Talking teaching or technology? A lesson from Pixar

Reflecting on how we train tutors to use Elluminate (our audiographic conferencing system) for a meeting of the Open University's eLearning Community, I realised that our attitude has done a 180 degree turn in just a few years.

When we began, we thought it was very important that tutors learned how to use all the Elluminate controls before thinking about how to teach with it, despite the time it would take them to do so. (The full manual is 365 pages long!) Now we're more inclined to the view that the first thing a tutor should do is to watch an Elluminate tutorial, or even better - with just a little basic preparation - to take part in one, run by someone else. Once they know what can be done, they can find out how to do it for themselves, with the aid of the manual if need be - and now with the motivation to do so.

The great thing about this approach is that it values the competences which tutors already have, rather than plunging them into an area where they're unskilled and are liable to become demoralised when the inevitable technical problems arise. ("There you are, I told you I'm rubbish with computers.") Our tutors are already brilliant at bulding rapport with students, with reassuring and challenging them, and creating a safe space in which they can admit to problems and make mistakes. All they need to do is to learn to do these things through a new medium.

To encourage tutors feeling nervous about the technology, I tell them the story of John Lasseter: the director or executive producer of some of Pixar's greatest computer-animated films (Toy Story, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, etc).

In 1981, when he moved from Disney to the division of Lucasfilm which would become Pixar, computer animation was still very much dominated by programmers and technologists, and the sorts of films they made showed rotating cubes with changing images on each side, or geometrical shapes rising out of pools of molten liquid, or the play of light on complex textured surfaces. (I remember going to a computer animation festival at this time, where one of the presenters got very, very excited about the precise fractal algorithm he'd used to generate the texture of ice and snow on a simulated glacier.)

By contrast, Lasseter's 1984 film "André and Wally B" was a story about a little man and a bee, and it was shown at a computer graphics conference where it got a tremendous reception. After the showing, a guy came up to him and said: "Hey, your film was really funny!" to which Lasster made a polite and appreciative response. Then the guy asked: "What software do you use?" and Lasseter explained that it was just a basic key-frame animation tool, pretty much what everyone else was using, nothing very special. The guy was visibly disappointed. "Yeah," he mused, "but your film was so funny!"

And Lasseter realised that the computer guy was assuming that the film's being funny was somehow a product of the software. It wasn't, of course: it was a product of character, emotion, narrative and timing - all things that Lasseter, as a former Disney animator, knew how to do, and do well.

So what I remind our tutors is that if someone says to them, as we hope they will, "Hey, that was a really great online tutorial you gave!" it won't be because of the excellence of the software or even their expertise in using it. It will be because of those qualities which already make them great tutors face-to-face and which they've learned to apply in the online environment.


References: John Lasseter has told this story in interviews for the BBC TV programme 'From pencils to pixels' ('Imagine' series, transmitted 10 December 2003) and at the 2001 London Film Festival. 
For OU staff only: a video of my talk to the eLearning Community is at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/webcast-ou/ (under 15 November 2011, Session 3, 27 mins in) and details of the event are at http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=9612.

Seen and heard - November 2011

"Living in the Material World" (film biography of George Harrison, on TV) - the quiet but interesting Beatle
"Strictly Gershwin" (ENB Ballet, at Milton Keynes Theatre)
The Invincible, by Stanislaw Lem (1964 hardcore SF novel from the innovative Polish writer, author of Solaris and The Cyberiad)
"The Making of the Drum" (choral piece by Bob Chilcott) - sung with chamber choir Polymnia, powerful African-inspired text on the sacred process involving death (killing the goat, cutting the tree) and voices ("speak when we touch you")
"The Elusive Technological Future" - John Naughton's keynote speech at Alt-C in September 2011.

24 words on how to write a restaurant review

In higher education, we tend to assume that students all know how to communicate online: that they instinctively know the right genre, register and tone for the context. And then we're surprised when forum communication either fails to take off or goes up in flames.

The Qype website makes no such assumptions. Beside the box allowing you to post a review of, for example, a restaurant, it carries the following instructions:

Write as if you were talking to a good friend (in front of your mother) No spam, no self promotion and no offensive language.

No long guidance document, no course in study skills. Just 24 words, which anyone about to make a comment is bound to see. Neat!

