Boring messages: how to make them interesting?

If you've ever fantasised about making a boring message more interesting by setting it to music, then you should see what Virgin America have done with their in-flight safety video.

It's great fun, of course, but this just confirms my doubts how much of a solution this is to the problem of a boring message. How much attention would you pay this video on the second or third in-flight viewing, let alone the tenth or the fiftieth?

But there are some nice touches. I particularly like how they deal with the problem of soundng like a prat when compelled by legislation to say things which pretty much everyone knows. Their approach is to acknowledge the problem and become arch. ("For the 0.001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before - really?....") It's one way of retaining dignity and credibility under impossible requirements.

Seen and heard: November 2013

Articles and postings

Review of Writing on the Wall: Social Media: The First 2000 Years by Tom Standage. "Standage's central argument [is] that mass media, the means of distributing information that we have become so used to, are an aberration, closely linked to the industrial phase of history. Now centralised industrial processes have given way to distributed, technological ones, with individuals at the controls, we are settling back into old ways of doing things." (David Shariatmadari in The Guardian)

The Dunning-Kruger effect - in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average . So for example about 80-90% of drivers think they have above-average ability. (Guardian Headquarters blog and Mind Hacks blog)

Top nine things you need to know about 'listicles' - a listicle being an article in the form of a list: an increasingly popular form because they're easy both to write and to read. (Steven Poole in The Guardian)

How’s your creativity coming along? (Dilbert cartoon)

Shows and events, books and games

Heavenly Spaces - concert by Polymnia (in which I sing) in the beautiful resonant space of the Milton Keynes City Church of Christ the Cornerstone. Highlight for some of the audience was our rendition of Monteverdi madrigals; highlight for me was the solo cello playing of the stupendously talented Gemma Rosefield.

Philomena - film of the true story of the journalist Martin Sixsmith helping an elderly Irish woman trace the infant son she was forced to give up for adoption when she was a girl. Judi Dench as excellent as one would expect as Philomena, but Steve Coogan as Sixsmith was a revelation: he can do serious, and do it very well. A tremendous film; you may start thinking that it's going to be a gently sentimental story - what Sixsmith calls disparagingly a "human interest story", the kind of journalism he doesn't do - but gradually and insidiously the film gets you in its grip, so that when the story proceeds to its final shocking revelations, the impact is colossal.

Cheek by Jowl - beautiful collection of articles and talks by Ursula Le Guin on the theme of the human-animal relationship in fiction, though actually the piece which resonated me most was one in which she talked about the origins and development of her Earthsea cycle.

The Choir: Sing while you Work - second TV series, in which Gareth Malone forms and trains workplace choirs in organisations such as a city council, a fire service, and a city bank. There are probably many other choirmasters who could do what he does in terms of getting a choir going; but what he has uniquely is the ability to make this work on television: to let us get to know the people and their jobs and to make us care about them and what the singing means to them. (As I've blogged elsewhere, "it's not so much the song or the singing which makes its impact on us: it's who the singers are.")

The Coronation of Poppea, performed by English Touring Opera - I could have done without the Russian Revolutionary staging, with Poppea dressed like Grayson Perry in his transvestite persona, but most of the singing was really great, especially Helen Sherman singing Nero.

Richard II - the Royal Shakespeare Company production, broadcast to cinemas, with David Tennant in the title role. A good production (though not a great one, says my wife, who's favourite Shakespeare play it is), and wholly immersive, with excellent camera work, moving between close-up and whole-stage view largely seamlessly. David Tennant was excellent as Richard, of course, but Bollingbrooke felt shallow by comparison; as Richard says, they're like twin buckets in a well: when one rises the other goes down, so it should be possible to see them as counterparts or equals.

An Adventure in Space and Time - nostalgic (for me) TV drama about the creation of Dr Who, focusing on the roles of Sydney Newman, the head of drama whose idea it was; Verity Lambert, the producer who made it happen; and Bill Hartnell, the fading actor who was chosen to play the first doctor.

Gravity - astonishing new space film, largely carried by Sandra Bullock (George Clooney being in a support role), with echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and (how embarrassing to admit knowledge of this) Barbarella. Unexpectedly intense; the tension never really lets up for all of the 90 mins, until she take her first shaky steps back on Earth. I'm still not sure what it was all about, though.

