MOOC

Welcome to Easy Street

Posted on by carolynemitchell

So I’ve been back in the online classroom again for the past five weeks – I just can’t help myself. I started Dan Ariely’s Beginners Guide to Irrationality last year but I had two other courses running at the same time, then I went to France for a week and couldn’t catch up so I ditched all three. I guess the lesson learned from that was to do one MOOC at a time.

I’d recommend this course to comms people, especially if you work in the public sector where many campaigns are about changing behaviour and winning hearts and minds. Basically Dan’s course is a foundation in behavioural economics and his books and academic papers are cited by the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team in their work. It’s not for the faint-hearted as there are about five 20-minute lectures a week, at least five academic papers to read, two quizzes a week and two written assignments if you want to so them. Dan himself is a bit of an entertainer and his lectures and pretty entertaining.

He starts by looking at visual and decision illusions – how we aggregate information over time which should help us to make decisions but invariably doesn’t. We think we know the answer to something but we’re usually wrong – the Foundation of Irrationality. Traditional economics works on the theory that we make rational decisions but if we did we wouldn’t let our credit card bill run up, we’d eat healthy food, exercise more and plan for the future. Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to realise that I don’t think rationally. This course has given me some insight to the bad decisions I make and mechanisms to make better ones.

Like visual illusions we rely on contextual information to make all sorts of judgements and decisions and our brains interpret information by incorporating our expectations into our perceptions.

For an example of this watch the film below – this isn’t the exact one from the course but it’s the same principle.

So what’s this got to do with comms? Well, as comms professionals we can influence the architecture of choice. Decisions are influenced by:

  • environment
  • defaults
  • complexity

Us humans tend to take the path of least resistance and we don’t realise how much defaults matter. We have bad intuition and don’t realise that defaults, whether put there on purpose or not, make our decisions for us. What’s worse is we create stories to justify our actions. The best example of a default is organ donation. How can Belgium have a 98% consent rate while the Netherlands next door only has 27.5%? It can’t be down to religion or culture as these are practically the same in each country. It’s down to whether you have to opt in to donate or opt out to not donate – in the Netherlands you have to opt in whereas in Belgium you have to consciously opt out, which not many people do. We’re basically lazy and will follow the path of least resistance, especially if deviating from the default is more complex. Forced choices require a decision and doing nothing is not an option. People generally avoid changes, even if they are minor and even is another path is clearly better.

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Dan’s very real example of this was a study of patients presenting with a sore hip who are then referred to specialists for a hip replacement (the default). Half of the doctors are then told that the specialists forgot to try Ibuprofen and the other half are told they forgot to try both Ibuprofen and Piroxicam. in the first group all patients were recalled to try Ibuprofen. In the second group only 28% were recalled and a massive 72% were sent straight for a hip replacement – it was simply too complicated to recall them to try both drugs. Scary stuff.

As comms people we should be aware of defaults – some are unintentional but create barriers to the behaviour we want to see but others can be used to get the results we want. For example, what could we do to make it less likely that people would save for retirement? We should:

  • ask people to opt in
  • provide lots of complex, difficult choices, preferably in a booklet
  • stress the importance of the decision

Does that sound familiar? Think council tax reductions, healthy eating, exercising. Badly designed defaults are everywhere.

I challenge you to spend a morning actively looking for defaults on your websites, in your leaflets and in your online forms and then you’ll have some insight into why they’re not working and people aren’t doing what you want them to do. It’s not their fault.
Remember – give them the path of least resistance.

Next week I’ll share some of Dan’s thoughts on persuasion.

Content strategy

Don’t tweet me in that tone of voice

Image | Posted on by carolynemitchell

This if the second of three posts gleaned from the MOOC Content Strategy for Professionals which I recently completed.

Tone and voice

The voice you use in your content should be the same as that of a phone call from a trusted friend.

The tone is the quality or mood of your voice – be yourself, be direct and be specific.

