Stop Motivating Your Students

I was once challenged to a spelling competition by a six-year-old inner-city girl. Though she had the option of playing outside, she thought writing words on a marker board was more fun. She named a word and the race was on to write it correctly first. Just to make it fair she made me look the other way while I wrote. Her favorite word was "butterfly" and she spelled it with two T's and everything.

This little girl had not yet had the love of learning stolen from her.

Dr Edward Deming often explained to befuddled managers that the idea of motivating employees is an illusion. But managers can demotivate. Some ways to demotivate are obvious like poor working conditions or communication. Other ways are less intuitive like tightly linking pay to performance or holding workers to quotas. The false assumption behind this type of thing is that people don't care about their work and so you must bring out the carrot and stick to motivate them.

But most people want to do a good job just like most kids want to learn everything about the world around them. They only need the proper tools and a little direction. The carrot and stick only serve to replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation. They can now be controlled but will only do the minimum for their reward. There is no joy or enthusiasm or drive to succeed left for them.

A teacher can't make a child learn no matter what they do but they can shape the trajectory, supply resources (preferably for the awesome stuff), and support the child's innate enthusiasm. Any more is less.

Thoughts About Microsoft Surface

About 7 years ago I got completely fed up with Microsoft. Several factors provoked my abandonment of the company's products: the way development had stagnated, the disregard for user expirience, and their habit of announcing cool stuff to squash the competition only to never actually release the product (sometimes called FUD).  I've been happily using Apple products and had no interest in Microsoft announcements ever since.

The recently announced Surface tablets changed that.

They have accomplished a really difficult thing, namely creating an interesting product in a space that Apple owns.  I finally got around to watching the announcement video and I had some thoughts...

strategy and execution
I think Microsoft has the right big picture strategy of where they need to go and clearly the engineering team has focused in on the details, honing them in an apple-like fashion. The outstanding question is in between--what us MBA types call "execution".  Strategically, Microsoft is playing this smart by pushing a consistant interface for all devices. The ARM Suface with the keyboard cover competes favorably with the iPad (and blows away android tabs) and the i5 Surface locks down the higher powered mobile computing. This is the new sweet spot as Apple has identified (most of their sales are iPads and MacBook Airs).  They are also right to compete against their OEM customers. The OEMs have no one to blame but themselves.
But this is Microsoft. Can they execute?  They have to be able to live up to their aspirations for the usability of their product. The touchscreen has to work flawlessly. The keyboard has to be as easy to type on as they claim. Battery life must be competitive. Responsiveness and framerate are critical.  Can they successfully jumpstart app development?  Then comes marketing and sales channels. Oddly, they indicated it would only be available from Microsoft stores. And you remember the ad campaign that sunk the Palm Pre.

name collision
The thing that threw me off for a long time was my association of Microsoft Surface with... you know, Microsoft Surface... the one that was a table which was a computer touch screen thing.  Amusingly, that Suface was in the video at the beginning which showed their hardware innovation over the last 30 years. But hey, lets take the name of a failed product and give it to the thing we're betting the farm on!

presentation glitches
Clearly Apple has spoiled me for watching presentations. A lot of minor problems happened that aren't a big deal. I just think it's weird that they've had all this time to learn from Apple and they still can't seem to get it right.
The first thing was the powerpoint flickering every now and then. Microsoft makes powerpoint for crying out loud! Can't they get it to smoothly transition static slides for their biggest presentation of the year?
The guy who talked after Balmer was horrible. He was running through features so fast I thought someone had put a gun to his head and said "tell me 20 reasons why this will beat the iPad. You have 2 minutes. Go."  Watch how Steve Jobs would introduce a product. He would set up the problem a feature would solve, give you a moment to wonder how it could possibly be solved, and then give space to let you marvel at the solution. At the pace this guy was going no one had time to be impressed. The worst part was that everything was explained in detail by the next two guys who did a much better job presenting their handiwork.
The demo unit didn't work! Seriously? Oh, I guess only Apple waits till they can ship to announce.
They never actually do anything with the product (well, that one time they launch a netflix video but it didn't look like it worked right). I mean seriously, they spend 5 minutes listening to the click of the magnetic keyboard cover but never sit down, turn it on and type an instant message to someone or something. They never interact with any apps besides netflix. This kind of thing stinks of vaporware.
And I thought it was really weird the way the presenters would wave the product around while they were talking. Ohhh... look how thin and light it is! Ok, ok, we get it. Are you gonna wave it around all day or are you actually going to show what it's like to use it? Oh.... right...
Plus there was that whole "hands-on review controversy"

competition is good
So I have my doubts. But I really hope this does well. At least well enough to keep Apple from getting lazy!