Why is writing learning materials hard for academics?

When academics first start to write distance learning materials, a few hit the mark straight off, most take a few attempts to work it out, and some never "get it": however hard they try, they continue to produce writing which no matter how excellent from the academic or technical point of view is simply unsuitable as learning materials.

Reflecting on this sad fact with another producer of learning materials from another university, he asked me why I thought academics found writing learning materials hard. Off the top of my head, I replied that I thought it had to do with the prevailing forms of academic discourse. Academic standing and prestige comes from writing and publishing research papers, which is an entirely unhelpful model. Apart from that, there are textbooks and lectures, which are better models in that they at least have a teaching function; but they too are monologic one-to-many forms of communication. What's needed for good learning materials is a different discursive model.

Actually the best model is one with many academics are familiar, although it may not occur to them at first. At The Open University, the relevance of this model for the fledgling university’s teaching was spelled out in a 1973 memo from Derek Rowntree (discussed in more detail in my previous post):

Rowntree... asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time. [He] argued that … it was highly unlikely that you would simply talk at the learner for hour after hour; he didn’t believe it would happen. Instead he thought you would probably regard a one-to-one tutorial as an ideal form of teaching. (Lockwood, 1992 p 25)

This was the model for classic OU learning materials during the 1970s and '80s: what Rowntree called the “tutorial in print”. Some thirty years later, a similar model was adopted by the very successful Khan academy videos, which (as I have already observed) are not video lectures but video tutorials: the camera does not look at the teacher but at the paper or screen on which the teacher is writing down the maths: the view you would have while sitting beside your maths tutor.

What the tutorial model does for the teacher is to replace the one-to-many communication of a lecture with communication that is one-to-one, or one-to-a-very-small-group. Unless a writer of learning materials makes this shift, they will be like one of the speakers in the early days of radio broadcasting who would deliver their talk in stentorian tones, thinking of the millions of listeners they were aiming to reach instead of the individuals or family groups who would each be listening on their own wireless set. Early radio producers, such as Hilda Matheson, the BBC's first Director of Talks, needed to work on speakers to get them to make this transition.

The models for BBC broadcasts were the public lecture, the political speech, the theatre and the variety hall. One of Matheson’s many achievements was to realise that the microphone demanded an entirely different manner from the podium. “It was useless to address the microphone as if it were a public meeting, or even to read it essays or leading articles,” she wrote. “The person sitting at the other end expected the speaker to address him personally, simply, almost familiarly.” She rehearsed, coaxed and harried speakers until they found a mode of speech that worked. (Higgins 2014)

If the one-to-one personal style has been found to be essential for broadcast media, how much more essential it is for learning materials, in which, as Diana Laurillard argued long ago (2002, pp 86-87), the critical element is the conversation or dialogue which goes on between teacher and learner.

References

Lockwood, F. 1992, Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, London, Kogan Page.

Higgins, C. 2014 'What can the origins of the BBC tell us about its future?', The Guardian 15 April 2014, online at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/15/bbc-origins-future, accessed 30 September 2018. 

Laurillard, D. 2002, Rethinking University Teaching; A Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd edn, London, RoutledgeFalmer.

Seen and heard: July to September 2018

Forgotton Anne - well-reviewed graphically beautiful adventure game, with particularly satisfying animation as Anne runs, climbs and jumps her way across a darkened cityscape. Intelligent (if predictable) storyline too, as young Anne gradually comes to realise the corrupt nature of the regime she services, in this world of forgotten and abandoned objects presided over by an elderly clockmaker.

Bach B Minor Mass - performed by English Voices conducted by Tim Brown in Cambridge Summer Music Festival, sung with one voice to a part rendering the counterpoint (sometimes eight-fold) crystal clear, an aural equivalent of ultra-high definition TV, all the parts remaining perfectly distinct with your attention drawn first to one singer then another. A truly astonishing performance.

Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger Halka, performing as part of Milton Keynes International Festival. A great family show (my four-year-old grandson kept on turning round to tell me "I love it!") full of astonishing acts skill and strength, woven together with characterisations and humour.