Setting boundaries: psychotherapy and spirituality workshop at Turvey Abbey. A day well-spent in the company of spiritual directors and therapists, provoking troubling reflections on what happens when boundaries break down - or are compulsively defended.

The Odyssey: a soldier's road home - article by Charlotte Higgins in Guardian Review. Penetrating interpretation of the return of Odysseus, bringing out aspects of the story which were wholly new to me - setting it alongside the contemporary experience of returning war veterans.

The singers and the song

One of the lovely things about Gareth Malone's TV series Sing While You Work is that he makes putting together a workplace choir not just about getting people to sing but about finding their voice. The bits of the programmes where he learns about the singers and their jobs, and what really moves them about their work, are the mose unique and usually the most moving parts. And one of the things he does is to find a song which sums up what they do and which they can really sing and mean it. As with The Zimmers performing My Generation, it's not so much the song or the singing which makes the impact: it's who the singers are.

So here's the Lewisham and Greenwich choir from Series 1, performing Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, mashed up with Coldplay's Fix You. Have a tissue ready; this one goes to the heart.



Even though not on sale until 9 December (£1.98 from the iTunes store), the bookies have this as joint fourth favourite to be Christmas Number 1 - which would be a welcome change!

Disclosure: the video was produced by my sister's company London Video Productions.

My Doctor Who memory: the Daleks in Trafalgar Square

5 December 1964. The Doctor was William Hartnell, and this was only the second ever Dalek story, the one in which the Daleks invade a near-future Earth. I was five, nearly six, and I was just discovering Doctor Who and experiencing that peculiar ambivalence familiar to subsequent generations of children: that of it's being terrifying, beyond anything else in our televisual experience - but also entirely compelling. The story is notable in the overall Who narrative, because it's the one in which his grand-daughter Susan stays behind to marry her nice resistance fighter and work for the post-war reconstruction of Earth. But for me it was memorable, in fact burned itself into my memory, because it showed the Daleks in a place which I knew intimately.

We didn't live in London, but we often drove there, and my father taught me the names of the landmarks: Hammersmith Bridge, Piccadilly Circus with its neon lights and statue of Eros, and Trafalgar Square with its stone lions and Nelson's Column. Practising my geography, I used them to mark the stages of our journeys, counting them off and naming them as we passed. They were not only part of London, they were part of my life.

So I'm watching Doctor Who, and there's this bit where Barbara, who's fallen in with a group of resistance fighters, is helping this old and wheelchair-bound hero of the conflict escape, because the Daleks are closing in on their location. In a long filmed sequence, with another woman of the resistance, they race along the Victoria Embankment, and then have to hide as a Dalek convey passes over Westminster Bridge. When the coast is clear, they move on quickly to Trafalgar Square - but the Daleks have got there first. The camera view starts at the top of Nelson's Column, then pans down to the stone lions, revealing the Daleks gathering there. The effect was breath-taking and astonishing for me; the Daleks were no longer just on television: they had invaded my life.<1>


(The Victorian Embankment / Trafalgar Square sequence begins at timecode 5:03)

Many years later, watching the episode on DVD, I had a flash of association with an image which I only got to know as an adult: the famous newsreel footage of the Nazi army marching into Paris past the Arc de Triomphe. The sense of violation, of a deeply familiar landmark being desecrated by something which should absolutely not be there, was just the same. I was also aware of how many associations there must quite deliberately have been in that episode when originally shown, for grown-ups who remembered the Second World War and knew about Nazi-occupied Europe: the intimidation, the resistance, the labour camps, and the occupied people pressed into service as collaborators: the humans who had been turned into Robomen.<2> The Doctor himself most obviously resembled an Eastern European refugee: cultured yet poor, wandering far from his native land, the generation between himself and his grand-daughter conspicuous by its absence, presumably due to war or armed conflict.



But back in 1964, my dear mother indulged my obsession. She always decorated our (home-made) Christmas cake with style and imagination, and so that year our Christmas cake featured the Daleks in Trafalgar Square. Nelson's Column was a stick of rock, with the plastic lions from my Noah's Ark around its base and Noah himself standing in for Nelson. The Daleks themselves were made of round chocolate biscuits in layers, with smarties on their outsides. It was a good end to a fantastic story. The Daleks might have conquered the Earth, but we ate them for Christmas.

