The instructions for playing Pong

Pong - the first massively successful video game - has just turned 40 years old. The original Pong machines were placed in bars and pubs, like pinball machines or fruit machines, but they attracted whole new groups of users who were not already players of slot machine games. Which raises the question: given that the technology and the type of game were wholly new to most of those who played it and loved it, how did they learn to play Pong?

From the kind of guidance we produce for students learning to use our online learning systems, you might think that there would have had to be some pretty long and detailed instructions. A lot of things would have been unfamiliar and would have needed to be explained: the rules of the game, how to use the control knobs to move your bat up and down the screen, what happens when the ball hits your bat, what happens when the ball goes out of play, how score is kept, and so on.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.  The instructions for playing Pong, printed on the machine cabinets, read as follows:

Avoid missing ball for high score.

That's it; there was nothing else. Or rather there was a whole lot else: the physical features of the machine and the experience of experimenting with the game. The coin slot was a familiar affordance for the insertion of a coin, which started the game. The knobs were obvious controls, and nudging them visibly moved the paddles on the screen. The contact between the ball and a paddle was marked as a significant event by the distinctive "pong" sound, and one or the other of the numbers at the top of the screen could be seen to increase whenever the ball went off a left or right edge, which was also accompanied by a negative sound. The one thing which the games designers judged needed explaining was the object of the game: to get a high score by avoiding missing (not, interestingly, "hitting") the ball. The single instruction also, as a bonus, identified the dot on the screen as a representation of a ball, which together with the game's name printed on the machine casing ("pong" does not carry its unfortunate British meaning in the USA, and to its first American users would have suggested only "ping pong"), provided further clues to interpretation from the real-world.

I'm not suggesting that instructions for students using online learning systems should be as brief as the original instructions for Pong, but I do challenge our tendency to strive for thoroughness and explicitness. Consider the advantages of brevity: first, students are more likely to read it; and second, by actually requiring students to fill in the gaps for themselves, they have to think about what they're reading and activate their previous knowledge in order to interpret it - in other words, the learning is deeper and more likely to be retained. Of course, not every single student will be able to manage with brief instructions - there may be some key piece of background knowledge which they lack, or  some distraction may lead them to a wrong interpretation; but most will, and will benefit from the brevity, and for those who need it we can also provide longer, more detailed guidance which holds their hand while walking them through stage by stage. (And those who need to refer to the detailed guidance will probably not need all of it.)

I adopted this approach a couple of years ago, when revising the guidance for new users of the Elluminate Live! audiographic conferencing system. The full Walkthrough ran for 15 pages, and included screenshots to show what should be happening at every stage of installation and setup, but I also produced a 2 page Short Guide, without screenshots, for those users who were used to installing new software and adjusting settings, and needed only a few essential details. Earlier this year, I was pleased to see the new edition of the Open University Computing Guide adopting the same strategy: prefacing its information on each feature of the Virtual Learning Environment with a Quickstart  page for those who neither want nor need the full detail.

Not always, but most of the time, less is more.

Reference

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), p. xiii

The slot: establishing dialogue between teacher and learner

We were planning a new edition of some distance learning books, when it turned out that our new tagging system for page layout couldn't reproduce some of the tables quite as they'd appeared before. The tables in question were ones with blank cells, to create empty spaces for the students to fill in themselves as part of learning activities. The technical difficulty raised the question: did we really need these responses spaces in the printed books? And if so, why?

I remembered Fred Lockwood's list of recommended features of learning activities, in which a response space or grid was one - the others being a title, a rationale ("if you cannot think of a good reason why it is worth posing the activity perhaps it isn’t worth posing at all!"), an indicative time, instructions, a example, and feedback. Though a space or grid didn't seem to make much difference to whether students actually wrote a response to the activity (as distinct from just thinking about it - what Lockwood called "degradation" of the activity), research found that students did like and prefer having one. But why, if they often did not use it?

One thing which a response space provides is what discourse analysts call a "slot". This use of the term was coined by the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, to describe the way in which one speaker can create an occasion or opportunity for another speaker to take over or make a specific kind of response. Asking a question, of course, creates a slot; a more subtle example - the one which was the starting point for Sacks' analysis - is "This is Mr Smith, may I help you", which without actually asking the telephone caller their name (which would be inappropriate on a confidential helpline) provides a cue for them to do so. A blank response space on a printed page, in the midst of the teaching text, is in visual terms almost literally a slot, providing a cue and an opportunity for the reader to make a response.

And what a slot does is open up the possibility of dialogue. Presentational text on its own can become a monologue: a single teacherly voice telling the reader how things are. A learning activity, when embedded in the text, establishes the expectation that the reader can and will respond and that that response is a valuable and important thing. Whether or not there is a response grid on the page or screen, and whether or not a student actually writes a response in it or even thinks about a response more than perfunctorily, the slot is there: a response can be made. Even though the medium itself is one-way and non-interactive, there can still be multi-vocal dialogue: what is modelled to the student, and what is encouraged to take place in their mind, is a conversation which moves back and forth between two voices, between teacher and learner.

That back-and-forth conversation enables teaching materials to deliver what Derek Rowntree called a "tutorial in print", in which students are called on to be active participants in their learning. And it is one of the many respects in which teaching materials are not about transmission of information, but about the establishing of relationship and dialogue: the socio-cognitive environment in which learning can occur.

References

Fred Lockwood, Activities in Self-Instructional  Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1992, p. 122, p. 129

Derek Rowntree, Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning; An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1994, p. 14

Seen and heard: November 2012

The Australian Voices - antipodean a capella choir, performing new (and fun) Australian music at a Milton Keynes church.

Graham Gibbs keynote address at faculty workshop - inspirational reminder of how assessment shapes student learning behaviour, unproductively or productively, from one of the gurus of learning design.

