As a journalist at LinuxWorld Australia:
Game developer turned author Kathy Sierra is the brain behind best-sellers "Head First Java" and "Head First EJB". During her 17 years in the IT industry, Sierra has worked as a master trainer for Sun Microsystems, founded javaranch.com, and now specialises in metacognition, which is the science of thinking about thinking.
Currently based in Colorado, U.S., Sierra will be visiting Australia this month to speak at linux.conf.au about "Creating Passionate Users". She will be the first ever female speaker to keynote at the conference, which has this year also attracted more female registrants than ever before.
Liz Tay speaks with Sierra for a sneak preview of her presentation, her experiences in the industry, and the future of learning.
How would you describe your role in the IT industry?
Currently I have two roles: to help people learn tough technical topics with the least amount of pain; [and] to help developers create passionate users regardless of the type of product (or service).
What are some of the most significant conclusions you've arrived at from thinking about thinking?
We (humans) have legacy brains - our brains think we're still living in caves watching for tigers, while our minds know we're living in the 21st century. That gap between what the brain "believes" and what the mind knows consciously is the source of so many problems we all have with attention, learning, memory, engagement, focus, etc. I think the biggest place to make a difference is learning to create more brain-friendly materials including products and user manuals. In other words, things that support the legacy brain instead of fight it.
For example, the brain cares about tigers, but could not care less about, say, Ruby code. So, I try to answer the question, 'how can we make the brain treat code as though it were as important as a tiger?' And the answer is associate that code with things the brain pays attention to using provocative visuals, unusual or novel presentation of the code, stories that make you curious (humans have always learned primarily through stories), things like that - things the brain is tuned to care about.
The problem is, the way we usually try to teach students (including our users/learners) is by presenting things in the least compelling way from the brain's perspective. When the brain sees pages of text or a dry lecture, it says, 'This is so not life-threatening, so I'll just keep scanning for something that's more interesting.' We've all been there when we're trying to study and can't stay focused on the page of our textbook no matter how motivated we are.
In what areas can metacognition be practically applied?
Everything. Product usability, marketing, user documentation and training, user communities, building user loyalty and evangelism, everything. Every place where a human is using their brain in some way, we can apply what we know about the brain to enhance the experience.
What first sparked your interest in metacognition?
I have a seizure disorder, so ever since I was young I was fascinated with the brain. But it wasn't until I started teaching programming (10 years ago) that I got more serious about it, and began digging into the research in cognitive science and learning.
From where do you derive your passion for programming?
I've been programming for about 17 years. I got into it accidentally, when I needed an 'expert system' for a medical fitness facility - a software application that would help prescribe wellness programs to executives, based on the knowledge of experts - and it turned out we didn't have the budget.
I thought, 'well, how hard can it be?' Pretty damn hard I found out, but fortunately I found that out only after I'd gotten in deep, or I'd never have tried. So I became fascinated with artificial intelligence (this was when expert systems were a big deal and AI was the hot thing), and the idea of representing knowledge in software. And then I was hooked.
How did you get from being a game developer to being a writer?
When the bubble burst and I finally got laid off, well, I figured I might as well use that opportunity to apply the research and principles I'd been studying for so long and write a brain-friendly Java book - the book I had wanted when I was trying to learn Java.
What prompted you to start the Head First series of books?
My partner Bert Bates and I were daydreaming-turned-brainstorming about what it would be like if we could design a brain-friendly user-experience with absolutely no concern for publishing templates, style-guides, etc. We said, 'If our only constraint is that the experience must be delivered in a flat, 2D printed book, what could we do?'
Head First was one possible implementation, and we presented it to two other major publishers before taking it to Tim O'Reilly. Today, Tim likes to thank those other two publishers for making a poor decision. Nearly everyone but Tim O'Reilly and our original editor at O'Reilly thought it was the most horrible thing they'd ever seen.
Even the bookstores were very reluctant to stock them at first.
Fortunately, we had a great Java community who embraced the book and began talking about it almost immediately, and to nearly everyone's shock - it became the #1 bestselling Java book, and still is.
What do you hope the books will achieve?
Four things:
1) We want reader/learners to have a better learning experience - one where they aren't made to feel stupid, but where nothing is dumbed down. I want readers to feel like we care about the quality of their time, by making it more enjoyable.
2) We want teachers to begin to see that there are other ways to teach technical topics that can be more engaging and interesting and fun and more effective (actually, more effective BECAUSE it is more engaging, interesting, and fun - all things that keep the brain paying attention to give the learning a better chance of happening).
3) We want to raise awareness about brain-friendly principles, and hope to see more people starting to care about it - and do something about it - whether in product manuals, books, or anything else where we want to communicate a message.
4) We want people to understand more about how they learn and remember, so that they can improve their own learning experience even in the face of very brain-UNfriendly materials.
Most of us try to communicate by talking to the person's mind, when we really need to be talking to their brain.
You have been quite an active advocate of Java, having written "Head First Java" and founded javaranch.com. Why do you focus on Java instead of other languages?
I just fell in love with Java - probably because I hated C++, and Java was more fun. I thought it would be a great language for people to learn programming and especially object-oriented programming. And later I went to work for Sun, so I was just very involved with it. Also, as it became so popular, there was a much greater opportunity for teaching it than with virtually any other language. But the longer I'm out of Sun, the more I'm starting to look at other languages, especially Ruby. :)
The Wickedly Smart Web site describes a scene from The Matrix where a character learns to fly a helicopter by downloading the lesson directly to her brain. How far are we from developing this technology?
