Sometimes we just need to be motivated, and TED Talks are a go-to genre to satisfy this need. Call me a bit behind the times, but I recently discovered two 2016 TED Talks that fit the bill: Astro Teller’s “The Unexpected Benefit of Celebrating Failure” and Adam Grant’s “The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers.”
True to the genre of the TED Talk, these were both inspiring presentations. While I really don’t identify as an “original,” I did connect with Adam Grant’s takeaways. There are some differences–I identify as a moderate procrastinator, but that’s really born out of necessity rather than personality. Since I work full time, teach, student, and mother, what feels like procrastination is usually just desperately trying to balance roles.
Within that space, though, I find time to incubate. If I’m not actively doing, I’m actively thinking (Aaron Sorkin’s “you call it procrastination, I call it thinking”). And I’ve experienced the benefit of having a few days to let ideas simmer and percolate before taking action on paper.
On the other hand, I identified with Grant’s point that we “can fail by starting a business that goes bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all.” When I was redesigning an LMS orientation for a community college a couple of years ago, I was struck by a bout of my perfectionism, and I had difficulty implementing my brief design plan into actual content in the LMS. It was my first design project for something that wasn’t my own online class, and I needed it to be “right,” to prove to myself and others that I could do the work of instructional design. It wasn’t until I found a kick-me-in-the-butt quote to put up on the wall that I could get over myself and starting ideas. As Jodi Picoult has said, “You can’t edit a blank page.” And the quote up on my wall, if you’re interested, was from Roosevelt:
Take action: that’s one way to separate idea doubt from self doubt. Shift perspective: that’s another. And this is where Grant’s point that “the first few drafts are always crap” aligns really well with the popular phrase from Anne Lamott, Shitty First Drafts (although really, I think she took this from Hemingway).
So what to do with these insights?
At the moment, an ever-present fear in the back of my mind is that I am going to design something that is inaccessible (to assistive technology [AT]). As I work to learn SoftChalk, I’ve been a bit disheartened by the number of interactives that require dragging motions that are difficult for a screen reader to communicate or make it difficult if not impossible to complete with a keyboard only (drag & drop, matching, layered maps, and others). I end up moderating my design desires and squelching creative thinking about interactive engagement because I feel like I have to make a logical list of “can use” and “can’t use.”
This leads me to want a “moonshot” (Teller) solution — isn’t there a way to create the technology to make all interactives just as usable to keyboard and AT as they are to mouse and touch-screen users? Teller would get to work in the “factory” to come with a concrete solution, but I’m not a programmer. So I do feel like there are limitations to the ability to think creatively and accessibly.
But others, more skilled than I, are pursuing solutions. Here’s one example I found on W3C with a link to an accessible drag and drop activity, which links to the article about the coding process. Again, I’m not a programmer or coder (I’m not even sure which is the right word!), so for now I have to work within the confines of the tools available to me (such as the list of interactives I can build right now, today, in SoftChalk), but I do know that people with the skills will put efforts into creating the solutions if we as designers and users continue to demand them.
For now, my plan is to test any design solution with the AT that I am also trying to learn at the moment, NVDA. This is an important way for me to get outside of my own assumptions about how technology works, about how learners “should” navigate their learning objects, and think through empathic design. As Astro Teller said, “sometimes shifting perspective is more powerful than being smart,” and maybe it’s more important than having the “right” answers before I take a step forward.
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