Engineering an online community: lessons from a student-centred hack day

A chance to spend a whole day with twenty of our students, selected from over 140 volunteers, for a workshop to find ways of teaching them better: too good to miss. The workshop was run like a coding “hack day”: each team identifying a problem, then developing a solution, prototyping it, and pitching it to the whole group with votes and a prize for the best conception. It was intense and fun (as hopefully comes across from the Twitter posts during the day), but for me the strongest sign of something important happening was that the problem my team chose to work on was not something I’d have guessed at all, despite my many years working in the field: testimony to the power and importance of bringing students into the process.

What’s the biggest problem you face in your studying? we asked the two students in my team. Both of them in different ways pointed to the problem of isolation and the difficulty of contact with other students. The first wanted to be able to share impressions with others, to see how they were responding to the same questions; online forums should have helped her, but she found that other students didn’t reply to her posts, and that in general people tended just to post their own ideas, at length, without responding to others. Long travelling distances were an obstacle to her attending face-to-face tutorials. The second student, on a foreign language course, wanted to find other students with whom to practice speaking; online tutorials enabled this, but low attendance put extra pressure on those who did attend, with added stress when the technology was unreliable. Hearing them talk, I remembered that the problem of student isolation is THE fundamental problem of distance education. I’d forgotten it because the problem has been around for so long, and because we’ve made so many efforts to solve it; what I realised was that despite forty years and more of trying, with all the latest technology at our disposal, we still haven’t really cracked it.

In trying to address the problem of student isolation, I think we’ve been ill-served by academic talk about “community” and in particular “learning community”. In health and social care, “community” has become notorious as a fantasy concept: that thing for which we all long to alleviate our sense of alienation in an individualised and fragmented society – ignoring the fact that communities are not necessarily benign or supportive. In education too, there has been something of the same hippy-like dream of creating “learning communities”, as networks of cooperative sharing and the collaborative construction of knowledge. Efforts to document actual learning communities has not been accompanied by comparable analysis of how they can be deliberately created, sustained and developed, and instead there has been an unhealthy fixation on collaboration as the highest form of participation in a learning community, with less intense forms – such as mere cooperation, or sharing, or (worst of all) “lurking” - relegated to lower rungs on the hierarchy of community engagement.

Yet “community” can be a meaningful concept even if there is only identification and no interaction. I remember once commenting to a colleague that my wife and I were Trekkies, Star Trek fans. “Oh,” she said, “what do you do?” I think she imagined that we went to conventions dressed as Klingons or something, so she was rather disappointed by my answer: “Well, we watch the TV show, and we rather enjoy it.” When I told this story at the Hack Day, two other members of my team to my surprise enthusiastically self-identified as Trekkies, showing that even this minimal level of identification with a community can have social significance.

More importantly, there can be practical outcomes from even low levels of community engagement. When I’m working out at the gym, I don’t interact with other gym users, and I don’t particularly want to; yet I can see them doing what they’re doing, and the fact that they’re there and working out also gives a spur to my motivation and persistence. “Exactly,” said one of our students, when I made this comparison. He regularly went to his local university library to work, so as to be in the midst of other people at study – even if they were studying different things – which helped him work longer and harder than he would have done at home.

The critical point of insight for me came when I realised that he didn’t have this sense of working alongside others with the other students on his course. He had no perception of the other students in his geographical area, who would be potential partners for face-to-face language practice, for example. Ideas started to ping rapidly now: I had a vision of a Google maps display, showing the geographical location of other students on his course (for privacy reasons, probably limited to the first part of the postcode); a faculty colleague had a vision of a dating app, which matched students with similar “would like to meet” profiles in the same geographical area or with a willingness to meet online.

And so, with the assistance of a super-smart graphic designer, we mocked up a screenshot of our solution: a view of the student’s community as >the first< screen a student sees on entering the University’s online environment. It included:

• a map showing the locations (approximate for privacy reasons) of other students (either on the course, on the qualification, or in the OU), with roll-over pop-ups of their profiles (for those who have made their profile public), and the colour of the indicator showing when they are online
• a roster of designated “friends” or “buddies” with whom the student already has contact, with again a colour indicator showing when they are online
• an “Ask the community” message board, switchable between messaging students on the course, the qualification, and the OU as a whole (this was a more modest substitute for the “dating app”, though we still thought this was a good idea).

