talking, questions and learning

In How Pair Programming Really Works [PDF], Stuart Wray discusses four mechanisms that contribute to successful pair programming practice. The author uses findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to provide evidence for his conclusions. There are some followup discussions at computingnow, reddit and hacker news.

I found particularly interesting the discussion around talking to develop understanding:

Around 1980, as computer science undergraduate students at the University of Cambridge, my friends and I noticed a strange phenomenon that we called expert programmer theory. When one of us had trouble getting our programs to work, we’d describe the nonfunctioning state of our code to each other over coffee. Quite often, we’d realize in a flash what was wrong and how to solve it. These epiphanies were quite independent of the other person having any real understanding of our problems—the listener often seemed little wiser about the subject.

I have experienced similar scenarios and this can be both relieving (finally solved the problem!) and frustrating (why didn’t I think of this a few minutes ago?).

Explaining something to another person or even an object can help the person’s own understanding. Wray points out that it is helpful, if we can talk to an expert, even if that expertise is large based on perception. The main reason seems to be that that person would be more likely to ask us deep questions that we can ponder or that may influence our thinking.

The ability to ask questions that are most appropriate for the given situation seems most valuable: Questions that don’t require too large a leap, but rather motivate the person to advance just a little further – questions that stimulate thinking.

What if software that we use daily asked us questions?

Lots of scenarios are conceivable, but here is one example. Imagine a news website that attaches to each article a module that contains at least one interesting question, such as “Do you think this policy change will effectively solve problem XYZ?”, “What do you think of senator X’s position on Y?”, “What if the economic situation in Y would change in Z way?” and so forth. These would be meaningful questions, based on the content of the article and meant to stimulate intelligent discourse (readers could leave responses and discuss amongst themselves). These questions would also ideally be automatically generated.

If we can accept that good questions at the right time can help our understanding and that deeper understanding is generally a good thing, then I think we will benefit from giving software more of an ability to ask questions – for our own benefit.