The learning technologies of 1990

To celebrate a colleague’s clocking up 25 years on the staff of The Open University, I put together a slideshow to remind us all just how long ago 1990 was. Amongst other things, that was the year in which Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign, Germany was re-unified, and the first Gulf War began. Top films of the year included Ghost, Pretty Woman, Home Alone, and Back to the Future III.

But what was learning technology like in 1990? Three events from The Open University’s history remind us how things were back then.

First, there was a change to the transmission timings of the TV programmes made and broadcast by the BBC for OU students. From the time of the OU’s first course in 1970, when domestic video recorders were many years in the future, these programmes had been transmitted late at night or in the early morning, so that – as became a legendary British curiosity – not only OU students but insomniacs and early risers could study art history, theoretical physics or human psychology in the hours before or after regular programming. In 1990, the BBC moved all its educational broadcasting, including OU programmes, to an overnight “Learning Zone” (“zone” was very much a word of the period) on the basis that people who wanted them would record them and watch them later at a time of their convenience. This marked a technology milestone, in that for the first time the OU was working on the assumption that video recorder ownership was now so widespread that all of its students owned and (perhaps more crucially) were able to program it.

At that time at the OU, only students on certain courses were required to have a computer, or at least access to one. The minimum specification of that computer had been the subject of much debate, being eventually fixed around the capabilities of the Amstrad 1512: an IBM PC “clone” from the company of Alan Sugar, who was then famous not for firing apprentices but for manufacturing cheap and sturdy computers for the business market. In 1990 however, the argument erupted again when the minimum specification was breached by a computing course which – because of the requirements of a database package – demanded that students have a computer with TWO floppy disk drives, instead of just one. (Most personal computers at this time did not have a hard disk drive, let alone a CD-ROM reader.)

In 1990 an internet connection was also a rarity for domestic computer users, though about two thousand OU students and lecturers were required to have one in order to use CoSy, an early computer conferencing system. Such things were new and unfamiliar to those outside academic science and the computer industry; CoSy had to be accompanied by a long and detailed manual, in which operations were explained through the analogy of working on a desktop with different files and folders which might be open or closed. (Few people other than users of the Apple Macintosh had experience of a windows-icon-menu-pointer system; Microsoft’s attempt to create a rival system called Windows had only reached version 3.0 in 1990, and was still vastly inferior to the Mac OS.)

These kinds of trips back into the past can be great fun. (So can seeing what kids of today make of the cutting-edge technologies of yesteryear.) But if we find the VCRs, floppy disk drives and dial-up internet connections of 1990 quaint, we should resist the temptation to imagine ourselves superior to the people we were back then or to congratulate ourselves on how much progress has been made. Rather we should be reminded of how many of the technologies which now seem so obvious and central to our lives will in fact prove transitory and doomed to ultimate obsolescence. William Gibson, the author of the 1984 SF novel Neuromancer and regarded as something of a prophet of the digital world, once commented on his attitude to new technologies:“whenever I’m shown something like Google Glass, … [I imagine] what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a [charity] shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do.”

That’s the great thing about history: it can give strip away our temporal chauvinism and give us perspective. How will the learning technologies of today look in 25 years time, I wonder?

Why a tutorial is like Weightwatchers

Seeing an obituary of Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weightwatchers, reminded me of an Open University student whom I interviewed some years ago about her experience of study. She greatly valued contact with other students, but not for the reasons one might suppose, because she compared her tutorials to Weightwatchers meetings;

You come home with a little book every week, and it tells you, ... “this is what we’re concentrating on this week, and this is how to do it, and this is what we’re going to help you with, and don’t let people distract you, and da, da, da. ... Don’t let people try and make you eat cakes. Tell people that you’re doing this.” Like, “I’m studying, please don’t come in. I need this hour, it’s,” you know.... People need sort of chivvying, … they need a bit of support. And, er, WeightWatchers is very good at that. Very good at that.... That’s why you go to WeightWatchers once a week, so that w–, apart from the ritual humiliation of being weighed. Um. But you go, and there’s other people there, and you all chat in a queue and, you know, ... all girls together, or whatever it may be, which is similar to the tutorials.... In part the reason you go along is the moral support of seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]. Or whatever.