These are things I’ve always stressed when talking to people about creating content for the web. You want the web experience to be like sitting next to a really warm customer services person, otherwise why would they choose the web over the other channels.

Media platforms

Each platform is a different opportunity. What is the best media window for your information? Think especially about the commute and which platforms would work best with this captive audience.

Storytelling changes across multimedia. The format should follow the story – let the story tell you which platform to use.

Design

Design is a never-ending cycle of improvement. Users need to be studied using your content, at the prototype stage and all through your content’s life-cycle.

Deciding what is a successful outcome will allow you to measure the improvement of your content.

Users should be the ones to evaluate your content design, not senior managers.

What is social?

Go beyond social networking and check out We Feel Fine.

We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a blogs since 2005. Every few minutes, the system searches newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds them, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence. The age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like:

  • Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans?
  • Do women feel fat more often than men?
  • Does rainy weather affect how we feel?
  • What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s?
  • What do people feel right now in Baghdad?
  • What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day?
  • Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements – Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds – artwork authored by everyone.

Virtual communities – understand their mission and the nature of the challenge they face. Create a guiding policy – how can you help them. Plan coherent action – create a set of actions they can perform to help them accomplish their goals.

Find out where are people talking about your topic so you can take your content to them.

Work smarter not harder. People don’t have time to read but they can watch or listen.

Differentiated messaging

Use A/B testing to test the success/shareability of your messages. You can use a tool like Bitly for this.

I have one last instalment to content strategy which I’ll do next week. Till then have a tune which will get you dancing. I’ve decided to keep the recipes off this blog but I can’t resist sharing a good tune now and then 🙂

Learn, learn and learn again

Posted on by carolynemitchell

I had a dream meeting this afternoon. I wasn’t even meant to be there – I was just standing in for my boss. I’m not sure if every one of these meetings is as good as today’s but aside from the lack of social media all of my favourite topics were covered and I managed to contribute quite a bit to everything. First up was channel shift and the next thing we’ll be looking at is payments. As part of the channel shift conversation I threw in some user testing of the website as it is at the moment. I’m proposing some hallway testing where we set up some table on the landings between the lifts and the entrances to departments. We’d leave them  unmanned but with screenshots of web pages, a scenario and a what-would-you-click-next Q&A sheet. We’d also have a manned one outside the staff restaurant over a lunch time and with the other results it would give us some indication of what works and what doesn’t. I’m on the working group for this next phase of channel shift so that will be interesting.

Next up was digital inclusion and how we need to have a master plan or channel shift will never work. Those who know me know that I’ve been banging this drum since 2007 so of course I offered my services and again mentioned Our Digital Planet and how we should be getting the project to South Lanarkshire. It fits right in with the group’s plans so tomorrow I have to share the Our Digi Planet goodness. Part of that conversation led to me bang on about the fabulous demographics we get by using the esdtoolkit – another hobbyhorse of mine.

Rounding up all this was a comment about switching off other channels and forcing people down the digital route, something I would never advise but this did lead me to tell them about my trip to the Behavioural Insights Team at the Cabinet Office last year. I think they all had to pick their chins up off the table at that point. But that led to a conversation about behavioural economics and I think I’ve won them over. I’m not sure I’ll be asked back though – I think I tired them all out 😉

On other news my third MOOC started today meaning I now have 3 online courses running simultaneously: An Introduction to Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute; Dan Ariely’s Guide to Irrational Behaviour at Duke’s University; and Disruptive Technologies at the University of Maryland. I must admit I’ve probably bitten off more than I can chew but I’ll give it a go anyway.

Today I have learned:

  • people sometimes learn things from me
  • for the next wee while it’s best if I take life in 10-minute chunks, any longer than that and I panic

Today’s track

I’m not a huge KT fan but this blows me away every time I watch it – outstanding talent.