Seen and heard October 2011

Obituaries and memories of Steve Jobs (1955-2011), including a quote on design as not merely surface veneer but the soul of a device
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the 1979 TV series with Alec Guiness as George Smiley) - after rewatching this on DVD, the new film seemed pretty trite and superficial
"Copenhagen" (play by Michael Frayn about Werner Heisenberg's mysterious 1941 visit to Niels Bohr in German-occupied Denmark) - repeat of the tremendous TV film version
"Mixed Britannia" (on the history of mixed-race people in Britain) - sensitive and moving TV documentary series by George Alagiah
"Strictly Come Dancing" and "Merlin", new seasons - so that's Saturday evenings sorted then
"Lavinia" by Ursula Le Guin (novel telling the story of the Latin woman married by proto-Roman Aeneas) - lovely re-writing of Virgil, more about household gods than battles
"Downton Abbey", second series - increasingly-soapy, but still hugely compelling
The Plenary Producer - wonderful resource with zillions of ideas for group activities by schoolteacher Mark Gershon

What can online teaching add to printed materials?

Here are 10 things you can do online, which add value to printed distance learning materials.

1  Make the printed materials available in digital form - for example, as a PDF or an ePub (e-book) file. This makes the materials searchable, portable (if loaded onto a mobile device), and copy-and-pasteable. (Even if students primarily read the materials in their printed form, they may find a digital version a useful alternative.)

2  Include time-limited subject matter. This is useful where a topic is essentially volatile (for example, because it is dependent on government policy), or topical examples or case studies are in danger of becoming dated. Rather than avoid them totally, you can include them in the knowledge that you can revise them if necessary later at relatively low production cost.

3  Provide exercises or learning activities - to help students develop their own knowledge and understanding of the subject matter. Where a question or task is followed by a model answer, comment or feedback, the online medium allows you to hide this (for example, just by putting it on another web page), so that students don't see it immediately. (Even if you can't force them to answer a question, you can still make them pause - and the dialogic question-and-answer form can help support students' own metacognitive processes.) 

4  Include interactive presentations - for example, animated diagrams. These can repay their development cost by helping students develop their own mental models of structures, processes or concepts.

5  Provide self-tests - for example, quizzes, which (with careful writing) can test analytical or even evaluative skills, as well as knowledge and understanding. These are only practical where the subject matter allows for questions with closed, well-defined answers, but where they are students usually greatly value the immediacy of feedback on their study.

6 Link to external online resources - not only resources which present or teach the subject matter well (if they exist and are free, why write your own?) but resources which can you can use as objects or exemplars of different perspectives for students to analyse and critique.

7 Develop digital skills and information literacy - the skills of digital reading, writing and note-taking, and finding, evaluating and using online sources, which are now expected of graduates.

8 Integrate learning activities with digital resources - so that students can for example move smoothly between audio-visual resources and the accompanying analytic questions, or between their current learning task and their products from previous tasks held in the “cloud”.

9 Include cooperative activities - for example, through an online forum, to enable students to share their experiences or findings, or to form each other's conceptual development through discussion, as well as developing communicative skills.

10 Include collaborative activities - for example, through a wiki, in which students work together to produce a shared product, thus requiring them to develop the meta-skills of work organisation and negotiation.

Mobile vs desktop vs print

If you’re trying to predict which delivery medium will predominate in the distance learning of the future, there are some wise words – supported as usual by decent empirical data – in a recent post from Jakob Nielsen on how people use mobile devices and desktop computers for accessing the internet.

His first prediction is that – contrary to the sayings of some enthusiasts – mobile devices will not be replacing desktop computers. (In general, new technologies seldom displace older ones entirely; theatre, radio and cinema co-exist alongside television, YouTube and download services.) People prefer, if they can, to have all options open to them. The question is how they use them.

His second prediction is that “highest-value use will stay predominantly on desktop”. Even if the split of time-spent-on-internet swings increasingly towards tablets and smartphones (because the best computer for an immediate need, like the best camera, is the one you have with you), desktop machines will retain users’ preference for a large proportion of complex high value tasks, because of their superior screen size and keyboards, as well as (currently) superior internet speed and printing connectivity.