I think of this student whenever I hear colleagues getting pretentious about the importance of contact between students for collaborative knowledge construction. Weightwatchers meetings are not intended for collaborative knowledge construction, or even for sharing information, because the basic principle of dieting is brutally simple – you just eat fewer calories – and all the details of the proprietary system for calorie-counting and meal planning are contained in a handbook which comes with WeightWatchers membership. For this student, the most important aspect of her meetings was the group identity (“all girls together”) and the moral authority which it gave to resist social pressures.

So though students may share information with each other and may build knowledge collaboratively, it’s not necessarily the only or the most important aspect of their relationship with each other. Nor is their sense of community, if they develop one, necessarily founded on shared goals; more powerful may be “the ritual humiliation”, “seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]”. As Ursula Le Guin wrote many years ago: “brotherhood begins in shared pain.”

How Costa prompts feedback

Having a post-gym breakfast at my local Costa last week, I saw a poster asking for customer feedback which went beyond the ordinary.

One difficulty, when asking for any kind of feedback, is to prompt people to think without pre-disposing them in any particular direction. Another is to get them to give positive feedback, instead of only giving feedback when they've a complaint to make! What Costa have done - as part of the poster design, not the overt message - is to provide a set of stems, so that they tacitly suggest ways you might start your feedback while leaving the actual feedback up to you.

The stems include: "We found ...", "We were ...", "I wish ...", "Glad to see ...", "Thank you for ...", "Hope it ...", "I really felt ...", "Could you ...", "Really enjoyed ...".

This reminded me of Andrew Ravenscroft's Academic Talk / InterLoc project, which experimented with an online discussion interface which forced students to contribute to the discussion using one of a limited set of stems. (For example: “I think that…”, “I disagree because…”, “Is there any evidence that…”, “Why do you think that…”.) Interestingly, students found the constraint of their responses didn't inhibit them but actually enabled them to engage in more and deeper discussion.

I like Costa, so I hope the poster works just as well for them. My own feedback: great graphic design, and a model of customer engagement!

Reference
Simon McAlister, Andrew Ravenscroft, Eileen Scanlon, “Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20 (2004), pp 194-204.

Visions of the future

As part of the Guardian’s Generation Y series, four authors wrote short-short SF stories about the media of the future. All were dystopian, and interestingly two of the four focused on the issue of personalization (as distinct from customization, see below), taken to the extreme: where you can view only the online content which has been deemed suitable for you, not by some Big Brother central state but the commercial forces of advertising and profiling.

In “News hacking is the new glue sniffing” by Laurie Penny, teenagers gather in a seedy dive to read the news: “not only the news that’s been tailored to their age, interests and background, but any news” - for example, that Tottenham has been under military occupation for two months, which is blocked if you have a London login. They hack the internet service to create open logins, which is a risky pursuit; “companies can and do sue users for loss of potential advertising revenue”.

In “Paper” by James Smythe, a man on the underground is reading his own (digital) Paper, which is feeding him news and gossip about the Oscars ceremony and trying to get him to buy a suit similar to the one worn by one of the actors. He sees a woman reading about an unfolding war on her own Paper, but he can find no trace of it in his own (although he finds “war” occurring in the names of TV shows and films, and a story about a fight between two women on a reality TV show). A message comes up: “Based on your social profile, we have predicted that these will not be interesting to you. Would you like to know more about best actor at last night’s Oscars?”