Secret State - Channel 4 drama, with Gabriel Byrne playing a decent and honest Prime Minister. The journey was better than the destination, and altogether not a patch on its predecessor A Very British Coup.

Last Tango in Halifax - BBC romantic comedy, with Derek Jacobi and Ann Reid as teenage would-be sweethearts reunited in their senior years. Great to see a drama in which the old folks are normal and its the younger  people who are in chaos.

The Hour, Series 2 - BBC drama set in (BBC) 1960s newsroom; no great depth, but full marks for style and performance.

Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) - video recording of David McVicar's hit 2005 Glyndebourne production of Handel's opera, shown at The Stables as a half-day event with a long interval for picnic lunch; definite added value over watching the DVD at home.

Turning junk into art: the Facebook song

One of the joys of television in my childhood was watching Tony Hart - first on Vision On and then on Take Hart - produce simple and beautiful drawings and paintings with apparent casualness and effortlessness. He had a trick of starting with a collection of rubbish - bits of paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, printed or plain, "any old load of junk" as he would say" - and then "get organised": arrange selected pieces on a backing sheet so that when he put a frame around them they looked great. A work of 'art, you might say.

The Australian composer Gordon Hamilton has done something similar, turning status updates from his Facebook friends into a vocal piece for his choir, The AustralianVoices. I had the pleasure last week of hearing them perform it live during a concert in Old Wolverton's Holy Trinity Church; they invited Polymnia, the choir I sing in, to do a guest spot in their concert, which was pretty cool too. The song takes its title from the first of the status updates: "Toy Story 3 =  Awesome".  Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, loved it, and you will too.


I'm not sure what the relevance for learning materials is, other than the obvious one: it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts.

Learning to self-assess: lessons from Graham Gibbs and Prue Leith

After he'd given the keynote address at my faculty's workshop on assessment, Graham Gibbs was rather worried that he'd been teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. Despite being one of the gurus of learning design, having occupied key positions at Oxford Brookes and Oxford University, like  many people coming (or, in his case, coming back) to talk to the Open University, he was concerned that he didn't have anything to offer to an institution whose practice was already good and whose student satisfaction scores were excellent.

I reassured him that his talk and his presence had been valuable. Even if he hadn't said anything that was wholly new to anyone there - the principles of good assessment are, after all, like the principles of good usability, pretty stable and have been known for some time - these were still things of which we needed to be reminded, because we tend to forget them in the pressure of production and delivery. Like, for example, the principle that we should be equipping students to self-supervise and self-assess; not only does it save on staff time, but it gives them the ability to keep on learning and improving when we're not there to assess them, long after their course has finished.

By way of thanks, I shared with him - and I'll now share with you - a favourite anecdote about Prue Leith, whom I saw interviewed back in the 1990s about her cookery school. The interviewer asked her what was the first thing she taught her students, which was a pretty interesting question: traditionally cookery courses have started with boiling an egg (Delia Smith still did so in her 1970s TV series), so I wondered whether her school would do the same, or if not what else would be the first thing she got them to cook.

I wasn't expecting her answer. "I teach them to taste." And of course, once said, it's obvious: it's the fundamental skill for a cook. If you know how to assess your food, and correct and improve it, you can do anything; and if you don't, all the recipes in the world won't help you. I think more of our courses could begin with teaching people to taste, or the subject-relevant equivalent, even if it's not what students are expecting, or - they think - why they've enrolled on the course.

Seen and heard - October 2012

Alexei Grynyuk (young Ukrainian pianist) - playing Chopin and Liszt for a live broadcast at The Stables.
The Sixteen, "The Earth Resounds" - concert in their 2012 Choral Pilgrimage, at Milton Keynes City Church, singing Josquin, Lassus and Brumel.
Strictly Come Dancing, followed by Merlin, followed by Inspector Montalbano - Autumn Saturday evenings are complete!
Hay on Wye - the town of bookshops: a lovely place to spend a weekend.
The Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky ballet - performed by English National Ballet at the Milton Keynes Theatre - feats of grace and endurance by the female and male leads, and a great super-villain with great stage presence in the evil fairy.
Skyfall - proper script, proper acting and proper direction; has James Bond grown up?

Lessons from Pixar (2) - storyboarding

Seeing once again Pixar's wonderful film The Incredibles on the big screen, as I watched the credits go up at the end I found myself having precisely the same thoughts as when I first saw it back in 2004. Screen after screen of names, a vast army of animators, each of whom can only have been working on a very small piece of the film: perhaps a few shots, lasting a matter of seconds. And yet all the pieces had worked together to make a story which is thrilling, funny and moving. Again I found myself wondering: how on earth do they do it? When the effects they're aiming to achieve depend so much on precise decisions about shot composition, movement and above all timing, how do they make sure each animator's miniscule contribution will work together with all the others?

By contrast, in my work life, I was at that time coming to the end of a project involving the assembly of a huge amount of web content, the creation of which had similarly been atomised into a vast number of minute tasks. It wasn't looking good. As we tried to put together the tiny fragments, some of which were just a single sentence of text, we found that some of them repeated the contents of others, some of them no longer fitted where they were meant to go because the author had "improved" them in the writing, and some of them, we only now realised, could never have fitted in their designated slot. There had been a master plan, of course, in the form of a vast spreadsheet, but it was so complex that few people understood it, and it was so large that it was impossible to print out the entire thing and have the text at a size which was actually readable. And now that we were starting to see the plan realised, we were starting to see all kinds of flaws, in terms of what it would mean for the experience of users - in this case, students. After some frantic editing, we managed to fix the worst of the problems before it all went live, so as to ensure that the content actually made sense when it was read together and that student experience would be okay. But it was never going to be great. The experience won't be like watching The Incredibles.

So again I find myself thinking, how do Pixar do it? Are there lessons we can learn?