 

Our choice of student isolation as a problem was validated when we discovered that two other teams had also chosen to address it, though in very different ways: one conceived an app for instant messaging with other students or with a tutor, and the other aimed to improve the effectiveness of online forums. It was the app which won the popular vote at the end of the day, but we still thought our solution was a good one because it embodied three critical features, necessary for students to build their own community:

• mutual visibility of online presence (if you can’t see the community, you won’t interact with it)
• flexible levels of engagement (you can interact minimally or massively, or start small and build, or drop back if other pressures intervene)
• viable even with initial low participation (unlike an empty forum, the community is visible and invites interaction even before anyone has done anything).

And the best thing about our solution, we thought, is that it requires no new technology: just the common social media tools, already familiar to a good proportion of our students. It can be done right now. Now we just have the challenge of making it happen!

By Grabthar's hammer, what an actor!

RIP Alan Rickman, who died last Friday. He was romantically wonderful in Truly Madly Deeply and scarily psychopathic in Die Hard, but the role for which I remember him most fondly is Alexander Dane in the Star Trek spoof (or should that be homage) Galaxy Quest. Dane is an English actor, who to his chagrin owes his fame to having played an alien in a sci-fi TV show, long-cancelled but still beloved by its devoted fans. Like Alec Guiness, whose ambivalent relationship with his character in Star Wars is well-known, he resents the fans who try to prompt him into declaiming his character's catch-phrase and the cheesy supermaket opening appearances he is forced to attend to maintain his income. Only when the cast of the TV show are kidnapped by real aliens, who think that they are real space heroes, does he have to play his part for real and in it discovers new meaning.

The compilation here contains some of his best moments, thought not for me the best of all. The crew are in a shuttlecraft, descending to a planet to search for a way of repairing their damanged ship, when Guy Fleegman, who played a minor part in a single episode, starts to panic. His character was a "redshirt", someone who exists purely to be killed off early in the episode to show that the danger is serious, and he fears that will be his role in real life too. The rest of the cast (except Dane) try to reassure him; perhaps he will turn out to be the plucky comic relief? His whimpering is interrupted when Alan Rickman from the back of the shuttlecraft asks in acid tones: "Are we there yet?"

Seen and heard: December 2015

Filmish – nice graphic / comic introduction to film studies (seven chapters on The Eye, The Body, Sets and Architecture, Time, Voice and Language, Power and Ideology, Technology and Technophobia), with illustrations from many classic films I knew and many I didn’t. Worthwhile enterprise, though not on the same level as Scott McLeod’s Understanding Comics.

Memoryhouse – wonderful album from contemporary classical composer Max Richter, which we first heard as the music to the BalletBoyz 'Serpent'. Rather like the music of Philip Glass, for which we mistook it initially, but there’s something different and more tuneful about this. It’s also more sad, with track titles and spoken elements suggestive of poetry and reminiscences of European catastrophes. We put it on, intending just to check it out, and sat listening in silence for the whole album. Deservedly famous and successful.

A Bridge Over You – the NHS Choir’s mashup of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and ‘Fix You’, which a widely-supported campaign took to Christmas Number One - so hat tip to Justin Bieber for telling his fans to support this rather than his own competing single. Apparently the BBC insisted on producing a new video as part of their promotion. I’m biased of course, but I prefer the original 2013 video produced by my sister’s company: it positions the viewer as a patient, feeling small and vulnerable, receiving the singers’ compassion, which is why some people were moved to tears; the new video makes the viewer an observer, with the staff singing to each other around a piano, and for some reason buries the song’s words beneath the text of the marriage service (“to have and to hold…”). Gareth Malone, when he set up the workplace choirs, took pains to find a song which the people could really sing, which truly expressed them and their work, and that’s what ‘A Bridge Over You’ did and what the original video did too: it was actually in alignment with the song. The new video reduces the song to a backing track. It may have been effective as a campaign video, but I can’t imagine it moving anyone to tears.