Generation Y, it seems, has no truck with the happy hippy utopian vision of the internet as a free space for (hedonistically) sexual expression or (politically) democratic protest. Some of us old ‘uns never believed it anyway, but the younger generation sees perhaps more clearly – despite, or perhaps because, being more immersed in online social media – that the digital world replicates all the power structures and social tensions of the physical, though amplified and on a larger scale. Let’s be careful out there, as they used to say in Hill Street Blues.

Note

“Personalisation” and “customisation” are similar and the words are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction. In usual usage, “customisation” is what you, the user, do to select the things you want; for example, you can “customise” the Toolbar in Microsoft Office so that it contains the icons you want to see most frequently. “Personalisation” is the system choosing what to put in front of you, based on what it knows (or thinks it knows) about your and what you want; targeted advertising or, more benignly, Amazon recommendations, are personalisation.

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.

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

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.

Turning junk into art: the Facebook song

One of the joys of television in my childhood was watching Tony Hart - first on Vision On and then on Take Hart - produce simple and beautiful drawings and paintings with apparent casualness and effortlessness. He had a trick of starting with a collection of rubbish - bits of paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, printed or plain, "any old load of junk" as he would say" - and then "get organised": arrange selected pieces on a backing sheet so that when he put a frame around them they looked great. A work of 'art, you might say.

The Australian composer Gordon Hamilton has done something similar, turning status updates from his Facebook friends into a vocal piece for his choir, The AustralianVoices. I had the pleasure last week of hearing them perform it live during a concert in Old Wolverton's Holy Trinity Church; they invited Polymnia, the choir I sing in, to do a guest spot in their concert, which was pretty cool too. The song takes its title from the first of the status updates: "Toy Story 3 =  Awesome".  Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, loved it, and you will too.


I'm not sure what the relevance for learning materials is, other than the obvious one: it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts.

Talking teaching or technology? A lesson from Pixar

Reflecting on how we train tutors to use Elluminate (our audiographic conferencing system) for a meeting of the Open University's eLearning Community, I realised that our attitude has done a 180 degree turn in just a few years.

When we began, we thought it was very important that tutors learned how to use all the Elluminate controls before thinking about how to teach with it, despite the time it would take them to do so. (The full manual is 365 pages long!) Now we're more inclined to the view that the first thing a tutor should do is to watch an Elluminate tutorial, or even better - with just a little basic preparation - to take part in one, run by someone else. Once they know what can be done, they can find out how to do it for themselves, with the aid of the manual if need be - and now with the motivation to do so.

The great thing about this approach is that it values the competences which tutors already have, rather than plunging them into an area where they're unskilled and are liable to become demoralised when the inevitable technical problems arise. ("There you are, I told you I'm rubbish with computers.") Our tutors are already brilliant at bulding rapport with students, with reassuring and challenging them, and creating a safe space in which they can admit to problems and make mistakes. All they need to do is to learn to do these things through a new medium.

To encourage tutors feeling nervous about the technology, I tell them the story of John Lasseter: the director or executive producer of some of Pixar's greatest computer-animated films (Toy Story, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, etc).

In 1981, when he moved from Disney to the division of Lucasfilm which would become Pixar, computer animation was still very much dominated by programmers and technologists, and the sorts of films they made showed rotating cubes with changing images on each side, or geometrical shapes rising out of pools of molten liquid, or the play of light on complex textured surfaces. (I remember going to a computer animation festival at this time, where one of the presenters got very, very excited about the precise fractal algorithm he'd used to generate the texture of ice and snow on a simulated glacier.)

By contrast, Lasseter's 1984 film "André and Wally B" was a story about a little man and a bee, and it was shown at a computer graphics conference where it got a tremendous reception. After the showing, a guy came up to him and said: "Hey, your film was really funny!" to which Lasster made a polite and appreciative response. Then the guy asked: "What software do you use?" and Lasseter explained that it was just a basic key-frame animation tool, pretty much what everyone else was using, nothing very special. The guy was visibly disappointed. "Yeah," he mused, "but your film was so funny!"

