Some of the lecturers in my faculty have become interested in simulations as a way of bringing more practical experience into their learning materials. As I prepare to advise them on the possibilities and pitfalls, I'm remembering the best piece of advice I ever received on simulation design.
Computer simulations for professional practice have been around almost as long as I have, especially in business and management where the funding for high-specification products is more forthcoming; I can remember my school contemporaries in the 1970s playing a computer-based business simulation against teams from other schools. They sent their decisions off by post, and received back lineprinter output with tables of figures, showing how all the teams' simultaneous decisions affected their shared market. By contrast the management simulation which I saw demonstrated at a conference in 2001 was stupendously impressive in its production values: graphical realisation of the business premises, video inserts of actors playing the various characters, a sophisticated "co-pilot" or animated mentor to give you in-simulation access to all the business management concepts and theories you might need. Truly, an embodiment of the notion of theory-in-practice.
As I watched the demonstration, I wasn't surprised to learn that the simulation had been the brainchild of a former McKinsey management consultant, nor that the cost of the simulation licence was £750 per single copy. I tried to estimate what the development and production cost must have been, and ran out of zeros in my mental calculator. I was working at the time for LMD Learning Solutions, where most of our clients were public sector organisations, and I knew that though they would drool over the prospect of such a product there was no way that any of them would be able to afford to develop one.
I'd also done enough game design (adventure games) to know the basic problem which you quickly encounter: you can't simulate everything. The idea of a simulation - a virtual world, in which you can lose yourself, like the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation - is very attractive. But outside of science fiction, I knew, you have to be selective: you can't create every detail of the environment a user might choose to inspect, or program a response for every action they might think of doing. So I realised what my question to the speaker from the simulation company needed to be: not "How do you produce this kind of thing on a budget?" - although I did want to know that - but the more important and deeper question "How do you decide what things to simulate?"
Her answer was so blindingly obvious in retrospect that I felt embarrassed at not having thought of it myself. You simulate those things which a learner is most likely to get wrong. There's no point in spending effort and resources in simulating the things which they can do without any trouble; you need to simulate the possibility for learners making the kind of mistakes which they're likely to make in real life, so that they can make them safely and learn from them without penalty.
If you want to theorise this, I'd say that a teaching simulation needs four components: Situation, or the practical setting and challenges in which the learner is going to find themselves; Action, or the possibility for the learner to do things in the setting; Feedback, or the results of those actions, whether immediate or long-term, made evident to the learner; and Reflection, or some kind of debriefing, to turn the simulation experience into learning.
Of these, Situation is the most immediately attractive and the one on which salespeople for simulations tend to focus - as in the Imparta video above. It speaks to the fantasy or game-like aspect of a simulation: you can be a management consultant to a blue-chip multi-national corporation; you can be a newly-qualified social worker thrown into the deep-end of a potential child abuse case; you can be a starship captain leading a covert mission in the Romulan neutral zone; and so forth. But if we're designing simulations which are going to be learning and not just fun - which isn't to say that they can't or shouldn't be fun, just that we're not going to spend the time and resources unless they make a pretty good contribution towards learning outcomes - then we need to plan also for Action, Feedback and Reflection.
(As a contrast to the Imparta video, see this simulation, about which I've already blogged, in which you play a scientific expert on a commission investigating a high-profile accident. Technically, it's very simple indeed; there's no video, no graphics, just very-well-written text, on which I suspect the authors spent a good many hours. But it's very thought-provoking, which surely needs to be one of the characteristics of a simulation at university-level.)
Tuesday, 19 August 2014
Sunday, 10 August 2014
Stars of YouTube and the limits of the digital world
Yesterday, Channel 4 news covered a convention at Alexandra Palace for fans of YouTube bloggers and musicians. Cue predictable comments about how incomprehensible this must be to anyone above their teenage years or not of the YouTube generation, with supporting clips of accompanying parents deeply grateful for the Adult Crèche where they could wait while their children queued to get a selfie with their internet idols.