As is well known, what they do is what every animation company does: they turn the script into storyboards - a sequence of graphic images to show, in rough, what the audience is going to see. But what I think is NOT well known is just how much detail animators go into with their storyboards. Here for example is the storyboard sequence for the Army men scene from Toy Story - which also shows how Pixar demonstrate it and test it out with their staff, a presenter pointing to each storyboard as they talk through the script and explain the key story points.

But they don't stop there. When they've a worked-out hand-drawn storyboard sequence, they animate it using video-editing software and set it against a temporary sound track, with the lines spoken by members of staff. This enables them to check even more closely how the scene will work, and to refine the pace and timing - as well as the shot composition and script - to tell the story with the proper emotional impact. They can also judge how the scene works in the context of the entire film, and some scenes never proceed beyond this stage. Here for example is one scene which was deleted from Ratatouille: the heist scene, in which the rats act as a team to steal food from the restaurant's rubbish bins, and Remy, who is supposed to be keeping lookout, becomes distracted by the vision of the splendid cuisine being prepared in the kitchen.

To sum it up, Pixar use their storyboards to make an entire film in rough, before they ever switch on their computers.

Contrast that with the type of student-experience planning which is described as "storyboarding" in online learning. The term was borrowed by the producers of multimedia applications in the 1990s, for their detailed records of the text, pictures, AV and interactions which would appear on screen together (see the linked examples at the bottom of this page from Michael Verhaart's teaching wiki ); but these "storyboards" were primarily used as assembly instructions for those building the applications, and insofar as they were used for testing, it was for testing usability, as a kind of low fidelity prototype, not for testing higher-order user experience.  Today, in online learning, as used by the University of Leicester for example, the term "storyboarding" seems to mean little more than putting the components of learning design into temporal sequence - an important piece of planning, to be sure, but quite remote from learner experience; you couldn’t talk through one of these storyboard sequences, like a Pixar presentation, and expect the audience to experience anything like what is supposed to be experienced by the learners.

Of course, the experience of studying an online course is very different from the experience of watching an animated film, which makes it intrinsically less suitable to storyboarding. For one thing, watching a film is strictly linear, whereas in a course a learner will switch their attention from place to place and even in a linear sequence will move backwards and forwards. For another, a film lasts matter of minutes or hours, rather than the tens or hundreds of hours entailed in studying a course, so it would be impractical to reproduce the experience in anything like real time. A third difference is that a film is (usually) intended for the general public, so its developers themselves are part of the intended audience, whereas following a course (usually) requires previous knowledge and understanding (to say nothing of interest in the subject!) so developers are typically not able to work through a storyboard and experience anything like an intended student.

Nevertheless, I think we should continue to strive to find ways to prototype not just the product, not just the usability, but the learner experience - and to prototype it in as close and as detailed a way as possible. Otherwise, our design efforts will focus on what is easy to plan and test, the delivery of information, without properly thinking about what learners will do with it, let alone how they will learn from it. Can we produce courses which are as great and compelling as the great Pixar films? Yes, I think we can, but to do so we need to design and craft the learner experience  at just as fine a level of detail, and not simply generate content.

Postscript

Harley Jessup, a production designer at Pixar quoted by Ian Sansom,  provides some interesting details of the number of paper storyboards created for various Pixar films, for example: The Incredibles 21,081; Monsters Inc. 46,024; Ratatouille, 72,000.

The case for formal learning - by Millie (aged 16)

For the past few years, the cutting edge talk has been about informal learning and the death of formal courses and formal educational institutions, now that the internet can provide a learner with so much information to study and so many other learners to whom to connect. This year, with the rise of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course - see review by John Daniels), the trending talk seems to be swinging back towards the traditional course, even if not the traditional institution.

So I was amused to re-discover, while clearing out my clipping collection, a brilliant statement of the case for traditional formal learning, made by a 16-year-old schoolgirl in 2005.

Millie Wilcox (aged 16, from Birmingham), was asked by a Guardian journalist whether she thought English at school should be about classics such as Chaucer or about writing skills. Her answer included the following.

The really  good thing about doing literature in school is that often you have a book and you think "Oh no" but once you've been through it in class and it's been explained to you, you realise it's really good. We've done  Pride and Prejudice and when I saw how long it was, I thought it would be really dull and boring. But in fact it's better than the TV programme. Some bits of Shakespeare are good, too. There are some books you just read for fun, but some you need help to get into.

All of which could be (and has been) said at much greater length by learning theorists and by learning and teaching consultants (such as Clive Shepherd). But I prefer Millie's down-to-earth and learner-centred formulation. The case (or place) for formal learning is for those things you just wouldn't study on your own ("you think 'Oh no'", "really dull and boring"), but when you have studied them thanks to the compulsion of a formal programme you're glad you did ("better than the TV").

Get that: "better than the TV programme". Respect, teacher. Respect, Austen. And respect, Millie.

Reference: The Guardian, 26 April 2005, "Multiple choice: should we study classics such as Chaucer, or concentrate on writing skills?"

Seen and heard: September 2012

Fundació Coll Bardolet - a favourite art gallery, when visiting Valdemossa, Mallorca; though his landscapes are impressive, truly stunning are his pictures of Mallorquin folk dancers: energy and movement conveyed in a zen-like way by just a few strokes of the brush.

Paintings by Ingacio Gelabert - the young man who carried our bags at our holiday hotel turned out to be an up-and-coming artist, fresh back from exhibiting in China, helping out in the family business.

Downton Abbey new season - starting with money troubles for the estate, very authentic.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974 - by Domenic Sandbrook, which I bought after watching his compelling TV series, to get more of his historically-detached view of a period which was very formative for me personally, and also (he argues) for Britain as a whole.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold - audiobook with Michael Jayston (Peter Guillam in the 1970s TV dramatisations) reading John le Carré's words very well. Though my wife did think it was an odd choice for holiday entertainment, while sun-bathing.