Christmas messages from the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope – which all in their own way addressed terrible recent events and people’s sense of the world descending into chaos. Simplest and best was the Queen, quoting the Gospel of John: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

Mercy as the Resolution of Paradox: A View from the Enneagram – webcast by Richard Rohr (Franciscan spiritual teacher) and Russ Hudson (Enneagram guru) from the Centre for Action and Contemplation. Intense but easy to follow, despite its two-hour length, which is a reminder of how effective video lectures can be with the right presenters.

Lara Croft Go – excellent turn-based puzzle game, which has made many reviewers’ Best Games of 2015 lists (Guardian, AppUnWrapper, Gamezebo, Apple). You have to figure out how to move Lara past dangerous animals (snakes, spiders, lizards) and lethal hazards (collapsing floors, rotating blades, rolling boulders, arrow traps). Tremendous “just another screen” addictive quality; effectively Monument Valley with added danger.

Cuttings: December 2015

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton: a big bang moment - review by Lorraine Daston in The Guardian. "Wootton’s aim is to offer a new interpretation of what he contends still deserves to be called the scientific revolution. This makes for a big book, with some historiographical chapters (and appendices) that are unlikely to be of interest to readers who are not historians of science over the age of 50.... Compressed into a few sentences, the major theses of this book sound unsurprising. The scientific revolution was not just the motor of modern history, it was the model of modernity. Rational, calculating, advancing at breakneck speed, respecting no authority: science after Newton seemed to embody the power and ever expanding possibilities of a society fixated on the future rather than the past. This is the narrative upon which university professorships and whole departments of the history of science were established after the second world war, and the narrative that a whole generation of historians of science were weaned on. Yet Wootton believes that historians of what he calls the 'post-Kuhn generation' – that is, roughly those who came of age in the 1980s and 90s – have broken with the faith and denied the scientific revolution’s significance as “the big bang” moment of modernity."

Iris Murdoch is ‘promiscuous’ while Ted Hughes is ‘nomadic’. Why the double standards?- article by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe in The Guardian. "We have been astonished by the number of reviewers who have been so fiercely judgmental of Murdoch’s personal life;... it is particularly galling to see many reviewers concentrating, sometimes rather salaciously, on Murdoch’s sex life and savagely criticising her for 'promiscuit'. John Carey uses the word twice in his article (Sunday Times) and Jonathan Gibbs is uneasy about 'the promiscuity of Murdoch’s intellectual affairs' (Independent). Roger Lewis writes rather shockingly that 'had she been from the working class, instead of a fellow of an Oxford college with heaps of honorary degrees, she’d have been a candidate for compulsory sterilisation' (Times). We have yet to read similar personal attacks on the behaviour of Michael Oakeshott – the political theorist and one of Murdoch’s correspondents – who was nicknamed 'dipstick' during his army years because of his sexual philandering. ... So men are glorious phallic trail-blazers when they tear through many women’s lives whereas women who have had many lovers are 'ruthless' and 'self-indulgent'. How have such double standards survived in an intelligent reading population of the 21st century?"

Are scientists easy prey for jihadism?- article by Paul Vallely in The Guardian. "A study of 18 British Muslims implicated in terrorist attacks found that eight had studied engineering or IT, and four more science, pharmacy and maths; only one had studied humanities. ... This is no coincidence, concludes Martin Rose, the British Council’s senior consultant on the Middle East and north Africa. Immunising the Mind – his report – gathers a wide spectrum of opinion in support of the contention that science education fails to inculcate critical thinking in the way that the debates within arts teaching do. Rose coins the notion of 'an engineering mindset', which makes science students easier prey for terrorist recruiters."

‘How do we keep up the fight for democratic values? With solidarity and storytelling’- article by Shami Chakrabarti, extracted from her Reading Agency lecture 'On Liberty, Reading and Dissent', in The Guardian. "Months before the recent Paris atrocity, senior British politicians rushed to the French capital to say 'Je suis Charlie' in passionate defence of the free expression of murdered journalists, only to return to London with promises of crackdowns on debate in mosques and universities as part of their 'domestic extremism' agenda. The relevant consultation paper talks of refusing to engage with and denying platforms to extremist people who fail to share our 'British values', thus denying the universal values that we share with all democrats and the vital importance of winning the battle of hearts and minds with open engagement and fierce debate.... To be clear, just as libraries should be free and open, and books must be saved from the fire every time, debates, however shocking, difficult and painful, must be had. There is no such thing as no platform in the internet age, merely closed and narrow platforms where hate goes unedited and unchallenged by humanity and reason."