Selling Politics, by Laurence Rees – 1992 book written to accompany the better-titled BBC TV series ‘We Have Ways of Making You Think’. The TV made a big impact on me at the time, for its demonstration of how the basic techniques of mass persuasion were effectively worked out by Goebbels, the brilliant (if twisted) Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany and the originator of the “great truth” that propaganda must first be entertaining and never try to give its audience information. In the book, successive chapters shows how Goebbels’ principles were, knowingly or unknowingly, taken up by political campaign managers after the Second World War, their effectiveness enhanced and exacerbated by mass television, culminating in the (then) contemporary political campaigning of Ronald Reagan and the UK political parties in the 1992 elections. The final chapter speculates that in the future these trends could make it possible for someone of no political experience but substantial media presence to be elected to high office. Scarily prescient!

Eye in the Sky - nail-biting dramatisation of a classic ethical dilemma (do you fire a missile to kill a group of terrorists about to launch a bomb attack, if you know you will also kill a twelve-year-old girl selling bread just outside their compound?) with tremendous performances by Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in his last role.

Incredibles 2 - not quite as good as the original but still way more fun and sophisticated than almost all other superhero films. Effectively it's an old sitcom trope (mum goes out to work so dad has to look after the baby), but given new life with the Pixar treatment. Anyway, the baby-with-superpowers joke was the best of the three high concepts from the original film (the others being superheroes-living-in-suburban-obscurity and rejected-fan-as-supervillain). Another fine 60s-inspired score from Michael Giacchimo.

The Martian - Robinson Crusoe meets Apollo 13 in neat hardcore SF thriller. We didn't mean to stay up so late, but once started we had to watch to the end to see he got home safely.

Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers - updated edition of the classic revered text by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. Full of really practical tips, with (negative) examples, of how to write or re-write intros, background and headlines, useful not only for journalists but any writer or editor who wants to attract and keep the attention of their readers. (Which should be all of them, really.)

Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage – Channel 4 TV series, contrasting sharply with the BBC/OU series on rites and rituals broadcast over the same weeks. Rather than doing the usual and boring thing of "here's a strange and unpleasant ritual, and here's another", this was truly engaged and high-risk documentary-making: the observation of a ritual in Bali, Papua New Guinea or wherever was only the preliminary to Grayson Perry's creation of a corresponding ritual with and for people in the UK. Most moving was the first programme on Death, which featured a ritual for a couple whose teenage son had been killed in a road traffic accident and a pre-death funeral for a man with terminal motor-neurone disease. Skilled, safe, sound work, which I bet he discussed lots with his psychotherapist wife.

The Marvellous Mechanical Museum / Rodney Peppe’s World of Invention - linked exhibitions at Compton Verney. Beautiful designs, of course, in the former case going back to the 18th century, but most striking was the numerous wooden cam-driven automata being built NOW by artists in (surely) rebellion against digital technology which would be the most obvious way of controlling the movements: for example, the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and Baba Yaga. Most charming was the gallery-filling set of kinetic sculptures called A Quiet Afternoon in the Cloud Cuckoo Valley, by Roland Emmet, who made Caractacus Potts' inventions for the film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: true English whimsy from the post-war era.

Telephones - 7 minute video by Christian Marclay, made of clips from classic films all featuring people using telephones. Very enjoyable, though I don't think I'd have the patience for his follow-up film doing the same with clocks, though apparently that is tremendous even without sitting through the full 24 hours.

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro - sad and haunting novel, about an elderly couple making their way across a post-Arthurian landscape, as traditions of hospitality give way to hostility, suspicion and superstition, and the fragile peace between Briton and Saxon threatens to turn to open conflict once again. The buried giant of the title, I think, is the past, or memory of the past: a mist clouds the memory of everyone, not just the elderly, so that people are forgetful of what happened an hour previously as well as what happened many years ago. At first, this forgetting is presented as an entirely negative thing, but then we start to wonder: is it the forgetting of past conflicts and massacres which has enabled the Arthurian peace to stand? And is even the dear old couple's loving way with each other only possible because they forget or choose to overlook the slights and wrongs which have gone between them before? There's no happy ending, but then (look at Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go) Ishiguro doesn't do happy endings.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine d'Engle - prize-winning American children's novel from the early 1960s. Apart from its bolshy but likeable heroine, the SF is much of its era - warping spacetime (several years before Star Trek popularised the warp drive) and a decidedly dodgy caricature of Soviet-style centralist communism - but overlooking that I can appreciate now, what I wouldn't have done at the time: the powerful use of body language and poetic imagery to describe the unimaginably strange (the experience of translocation, the encounter with totally alien life forms). And Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who (several years before her doctoral relative appeared on British TV) and Mrs Which make a great trio of wyrd sisters. I wonder what the recent film does with the story.