Maid in Manhattan - Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in a Cinderella / Pretty Woman re-versioning, seen on TV. Interesting, with all the guff talked about Downton Abbey's rigidly divided world of masters and servants: are there less rigid divisions between international celebrities, staying in $2000-a-night hotel rooms, and the maids by whom those rooms are cleaned? Also interesting: invisibility is presented (I'm sure authentically) as being the cardinal quality of a hotel maid, just as it was for domestic servants in the Downton era.

Hope Springs - new film, with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as a middle-aged couple trying to re-discover the romantic marital spark. Nice to see (1) the pair of them, especially Tommy Lee Jones, getting better with age; (2) a positive and realistic-looking presentation of psychotherapy, in this case couple therapy; (3) older people having sex. Sorry kids, your parents did do all that, you know, otherwise you wouldn't be here.

Seen and heard: August 2012

Kelmscott Manor - William Morris's country home, as featured in News from Nowhere. Well worth the visit (especially when shown round by a friend who's a volunteer guide), but the arts and crafts strangely de-politicised.
A History of Art in Three Colours - three-part BBC documentary by James Fox (the art historians are getting younger). Some truly surprising revelations; I'd never before realised the creepy association of White.
The Best of Men - powerful BBC drama based on the pioneering work done at Stoke Manderville hospital by Dr Ludwig Guttmann in the rehabilitation of paralysed and amputee soldiers, which gave rise to the paralympics.
The Last Weekend - compelling but horrifying ITV dramatisation of Blake Morrison's novel; had to keep watching to find out how it ended, even while disliking every single one of the characters.
Parade's End - top-notch BBC dramatisation which runs along at a cracking pace thanks to sharp script by Tom Stoppard and eloquent performances by Benedict Cummerbatch and others; surprised that the contemporary-sounding lines about "Toryism for the pigs trough" aren't quoted more often.
Inspector Montalbano - the second season at last, bellissimo!
Olympics closing ceremony - nice to watch Annie Lennox and Brian May showing the younger generation how it's done.

Seen and heard: July 2012

The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner - a tribute to language, landscape, and local culture.
Mohamad at Eton, 30 min film in Al Jazeera (English)’s Witness series, following a boy from a refugee camp in south Lebanon to Eton on a Horizon Foundation Scholarship.
Heart v. Mind: What Makes Us Human? - Moving and engaging BBC documentary by David Malone on contemporary heart research, showing how the organ is involved in a person's emotional life and much more than a mechanical pump: it actually has its own "little brain".
The Fear Index - latest novel by Robert Harris, clever and gripping and (like The Ghost) very much of the moment. Read it while it's hot.
The Passadena Roof Orchestra - playing at The Stables; 1920s swing, reliably good fun.

Allegri StringQuartet - performing as part of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival. (They never used to be this young, surely?)

The Juice of the Pomegranate - programme of choral music (mainly Renaissance / Baroque) inspired by the Song of Songs, sung by vocal group Exaudi as part of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival.

Olympic opening ceremony - started watching out of curiosity but stayed to the end, moved by the jubiliation of the athletes, many of whom were just pleased to be there and never mind the medals

The Incredibles - one of the greatest of the Pixar animations, having a welcome big-screen presentation at the Leicester Phoenix.

Beauty and surprise in ordinary places

Last Friday was the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast on ClassicFM. To celebrate, a group of musicians did a flashmob performance of Zadok the Priest (the first piece played on ClassicFM, and the best intro of any music track, any genre, ever) in the middle of a supermarket.


What's extraordinary, of course, isn't the performance itself (thought that's pretty good) but where it takes place: in the middle of everyday life, when people aren't expecting it.

I particularly like the bit where a woman phones a friend and then holds up her mobile so that she can listen too (a still of this is used as the title picture of the video).

I also like the fact that the musicians end up performing in the Fruit and Veg section, beneath a large sign reading "Bananas". Yeah, bananas! But also beautiful. And it's a reminder to all of us concerned with writing and producing learning materials that even if much of what we produce is bound to be humdrum and mundane (there are just so many things a course has to get through, just like supermarket shopping) we should always remember to include moments of surprise and beauty too.

Killing with kindness

Last night I watched The Best of Men: a beautifully-made BBC drama about Dr Ludwig Guttman who transformed the care of patients with spinal injuries at Stoke Manderville Hospital and invented the Paralympic Games as part of his rehabilitation programme. One of the things that was made very clear was that the nursing staff whose methods he challenged and overturned were not uncaring or unkind: they immobilised and sedated patients up to the eye-balls because they could see that they were in pain. It was in fact kindness that motivated them, and they initially resisted Guttman's methods because they seemed unkind: he reduced the patients' medication, forced them to move, and woke them up every two hours at night in order to turn them so that they didn't get bedsores.

And then this morning I read the OU production department's super new style guide for writing student guidance material on using our online systems. Many of the problems it identifies with how guidance is too often written are not the products of thoughtlessness or incompetence: they're the products of kindness, of trying to help students, of trying to explain everything to them.

For example: consider a piece of guidance entitled "Using your module website". Its introduction reads: "This document offers a guide to using your module website while studying with the OU." How could this introduction be improved? By being totally deleted. It adds nothing to what's already in the title. Yet kindness motivates people to write such introductions, knowing the trouble which some students have finding their way around the OU websites and concerned that students need to have the purpose of the document explained to them.

The same kind impulse leads to verbosity and unnecessary complexity. For example: "If you are looking for information on forums, the document is called ‘Forum guidance’ and is available in the Computing Guide. The direct URL is http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=252916". Here's what the style guide recommends as an improvement: "For information on forums, see ‘Forum guidance [link]’ in the Computing Guide."

For those accustomed to lengthy reading times and print documents, this style may seem clipped and abrupt, or perhaps even rude. (The style guide actually recommends avoiding using the word "please".) But useless and unnecessary words have a greater cost online: they fill up the screen, making it harder to see the things that are necessary and important, forcing the reader to expend cognitive load on working out where to devote their attention.