And Lasseter realised that the computer guy was assuming that the film's being funny was somehow a product of the software. It wasn't, of course: it was a product of character, emotion, narrative and timing - all things that Lasseter, as a former Disney animator, knew how to do, and do well.

So what I remind our tutors is that if someone says to them, as we hope they will, "Hey, that was a really great online tutorial you gave!" it won't be because of the excellence of the software or even their expertise in using it. It will be because of those qualities which already make them great tutors face-to-face and which they've learned to apply in the online environment.


References: John Lasseter has told this story in interviews for the BBC TV programme 'From pencils to pixels' ('Imagine' series, transmitted 10 December 2003) and at the 2001 London Film Festival. 
For OU staff only: a video of my talk to the eLearning Community is at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/webcast-ou/ (under 15 November 2011, Session 3, 27 mins in) and details of the event are at http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=9612.

What can online teaching add to printed materials?

Here are 10 things you can do online, which add value to printed distance learning materials.

1  Make the printed materials available in digital form - for example, as a PDF or an ePub (e-book) file. This makes the materials searchable, portable (if loaded onto a mobile device), and copy-and-pasteable. (Even if students primarily read the materials in their printed form, they may find a digital version a useful alternative.)

2  Include time-limited subject matter. This is useful where a topic is essentially volatile (for example, because it is dependent on government policy), or topical examples or case studies are in danger of becoming dated. Rather than avoid them totally, you can include them in the knowledge that you can revise them if necessary later at relatively low production cost.

3  Provide exercises or learning activities - to help students develop their own knowledge and understanding of the subject matter. Where a question or task is followed by a model answer, comment or feedback, the online medium allows you to hide this (for example, just by putting it on another web page), so that students don't see it immediately. (Even if you can't force them to answer a question, you can still make them pause - and the dialogic question-and-answer form can help support students' own metacognitive processes.) 

4  Include interactive presentations - for example, animated diagrams. These can repay their development cost by helping students develop their own mental models of structures, processes or concepts.

5  Provide self-tests - for example, quizzes, which (with careful writing) can test analytical or even evaluative skills, as well as knowledge and understanding. These are only practical where the subject matter allows for questions with closed, well-defined answers, but where they are students usually greatly value the immediacy of feedback on their study.

6 Link to external online resources - not only resources which present or teach the subject matter well (if they exist and are free, why write your own?) but resources which can you can use as objects or exemplars of different perspectives for students to analyse and critique.

7 Develop digital skills and information literacy - the skills of digital reading, writing and note-taking, and finding, evaluating and using online sources, which are now expected of graduates.

8 Integrate learning activities with digital resources - so that students can for example move smoothly between audio-visual resources and the accompanying analytic questions, or between their current learning task and their products from previous tasks held in the “cloud”.

9 Include cooperative activities - for example, through an online forum, to enable students to share their experiences or findings, or to form each other's conceptual development through discussion, as well as developing communicative skills.

10 Include collaborative activities - for example, through a wiki, in which students work together to produce a shared product, thus requiring them to develop the meta-skills of work organisation and negotiation.

Online collaborative work for beginners

We seem to have realised, at last, that one cannot simply provide online collaborative technology to students and expect them to collaborate. (One of the most interesting findings from the JISC Great Expectations survey was that although young people may be experienced in social networking technology, on arrival at university they struggle to see how it can be used in learning.) So how should one introduce online collaborative work to students? What kinds of scaffolding and support do beginning students need?
I've just come across a paper (unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online) by Andy Northedge, author of The Good Study Guide, describing how he and colleagues designed "a fail-safe online group project work environment" for students on an entry level Open University course in health and social care (KZX100). A high degree of structuring to tasks, supported by custom online software, meant that after an initial set-up stage student teams could work largely independently with little teacher support. Satisfaction levels were high, and - most remarkably - students were actually interested in each others' work. (This happens much more rarely than teachers suppose!)
The key features of the learning design were as follows.
(1) A highly structured team set-up stage. This addressed the critical issue for all collaborative work: that students need to be doing their work at roughly the same time - not trivial to arrange with distance learning students, for whom flexibility of study is often critical. Students began by indicating their availability during a six-week period, after which their tutor divided them into teams who could work on the project during the same two-week block. A coordinator in each team then obtained students' commitment to precise start and end dates. Importantly, students received credit for tasks in this stage, even before actually doing any work on their project, "to stimulate them to participate in a timely way and to commit to the team enterprise". (Without the custom software, other courses could do some of these tasks on Doodle.com - a free public web application for event scheduling.)

