former, while a bit more short and specific, does little to give the reader a sense of why he or she should push the buttons in that order. The second set, with only a little more text, establishes the context for pushing these buttons. This extra text expands the utility of this knowledge. The first set doesn't explain what you're doing, so if you get a new VCR, you have to learn all over again—the second set provides a bit more context, but could transfer to the second VCR a bit better.

While these examples are a little silly, they highlight an important strategy to use when you teach your students anything to do with technology— bootstrapping. Whenever you give instruction, try to avoid decontextualized step-by-step instructions. Such instructions, like Set 1 above, teach students how to do a particular thing with their computer, but not what they're doing or why they're doing it. In my experience, such decontextualized knowledge leads to strange mismatches in skill and knowledge among computer users. For instance, some students only know how to find Word documents through Word. They know how to save and retrieve, but they haven't any sense of a larger system of files or data-storage on their computer.

In his book Datacloud, Johndan Johnson-Eilola suggests that the GUI, the modern 'windows' interface, has a hand in creating this kind of decontextualized knowledge. He writes:

The [GUI] articulates computer work in two paradoxical directions ...: it puports to not merely support, but to show users how to complete a dizzying array of tasks while it decontextualizes and oversimplifies them. The interface articulates a tightly bounded space; because there is not room in that space to support rich complexity for all types of work, the complexity is stripped away, streamlining work. (53)

Johnson-Eilola suggests that the complexity possible in many kinds of digital work is erased by the spatial constraints of the interface. (For example, the multitude of formatting options in Word are generally effaced by the simple Bold, Italic, Underline options.) When users are given no larger context or deeper instruction within which to understand their computer use, that knowledge stagnates, remaining entirely on the surface.

As we teach technology, it helps to keep bootstrapping in mind. By taking a few extra moments to situate the knowledge we're teaching within a larger context, we make that knowledge much more versatile for our students. We should also keep on the lookout for gaps in our students' conceptual systems, and fill them in where necessary; we already peel our peepers looking for these gaps, but I'm urging you to do so in the technological realm as well. In my own class, I refer to such mini-lectures (usually about 2 minutes or so) as “Nerd Asides”—a phrase that acknowledges that I'm teaching them something tangential, but doesn't back away from doing so.

If you're interested in discussing bootstrapping more, please drop by or send me an email, and we'll explore how to include larger systems in your instruction so your students can build on the skills they learn.

See you next month!
Brendan