Be Specific seems like a subskill of a more generic skill: fixing ontology problems. Going down a level helps you discover that you’re talking about very different things when you use the word “connection”- if one person is thinking “interpersonal relationships,” and the other person is thinking “communication mediated by an online application,” they’re not going to understand each other very well. Specific examples don’t fix the ontological models, though, although they make them easier to fix by bringing the problem to your attention.
Another idea is trying to come up with a game where the players have different mappings from features to words. There might be a blue triangle that I say is a “gleam board” but you say is a “dull spike”- but my shininess words (gleam, dull, etc.) map to colors (blue, red, etc.) whereas your shininess words map to shapes (gleam → square, dull → triangle). With several different features and different words, the mappings can be nontrivial, and the challenge would be to figure out the mappings in as few examples as possible.
This works if you have examples that you can point to, but is weird if you try to do it just by words- if I say “gleam board” and think I mean a blue triangle and you hear “gleam board” and think I mean a red square, then unless we draw them out we can’t figure out what’s going on.
I also learned that explaining a variant of this game was trickier than I thought it would be; I should have just come up with an example to give people, rather than explaining how it worked. Oops. (We split into groups, and so I couldn’t generate my group’s rule, but I should have explained what kinds of rules were permissible with examples. Yes, I noticed the irony.)
That game appeared to work well (but way better with two people), but we didn’t feel it fit Be Specific all that well. The particular variant I used was that the rules fit A_B_C, where the rules varied on what operator fit in the _. At least one of them had to be an equality or inequality, and the other could be an inequality, equality, or one of the four basic operations (+, -, *, /). (That means there are 65 possible rules.)
We also tried out this game, but with the students both guessing the questions and coming up with examples, which I predicted would work poorly and did work poorly. I think that with the teacher generating questions it works better- it seems useful at concept concretization, but not at the “pick concepts which communicate the concept boundaries well” skill.
During our discussion about Be Specific, majus had a good point:
Another idea is trying to come up with a game where the players have different mappings from features to words. There might be a blue triangle that I say is a “gleam board” but you say is a “dull spike”- but my shininess words (gleam, dull, etc.) map to colors (blue, red, etc.) whereas your shininess words map to shapes (gleam → square, dull → triangle). With several different features and different words, the mappings can be nontrivial, and the challenge would be to figure out the mappings in as few examples as possible.
This works if you have examples that you can point to, but is weird if you try to do it just by words- if I say “gleam board” and think I mean a blue triangle and you hear “gleam board” and think I mean a red square, then unless we draw them out we can’t figure out what’s going on.
I also learned that explaining a variant of this game was trickier than I thought it would be; I should have just come up with an example to give people, rather than explaining how it worked. Oops. (We split into groups, and so I couldn’t generate my group’s rule, but I should have explained what kinds of rules were permissible with examples. Yes, I noticed the irony.)
That game appeared to work well (but way better with two people), but we didn’t feel it fit Be Specific all that well. The particular variant I used was that the rules fit A_B_C, where the rules varied on what operator fit in the _. At least one of them had to be an equality or inequality, and the other could be an inequality, equality, or one of the four basic operations (+, -, *, /). (That means there are 65 possible rules.)
We also tried out this game, but with the students both guessing the questions and coming up with examples, which I predicted would work poorly and did work poorly. I think that with the teacher generating questions it works better- it seems useful at concept concretization, but not at the “pick concepts which communicate the concept boundaries well” skill.