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In the early 1980s, John M. Carroll was teaching regular folk how to use dedicated word processors such as the IBM Displaywriter. There were lots of new concepts for the learners--and lots of restrictions--and he discovered instruction manuals were written in such a way that they prevented the learners from learning what they needed to know. To fix this, he developed what's called minimalist instruction. At the core, everything that needs to be done is treated as a stand-alone piece of information that points to other things that need to be done. You start at your own level of skill, and you only need to read about what you don't know. In a sort of pre-internet way, the stand-alone pieces were linked together, and you followed the links you needed. (His book about this is named The Nurnberg Funnel: Designing Minimalist Instruction for Practical Computer Skill.) Descriptive Psychology is a very extensive, highly-elaborated, closely-linked set of concepts. There doesn't seem to be a best entry point for learning about the concepts and their links, so I decided to put the concepts on individual pages and link them. I expect the reader to move from concept to concept as needed. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time; thus, |