I believe that the best way to be kind and considerate to an online user is to respect the value of their time and come to the point quickly, which is why I think this new style guide is great. But I can imagine it attracting criticism in just the way that Guttman did, and for very much the same reasons. Hopefully it will be vindicated, as he was!

Why don't students with IT problems phone the Helpdesk?

An advisor on the Open University's Computing Helpdesk told me the other day that a major reason why students don't phone the Helpdesk when they have computer problems is that they're afraid they'll be asked questions they don't understand and can't answer.

It's obvious when you think about it. But it needs statng, for those of us fortunate enough to feel relatively comfortable with technology. We need to understand that the fear which paralyses many people isn't just fear of technology itself, but fear of the humiliation which comes from being reduced to a state of ignorance and incompetence.

There's a great Not-the-Nine-o'-Clock-News sketch all about that fear. It was made around 1980, when personal computers and mobile phones were still in the future, and it was hi-fi audio systems that were the geek's favourite cutting-edge technology. The premise is simple: Mel Smith walks into a hi-fi showroom and asks to buy a gramophone. The shop assistants laugh at him.



Just after that conversation with the Helpdesk advisor, I read about some interesting work by Clare Lee and Sue Johnston-Wilder on fear of maths: a close cousin surely of the fear of technology. Their aim is to find ways to develop "mathematical resilience" in children and adults - so this isn't so much about people not having problems as having confidence that problems can be solved. Their approach is based on collaborative working, mutual support, and a lot of talking. "Articulation of ideas improves learners' confidence in both their learning and their competence to use mathematical concepts. In other words, when learners have the opportunity to 'talk like a mathematician' they can become someone who 'knows and can do mathematics' - they begin to see themselves as capable." (OpenMinds, June 2012, p 47, www.open.ac.uk/openminds)

What this suggests to me is a language-learning approach to IT: helping people develop confidence with the technology by developing their capability to talk about it. This would be rather like the language-learning approach to academic skills, currently being pursued by colleagues in the OpenELT secton of my faculty. I wonder if anybody's tried this before?

Short writing (2): Virgin media short

My sister's two-minute film The Test has just been entered for the Virgin Media Shorts competition.

I think it's great! (And that's not just fraternal loyalty.) But I'm also interested to see how the script has changed since the first draft I saw. She set herself the task of telling a pretty complex story in just two minutes, and the problem from the start was: just how explicit does it have to be, so that viewers can understand what's going on?

The answer turned out to be: pretty explicit. To begin with, people who read the script were saying that they weren't getting it first time (and one can't count on people watching a film more than once), so Ros had to find ways to make the story clearer without increasing the length and weighing the film down. For educational writers and learning designers, this is this is the take-away point: making things explicit doesn't mean using a lot of words and trying to say everything. In the case of this film,visual cues, slight changes to the wording, and a few captions give viewers enough pointers to work out the rest for themselves.

I'm particularly pleased that she used my suggestion to have Adi snap his fingers at one key point - which tells the viewer that the transition which follows is something which he wills to happen, and not a fantasy or a flashback. If that doesn't make much sense without the context, you'll just have to watch the film!

iTunes University: better than the real thing?

Reviewing some draft course materials about the evaluation of e-learning innovations, I was reminded of a rather nice piece of evaluation research which caused quite a stir when it was published in 2009. The nice thing about it is that it's very simple, yet perfectly illustrates the importance of not taking evaluation data at face value and looking at what's going on beneath the surface.

The experiment was very simple. A university psychology class was divided into two; half went to a regular lecture, and half were given an audio podcast of the same lecture. A week later they took a test on the lecture content - and guess what happened? The students who'd had the podcast scored significantly higher.

Cue headlines in the educational press and blogosphere, along the lines of "iTunesU better than the real thing!", and delight for the proponents of new technology (such as here, here, and here). But there was something puzzling about the result. As any lecturer who has tried producing audio teaching materials knows all too well, the average lecture  makes a pretty poor podcast: stripped of the motivation and engagement factors which come from physical presence at a live lecture, the soundtrack on its own tends to be dull and slow - unless the lecturer is a truly stellar performer, which most are not. So how was it that the students who had the lecture podcast did better in the test?

The answer of course lies in the use which students made of the podcast (which was only reported by some of the commentators, such as here and here). Most of these students took notes, and took really good notes, some of them listening to the podcast several times to make sure they'd understood everything. That they scored highly is not surprising! Those students who DIDN'T take notes from the podcast  - one listened to it while working out at the gym - got rubbish scores. So the real finding turns out to be, not that a podcast is better than a live lecture, but that taking notes is better than not taking notes - and a podcast can be one way of helping students take good notes.

There are two lessons I see I this in story. The first is that evaluation of learning technology needs to get down to the level of student activity, because it's there, in what students do or don't do, that changes need to occur for there to be benefit. The second is that when we introduce new learning technologies, we need also to work on students' understanding of how to use them. There's a cultural norm that you take notes in university lectures, but there's no such common understanding in the case of podcasts. In fact, the cultural norm is rather then other way, a podcast being something you listen to while doing something else, such as working out at the gym. The associations of the technology encourage students to assume that they will learn the information simply by listening to it.

The malignant way in which information technology supports a view of education as the transmission of information is something on which I'm intending to blog in a future post.