Very, very far. But the way most learning happens today is SO inefficient, that we can make a dramatic improvement - orders of magnitude improvement - with the technology we DO have, simply by applying a set of principles that have come from cognitive science, neurobiology, game design, psychology, entertainment, and learning theory.
What hurdles do we have to overcome to achieve this?
For the direct-to-brain download, the hurdle is time. Depending on who you talk to, that time could be 50 years minimum, most likely far more. But for an order of magnitude jump in learning efficiency, all we need is for more people to acknowledge that the way we've been expecting people to learn technical topics is horribly obsolete.
We're using techniques for communicating knowledge that are no different than what people were using thousands of years ago - we 'talk' at the learner either in written text or lectures. It worked in the past only because people had plenty of time for learning the one skill they'd use the rest of their life.
Today, that's absurd. If you're in the technology field, more than half of your technical knowledge becomes outdated within 18 months (or so the estimates say).
We are all constantly in a state of learning and unlearning, but we're using centuries-old methods for communicating it. The Internet doesn't help, since it's still delivering things in the same old way (mostly words pushed at you which you're supposed to passively absorb), only in far, far greater quantities.
What will you be speaking about at linux.conf.au 2007?
How to Create Passionate Users. :)
How to take what we've learned from those other domains I mentioned (game design, cognitive science, neurobiology, entertainment, etc.) and apply them to everything from product design and user documentation to building a community of users and developing t-shirts and other 'tribe items'.
What are your thoughts on Free and Open Source Software, and how does the concept of FOSS relate to your work in cognition?
The majority of FOSS efforts aren't doing a good job in two crucial areas: getting more people involved in the project (other than code contributors) and getting more end-users for the non-developer applications. Look at OpenOffice, for example - they've done a terrible job of helping their target audience - all those people working in offices using Word - learn to use the program. There are only a few people who are out there trying to hold people's hands and help them make the transition to OpenOffice, when this should have been a huge priority. When I used to go to the OpenOffice.org site (haven't been there in a while, so I hope it's improved), it felt like a place for developers, not end-users who wanted to use a non-Microsoft word processing tool!
So, I think FOSS is an area that could use some help in creating passionate users, and to me - one of the most exciting things about the approach we take is that it doesn't require a big marketing budget (or really ANY marketing budget). Anyone can apply many of these principles and make a dramatic difference. In fact, it's an advantage to not have a marketing/ad budget, because that just distracts you from what matters... all that matters is the ways in which you can help your users kick ass. We always say that a company should take the marketing staff and have them help make the user manuals more beautiful.
Are you a Linux user?
In the past I was, but for the last couple of years I've been exclusively on OSX, and I can do everything I need to. I'm doing a lot of experimenting with media lately -- audio and video editing especially -- and I love the Mac tools.
What is one piece of advice you'd like to get across to IT managers?
It's absurd to think of having passionate users if you don't have passionate employees. And when employees are too far removed from those most affected by their work - the end users - it's easy to not have to think about users as Real People.
At Sun, when they instituted Six Sigma, 'users/customers' became line items on a report, and user problems were DPMOs (defects per million opportunities). When people become numbers and stats instead of breathing human beings, it's no wonder we build products and documentation and support that's frustrating for people.
So here's my one piece of advice: do whatever it takes to make sure everyone has regular exposure to users. One 100-person software company I know makes every single person - including upper managers - do time on tech support or customer training.
Think about the effect that has when you're building something that you will eventually have to help someone use. But even if you can't have real customers come in or have all of your employees visit customers, a fairly inexpensive and practical tool is to videotape customers talking about their work and life, and how the product fits into their world. I've done this a lot, and employees are often shocked to learn even just the every day details about an end user's life. It stops them from seeing users as DPMO numbers.
What's one piece of advice you'd like to get across to IT staff?
Learn everything you can about 'Flow' - a required book when I first worked at Virgin - and think about ways to make it happen both in your own job, and as part of the end user's experience. Flow is considered one of the best 'states' a person can be in, and essential to having a healthy life, and as developers we are often responsible for creating - or preventing - users from spending more time in the flow state.
What are your experiences as a woman in IT?
I haven't had any negative experiences at all. Some people along the way would seem mildly surprised, but it was never anything but good for me, and that's across many jobs in two different states. Perhaps if I'd been working in enterprise IT I would have found a different environment, but the worst problem I've had is not enough female programmers to talk to on the job. But there are always women in other roles, so it's not like I couldn't find another woman to have lunch with at work, for example.
Why do you think women are still a minority in the industry, and do you think the gender imbalance will ever even out?
This is just my opinion - not based on anything else - but I believe it's that most women simply aren't interested. Period. Yes, in earlier days - even as recently as 10 years ago - computers were still seen as a "boy's thing", in school computer labs and in homes, but that's changed so dramatically. Whenever I hear someone trot out old research about how "girls are told that computers aren't for them", I ask if they've tried to pry the mouse out of a teenage girl's hand while she's on MySpace. No, there's nothing stopping girls from thinking they can do anything they choose with computers - including hack their javascript if they choose - it's starting to be a skill not that different from the way programming a VCR was in the 90's, or getting custom ringtones on their cell phone.
I think there will be less and less of a Women In Computing/IT idea, and more and more a shift to computers (and sometimes programming) as an essential skill that people will need in a wide range of fields, and women will come into it through these other side doors, and a formal "Comp Sci" degree will be more specialized and more an academic or engineering science rather than the place where programmers are trained.
I do not think the gender imbalance will even out, but it may not make so much of a difference once more people in other domains are doing work that would have traditionally been only for the computer science folks.