Notes

<1> This story was the first in Dr Who to use extensive location filming - to great effect. The image of the Daleks on Westminster Bridge is well-known because of a publicity still (not reflecting the shots used in the actual episode), which was later imitated on a Radio Times cover in 2005 (image 14) and the 50th anniversary programmes.
<2> The World War 2 and Nazi occupation references are discussed in the commentary on the BBC Dr Who website, and in the Wikipedia entry.

The secret of learning design - on a T-shirt

This excellent T-shirt is produced by the same designers who produced the much-circulated graphics on How to Care for Introverts / Extroverts.

As soon as I saw the design, I forwarded the link to a friend who finds some of her work colleagues need to have the same things explained to them repeatedly, or think that if they're sent on a training course they'll magically be able to do their job. She loved the design, as I knew she would.

But it later occurred to me that this T-shirt slogan also goes to the heart of learning design, along the same lines as my previous effort to summarise everything one needs to know about it in two principles. What it says is that you can explain as much as you like, and produce texts and videos and websites, and none of it guarantees anything. Or as I put it in my previous post: people learn because of what they do, not what you do.

Of course, if you're a teacher, this doesn't mean that you can just explain things and leave the rest up to the learner. If you're going to take your responsibility seriously, and if you have learners who you can't be sure will be able to take charge of their own learning, then you need to prompt them into doing things which will enable them to learn from your explanations. It's in that interaction that the magic happens, which is why learning design is a creative craft. As the T-shirt reminds us, the learning begins when the explanation ends: when the teacher stops talking and the learner becomes active.

Seen and heard: October 2013

Queen of Heaven - concert by The Sixteen, mainly Palestrina plus beautiful comparison-contracts with the contemporary James Macmillan. Fantastic to hear this top class choir close to home, now that they've added Milton Keynes City Church to their annual choral pilgrimage.

A Night in Vienna - concert by Milton Keynes City Orchestra, Strausses, Lehar and so on. Great fun, with conductor Hilary Davan Wetton in full audience-pleasing mode, though I'm not sure how many of the large youth party from Milton Keynes College really enjoyed it.

The Big Red Bath - a kid's theatre trip to The Stables for our grand-daughter aged 6. I didn't seen how a simple picture book about bathtime could make a stage show, but the Full House theatre company did it: with three actors taking all the parts, atmospheric music, and lots of mime and dance. As one of the Stables staff commented, not one child asked to go to the toilet during the show: a strong indicator of quality.

The Russia House - 1990 film with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, watched again on video: an anniversary present from my wife. It's one of our favourites: a John Le Carré novel in a cracking adaptation by Tom Stoppard, heartfelt and powerful. Best line: "these days you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being."

22 Reasons for the Bedroom Tax - gently satirical poem by Carol Ann Duffy, riffing on the ministerial statement about the difficulties encountered with the badger cull (that "the badgers had moved the goalposts"). Also a witty commentary on the use of clichéd metaphor in public life.

Get Your Inbox to Zero - training course provided by ThinkProductive. I'm fairly cynical about the value of most training, but this fell into small fraction of courses I've experienced which was actually good and useful. It was basically an application of the well-respected David Allen "Getting Things Done" approach, and by the end of the day I had indeed reduced my email Inbox to zero, from a starting point of nearly 300. More to the point, it's still at zero, or at least I get it to zero by the end of each day.

Masters of Sex - Channel 4's intelligent and period-detail-rich dramatisation of the collaboration between Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson in their ground-breaking 1950s study of human sexual response. Michael Sheen is especially good as Masters: since it's presumably not known what he was actually thinking and feeling as their relationship took its twists and turns, this is made into a character trait: you feel that he's a stranger to himself and doesn't really know his own thoughts and feelings.

Inspector Montalbano - new series on BBC4. So The Young Montalbano was a gap-filler (very good gap-filler) before the return of the original. Good to be back in Vigata, though a bit sad to see how much older everyone is now - especially Augello.

New Directions in Learning and Teaching - my Faculty's annual mini-conference / workshop, with particularly memorable presentations on peer assessment, student experience of online materials, and the strategic use of discussion forums.