(2) Visible time targets for project milestones. These were initially generated by the software, from the start and end dates, but could then be adjusted by coordinators, allowing teams to re-plan their time strategy.

(3) An interface which rendered each student's work visible to other members of their team. Each student had first to find three websites relevant to their chosen concern and review them using an online proforma, and then to review two high-rated and two low-rated websites found by other students. The software displayed students' review of the same website in parallel columns, as well as a "hit parade" of websites in rank order.

(4) Discussion to facilitate the transition from exploration to production. After reviewing the websites, the students used an online forum to discuss six evaluation criteria (breadth, accessibility, trustworthiness, etc), drawing on their experience, and also working towards the joint report which they would next be writing.

(5) Individual authorship of discrete parts of the joint product. Each student wrote a separate section of the final report, summarising the team's discussion of one of the six evaluation criteria. The software only allowed them to work on their own section (or sections), but reading and suggesting improvements to other sections was encouraged.

(6) Assessment not of team product ("to reduce strain on team relations"), but of individual reflective essay on what has been learned from the project.

Although the course has now been superceded, the learning design remains valid. Like the InterLoc tool for structuring online discussion, this is an example of how structure and constraints on action can be useful in a teaching environment, as scaffolding to help students attain a level they would have found it difficult to reach on their own - in contradiction to the freedom ethos of Web 2.0.

(The full reference of the paper: Northedge A, 2006. Designing a fail-safe online group project work environment, Proceedings of International Conference on e-Learning: Learning Theories vs. Technologies, 14–16 December, 2006, Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand, pp 12.1-7)

The enforcement of rational chat

InterLoc (formerly AcademicTalk) is a tool for synchronous online discussion, or chat, which has been specifically designed to force participants to follow the rules of rational academic discussion.

Its creators, Andrew Ravenscroft and Simon McAlister, were responding to concerns about the low levels of online debate - not only in public chatrooms, where dialogue can often take the form of "You suck!" "No, you suck!", but even in organised student discussions, where the tendency is for students to give each other an easy time and resort to "trading" opinions ("I think this." "I think that." "Okay, shall we go for a drink now?")

The InterLoc interface forces participants to start each message with one of a number of prescribed openers, not only to state a position ("I think...", "Let me explain...") but to ask questions ("Why do you think that...?" "Can you give an example...?") and make challenges ("I disagree because...", "An alternative view is...", "How reliable is that evidence...?) Student discussions with InterLoc are found to stay more on topic and go deeper than synchronous discussions conducted without it; in particular, students seem to be more willing to question and challenge each other when socially protected by the formal structure of the system.

Of course this goes directly against the cultural assumptions of freedom and spontaneity associated with online discussion and chat in particular, and some students reported resenting the restrictive openers. But as the authors comment: "It is only by being restrictive in some degree that they will have a positive benefit for the student, by forcing them to reformulate intuitive, reactive thoughts into a more well crafted and, hopefully, thoughtful contribution" (Final report, p. 37)

The InterLoc project's website includes details of publications as well as the latest version of the tool and links to other users. The list of message openers used in the original AcademicTalk is published as an appendix to McAlister, Ravenscroft and Scanlon (2004), "Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC", Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20, pp 194-204.