References
Dan McKinney, Jennifer L. Dyck and Elise S. Luber, "iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?", Computers and Education, 52 (2009), 617-623
Hannah Fearn, "Coming to a screen near you", Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 June 2009, p 38

Seen and heard: June 2012

Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) sermon for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations - on dedication and public service. It was attacked by the Daily Mail, so he must be getting something right.
Julia Fisher, Bach Violin Concertos - with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Ordered this CD after hearing the first movement of the double violin concerto played on ClassicFM: great sound, great rhythm!
Inca - band specialising in South American music, after the manner of Incantation, one of whose members is in the new group. Nice to hear them perform live at The Stables, but afterwards it was an Incantation CD that I bought.
The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner. For those who think of Alan Garner's books as being about magic, there's no magic here - except for the magic of landscape and language, of stone and iron and wood, of the craft of the hand and the bond of the family.
The Identity of the History of Science and Medicine, by Andrew Cunningham - a collection of articles by my friend and former colleague, including our jointly-authored and already-anthologised "De-Centring the 'Big Picture': The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science" (History of Science, 26 [1993], 407-432).
Antigone - cracking production by the National Theatre, using a straight-to-the-point modern English translation (everyday language, without being colloquial), and a top-notch performance by Christopher Ecclestone. Bang up to date, with modern army uniforms and an opening scene echoing the assassination of Bin Laden, and its themes of authority and morality, power and defiance, terror and fate; a play about Now, not about then. Truly, as the Chorus says: "Today it has happened here."
Amerzone - 1999 adventure game by Benoît Sokal, which led to his later greater Syberia. Lovely artwork, but this being a first-person game (in the mould of Myst) I missed the presence of a protagonist; I think there's a good reason why more recent narrative games have gone for the third-person approach.

Seen and heard: May 2012

Debussy's Danse Sacrée et Danse Profane, at a concert by the Milton Keynes City Orchestra - also on the programme Britten's Simple Symphony and Vaughan Williams' Dives and Lazarus, and three short pieces by pupils at The Purcell School, following a week-long project with the Orchestra.
The Night Shift, by Sarah Waters
West Wing spoof - starring several members of the original case, in a public service film to promote walking (though talking while you walk, as the West Wing people characteristically do, is strictly optional)
The King and the Playwright - BBC TV series presenting Shakespeare as a Jacobean rather than an Elizabethan author, showing how his later plays reflected the religio-politics and social concerns of the reign of James I / VI.
War and Peace - the Russian version, directed by and starring Sergey Bondarchuk, with the Red Army as extras in the battle scenes.
Bette and Joan, starring Anita Dobson as Joan Crawford, Gretta Scacci as Bette Davies, in a two-hander exploring the friction between the two stars during their filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.
Episodes, series 2 - not as good as the first series (now that there's no obvious sense of direction) but still very funny.
Cloven tongues - Rowan Williams sermon on the theology of biblical translation, given last year during the commemoration of the King James Bible.

Being known, as a condition for learning

One of the few good things about being ill over a bank holiday weekend is that it gives you a chance to catch up with those videos you've been meaning to watch for ages - in my case, a documentary called "We Are the People We've Been Waiting For", distributed with The Guardian a couple of years ago. The film is a call for transformation in the educational system, to give the next generation the creative and human qualities (and not just the employability skills) they will need for the road ahead. The case is well-made and engagingly stated, though I don't think there's anything in it which would be new or surprising to anyone working in the field.

Except perhaps one thing. The film featured an American school called MetWest High where they have a zero per cent drop-out rate and a 96% graduation rate, which Eve Gordon the Principal explained by the three conditions for learning which they aimed to fulfil. When she started her list, the very first item surprised me completely and had me scrabbling for a notepad.

What would be your top three conditions for learning, those circumstances in which people learn best? My guess is that most learning theorists would include the second on Gordon's list:

"People learn best when they are intrinsically motivated, when they are learning about something that they chose, that they are excited about, that they have real questions about."

The third of her conditions for learning might not occur quite so readily to people in higher education:

"People learn best when they do mind and hand learning together."

Manual operations of course tend to be ignored or disparaged in universities, as though the only learning processes of relevance to their curriculum are purely intellectual.  We acknowledge the importance of "active learning", but we tend to conceive this only in terms of mental activity. Perhaps we should be more explicit about the importance of physical action even in academic learning: the physicality of writing actual notes and actual answers, the embodiment of knowledge and understanding in physical artefacts, the physical transfer of resources from one location or context to another. I found myself thinking that we still have much to learn from school education.

But it was Eve Gordon's very first condition for learning which was the surprise for me.

"People learn best when they are known well, in the context of a relationship."

Now the importance of relationship is  I believe seriously under-acknowledged by theorists. My experience is that if you try to talk about it, people think that you're talking about learning communities or social learning: about peer relationships between learners, not what Gordon is talking about here, which is the fundamental relationship between learner and teacher. Ken Robinson described it like this, elsewhere in the film: " The kids who are not doing well suddenly find themselves in a programme with a teacher, somebody who looks into their eyes and sees who they really are, gives them a different way of doing [things], and they come back to life."

Practitioners have long acknowledged the importance of knowing your learners (in the sense of connaître, acquaintance, rather than savoir, cognition) and of giving them a sense of being known. It's why at the Open University we have from our foundation put much more effort and investment into tutorial support than other distance learning providers; when students come to us short on self-confidence or familiarity with high-level study, the sense of there being someone else who believes in them may make all the difference between their being able to marshal the resources to continue and giving up the unequal struggle. In our learning materials, where the relationship with our students is mediated through text, we always address the student in the second person, as "You", adopting the voice of what Derek Rowntree called "a tutorial in print" - and when we get it right, as I have found in my research, students do indeed feel that there is a teacher who knows and understands them, and with whom they develop a relationship of trust.

I wish there was better theoretical understanding of how this works: what's happening in the learner when they have this sense of being known, of there being someone who believes in them, who will hold the promise, the future for them, and how it is that this can affect their learning so profoundly. What is it that the teacher reaches in and touches, that brings about this transformation? If somebody understands this, I wish that they would tell me.

Reference: Derek Rowntree, Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers (Kogan Page, 1994), p 14.

Short writing: when less is more

Some tips on writing very, very short stories have been posted by David Gaffney in a Guardian blog. (Some readers' stories, inspired by these tips, are here.)