But what occurred to me was how completely the success of this event contradicts the utopianism of the techno-evangelists, who have been prophesying for some years now the total domination of the digital world. Yes, its digital technology which has given these YouTube celebrities their global following. But what do their digital fans want and are willing to queue for hours to get? To be in the same physical location as them, to see them with their own eyes, to be able to speak to them in person. They're wanting something which the digital world cannot provide.
It's like David Edgerton says, in The Shock of the Old (and in his Guardian interview): new technologies hardly ever displace old.
YouTube's biggest stars in person - Channel 4 news items
http://www.channel4.com/news/youtubes-biggest-stars-in-person-video
"They're global celebrities: but not as you know them. Young people turned massive social media stars - who've been mobbed by thousands of fans at Britain's biggest YouTube convention."
Seen and heard: July 2014
Cognition Episode 4 –I wasn’t the only one to be disappointed at this conclusion to a great sequence of adventure games, especially after the nerve-shreddingly climactic ending to the previous episode. What went wrong? After all that built-up momentum, the tension is just dissipated with three extensive backstory sequences; basically, there’s not that that much left to tell. Also, I found the main secondary character unconvincing, now that we know them to be a murderous psychopath. A pity, when I think of some of the great game endings I’ve played (The Longest Journey, Syberia I and Syberia II). It’ll be the earlier episodes I treasure (if that’s the right word, for stories so grim and gore-laden) in my memory.
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, by David Edgerton – vision-changing book, in which he takes apart the innovation-centric view of the history of technology (as explained in this Guardian interview). Looking at the technologies which people actually use shows that “old” technologies persist for all kinds of reasons and frequently remain more practical or more effective than the new. Futurism has definitely had its day.
Edge of Darkness - reshowing of the 1985 TV series on BBC4. Nice, in a creepy kind of way, to be taken back to the 1980s and the era of revelations about the Secret State (and we thought that was bad, so the Snowdon revelations about NSA surveillance should have been no surprise). It's the slow-paced brooding thriller quality which has lasted best, helped by a great script by Troy Kennedy Martin (creator of of Z Cars) and a magnetic performance by Bob Peck. The semi-mystical ending, which impressed me so much back then, left me cold this time. Ah well, not everything survives.
The Honourable Woman - BBC TV drama. I wonder how well this look in thirty years time; in fact, I wonder how well it looks right now, given the unfolding events in Gaza (where it is partially set, in an eight-years-ago flashback), though that may depend on how it ends. Fantastic performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal and many others, with some tremendous cinematography, and ingenious plotting with steady week-by-week revelation of twists and hidden depths which is this drama's best defence against critical attack in this politically dangerous area.
Aurora Jitterbug - absolutely sensational concert, in the wonderful Saffron Hall, by a combination of the Aurora Orchestra (classical chamber group) and Man Overboard (four-piece jazz band), the common element being the lead violin Thomas Gould, who we have marked down as the new Stephan Grapelli. The magic began when the Aurora's first number was Rameau's music from Les Indes gallantes morphed seamlessly into Man Overboard playing Duke Ellington's Jubilee Stomp. (You couldn't ask for a better demonstration of how small a distance there lies between 18th century French dance music and 20th century American jazz.) Later in the first half, the band played a couple of numbers in which the orchestra was used as a backing group - which I'd heard done before on Simon Rattle's CBSO recording of Duke Ellington numbers, but this was far more smooth and subtle and simply gorgeous. I hope they find the resources to do more of that combination; the sound is truly unique. In the meantime, I'm enjoying Man Overboard's CD 'All Hands on Deck', in which, as a bonus, their vocalist is properly audible.
Anna Hashimoto (clarinets) - free lunchtime concert at the Fitzwilliam Museum, accompanied by Daniel King Smith. Lively and talented young performer (British of Japanese ancestry), playing a range of clarinets from long to tiddly, opening with a stupendous rendition of Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fuge in D minor (transcribed) which echoed through the cleristory of the Fitzwilliam Museum gallery.