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - Japanese cartoon-style point-and-click adventure game. The character whom you play is dead and the murder he's investigating is his own, using his abilities to move physical objects poltergeist style, travel along phone lines, and wind back time to four minutes before someone else's death in order to prevent it taking place. Funny and charming, with excellent animation (especially the dancing police inspector); no voice acting, but the story cracks along just fine through speech balloons. Lots of happy hours here.

How to care for introverts / extroverts

This pair of wonderful diagrams has been circulating around the internet without source or acknowledgement – but as far as I can see the original designers are here, and we should acknowledge their brilliance.

For me, there are several reasons why these diagrams are great. First, they get right the meaning of introversion and extraversion. The popular misconception is that introverts are shy and don't get on with people, or are lacking in social skills, whereas extraverts (or extroverts, as it's now often spelled) are gregarious and get on with people splendidly. But in Jung’s original conception, introversion is a focus on the inner contents of one’s mind, and extraversion is a focus on external objects and the outside world. So extraverts get energy from other people, and introverts get energy from thinking. It isn’t that introverts don’t like other people or don’t know how to deal with them: it’s that they find them draining of energy (though not quite in the sense of this Dilbert cartoon). Introverts can be very socially skilled, though they’re unlikely ever to shine in a field such as telesales. It’s rare to find an extrovert with poor social skills (though they do exist), but it’s common to find extroverts who prefer to do their thinking by talking to other people.

The second reason these diagrams why these diagrams are great is that they’re actually useful. Most discussions of extraversion and introversion in pop psychology or HR literature focus on “finding your type” or working out where you are on the introversion-extraversion spectrum, but don't tell you what to do about it - except, usually, to imply that if you're an introvert you shouldn't be promoted into management or do any kind of job which involves working with people. (Hence the need for ripostes, such as Susan Cain's Quiet.) These diagrams address the problem that if you're an extrovert you probably don't know how extroverts like to be treated (and they're unlikely to tell you), and if you're an introvert you may know what extraverts like but don't have the confidence to do it for them. These are diagrams which offer the possibility of a better world.

And the third reason why these diagrams are great is of course that they're superb pieces of design. Pithy and memorable text, engagingly laid out. (I think the variation in type sizes forces one subconsciously to slow down and pay more attention while reading the text, hence encouraging one to pay attention to what it actually says.) Writers and designers of motivational aphorisms, take note.

Which to Teach, Procedure or Understanding?

When I’m showing a colleague how to do something on their computer and I try to explain why it works that way, often they’ll say: “Don’t tell me how it works, just tell me what I need to do.”

The reason I try to explain how it works is that referring back to the underlying system is how I myself remember things. It is, I think usually a better strategy overall: it equips one better to cope with unexpected situations, such as a software upgrade which moves the buttons or changes their names. But what I have to remind myself is that many people really don’t want to know all that; they just want to know what to do.

The trouble is that it’s sometimes very hard to devise a procedure – what the mathematicians call an algorithm, or sequence of instructions – which is really robust so that someone without any understanding at all can follow it and get the desired result every time. For example, what instructions would you give someone to enable them to get across a city by bus, if they don’t really understand what a bus route is or what governs a bus’s starting and stopping?

In the magnificent from-the-inside book about autism Send in the Idiots, that was the problem which confronted Henry and Sheila, who wanted to teach their autistic daughter Elizabeth (age 23) to get from their house to the public library, which she loved, by bus on her own. They’d shown her the way to the bus stop and explained the bus numbers and how the motions made by people at the bus stop attract the driver’s attention and make the bus pull over. “She might not have realized [that there was a correlation between people sticking out their hands and the bus pulling in], not because she lacked deductive reasoning but because she might have noticed the green stain on the person’s sneakers instead, the misplaced apostrophe in the advertisement on the side of the bus.”

Next they had to teach her when to get off the bus. They started with a street map and a bus route map, and she understood the differences between them. But when they tried the trip together, with a portable copy of the bus map, she couldn’t follow their route. “Each time the bus stopped, Elizabeth thought that she was to count off a dot, except that the bus stopped for traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, as well as to pick up or let off passengers. And, to make things worse, it also didn’t stop every time that it was supposed to. There weren’t passengers to let off or pick up at every point designated on the map.” Trying to follow the bus map, she became increasingly confused and distressed, to the point where Sheila had to take her off the bus.