Most of these tips are applicable also to writing of learning materials, when we need to write concisely to suit the online medium or simply need a punchier, more motivational style than the academic norm.

• "Start in the middle." Academic writing traditionally starts with the most general and abstract statement of the subject, which may make logical sense but is precisely the wrong thing to do for ease of understanding. Just as back-story is best introduced some way in, when you already care about the characters, rather than in chronological order, so generalities and abstractions make more sense once the particulars and concrete instances are established.
• "Don't use too many characters." The teaching equivalent would be: you can't say everything that you know, so you're going to have to be selective.
• "Make sure the ending isn't at the end." The rationale here is that once your reader reaches the end of the text, you've lost contact with them, so if you want to set them thinking about what your conclusion means and what its implications are, you need to do that before the end of the text.
• "Sweat your title - make it work for a living." In academic writing, a title's main function is to describe and summarise the contents. In other kinds of writing, especially online, a title is often the basis on which a reader decides to read your piece or not. A description or summary is one of the ways to bring a reader in, but a good title can do more: it can pique the interest and set the tone, like the titles of a TV series.
• "Make your last line ring like a bell." It's not only in fiction that we can aspire to writing final lines that "leave the reader with something which will continue to sound after the story has finished."
• "Write long, then go short." Sometimes writing longer than the word limit is the only way to begin, but after that you need to prune, prune, prune. I sometimes advise writers to pretend that they live in the days of telegrams, where you had to pay for every single word, and every word you could cut out of your message was money saved.

Recently an academic colleague thanked me for something I'd said to her three years ago when writing her first online course materials and facing a terrifyingly small word limit. What I'd advised her was to think in terms of writing haiku: a small number of words, getting the reader to do the maximum amount of work - active learning, active reading, at its most extreme.

There's an old example sometimes given to illustrate the nature of story. This:

The king died

is an event. This:

The kind died and the queen died

is two events in temporal sequence - still not a story. This:

The king died and the queen died of grief

is a story. Its power lies not in the words but in what the reader is inspired to bring to the text. If you can get the reader to do the bulk of the work, you don't need a lot of words to tell a story or provoke deep thought.

eBook readers and academic reading

Research on the use of eBooks in higher education suggests that reading devices such as Kindles and iPads aren't going to transform university study in the way some have hoped.

A literature review by Simon Cross in the OU's Institute of Educational Technology covers twelve recent publications and finds a remarkably consistent picture emerging of the advantages and disadvantages of eBooks. The three main advantages reported are those one would expect, and apply whether eBooks are read online with a conventional computer or on a portable reading device: ease of access (by comparison with a physical library), low or zero cost (by comparison with expensive print textbooks), and the searchability of texts. In addition, where students were issued with reading devices for the purposes of the trial, staff found advantage in being able to assume a common hardware and software platform. The only surprise here is that portability, when accessed through a mobile device, did not seem to figure strongly as an advantage.

The disadvantages, however, reveal an important distinction between leisure and academic use. While respondents were very happy with eBook readers for reading novels or magazines, they experienced significant difficulties in using them for the kind of high-level reading required for university work. As I have already observed, academic reading falls into the category which Jakob Nielsen has called "high-value use", for which mobile devices are less well suited than desktop or laptop machines because of their smaller screen size and inferior keyboard interfaces. With the help of the IET literature review,  it's possible to go further and identify some of the distinctive requirements of academic reading.

1  Non-linear navigation.  When reading for academic purposes, you need to do more than simply move forwards through the document. You may need to skip back to earlier parts to remind yourself of what was said previously or skip ahead to see where the text is leading, and then return to where you were. You may need to flick back and forth repeatedly between two or more parts of the text to compare and relate them. You may need to skim read the text to get a sense of its overall structure. All these things are possible on an eBook reader, but they're not simple, because the devices are optimised to show a single page at a time and to navigate linearly forwards and backwards.
2  Note-taking. Academic reading is active reading, to understand and assimilate and interpret, and that usually involves taking notes. Highlighting text and adding annotations, which are supported (if awkwardly) by many eBook readers, are helpful, but only provide part of what is needed. Deep reading involves incorporating the text into your own understanding, which means making your own synthesis: the notes  need to be part of your own text, not the text of the document you're reading. Mobile devices, because of the limitations of their interfaces, tend not to support such synthesis very well; it was said of the iPad on its launch that it was a consumption device rather than a creation device, and (notwithstanding the iPad paintings of David Hockney) that largely remains true. A more fundamental limitation with mobile devices is that they are designed to do only one thing at a time, so that task switching is poor, whereas for note-taking you need to be doing at least two things simultaneously: reading and writing. The difficulties are such that one lecturer concluded that eBook readers were encouraging passive reading in his students.

What seems to be emerging is a pattern of mixed use: combining screen reading for discovery and searching with print reading for note-taking and deep study; using a mobile device for reading and another device for note-taking; or using an eBook reader as a secondary device for when portability is important. eBook readers may have made on-screen reading more comfortable and convenient, through their high resolution imaging and re-sizeable text as well as their physical lightness; but they are unlikely to transform academic use unless and until they can better support these high value functions. Split screen operation would be a start.


Postscript. Since writing the above, I've seen this interesting post by Alex Golub, an American academic and iPad enthusiast, who makes very similar points about the limitations of an iPad, by comparison with a laptop, for academic work.