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, by David Edgerton – vision-changing book, in which he takes apart the innovation-centric view of the history of technology (as explained in this Guardian interview). Looking at the technologies which people actually use shows that “old” technologies persist for all kinds of reasons and frequently remain more practical or more effective than the new. Futurism has definitely had its day.
Edge of Darkness - reshowing of the 1985 TV series on BBC4. Nice, in a creepy kind of way, to be taken back to the 1980s and the era of revelations about the Secret State (and we thought that was bad, so the Snowdon revelations about NSA surveillance should have been no surprise). It's the slow-paced brooding thriller quality which has lasted best, helped by a great script by Troy Kennedy Martin (creator of of Z Cars) and a magnetic performance by Bob Peck. The semi-mystical ending, which impressed me so much back then, left me cold this time. Ah well, not everything survives.
The Honourable Woman - BBC TV drama. I wonder how well this look in thirty years time; in fact, I wonder how well it looks right now, given the unfolding events in Gaza (where it is partially set, in an eight-years-ago flashback), though that may depend on how it ends. Fantastic performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal and many others, with some tremendous cinematography, and ingenious plotting with steady week-by-week revelation of twists and hidden depths which is this drama's best defence against critical attack in this politically dangerous area.
Aurora Jitterbug - absolutely sensational concert, in the wonderful Saffron Hall, by a combination of the Aurora Orchestra (classical chamber group) and Man Overboard (four-piece jazz band), the common element being the lead violin Thomas Gould, who we have marked down as the new Stephan Grapelli. The magic began when the Aurora's first number was Rameau's music from Les Indes gallantes morphed seamlessly into Man Overboard playing Duke Ellington's Jubilee Stomp. (You couldn't ask for a better demonstration of how small a distance there lies between 18th century French dance music and 20th century American jazz.) Later in the first half, the band played a couple of numbers in which the orchestra was used as a backing group - which I'd heard done before on Simon Rattle's CBSO recording of Duke Ellington numbers, but this was far more smooth and subtle and simply gorgeous. I hope they find the resources to do more of that combination; the sound is truly unique. In the meantime, I'm enjoying Man Overboard's CD 'All Hands on Deck', in which, as a bonus, their vocalist is properly audible.
Anna Hashimoto (clarinets) - free lunchtime concert at the Fitzwilliam Museum, accompanied by Daniel King Smith. Lively and talented young performer (British of Japanese ancestry), playing a range of clarinets from long to tiddly, opening with a stupendous rendition of Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fuge in D minor (transcribed) which echoed through the cleristory of the Fitzwilliam Museum gallery.
Polymnia: Choral Kaleidoscope - the summer concert of the
choir in which I sing, in the beautiful (but accoustically challening) Chrysalis
Theatre. Essentially a re-run of favourites from our Spanish tour, with the
added bonus of being able to capture a few performance videos, including the
lovely Señor de las Cimas and Piazzolla's tango Verena Porteño.
The Phoenix - year-old British weekly comic for six-to-twelve-year-old kids. After the strong endorsement in The Guardian, and checking out the sample online issue, I signed my grand-daughter up for a subscription as a present for her seventh birthday. She's loved her first couple of issues, and there's a great mix of content: some things she can read on her own, other things for which she needs help and explanation, and some things for which at present her stamina is limited - but plenty of room to grow.
The Phoenix - year-old British weekly comic for six-to-twelve-year-old kids. After the strong endorsement in The Guardian, and checking out the sample online issue, I signed my grand-daughter up for a subscription as a present for her seventh birthday. She's loved her first couple of issues, and there's a great mix of content: some things she can read on her own, other things for which she needs help and explanation, and some things for which at present her stamina is limited - but plenty of room to grow.
Cuttings: July 2014
How to think about writing – Oliver Burkeman column in The Guardian. "The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is 'cognitively unnatural'. For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this? Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach 'joint attention'. Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? 'When you write,' Pinker says, 'you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing.'"