Nielsen’s predictions are about internet use in general. How might they apply to distance learning?

First, they confirm the correctness of the Open University’s strategy of giving students flexibility of delivery medium as far as possible. An increasing proportion of them will own one or more mobile devices in addition to a desktop computer and will expect to be able to transfer study materials and their own notes between them. The new feature enabling students to re-render onscreen structured content on formats for eBook readers and MP3 players, as well as printing, will go a long way towards meeting these expectations.

Nevertheless, Nielsen’s observations suggest that students will still prefer to do much of their work through print (whether supplied by us or printed by themselves) or on a desktop computer. The “high value use” which requires a large screen (or printed page) and keyboard (or physical notebook) is the reading of complex texts, requiring regular scanning and skipping backwards and forwards, and the simultaneous taking of content-rich notes: the core study activities at higher education level. Though small-screen devices such as smartphones will be increasingly used for brief, low-intensity activities such as checking the due-date for a TMA or monitoring activity on a forum, their use for core study activities is likely to be secondary and less-preferred – though still convenient as a backup mode, for example when taking study materials to work on during a child’s evening class.

(For Open University staff: updates on our ongoing work to extend and enrich mobile access are available from:

• http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/teaching/learning-systems/development/projects/mobile-vle-development – updates on developments as part of the Roadmap Acceleration Programme
• http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/mLearn/?cat=19 – OU blog by Rhodri Thomas on mobile learner support
• http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/teaching-and-learning/mobile/guidance/module-websites/ou-staff-demonstrator-mobile-vle – simulation of the mobile view of a module website on your desktop machine)

Moodle tools – and the teaching / learning they support

This quick and concise guide to Moodle tools – from the nicely named Cats Pyjamas blog – has a couple of really lovely features.

First, it’s a chart. You can read through it horizontally or vertically, or you can print it out at poster size and put it on the wall while you’re writing materials, or on the table when you’re working with a group.

Second, it’s pedagogically rich, and just browsing through it sharpens up one’s thinking. For each Moodle tool (including the ultra-basic “Add resource / Upload a file”), it comments on each of the possible teaching / learning uses to which you might put it (Information transfer, Assess learning, Communication and interaction, Co-create content), as well as its affordance in terms of Bloom’s hierarchy and its ease of use.

(Note for Open University staff: as this is a guide to Moodle in general, it doesn’t quite correspond to Moodle as implemented at the Open University. But the differences are minor, and the principles are great.)

MP3 files from an Audacity audio recording

Audacity is a great piece of free software for audio recording and editing, but unfortunately creating an MP3 file from a recording isn't entirely straight-forward and regularly perplexes some of the Open University's Languages students (who have to record themselves speaking their target language and upload the audio file to the online assessment submission system). The fact that questions about this keep coming to me suggests that not all OU staff are entirely clear about it either...

There are two complications.

(1) The "encoder" which Audacity needs to produce an MP3 file isn't built in. (Apparently US patent law says that the Audacity people aren't allowed to build it into the software, but they ARE allowed to point us to another website where we can download it and build it in ourselves. This is one of those cases where the law is an ass and makes additional work for the rest of us. D'oh!)

Assuming you've already downloaded and installed Audacity (from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), you also need to follow the link to the "LAME MP3 encoder" and install that too. When you first try to export a recording as an MP3 file (see below), Audacity will ask you to find a file called "lame_enc.dll"; hopefully it will be in somewhere obvious like C:\Program Files\Lame for Audacity, and once you've pointed Audacity towards it you won't have to do it again.

(2) The second complication is (apparently) simpler, and therefore (paradoxically) more difficult: the difficulty isn't obvious so the solution is harder to remember. To create an MP3 file from your recording you DON'T select "Save As" (or its nearest equivalent, "Save Project As") from the file menu, as you would if you were saving a Word file in a different format (such as .RTF or .DOC instead of .DOCX). You don't want to do that, because that would save your recording as an Audacity project, which won't be readable by anything other than Audacity.

What you need to do is to select "Export..." from the file menu; then under "Save as type..." select "MP3 files".

Easy when you know how. (But harder to remember.)

(For Open University staff: you can see the Department of Languages' guidance on installing and using Audacity on the website for any Modern Languages module, amongst the resources for assessment.)