The next strategy was to teach her to count streets, to use just the street map and to count the streets to her [destination]. However, when they tried this, she disputed their interpretation of a street. She wanted to count everything that was paved as a street. Again the map didn’t match what she was seeing. Elizabeth’s parents tried to wean her off this by telling her to count only those paved routes that had street signs. This had the potential for excluding entrances to parking garages and walkways. She was good at noticing details, so it seemed safe to assume that she would notice every street sign and cross-reference it with the map. However, not every street on the map had a sign – far from it, especially when they got downtown. They also tried by counting only streets that had white lines drawn on them. But some of the wider streets had several lanes – so several white lines – and some of the narrower streets had no lines. This didn’t work either.

They’d been trying for three weeks, when Elizabeth’s distress during another unsuccessful attempt Elizabeth’s distress forced them to get off the bus early yet again. They were feeling a deep sense of failure. Blind people travelled on buses. So did children. But their grown-up daughter couldn’t.

‘Where are we, anyway?’ exclaimed Sheila.

‘Twelve,’ replied Elizabeth….

‘What?’ asked Henry. ‘Why twelve?’

Elizabeth pointed to the bus stop.

She had worked out that the bus map wasn’t at all abstract. It was only abstract if you were comparing it to the street map, or if you assumed that the bus had to stop at every dot. Instead, the bus map was a map of all the bus stop signs with the same logo as was in the bottom righthand corner of the map. In fact, you didn’t even need the map. You just needed to know the number of signs from the point of embarkation to the point of disembarkation. They were at twelve. They needed to get to fifteen.

So a triumph of sorts. But what a distance there is between Elizabeth’s algorithm for working out when to get off the bus and anything like a systemic understanding of the situation, in which the counting of bus stops relates to her progress across the city. And how good is her algorithm really? Would she know how to adjust it, if say a bus stop was suspended due to road works, or the bus route was diverted? Nevertheless, this story was a reminder to me that, if what you’re most concerned about is a practical outcome, it may be a good idea to abandon the goal of teaching understanding: even with non-autistic people, the effort may simply not be worth the benefit, for everyone concerned

Reference

Kamran Nazeer, Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism (Bloomsbury, 2006), pp 147-150.

Seen and heard: September 2013

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, Episode 1 The Hangman - tremendous point-and-click adventure game (see this trailer and this review), on which Jane Jensen (celebrated game auteur) was a consultant. Worked beautifully on the iPad too. And best of all, I still have three more episodes to go...

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone - book based on their workshops of the past few years. I used to be a big fan of Joanna Macy's marriage of Buddhism and systems theory, but I found this disappointing: the spiritual process is sound enough, but environmental activism isn't where I am right now. The British doctor and psychotherapist Chris Johnstone seems to have introduced another note to her West Coast philosophy; I think he may be the one to follow up at this point.

Banyalbufar fiesta, celebrating both a hundred years as an independent parish (hence a Solemn Mass performed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Barcelona, an adopted son of the town) and a hundred years of electrification. Events and entertainments included water slides for the kids, a magic show with Albert the Magician, a variety night opening with the town's primary school children performing Gangnam Style, and a dance evening ending only at 7:00 am .

Culture Show programme about the new Birmingham City Library, the People's Palace. They seem to have created something which is genuinely a nice space in which to be, and not just something functional (for which the internet would be a more serious rival). There's some speculation that we're now seeing the rise of the "super-library".

Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies - skillful and accessible TV series by film composer Neil Brand, with detailed examples of how music and sound have been used to achieve powerful effects across the history of cinema.

The Young Montalbano - how could anyone take the place of original Montalbano Luca Zingaretti? Well, like this actually. The programme makers have done a smashing job of finding a cast to play the same principal characters at a younger age, and the stories have the same Sicilian sunshine look and feel. I miss the old titles music, though.

About Time - the new Richard Curtis film: not profound, but very amusing and well-told, and moving in a gentle, impressive kind of way.

Seen and heard: August 2013

Proms in the Park - with the Milton Keynes City Orchestra and Polymnia (in which I sing) belting out the popular standards (Zadok the Priest, Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, Jerusalem, Rule Britannia); great fun!