Facebook reveals newsfeed experiment to control emotions – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "[Facebook] has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of 'emotional contagion'. In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' 'positive emotional content', resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to 'negative emotional content' and the opposite happened. The study concluded: 'Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.'"
Facebook emotion study breached ethical guidelines, researchers say – article by Charles Arthur in The Guardian. "Researchers have roundly condemned Facebook's experiment in which it manipulated nearly 700,000 users' news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions, saying it breaches ethical guidelines for 'informed consent'. James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, points in an extensive blog post that 'Facebook didn't give users informed consent' to allow them to decide whether to take part in the study, under US human subjects research."
The BBC informs, educates and entertains – but in what order? – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "It is precisely the noisy jumble of cultures within the BBC that has been one of its strongest and most exciting characteristics. In 1935, the pioneering documentary maker John Grierson made a film for the GPO called BBC: The Voice of Britain. The two musical stars of the film were Adrian Boult, the great conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the toe-tappingly brilliant Henry Hall, band leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra. Between them they represented the extreme edges of rarefied and populist culture then projected by the BBC. There is a similar bifurcation in drama: while the film shows the delightfully homemade sound effects being created for a broadcast of Macbeth, the lighter end of theatre is represented by Eric Maschwitz, the debonair head of variety, seen urging a producer to make sure a music-hall act’s jokes are cleaned up (‘It won’t get by for a moment, old boy’)."
The BBC: how the voice of an empire became part of an evolving world – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "In the psychological warfare conducted by the BBC [during the 1930s and '40s], its great weapon was the truth – which is neither as simple nor as pious as it sounds. Truth became a formidable force, skilfully deployed, difficult to combat by the enemy. According to Webb: ‘The truth can be self-flagellation, government-bashing, and admitting failure. But admitting failure gives you more strength, and that is what Goebbels didn’t get, and that’s what the BBC learns in the war. And the BBC also learns that if you keep doing that, so if there’s a consistency in the way you report failure and problems, then you end up with even more credibility.’ By the time decisive allied victories such as El Alamein and Stalingrad finally came, the BBC had built up enough trust for its accounts of them to be believed."
We shouldn't expect Facebook to behave ethically – article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "When the story of this period comes to be written, one thing that will astonish historians is the complaisant ease with which billions of apparently sane people allowed themselves to be monitored and manipulated by government security agencies and giant corporations.... I suspect that once the fuss has died down most users will continue to submit to the company's manipulation of their information flow and emotions. Those who the gods wish to destroy, they first make naive.... The idea that corporations might behave ethically is as absurd as the proposition that cats should respect the rights of small mammals. Cats do what cats do: kill other creatures. Corporations do what corporations do: maximise revenues and shareholder value and stay within the law. Facebook may be on the extreme end of corporate sociopathy, but really it's just the exception that proves the rule."
Can we take something positive from the Facebook furore? – article by Pete Etchells in The Guardian Headspace blog. "A central ethical tenet of psychological research is the requirement for informed consent – people should be able to make a decision about whether they want to take part in a study, based on an awareness of what the research actually involves. In some cases it’s acceptable to mask the true purpose of the study, but nevertheless people should be (at the very least) aware that they are being tested. This didn’t happen with the Facebook experiment. By all accounts, the researchers involved took advantage of a clause in Facebook’s data use policy which states that '…we may use the information we receive about you… for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.' ... I can’t help but feel that we risk missing a huge opportunity to improve the process by which digital research is conducted in the future. We’ve been offered a glimpse of the potential insights we can get from social media research. We’ve also been warned about what needs to change for that work to be ethical and responsible."
Amazon at 20: billions, bestsellers and legal battles - article by Mark Hooper in The Guardian, summarising key events and key products in Amazon's history, year by year, from 1994 to the present. "It's 20 years since an ambitious entrepreneur named Jeff Bezos registered the company that would become Amazon. How did it get so big so fast?
