BIM and smartphones

BIM and smartphones 

Another frequent question (and complaint) about BIM is about learning it: when can one find the right training programme? I often hear of expensive courses for employees of design, engineering and construction firms, as well as for students (universities don't often care for the development of some practical skills). Which one of these courses is the best?

My usual answer is that one should take a BIM course with the same people who gave them their smartphone training because they appear to have made an excellent job of it: practically everyone uses a smartphone nowadays, most to the best of their ability and, perhaps equally significantly, most seem happy with what they can do with it. People think I'm joking but I'm not.

What makes self-education and training so effective with some technologies? Does it apply to all things? Leaving aside a ubiquitous companion like the smartphone, which one inevitably learns to use as well as their pens and pencils (i.e. with variable yet generally adequate results), everybody seems able to work with text processing software like Word but quite often I realise that some of the key facilities may escape them. For example, even young people, seem unaware of page breaks and use instead long sequences of hard returns to move to the next page. Why haven't they learned or discovered it?

In general, becoming a good user of something complex like a smartphone or a computer program is a combination of understanding their fundamental principles and having extensive experience with their operation (and one many need more experience than another). We can teach the former and initiate the latter but one has also to keep coming back to the principles as experience grows to extend understanding of principles into a transparent framework that guides and explains operation. This is something that even university education fails to offer; what are the chances in a work environment?

In conclusion, anyone can learn BIM by spending time with it, trying things out and communicating to other users and experts. I'm not sure how far one can go without support in the form of theory and feedback from theory. What I do know is that smartphones have become so easy to learn not only because we use them all the time but also because they have developed interfaces and apps that are very limited and therefore easy to comprehend without much understanding. By contrast, BIM or text processing software are behemoths with interfaces that try to do too much and may consequently obscure many critical facilities or even intimidate users. Dissolving such software into a myriad of small apps may not be the solution but learning from the success of smartphone can only help.