Olga Werby

Olga Werby, Ed.D., has a Doctorate from U.C. Berkeley with a focus on designing online learning experiences. She has a Master's degree from U.C. Berkeley in Education of Math, Science, and Technology. She has been creating computer-based projects since 1981 with organizations such as NASA (where she worked on the Pioneer Venus project), Addison-Wesley, and the Princeton Review. She conceived, designed, and illustrated the award-winning "Field Trips" series of programs distributed by Sunburst Communications. Olga has a B.A. degree in Mathematics and Astrophysics from Columbia University. Olga currently teaches interaction design and cognitive theory at the American University in Paris and the University of California at Berkeley Extension Program. She was part of the faculty of San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and the campus of Apple Computers. Olga is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. She also holds a California teaching credential and is part of the San Francisco Unified School District where she often tests science-related curriculum materials in public elementary and middle schools.

Cognitive Blindness, Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Fog of War

by Olga Werby • October 11, 2023

Once again, we find ourselves bearing witness to yet another war with a non-stop spectrum of horrific stories and images that make our souls shudder and our hearts break. It is easy to get drawn into a narrative of good guys versus bad guys. It is easy to find ourselves in a heated screaming fight over why one side or the other are the evil ones. But wars at ground level are not really about good versus evil; they are about survival. Regular people get swept up in evil and find themselves doing things that they never would have thought possible. War turns normal people into monsters. Robert Sapolsky wrote: “We judge ourselves by our internal motives, but others by their external actions. … When Thems do something wrong, it’s because they’re simply rotten. When Us-es do it, it’s because of an extenuating circumstance”. Imagine the great harm you might inflict on another to protect a child you love. Because our motives are “pure” they mitigate our actions — allowing ourselves not to think of ourselves as monsters — even when we do objectively terrible things. We are all good at rationalizing our own behavior. To overcome our natural instincts…

Neanderthal in The Back Yard

by Olga Werby • August 11, 2023

I was around ten when I had a recurrent dream. Back then, I was good at lucid dreaming — I could make myself dream the same story for weeks on end and remember all of it. It was similar to writing in that it was like watching a story unfold in my imagination. I dreamt many stories this way; although most are lost, there was one that stuck with me about a Neanderthal buried in the permafrost next to the mini merry-go-round in our apartment building’s back yard. We lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was cold and snowy in the winter even if there was no actual permafrost in the courtyard. I must have read something about the marvelous preservation of mammoths, and that gave me the idea. I figured that if those ancient pachyderms could be found in permafrost, so too could early humans. In my dream, I dig under the snow, in the bushes located a few feet from the merry-go-round, and discover a bit of old animal skin. Brushing away a few more layers of snow and dirt, I find what looks like a mummified arm, dressed in clothing made of fur. I know right away…

Developing a Story

by Olga Werby • April 10, 2023

How does one choose a story? Or does a story choose its teller? For me, random triggers in my subconscious coalesce and spark inspiration that is not yet a story but rather the embryo of one. That seed, with time, might ripen enough to be worth planting. But the seed of a story doesn’t contain a compelling narrative that grabs and doesn’t let go until the very last word and beyond. A good story stays with its reader long after the last word is seen or heard. It rises unbidden in the middle of the night to infiltrate the reader’s dreams and deliver something new — a melding of what the author was trying to tell and what the reader took away. What does it take to develop a good story? A spark of imagination is one. Persistence is another — it takes time and perseverance to get words down on a page. But there’s more. I believe that good stories, like all good products, are constructed following a design process. There are always constraints on how the story needs to be told for a specific audience. There are industry demands on authors. There is a ton of background research.…

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