Today’s recipe

Creamy chicken and mushroom lasagne

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Serves 8 easily

This is very rich and in no way healthy, although it’s healthier than a massive shop-bought lasagne.

a knob of butter

2 onions, sliced

3 garlic cloves, chopped

2 small boxes of chestnut mushrooms

5 cooked chicken breasts (I did mine the day before in tinfoil with seasoning and a dash of white wine 180C/Gas 5) for 35-40 mins), chopped

a small bunch of parsley, chopped

3 tbsp Parmesan, grated

150mls double cream

750mls bechamel sauce (see below)

1 packet of fresh lasagne

For the bechamel

60g butter

1.5 tsp mustard

2-3 tbsp plain flour

750 mls milk

For the basil topping

1 small pack pine nuts

2 small packs basil leaves

2 garlic cloves

4 tbsp Parmesan, grated

enough olive oil to make a paste

Method: First make the basil topping. Blitz all the ingredients together and set aside.

Melt the butter in a deep frying pan and add the onion and garlic and cook till soft. Add the mushrooms and when almost cooked add the parsley and the cooked chicken. Next add the  Parmesan and cream and season. Simmer until the cream has thickened slightly.

Next make the bechamel. Melt the butter in a heavy based pan and add the mustard. Stir in the flour until you have a thick mixture. Add the milk gradually, whisking with an egg whisk to prevent lumps and heat until you have a thick sauce.

Heat the oven to 180C/Gas 5.

Now to put it all together. Put a layer of bechamel on the bottom of a big lasagne dish. Add a layer of pasta then half chicken and mushroom mixture. Add another layer of pasta then the rest of the chicken and mushroom. Add a final layer of pasta then spoon over the basil paste and top with bechamel. Add a sprinkling of Parmesan then bake for 50 minutes.

My life has added complexity

Posted on by carolynemitchell

At the tail end of last year I signed up for six MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) at various institutions and today I enrolled and started the first one – Introduction to Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute.

I hadn’t appreciated how cutting edge the Institute is when I signed up – I just thought the course sounded interesting and that it might stretch my blonde brain cells to their limit.

Over the next 11 weeks I’ll be learning about the tools used by scientists to understand complex systems. It’ll cover dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modelling, and networks. By the end of it I should understand how these fit together and how complexity arises and evolves in nature, society, and technology.

 

Apparently I don’t need a science or maths background – all I need is an interest in the field and be up for a hands-on approach.

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I’ve done the first few lectures and installed Netlogo on the PC at home. This is a programmable modelling environment and is what much of the homework will involve.

I’ll let you know how I get on as the course progresses but I had to admit defeat with MiniMe’s algebra homework and phone my Dad for help so I hope complexity doesn’t get any more complex that first year maths 😉

Today I learned:

  • complex systems have simple components
  • the interaction among components is non-linear
  • complex systems have no central control – they are de-centralised with self-organisation
  • complex systems have emergent behaviours
  • quite a lot, really

Today’s recipe

Mum’s shepherd’s pie

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This is really cottage pie as no shepherd’s were harmed in the making of it but we always called it shepherd’s pie when I was growing up and it’s stuck.

Ingredients

oil for frying

1 onion sliced

1 carrot, diced

500g mince

500mls gravy (I cheat with granules)

a dollop of brown sauce (got to be HP)

approx. 6 potatoes, peeled and cubed

a knob of butter

a dash of milk or cream

more butter

1 tin of beans

Method: Heat the oil and fry the onion and carrot. Add the mince and brown, breaking it up with a wooden spoon. Add the gravy till the mince is just covered, brown sauce and season. Let the pan simmer uncovered while the potatoes cook. Add more gravy if it gets too dry.

Boil the potatoes in salted water for 20 minutes until soft. Drain and leave on a low heat for a minute with the lid on to get rid of any moisture. Mash with the knob of butter and the milk.

Heat the oven to 200C/Gas 6

Put the beans in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add the mince on top then the potatoes on top of that. You can either smooth them off with a knife or fluff with a fork. Add some dots of butter to the top and put in the oven for 20-30 minutes until the top is golden.

Dig in!