Chopin Saved My Life - beautiful Channel 4 documentary featuring people for whom Chopin piano pieces have been transformative, including one brought back from a coma by the Ballade Number 1.

The BBC Proms season - highlights for me being Naturally7 (American a capella group, like a hip-hop version of the Swingle Singers); John Elliot Gardener and the Monteverdi Baroque Choir doing Bach's Easter Oratorio and Ascension Oratorio; Nigel Kennedy and Palestinian string players performing a remix version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (which I though really worked, like Stravinsky's remix of Pergolesi's Pulcinella); and the John Wilson orchestra, delivering a belting full-force (double orchestra with integrated dance band) rendition of film score music both familiar and unfamiliar.

Miss Marple, the old Joan Hickson versions, showing on the Drama channel, still head and shoulders above the more recent pretenders to the franchise. I'd say the best female detective on the telly at the moment, except that Vera has just started a new season.

The Social Network, film (recorded off air) about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook. Neat presentation of the thesis tracing the technology to the interests and social psychological needs of American college students, and since the script is by Aaron Sorkin even the rowing jocks get witty funny lines.

Salvador Dali's house at Port Lligat. Or rather, we didn't see it, because it turned out you needed to book in advance which certainly wasn't clear from the brochures. But we bought a DVD tour and watched that instead, and found Dali (perhaps through Gala's influence?) a much more grounded and practical person than his waky output would suggest.

Iain Banks, The Quarry. His last novel - ironically, since the events centre on a character who is dying of cancer. Nicely written, well-paced (with gradual introduction of the large cast of characters), and a gripping acceleration towards the end. The misanthropy of the dying character, and the sense of disillusion for this group of '90s film and drama students, is quite painful, though.

A falcon (? some kind of bird of prey anyway) in the hills above Joch, "turning and turning in the widening gyre" - now I know what W.B. Yates was talking about.

Seen and heard: July 2013

Andy Murray winning Wimbledon

Seemingly inevitable in retrospect, but nerve-wracking to sit through that last game, which could so easily have swung the match the other way. (Had Murray NOT taken it - and he very nearly didn't - the set would have gone to tie-break, which Djokovic could well have won, and then we'd have been looking at a fourth and perhaps a fifth set. And though he was two sets down, Djokovic could have come back from that position; Murray, like Federer, has done so many times.)

Midnight Tango

Vincent and Flavia show tells a whole evening's story through variety after variety of tango. Astonishing dancing, amazing physique, and a very good live band (Tango Siempre). You know when you've been tangoed - and we were.

Send in the Idiots

The author visits five of his school classmates, all of them on the autistic spectrum but who have found their own ways of functioning socially to a high degree (one is a speech writer for the American Democratic Party). Beautifully written and fascinating for what it shows about how not only autistic people but all of us manage to cope with each other - the chief difference being that autistic people have to work it out very slowly and painfully.

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 4 (Fly to Paradise)

I've already blogged about this wonderful massive online community choir project, now in its fourth incarnation.

Notes from the Inside

A concert pianist brings classical music to the inmates of a mental hospital, so far so ordinary. But James Rhodes is a former mental patient himself. And instead of giving a concert, what he does is spend time getting to know four inmates and then choose a piece to express what he's seen  in them, which he then performs for them individually, one on one. Deeply moving and genuinely therapeutic - and not just for them. The programme is on 4oD for 30 days from 24 July, and the trailer and other videos are available on the programme website.

Music and Monarchy

David Starkey TV series, tracing the history of British royal music. Unexpectedly illuminating, especially in his own favourite period (the Tudors) when what kind of music you have in the Chapel Royal (or whether you have any kind of music at all) is a major religio-political statement. Great performance extracts too, many of them available on the programme website.

Massive online collaboration: Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 4

As an amateur singer myself, I'm a bit ashamed that I only took notice of Eric Whitacre's virtual choir with the release of the fourth video on 11 July, premiered as part of the Coronation celebration gala concert.

It's a great example of how the online technology enables massive scale collaboration - in this case, the performance of a very large community choir: the volunteer singers (nearly 6000 of them in Virtual Choir 4, from over 100 countries) record their parts individually on a webcam and upload the recordings to Whitacre's team, who (funded by Kickstarter) mix the recordings together and create a video.

