Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter: an appreciation

(Copied from my original post 15.2.2021 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)

When I went off to uni in 1977, Cooking in a Bedsitter was one of the books I took with me, and it got a great deal more use than any of my textbooks. Although Katharine Whitehorn had written it for a different generation of young people (it was first published in 1961), the material conditions of life had not changed so very much; if your student room was in a moden block you might be lucky enough to have a shared kitchen, but if you were in an old university building or living out in digs, the best you could hope for was a single gas or electric cooking ring in your room, and no fridge. There were no take-aways other than fish and chips; pizza was still regarded as foreign food and McDonalds had yet to achieve a serious presence on the high street. Chilled ready-meals were many years in the future. So if you wanted to cook for yourself, the challenges were enormous – and it was those that Katherine Whitehorn addressed. Cooking in a Bedsitter was not a book of recipes; it was a lifestyle book, shot through with her trademark down-to-earth simplicity and straightforward common sense.

It was that punchy pragmatic tone which characterised her Observer column. Take for instance her observation (early ’60s, remember) that a woman at a party needs to hold a bag, gloves, plate, drink, serviette, fork and cigarette – AND have a hand free for shaking hands. Having identified the problem, she then worked out the answer, and a photograph of her doing it appeared on the cover of her Social Survival (1968). (Bag goes on the arm, gloves between fifth and fourth fingers, serviette between fourth and third, cigarette between third and second. Hold the plate with first finger and thumb, with the thumb holding down the wineglass and the fork resting on the plate. Your other hand is free for eating, drinking, smoking and shaking.)

In the same vein, Whitehorn’s opening chapter of Cooking in a Bedsitter defined “The problem – and some of the answers”.

Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of finding something that can be cooked over a single gas ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork while you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding somewhere else to put the lid. It is finding a place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or your hairpins. It is having your hands covered with flour, and a pot boiling over on to your landlady’s carpet, and no water to mop up any of it nearer than the bathroom at the other end of the landing. It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which is any case is full of socks. (p. 13)

My copy of the book had one of Penguin’s great new photographic covers of the 1970s, which “allowed the title to be ‘read’ instantly from the image alone” (Baines, 2005, p. 205). In this case the image was of a cast iron bed frame, hung with cooking utensils and food items (see above). Arresting and funny, this was an illustration of the same problem: that the place where you cook is also the place where you sleep.

Whitehorn’s answers to this problem included casseroles (“far the best way of cooking a number of different things together, as one must on a gas ring” p. 16); a damp cloth (for wiping), a water jug (for adding water during cooking) and a plastic bucket (for emptying dregs); newspaper (as a work surface and wrapper for rubbish); and equipment (“it is not a question of the best possible tools, but the fewest” pp. 20-21). All these she covered in her magisterial first chapter, followed by a supremely useful “beginner’s index” of ingredients, including “how much to buy, how to prepare, standard cooking times” (p. 27). The recipes, although they occupied the remainder of the book, were in a sense secondary; fundamentally this was a book on how to approach and think about cooking – which is why its popularity endured, even as ingredient availability expanded and food tastes changed.

Here are some of Whitehorn’s best insights, which have shaped my cooking from that day to this.

• “Cooking to stay alive.” Most of the recipes in the book fall into this category, the other being “Cooking to impress”, for which there are special tips. “(1) Finish any cleaning. You can finish cooking without shame in front of your visitors, but you cannot very well sweep under their embarrassed feet. (2) Set the table – it will reassure people that they have come on the right day, and that there will be a meal eventually. (3) Get yourself looking nice. In a house you can disappear and finish dressing – in a bedsitter, no.” (p. 145) And for the cooking itself: “Never have more than one thing that needs last-minute attention.” (p. 144) Further guidance is divided according to the category of person you are trying to impress: “(1) The troglodyte in the next bedsitter. (2) Couples … who … have forgotten what it was like to cook in a bedsitter (if they ever knew), and it is your business not to remind them. (3) Your parents, or your parents’ spies… (4) Delicious little parties à deux.” (p. 147)
• “The potato-shaped space.” “Most of us have a potato-shaped space inside that must be filled at every meal, if not by potatoes, then by something equally filling – rice, bread, spaghetti, macaroni, and so on.”(p. 16)
• On drink and parties (by her husband, Gavin Lyall). “It is a bad rule to buy the cheapest of anything, and a good rule, when faced with the temptation, to buy the best of something cheaper…. The happy fact is that nobody will know you thought of giving them champagne anyway.” (p. 175)

And here, as a specimen of how all this works out in practice, is one of my most-used recipes from the “Cooking to stay alive” section: Leeks Lucullus.

3 leeks (about 1lb)
2 or 3 potatoes
1 tablespoon grated cheese
butter
top of the milk
salt, pepper

Boil leeks and potatoes together in salted water with lid on pan till tender – 15-20 mins. Pour off liquid. Mash leeks and potatoes with a fork; stir in as much butter as you can spare (at least a teaspoon), cheese, creamy milk. Eat with a piece of toast. If you have a grill, sprinkle more cheese and brown the top. This looks like pale green mashed potatoes, but tastes delicious. (25 mins.) (p. 65)

Rest in peace, Katherine Whitehorn. Thank you for teaching me how to think about cooking, how to think about life, and that it’s possible to be smart, practical and funny all at the same time.