References The IET literature review is available only to Open University staff through http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=9673, but the reports surveyed include the following:

• Darden School of Business (2010) Darden Shares Results of Kindle Experiment,
  University of Virginia News and Media. 5 November 2010. Available at:
  http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/Media/Darden-News-Articles/2010/Darden-Shares-
  Results-of-Kindle-Experiment/
• Marmarelli, T. and Ringle, M. (2010) The Reed College Kindle Study. 26 February
  2010. Available at http://www.reed.edu/cis/about/kindle_pilot/Reed_Kindle_report.pdf
• Li, C., Poe, F., Potter, M, Quigley, B. and Wilson, J. (2011) UC Libraries Academic e-
  Book Usage Survey: Springer e-Book Pilot Project, University of California Libraries.
• Foasberg, N. (2011) Adoption of E-Book Readers among College Students: A
  Survey, Information Technology and Libraries, September 2011, 108-128

Data processing vs. getting things done

I think the reason I like Jakob Nielsen's online posts so much, and always seem to get something from them, is the way he alternates concrete observational detail with top-level principles, so that you learn to see in a different way: you learn to look at websites and software interfaces as he does, through the lens of usability design.

His latest post, though starting off with detailed discussion of the winning applications in some recent awards for user interface design, rapidly moves into some refreshing ideas on what we should be striving for in systems design.

"Software's real goal should not be to simply process transactions in a system where users are nothing more than data operators who click required buttons to make things happen. Rather, software should work to augment human capabilities, helping us to overcome weaknesses and emphasize our strengths. "

It sounds obvious. Yet the temptation for software designers, who tend to be more interested in data processing that the intended users, is to design the kind of interfaces they would like themselves. As Alan Cooper observed (2004, pp 93-94), there are two kinds of people: those who on entering an aeroplane would turn left into the cockpit if they could and those who'd prefer to turn right into the cabin; in other words, those who are prepared to tolerate complexity if it gives them control and those who are prepared to tolerate absence of control if it gives them simplicity. Most IT people, including most interface designers, are of the first kind; most users are of the second. As Nielsen says:

"We want to empower users to be creative and accomplish advanced things with our software. But we should also recognize that users sometimes just want to get their tasks done without having to explore numerous options and new ideas. ...To speed users through infrequent or complicated tasks, it's often good to present a linear workflow with minimal disruptions or alternatives. Yes, the lack of flexibility can feel constraining, but it can be faster to just power through all the steps instead of having to ponder which steps are needed. Also, the cost of too much freedom is that users have to decide the order of the steps — something that they're often happy enough to delegate to the computer. "

The temptation for software designers to complexify the interface is compounded by the temptation for teachers to complexify the learning options for our learners. There are so many things we want them to do, or to be able to do, or which we think they might want to do, and we're so worried about whether we've provided enough that we pile resource upon resource upon resource, and we're so worried about whether they'll find them that we put them all at the top level of the interface, until the learner is faced with something as complicated and intimidating as an aeroplane cockpit.

What we need to remember is that most learners, most of the time, are not interested in the technical system or even (though we hate to admit it!) in the learning process. They just want to get on and do the next thing. The trick for us is to create an interface which will let them do that with minimum fuss, and yet provide them with the power to go deeper and do more when the occasion arises.

Reference: Alan Cooper (2004), The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, 2nd edn (Sams Publishing)

Seen and heard: April 2012

The Adjustment Bureau - re-watched on DVD, having enjoyed the film so much in the cinema. Now we know the reason for those odd technical failures such as a mobile phone signal failing or an email going astray: it's the men in suits making adjustments!
White Heat - BBC friends-across-the-years drama series, rapidly becoming more profound and moving than its sixties-nostalgic first episode suggested.Divine Women - Bettany Hughes recovering the ancient history of women as gods, priestesses and promoters of faith. I thought I knew this territory, but many of the women she featured were new to me.
Meet the Romans with Mary Beard - real history from below, with the slums, toilets and mass cemeteries of ancient Rome.
The 70s - no nostalgia fest this, but a proper historical survey by Domenic Sandbrook (also consultant on White Heat). It makes a lot of sense of what I didn't understand properly at the time.
British Light Music Classics - the music of a very specific era, from the growth of radio (or "wireless") ownership to the advent of rock and roll, superbly re-created by Ronald Corp and the New London Orchestra. They're all here: Paul Temple, The Archers, Desert Island Discs, Dick Barton - and many more you know but didn't know you knew.
Our Lady of Walsingham - Anglo-Catholic shrine to the Virgin Mary; worth the pilgrimage.
Norwich Cathedral - and one of the best guided tours I've had in a long time (free, with no hanging around for a tip), the continuous presence of volunteer staff being testimony to how close its ties are with the local community.
Norfolk Summer: Making The Go-Between (by Christopher Hartop, 2011) - bought at Norwich Cathedral, which features in the 1971 film. I remember seeing the film at school in, I think, 1973; being schoolkids, we laughed at the Harold Pinter dialogue, but even we could see what a great film it was (despite not including the book's memorable opening line: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.")
Vera Series 2 - with the wonderful Brenda Blethyn completely out-classing most other TV crime dramas on the box today.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen - well-crafted, well-acted British rom com, with Kirsten Scott Thomas as a female Malcom Tucker, especially hilarious when bawling out her own kids.

Seen and heard: March 2012

How Users Matter, edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (MIT Press 2003) - collection of sociology of science papers on how users have co-constructed technologies such as the telephone, mass electrification, internet cafes, and the Minimoog music synthesiser.
ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environment) project workshop on desktop gadgets to support self-regulated learning, hosted by the British Institute for Learning and Development workshop, 14 March 2012.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Quintessential Phase - the 2007 radio version of the Douglas Adams's pessimistic (but still wickedly funny) conclusion to his sequence, when the new edition of the Guide has the single word "Panic" on the cover and the Earth is destroyed by the Vogons again, but this time finally and irrevocably.
Still Life - gritty and disturbing adventure game noir from 2005.
The Artist, Oscar-winning soundtrack to the  2011 film, by Ludovic Bource.
Kyrie, from Missa de Meridiana Terra, by Neil Van der Watt (music for choir and percussion, 2005) - heard in a Jesuit Media Initiative podcast, recording unfortunately not available in this country.
Empire (TV series) -  Jeremy Paxman nicely combining ironic historical detachment with personal empathy for the survivors of the British Empire, colonisers and colonised alike.