Love You to Bits - well-reviewed charming and ingenious puzzle game, in which little Cosmo searches for the missing pieces of his beloved robot girlfriend across 28 strange worlds. The basic puzzles are kind - it's always clear what actions are possible, so if necessary you can complete the levels through elimination - but the way they unfold is beautiful and impossible to anticipate. My favourite level is the secret laboratory, where mad scientists are torturing animals and creating monsters; by the end of the level, the monsters have escaped and are torturing the scientists. However the bonus hidden objects - each a momento of Cosmo and Nova's life together - are very challenging to find, and I've often had to resort to a walkthrough.

Cuttings: September 2018

Say goodbye to suspicion - prayer by Phil Harrison SJ, circulated by the Jesuit Refugee Service. "Say goodbye to suspicion, say goodbye to despair, say goodbye to hate. Say goodbye to these three things and I will be revealed in your midst. When suspicion, despair and hate have left the room, I will enter, although cautiously because you may not recognise me at first. I am the one you have passed in the street. I am the one you ignored as I slept on a bed of concrete and nails. I am the one who has been serving you all this time, though you did not know it was me. I am the guest you did not invite, but I have come to invite you to the banquet prepared in the Kingdom of God at which all may rejoice. I will show you that suspicion, despair and hate can never have the last word. Say hello to faith, say hello to hope and say hello to love. Let these three remain among you and let me remain with you."

Ways to think about machine learning - blog post by Benedict Evans, referenced in John Naughton's Observer column. "One of the challenges in talking about machine learning is to find the middle ground between a mechanistic explanation of the mathematics on one hand and fantasies about general AI on the other. Machine learning is not going to create HAL 9000..., but it’s also not useful to call it ‘just statistics’. [Drawing] parallels with relational databases, this might be rather like talking about SQL in 1980 - how do you get from explaining table joins to thinking about Salesforce.com? It's all very well to say 'this lets you ask these new kinds of questions', but it isn't always very obvious what questions.... I think there are two sets of tools for thinking about this. The first is to think in terms of a procession of types of data and types of question: (1) Machine learning may well deliver better results for questions you're already asking about data you already have, simply as an analytic or optimization technique.... (2) Machine learning lets you ask new questions of the data you already have. For example, a lawyer doing discovery might search for 'angry’ emails, or 'anxious’ or anomalous threads or clusters of documents, as well as doing keyword searches, (3) Third, machine learning opens up new data types to analysis - computers could not really read audio, images or video before and now, increasingly, that will be possible.... Automation is the second tool for thinking about machine learning. ...One of my colleagues suggested that machine learning will be able to do anything you could train a dog to do... Andrew Ng has suggested that ML will be able to do anything you could do in less than one second. Talking about ML does tend to be a hunt for metaphors, but I prefer the metaphor that this gives you infinite interns, or, perhaps, infinite ten year olds."

Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code - article by Andrew Smith in The Guardian. " 'In some ways we’ve lost agency. When programs pass into code and code passes into algorithms and then algorithms start to create new algorithms, it gets farther and farther from human agency. Software is released into a code universe which no one can fully understand.' If these words sound shocking, they should, not least because Ellen Ullman, in addition to having been a distinguished professional programmer since the 1970s, is one of the few people to write revealingly about the process of coding. There’s not much she doesn’t know about software in the wild. 'People say, "Well, what about Facebook – they create and use algorithms and they can change them." But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and they learn and change and run themselves. Facebook intervene in their running periodically, but they really don’t control them. And particular programs don’t just run on their own, they call on libraries, deep operating systems and so on ...' "