This is a method which excellently suits Whitacre, who for a classical composer has a huge worldwide fanbase ready to jump at the chance of singing his music to and with him. It also suits his trademark big-chord musical style: small differences and imperfections are averaged out in the aggregation process. (It wouldn't work so well, I think, for Bach's rapid counterpoint.)

Here's Whitacre being interviewed by Tim Lihoreau of ClassicFM just after the call for submissions, in which poor old Tim has to sightread the baritone part in front of its composer in order to show the working of the online interface (note the demonstration tracks, conducting and click tracks, and the ability to make multiple attempts).



Some of the singers have done their own video aggregations. One very skilled performer produced a video of himself singing all eight parts - but perhaps the more revealing aggregation is this one of fifteen singers (the originator did both soprano and alto parts); Eric Whitacre's conducting track is in the middle.



And here's the final product, with the addition of soloists, electronica instrumental track, and Manga-style animation.

Sign me up for Virtual Choir 5...


See also
Eric Whitacre's 2011 TED talk, reflecting on the Virtual Choir phenomenon and introducing Virtual Choir 2
Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir site

Seen and heard: June 2013

John Tyndale, the most dangerous man in England - Melvyn Bragg TV programme, bringing out the awesome level of Tyndale's defiance in producing an English translation of the Bible (as shown by the punishment he received) and his influence on the English language (the King James Authorised version of the Bible was based on Coverdale's, which in turn was based on Tyndale's). Also interesting for Tyndale's repeated image of the ploughboy as his ideal reader, the person for whom he was writing his translation. Learner-centred education, in its way.

Contact - rewatched the 1997 film on DVD. I love the high concept story, with its twin themes of contact and faith; the execution isn't quite as good as the conception, but Jodie Foster is excellent and convincing as the astronomer who picks up a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligences.

Polymnia at Wavendon garden - my choir's concert went very well, thank you, and it was a lovely afternoon for a picnic in Cleo Laine's garden.

The Americans - ingeniously and carefully scripted drama series, about undercover KGB agents in 1980s America and the FBI agent on their tail who just happens to live across the street. Remarkable how it makes you sympathise with everybody in turn - right up to the point where they do something awful.

Les revenants (English title The Returned, but this doesn't carry the double meaning of the French) - fascinating, creepy and very compelling.

Spies, novel by Michael Frayn -  super book. What I've never seen so well done, not even in The Go-Between which it partially resembles - is the exploration of the confused (to adult eyes) world of a child, in which what is real is both fluid (do they really think Keith's mother is a German spy, or do they know they're playing a game?) and subject to social pressure (especially the dominance of the more affluent, more assured older boy).

The Art of Asking - TED talk by Amanda Palmer - to which I was pointed by (draft) course materials for a new OU course The Networked Practitioner. I suspect I wouldn't like her music at all ("punk cabaret"?) but this is a very good and powerful talk about the risk of trust: her experience of asking her fans to support her - physically (crowd-surfing and couch-surfing) and economically (through Kickstarter). It's not all as beautiful as she makes out, of course, as comes out in her interview with Jon Ronson; but this is a gem of a sermon.

Romanza - extraordinary steel band version of the slow movement of Vaughan Williams Symphony number 5, commissioned as part of Jeremy Deller's English Magic installation at the Venice Biennale.

Designing emergent collaboration: lessons from games design

Having written about what learning design has to learn from games design, I've just read an extraordinary account of the development of an extraordinary game, which has something to teach everyone concerned with collaborative learning activity.

The game, called Journey, has already created something of a sensation. Visually powerful, wordless and emotionally intense, it was specifically intended to be a co-operative experience, allowing simultaneous players linked through the PlayStation online network (it's only available for PlayStation, unfortunately) to meet (though not talk) and help each other.

One reviewer's account of playing the game is here. And the designer's account of developing the game is here. What's interesting from the learning design point of view is the repeated playtesting, to check how players were responding to each other the game environment, and the tweaking of the game rules, so that the cooperative and trusting behaviour they wanted the game to afford was positively encouraged.

Later addition. To spell out the take-away point for learning design: if you're designing a collaborative or cooperative group activity, the most important thing to clarify and specify is what kinds of interactions you want there to be between the learners - and then design the task accordingly, and check that those are the interactions which actually happen.