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?