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.

Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Witchy Readings

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Time flies and it’s October — witchy season is upon us! Fall has always been one of my favorite seasons — the need for a nice sweater and thick blanket, the ability to enjoy a nice fire, the smell of rain in the air, the bright colors of changing leaves. It’s a perfect season. Halloween just makes it doubly so. As a family, we always were into decorating with pumpkins and skeletons and all things spooky. We ran the Carnevil Driveway for a decade, giving away over a hundred pounds of candy in a night. We invited all of our friends and neighbors to participate as creeps (term of art for those employed by a carnival) in full costumes and wearing fun personas as they scared (in a nice way) the little boys and girls that came out to Trick-or-Treat to our door. To this day, our basement in full of decorations: a wall of heads, corpse in a trunk, iron hands holding a severed head, tons of black lights, and thousands of other big and small props that go bump in the night. There were even a few years when we put together two of these — one in…

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Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Love of Reading

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Monument to Jules Verne

I assume that people who read my newsletters love to read as much as I do. Reading is the best form of escapism. It’s a way of stepping into another life, another world. It can be completely immersive and totally consuming. You can read to match your internal moods or to shift them into a completely different direction. Reading is awesome fun. I’m sorry for those who don’t know this. That said, even some great stories won’t be great for every reader or even be appropriate for a particular time in their lives (or circumstances in the world). I have been reading a lot lately, catching up on the giant pile of books that I acquired during the height of the pandemic but never got around to actually consuming. My pile is still very high, but I did discover some gems and also some books that are simply not for me (or not for me right now). I am getting better at putting those books away partially read — that’s a new skill that I just recently learned. Prior, I felt that I had to read to the last page (appendixes included) once I’ve started a book. Now, I am…

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Newsletter, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles

Stress Response

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Terri the relentless tortoise

Stress is an actor in all our lives. As we grow up, our stress grows too. We perceive that stress as a sign that we are coping with more than our historical share. Every generation believes that their stress surpasses that of the generation before. So it is probably just an illusion — or delusion. What’s most important is how we cope with stress. Not all stress coping mechanisms are learned. Some are probably encoded — they come for free with our genetics. It can be easier to see these mechanisms in action by observing animals — particularly pets, whose behaviors we know intimately. Take, for example, two very different species that we have had as pets over the years — Terri the tortoise and Kushy the ferret. Terri comes from an ancient lineage of chelonians (Greek word for tortoise), who have walked and swam upon the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Kushy the ferret is of the Mustelidae family — weasels and skunks. Kushy was a descendant of a domesticated breed of ferrets that first became pets about four thousand years ago. We bought Kushy at a pet store; Terri was a rescue. Terri’s natural habitat is…

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Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Group Decision Errors, Newsletter

Cultural Trauma

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Bloody 4th of July

I felt devastated by the shootings in Uvalde. How could we have allowed this to happen? The video of the police response was recently released. Hundreds of gunshots can be heard. The police carefully edited out the screams of the children. I can easily imagine my own children’s voices…and I can’t even… The mass shooting during the 4th of July parade in a sleepy Jewish suburb of Chicago was another blow. A close friend grew up there. Her backyard neighbor was one of the killed, and she spent hours trying to learn the fates of her classmates. The little boy who will grow up without parents, for what? What do we get to gain by equipping ourselves with weapons of war? The guns used in these two and most other mass shootings were made to kill people. They are very at it. Why do we need these weapons among civilians living in a peaceful nation? America is very efficient. If it ever came to us needing weapons to defend ourselves from enemies, I’m sure we can distribute them to those who know how to use them — our national guard in no time. Apocalypse is great to watch in the…

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book promotion, Cultural Differences, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Coming-of-age in the Modern World

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How we see ourselves

There is a whole genre of coming-of-age stories — stories that describe a transition from childhood to adulthood. The transition could be fast, forced by some external events, or painfully slow. And sometimes, it might not happen at all — we all know people who we charitably describe as having “arrested development” issues. This is how Wikipedia defines the coming-of-age genre, too, adding: “Coming-of-age stories tend to emphasize dialogue or internal monologue over action, and are often set in the past. The subjects of coming-of-age stories are typically teenagers.” But is it correct to place teenagers as protagonists in coming-of-age books? In Victorian times (1937 to 1901), the female protagonists used to be about fifteen or sixteen — girls of marriageable age! For these children, coming-of-age meant going directly from playing with dolls and right into a marriage bed. Boys were perhaps a bit older, 17, their swords changed from wood to metal over the telling of their coming-of-age stories. Think of The Vicomte De Bragelonne or The Count of Monte Cristo, written in 1847 and 1844, respectively. The young count and Edmond were just teenagers when their stories got started. Edmond got to live to be an old man.…

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book promotion, My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Emotion Field

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American Mythology: superhero underdogs

I saw a question on Twitter: Can readers become emotionally invested in a story if the main character is interesting but not sympathetic? My answer was that I need characters that I can care about. A superhero that has all kinds of cool and interesting superpowers is ultimately boring unless there is an emotional narrative that I can care about. I think the most important answer an author can give to their readers in the first few pages (or paragraphs) of their book is why they should care enough to read more? And that answer is always why the reader should care. I find that caring about sympathetic characters is easier than for villains, no matter how interesting those villains are. I can go for a story about a young kid who grows up to be a villain because the world forces him to become one — he wasn’t born evil, he was made to be. Villany was forced on an innocent soul in order to survive. But this just means that I’m reading a tragedy. There are lots of different types of stories. It’s never about the genre. Science fiction is just fantasy wrapped up in fancy techtalk. Romance…

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Errors, Language, Newsletter, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles

The Music of Language

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Old World Language Families

The illustration above is created by Minna Sundberg. Unlike pictorial art, music is perceived and processed in time. Complex music — consisting of more than one melody woven together — is even more difficult to process than a single stream. It requires focused attention. It’s more akin to listening to several conversations at once even if they are speaking on the same topic. If attention strays for just a moment, vital data can be lost. Thus music comprehension improves over several listenings. Things like nuance in performance, which ride on top of the basic syntax and message, are easy to miss for novice listeners. Listening, like performing, requires the development of skills. Humans are poor at splitting their attention and multitasking, and thus are prone to missing a lot of details. Language is also much more than a ruled-based string of words. There is a melody to each that varies from language to language. The melody provides the underpinning of emotion to the informational content that words carry. It’s easy to create cognitive dissonance by using the wrong emotional music while delivering a message. People who are good at this are good at manipulation. This is because we listen to…

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