Winsteps

Elizabeth Newton's (1990) Stanford Ph.D. dissertation "The rocky road from actions to intentions" discusses the Curse of Knowledge - the paradox that being too much of an expert makes it difficult to explain elementary concepts to a beginner.
The on-line Winsteps course Practical Rasch Measurement is reminding me of this. Participants in the Course have pointed out to me that some of my supposedly obvious and comprehensive instructions in the Winsteps Help file assume too much of the beginning Winsteps user. Thank you participants! All feedback is welcome!
But this also reinforces my conviction that Ken Conrad and Barth Riley are better instructors for the Introduction to Winsteps in-person workshops than I could be. They are Winsteps users, not Winsteps specialists. They know what users need to know to be productive, and they know how to teach that knowledge.
The advantage of knowledge with the on-line course is that I can answer those obscure technical questions produced by the 40 participants over a period of four weeks. This is the fourth time for the Practical Rasch Measurement Course. Each time has seen improvements in the teaching material (at least from my perspective).

It's heading towards the Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die ideals of the Heath brothers,

1. Simplicity - every time better, but still a way to go.
2. Unexpectedness - there are always surprises; the challenge is to make them all good ones!
3. Concreteness - Rasch is mathematically abstract. So solid examples are emphasized.
4. Credibility - do the results make sense?
5. Emotions - O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy ... Rasch analysis should be fun ....
6. Stories - that's the crux of it all. If our findings don't communicate a great story, who will remember them? What use will they be?

Ben Wright would love the acronym of those 6 points, SUCCES, but he would have completed it with another "S", perhaps "7. Sharing". We can have wonderful ideas with all the 6 attributes, but they will quickly die unless we share them with others. Rasch analysis appears to be an abstruse statistical technique to be performed by the initiated almost in secret, but its purpose is to produce knowledge that can be shared, that is useful to as many people as possible. SUCCESS, that's what we want!