Eugene Wallingford talks about a great idea for a conference session:
At SIGCSE a couple of weeks ago, I attended an interesting pair of complementary panel sessions. I wrote about one, Ten Things I Wish They Would Have Told Me…, in near-real time. Its complement was a panel called “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time”. Here, courageous instructors got up in front of a large room full of their peers to do what for many is unthinkable: tell everyone about an idea they had that failed in practice. When the currency of your profession is creating good ideas, telling everyone about one of your bad ideas is unusual. Telling everyone that you implemented your bad idea and watched it explode, well, that’s where the courage comes in.
My favorite story from the panel was from the poor guy who turned his students loose writing Java mail agents — on his small college’s production network. He even showed a short video of one of the college’s IT guys describing the effects of the experiment, in a perfect deadpan. Hilarious.
The linked positive panel had some good stuff in it, too, but I really like the idea of “It Seems Like a Good Idea at the Time.” The beautiful thing about it is that it could apply to any area of activity: teaching, research, personal relationships, foreign policy. No matter what field you’re in, you could make a fascinating panel discussion around the topic of things that seemed like brilliant plans, but just didn’t work for one reason or another.
And as Eugene notes, you can learn a lot from seeing why an idea that seemed good failed. Often, you end up learning more from failed ideas that seemed promising than you do from ideas that work just like you expect.
So, what’s your favorite example of something that seemed like a good idea at the time, that just didn’t work out?
(This is the spot in the post where I ought to provide a funny anecdote about something I tried in the lab that failed miserably. Unfortunately, I was up half the night coughing, and while a pseudoephedrine bomb at 2 am enabled me to sleep through the other half of the night, it also nicely demonstrated why I didn’t just take pills before I initially went to bed: my sinuses are mostly clear of gunk, but so is the rest of my skull. I made it through the morning lecture introducing electric fields on spinal reflex, but I can barely focus my eyes, let alone relate witty anecdotes.)
(So, you’re on your own.)