How weak schools serve Trump's agenda - article by Arne Duncan in The Guardian. Education is a complicated issue, but for a long time it’s enjoyed bipartisan support. ... My tenure as education secretary was not perfect, but we were committed to aspirational goals and to students.... Today, no such goals exist. The Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos don’t talk about improving educational outcomes. The Trump administration has no position on increasing access to pre-K, or continuing the work of raising high school graduation rates, or of once again leading the world in college graduation rates.... Some maintain this is due to incompetence, but the more I listen to the president, the more I’m convinced that the administration’s lack of educational goals is by design. A healthy democracy requires an educated citizenry, while an authoritarian regime benefits from the lack of one. President Trump is on record as saying we should all listen to him – he wants to be the final authority and arbiter of truth. ... Upon winning the Nevada primary in February 2016, Trump observed: 'We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.' I wasn’t so amazed he said it, but I was amazed that he said nothing about educating people. Nothing. No goals, no aspirations, no unifying message. The quote succinctly reveals that this is right where he wants people to be: divided and preferably poorly educated."

The mood has shifted: now Corbyn really can transform the economy - article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "The left did not learn from its opponents. The financial crash of a decade ago was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Hungry Thirties. Yet the left’s intellectual cupboard was bare. With little to offer other than fiery speeches about bankers’ greed and defensive slogans against cuts, it presented no coherent alternative. Years of austerity followed, endorsed or even implemented by centre-left parties that signed their own political death warrants in doing so. A decade later, a new intellectual ferment can be found on the left. ... The [IPPR] has attempted to embrace the spirit of our time: the latest report, published by its commission on economic justice, is a critical contribution to a left intellectual revival. Its underlying message is inarguable: the current system is broken. ... The report’s prescriptions challenge assumptions that until recently were considered to be as immovable as the weather. A well-funded national investment bank would modernise Britain’s creaking infrastructure and drive innovation, while a national economic council would design a 10-year plan for the economy. The commission recommends that a genuine, higher living wage should be introduced; and proposes that a target should be set to double the percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining ... Workers would get elected representatives on company boards; and the self-employed ... would be granted work-related benefits. The report also recommends reversing recent cuts to corporation tax, which have failed to increase investment as promised, and a cooperative development act to encourage the mutualisation of the economy."

The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world - article by Oliver Bullough in The Guardian, based on his book Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. "In the years after the first world war, money flowed between countries pretty much however its owners wished, destabilising currencies and economies in pursuit of profit. Many of the wealthy grew wealthier even while economies fell apart. The chaos led to the election of extremist governments in Germany and elsewhere, to competitive devaluations and beggar-my-neighbour tariffs, to trade wars and, ultimately, to the horrors of the second world war. The allies wanted to prevent this ever happening again. So, at a meeting at the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire in 1944, they negotiated the details of an economic architecture that would – in perpetuity – stop uncontrolled money flows. ... One banker in particular was not prepared to tolerate [the controls]: Siegmund Warburg.... [He] had been a banker in Germany in the 1920s and remembered arranging bond deals in foreign currencies. Why couldn’t his bankers do something similar again?... If [Warburg's] bonds had been issued in Britain, there would have been a 4% tax on them, so [his colleague Ian Fraser] formally issued them at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. If the interest were to be paid in Britain, it would have attracted another tax, so Fraser arranged for it to be paid in Luxembourg. He managed to persuade the London Stock Exchange to list the bonds, despite their not being issued or redeemed in Britain, and talked around the central banks of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain, all of which were rightly concerned about the eurobonds’ impact on currency controls. The final trick was to pretend that the borrower was Autostrade – the Italian state motorway company – when really it was IRI, a state holding company. If IRI had been the borrower, it would have had to deduct tax at source, while Autostrade did not have to. The cumulative effect of this game of jurisdictional Twister was that Fraser created a bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and which could be turned back into cash anywhere.... There was no register of ownership or any obligation to record your holding, which was not written down anywhere.... The eurobonds set wealth free and were the first step towards creating the virtual country of the rich that I call Moneyland.... This is the dirty secret at the heart of the City’s rebirth, the beginning of the process that eventually led to today’s stratospheric inequality. It was all made possible by modern communications – the telegram, the phone, the telex, the fax, the email – and it allowed the world’s richest people to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship."

