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.