How Jane Austen’s Emma changed the face of fiction - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Emma, published 200 years ago this month, was revolutionary not because of its subject matter: Austen’s jesting description to Anna of the perfect subject for a novel – 'Three or four families in a country village' – fits it well. It was certainly not revolutionary because of any intellectual or political content. But it was revolutionary in its form and technique. Its heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to share her delusions. The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind. Though little noticed by most of the pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Flaubert or Joyce or Woolf.... Austen ... was perfecting a technique that she had begun developing in her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility. It was only in the early 20th century that critics began agreeing on a name for it: free indirect style.... It describes the way in which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. Before Austen, novelists chose between first-person narrative (letting us into the mind of a character, but limiting us to his or her understanding) and third-person narrative (allowing us a God-like view of all the characters, but making them pieces in an authorial game). Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external."

The science of learning: five classic studies - article by Tom Stafford in The Guardian. "A few classic studies help to define the way we think about the science of learning.... I’m a psychologist, so you won’t be surprised that my choice of classic studies concern the mental processes rather than the social processes involved in learning.... 1. Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts'. Frederick Bartlett was a Cambridge psychologist who used a native American folk story called War of the Ghosts to show something fundamental about our memories. The story, and the research study he used it in, are related in his 1932 book Remembering.... 2. Skinner's rats and pigeons. BF Skinner is famous as the father of behaviourism, the school of psychology known for training behaviours in pigeons and rats.... His great achievement was to show how schedules of reinforcement, such as the delivery of food pellets to hungry rats, could condition behaviour.... 3. Dissociable memory systems.... Pioneering work led by Larry Squire showed that amnesic patients who had trouble remembering episodes of their lives had no trouble performing a new skill they had learned. Brain imaging has confirmed the basic division of labour between so-called declarative memory, aka explicit memory (facts and events), and procedural memory, aka implicit memory (habits and skills).... 4. Inside the mind of the chess masters.... Adriaan de Groot was a Dutch chess master as well as a psychologist.... One of his findings was that chess masters have an amazing memory for patterns on the chess board – able to recall the positions of all the pieces after only a brief glance. Follow-up work showed that they only have this ability if the patterns conform to possible positions in a legal game of chess.... The result confirms the idea that knowledge is a web of associations – when you have a large existing store of knowledge it is easy to spot patterns and so remember the positions of all the pieces. 5. Ericsson's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson is famous for claiming that all world-class performers have in common is that they have all invested at least 10,000 in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means effortful, structured practice focusing on reducing your failings and errors, constantly pushing yourself to improve."

What Orwell can teach us about the language of terror and war - extract from Rowan Williams' 2015 Orwell lecture in The Guardian. "Creating a language that cannot be checked by or against any recognisable reality is the ultimate mark of power. What [Thomas] Merton characterises as “double-talk, tautology, ambiguous cliche, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity and pseudoscientific jargon” is not just an aesthetic problem: it renders dialogue impossible; and rendering dialogue impossible is the desired goal for those who want to exercise absolute power.... Both Merton and [George] Orwell concentrate on a particular kind of bureaucratic redescription of reality, language that is designed to be no one’s in particular, the language of countless contemporary manifestos, mission statements and regulatory policies, the language that dominates so much of our public life, from health service to higher education.... Bad writing is politically poisonous; good writing is politically liberating – and this is true even when that good writing comes from sources that are ideologically hostile to good politics (however defined). The crucial question is whether the writing is directed to making the reader see, feel and know less or more. And the paradox is that, even faced with systems that stifle good writing and honest imagining, the good writer doesn’t respond in kind but goes on trying to fathom what the terrorist and the bigot are saying, to make sense of people who don’t want to make sense of him or her. Failing to do that condemns us to bad writing and bad politics, to the language of total conflict and radical dehumanisation."

The Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas Sermon by Justin Welby. "What the shepherds glimpsed that silent night outside Bethlehem was an apocalypse, which means an uncovering of God’s final purpose for all the universe.... Today, across the Middle East, close to the area in which the angels announced God’s apocalypse, ISIS and others claim that this is the time of an apocalypse, an unveiling created of their own terrible ideas, one which is igniting a trail of fear, violence, hatred and determined oppression. Confident that these are the last days, using force and indescribable cruelty, they seem to welcome all opposition, certain that the warfare unleashed confirms that these are indeed the end times.... The shepherds see the truth, eternal, unwavering, divine truth, defined not by them, but by God: it was truth for them then, it is truth with us today. Goodness knows what they were expecting, but what they find is a new-born child – tiny, helpless and vulnerable. Yet they bow down in worship. The shepherds get this apocalypse.

Secret Teacher: WALT, WILF, EBI – we're awash with useless acronyms - article by 'The Secret Teacher' in The Guardian, Teacher Network. "When WALT and WILF made their grand entrance, telling the children what “We Are Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For”, it was as though nobody in teaching had ever thought to mention what they were going to do in a lesson and why students needed to do it.... Good teachers, trained properly, do not need WALT or WILF (sorry, guys) for their students to do well. And children will still learn less in badly taught lessons whether WALT and WILF are present or not. It was the same when the new girls in town – WWW (What Went Well) and EBI (Even Better If) – were expected to transform marking standards. The result was that those who already marked diligently now took three times longer to get through a set of books, putting further strain on their work-life balance and causing increasing discontent. Those who weren’t marking properly before, still didn’t bother. This frustration can quickly turn into negativity and before you know it, you have committed teachers feeling inhibited by the rigidity of the system, while their less conscientious colleagues remain unfazed."

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe – review by Naomi Alderman in The Guardian. "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is an illustrated 'how things work' book. Munroe’s beautiful, ligne claire-style illustrations are perfect for this task: you can pick out the tiny individual chairs in a recreation room on an oil rig, or the parcels in the hold of a tall ship. He has chosen a diverse range of things to explain: from helicopters to a human cell, from the table of elements to the machines in a hospital room. And there’s that gimmick from 'Up-Goer Five': the book is written using only the top thousand (or 'ten hundred') words most commonly used in the English language. At some points, this produces passages of such startling clarity that one forgets there was ever anything difficult to understand about these phenomena. Explaining why there are U-shaped tanks of water in the centre of skyscrapers, the caption reads: 'This room is very carefully shaped so that when the building leans one way, the water runs the other way and hits the wall, pushing the building back up.' No jargon needed there; it’s precise, to the point and absolutely fascinating."

Patrick Ness: ‘You’re 10, a refugee in a foreign country. What the hell do you do?’- interview by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. " 'I love the chosen-one narrative; long may it reign,' Ness says. 'But it seems to me there are two periods of challenge in a teenager’s life. The first is when you become a teenager and realise: "I’m separate from my family." That experience is vital but it’s also kind of violent, and the chosen-one narrative offers an amazing explanation: it says, everyone feels this way, there’s power in this decision you’ve made. The second is the end of school. You’ve spent time figuring out what you believe and where your boundaries are, and you’re just getting back on your feet when everything ends. And the chosen one is less good at dealing with that. I wondered if the two were entwined: do you feel less chosen the older you get? Then there are all those millions of kids – and I was certainly one of them – who would never have got the Hogwarts letter. It’s not even that I’d have been in a different house from Harry – I’d never have gotten the letter in the first place.'”

Why Star Wars is a political Force to be reckoned with - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian.  "It was noted in 1977 that A New Hope, both in its tone and in its reception, represented a kind of wish-fulfilment after Vietnam, the rebuilding of shared moral absolutes after a visceral pasting. Two decades on, a sad adaptation to a new reality had taken place, where the living incarnation of all that is noble – the Jedi – are critically limited by the rather limp and indecisive democracy that governs them. This is inevitable, if the highest beings are aristocrats but the highest stated value is democracy. The ideas that all citizens share the dignity of being born equal, and the best among them are more equal than the others, are simply incompatible. This explains why the goodies are suddenly so complicated while the baddies’ motivation is intact and as strong as ever."