Here’s the science behind the Brexit vote and Trump’s rise - article by Michele Gelfand in The Guardian. "Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures are the opposite. In the US, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to arguing loudly on the street. By contrast, in Singapore, gum is banned, streets are pristine and jaywalkers are rare.... We’ve shown that US states with histories punctuated by high threat, including more natural disasters, higher pathogen prevalence and food instability, are much tighter than those that enjoyed relative safety. Similarly, communities that face financial danger – hunger, poverty, bankruptcy – and higher occupational hazards, are substantially tighter. This helps explain why those on low incomes have consistently told us they desire strong rules and leaders. In fact, when we ask respondents to free-associate from the word 'rules', low-income subjects consistently write positive words such as 'good', 'safe' and 'structure', while wealthier ones write down words such as 'bad', 'frustrating', and 'constricting'. These preferences arise early: in our lab, three-year-olds from low-income families were more visibly upset than peers from wealthier homes when they saw puppets violate clear rules.... Threats lead to a desire for stronger rules – and obedience to leaders who promise to deliver a tight social order. Our research confirms that the strongest Trump supporters, as well as the supporters of Marine Le Pen in France, believe their country is threatened, whether by terrorism, illegal immigration, natural disasters or disease. They felt their countries were too loose, and they wanted tighter rules and stricter leaders. Fearful voters also drove the UK’s Brexit decision and the candidacies of far-right or autocratic politicians in Poland, Russia, the Philippines, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy."

The Coddling of the American Mind: how elite US liberals have turned rightwards - review by Moira Weigel in The Guardian. "Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focus on students demanding 'protection' from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them....The methods they teach come from cognitive behavioural therapy, which Lukianoff credits with having saved his life when he suffered from depression. He and Haidt argue that student demands for social justice are expressions of 'cognitive distortions' that CBT can correct, and that the problems that young people and their parents worry about are not as grave as they think.... Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help.... The Coddling of the American Mind is less interesting for its anecdotes or arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style. That style wants above all to be reasonable.... The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. ... The style that does befit an expert, apparently, is the style of TED talks, thinktanks and fellow Atlantic writers and psychologists. ...As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as 'clicktivism' or mere 'hashtags', right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking 'up their monopoly on discourse. ...The core irony of The Coddling of the American Mind is that, by opposing identity politics, its authors try to consolidate an identity that does not have to see itself as such. Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.... As the right liberals insist that students are suffering from pathological 'distortions', a sense of unreality prevails. In their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and think pieces, the genteel crusaders against 'political correctness' create their own speech codes. As their constituency shrinks, their cant of progress starts to sound hysterical. The minds they coddle just may be their own."

Think we can rewind to the heady days before Trump and Brexit? Think again - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. The dominant mood among liberals is that we need to go backwards to better times. Brexit followed by the election of Donald Trump provide such undeniable illustrations of self-harm to some that they should be reversed or even erased. ... In pursuit of one enormous do-over, they want Trump impeached and another Brexit vote.... [These calls] not only don’t go far enough but ... could have unintended consequences that make things worse. For there is a crucial distinction between challenging a decision that is procedurally flawed or unlawfully enabled, and nullifying a decision because you think it’s a mistake. ... In both scenarios – impeachment or a second referendum – the suspicion of elites would become even greater, and the political alienation and economic marginalisation that contributed to it would still exist. That’s not a reason not to support them. It is a reason to be wary."

'It's impossible!' Christian Marclay and the 24-hour clock made of movie clips - article by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious. Entitled The Clock and lasting 24 hours, the world’s most popular piece of concept art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock. It is a staggering, almost superhuman feat of research that has gained a cult following ever since it was unveiled at the White Cube gallery in London in 2010. The Clock’s easy-to-grasp governing principle coexists with the almost ungraspable fact that its creator, Christian Marclay, really has pulled it off, beguilingly combining the utter randomness of each individual clip with the strict form of his overarching idea, allowing everyone to meditate on time, how we’re obsessed with it, how there’s never enough of it."