Facebook reveals newsfeed experiment to control emotions – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "[Facebook] has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of 'emotional contagion'. In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' 'positive emotional content', resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to 'negative emotional content' and the opposite happened. The study concluded: 'Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.'"
Facebook emotion study breached ethical guidelines, researchers say – article by Charles Arthur in The Guardian. "Researchers have roundly condemned Facebook's experiment in which it manipulated nearly 700,000 users' news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions, saying it breaches ethical guidelines for 'informed consent'. James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, points in an extensive blog post that 'Facebook didn't give users informed consent' to allow them to decide whether to take part in the study, under US human subjects research."
The BBC informs, educates and entertains – but in what order? – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "It is precisely the noisy jumble of cultures within the BBC that has been one of its strongest and most exciting characteristics. In 1935, the pioneering documentary maker John Grierson made a film for the GPO called BBC: The Voice of Britain. The two musical stars of the film were Adrian Boult, the great conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the toe-tappingly brilliant Henry Hall, band leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra. Between them they represented the extreme edges of rarefied and populist culture then projected by the BBC. There is a similar bifurcation in drama: while the film shows the delightfully homemade sound effects being created for a broadcast of Macbeth, the lighter end of theatre is represented by Eric Maschwitz, the debonair head of variety, seen urging a producer to make sure a music-hall act’s jokes are cleaned up (‘It won’t get by for a moment, old boy’)."
The BBC: how the voice of an empire became part of an evolving world – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "In the psychological warfare conducted by the BBC [during the 1930s and '40s], its great weapon was the truth – which is neither as simple nor as pious as it sounds. Truth became a formidable force, skilfully deployed, difficult to combat by the enemy. According to Webb: ‘The truth can be self-flagellation, government-bashing, and admitting failure. But admitting failure gives you more strength, and that is what Goebbels didn’t get, and that’s what the BBC learns in the war. And the BBC also learns that if you keep doing that, so if there’s a consistency in the way you report failure and problems, then you end up with even more credibility.’ By the time decisive allied victories such as El Alamein and Stalingrad finally came, the BBC had built up enough trust for its accounts of them to be believed."
We shouldn't expect Facebook to behave ethically – article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "When the story of this period comes to be written, one thing that will astonish historians is the complaisant ease with which billions of apparently sane people allowed themselves to be monitored and manipulated by government security agencies and giant corporations.... I suspect that once the fuss has died down most users will continue to submit to the company's manipulation of their information flow and emotions. Those who the gods wish to destroy, they first make naive.... The idea that corporations might behave ethically is as absurd as the proposition that cats should respect the rights of small mammals. Cats do what cats do: kill other creatures. Corporations do what corporations do: maximise revenues and shareholder value and stay within the law. Facebook may be on the extreme end of corporate sociopathy, but really it's just the exception that proves the rule."
Can we take something positive from the Facebook furore? – article by Pete Etchells in The Guardian Headspace blog. "A central ethical tenet of psychological research is the requirement for informed consent – people should be able to make a decision about whether they want to take part in a study, based on an awareness of what the research actually involves. In some cases it’s acceptable to mask the true purpose of the study, but nevertheless people should be (at the very least) aware that they are being tested. This didn’t happen with the Facebook experiment. By all accounts, the researchers involved took advantage of a clause in Facebook’s data use policy which states that '…we may use the information we receive about you… for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.' ... I can’t help but feel that we risk missing a huge opportunity to improve the process by which digital research is conducted in the future. We’ve been offered a glimpse of the potential insights we can get from social media research. We’ve also been warned about what needs to change for that work to be ethical and responsible."
Amazon at 20: billions, bestsellers and legal battles - article by Mark Hooper in The Guardian, summarising key events and key products in Amazon's history, year by year, from 1994 to the present. "It's 20 years since an ambitious entrepreneur named Jeff Bezos registered the company that would become Amazon. How did it get so big so fast?
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