References

Baines, Phil (2005), Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 (London: Allen Lane).

Whitehorn, Katharine (1963), Cooking in a Bedsitter (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

See also Obituary of Katherine Whitehorn by Janet Watts and ‘Thank you, Katharine Whitehorn, for giving all the female reprobates a voice’ by Barbara Ellen.

When signs get personal

(Copied from my original post 4.3.2020 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)

What do you think of signs like this? Do you find them cute and amusing, or do you find them annoying? Above all, do you find them effective for what they’re trying to do?

I must admit I rather like this sign, which I spotted on the luggage trolleys at Milton Keynes railway station. In one sense, the sign is redundant: if you’re looking for a luggage trolley, you don’t need a sign to tell you that you’ve found one. But I think the purpose of the sign is other than that. For one thing, it prompts someone with luggage to think of using a trolley, even if they weren’t looking for one. (We’ve all seen people struggling with wheelie suitcases who should really be using a trolley, for the benefit of other passengers if not themselves.) More important than that, though, the real purpose of the sign I think is to give a voice and identity to the station and the railway company: what discourse analysts call “subject positioning” [1]. The words on the sign are the sort of thing which might be said by someone who was considerate and helpful and attentive to your needs. The implication is that the station staff and the railway company collectively have the kind of personality which means they talk to you like that: polite, kind and helpful in a personal way. Contrast that with the sort of sign which you’re more likely to see on a luggage trolley:

Warning: trolleys MUST be returned to a designated point. Penalty for abandoned trolleys £500.

What kind of person says that? Someone who is bureaucratic and officious, and that’s the kind of personality such a sign attributes to an organisation which puts it up.

Such personal-sounding offers of help need to be carefully judged, of course. Those of my generation who used Microsoft Word 97 will remember the Office Assistant, which by default took the form of a cheery, cheeky animated paper clip, popping up unbidden at the least appropriate moments. I’m afraid the paper clip’s conversations with me generally did not go well.

Office Assistant: It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?

Me: No! Sod off!

I think the reason the Office Assistant’s appearance was so annoying is that it was intrusive: it actually interrupted what you were doing (such as writing a letter) and demanded that you respond to it before you could continue. Although the notice on the trolley hails you as a carrier of luggage – subject positioning again – this is not annoying in the same way; if you’re not part of the target audience, you simply disregard the hail and walk on, though perhaps with a pleasant lingering appreciation for the fact that HAD you needed help with your luggage it would have been available.

The relevance of this for education, specifically for learning materials, is that often you want to address the learner personally and directly. This is an illusion of course, just as a TV presenter talking to you directly is an illusion because what they’re actually talking to is a television camera. [2] Nevertheless, when it’s done right, it feels natural and unremarkable, even though the writer or presenter cannot see you and knows nothing about you and what you are thinking and feeling; you only notice it when it goes wrong and the illusion is broken.

The reason authors of learning materials, like TV presenters, try to address the members of their audience individually and directly, is that it sets up a personal relationship and introduces emotional warmth into the communication. The standard for learning materials is to use the second person (“you”) and contractions (“as you’ve seen”), resembling spoken language more than written language. A common stylistic model is what Derek Rowntree many years ago called “a tutorial in print” [3]: you talk to the learner as though they were there with you, and invite responses from them. (“What would you do next in this situation?” “What do you make of this argument?”) This kind of writing has been fundamental to the learning materials of The Open University, both printed and online, since its inception in the 1970s.

This too can go wrong, of course. As with the Microsoft Office Assistant, eagerness to help can come across as patronising, if the reader or learner is fully capable of managing by themselves; there’s an OU legend of the course materials which at one point suggested to the learner that they should take a coffee break if it was all getting too much. But there are many OU students who are grateful for a supportive tone; I remember one telling me how she’d been finding a particular section of her course hard going when she was delighted to read the materials’ reassurance that this topic was difficult and probably wouldn’t make sense until later. The perfect anticipation of what she was thinking and feeling not only encouraged her but reinforced her relationship with the course, communicating to her that the personality behind it was concerned for her and her success.

The OU was set up to bring higher education to people who had missed out on it earlier in life. Such people, frequently with a poor educational background, could not be expected to be familiar with formal study and the experience of a new subject being initially difficult but becoming easier with practice. They would therefore very likely be in need of assurance that the experience of difficulty is not a reason for thinking yourself incapable or for giving up. Postgraduate students, at the OU and elsewhere, can be expected to be better able to manage their own study, and can be safely left to self-regulate and negotiate normal difficulties for themselves, to say nothing of deciding when to have their own coffee breaks.

But I would argue that, even for experienced and sophisticated learners, learning materials should still embody that personal relationship implied by direct address. It’s what distinguishes education or training from an information dump. The illusion of the materials being a personal tutor – an illusion in which the learner acquiesces, just as we acquiesce in the illusion that a TV or radio presenter is talking to us – allows learning materials to do two very important things. The first is to support motivation – the great challenge in all distance learning – by giving comfort and encouragement. The second is to support self-management, by modelling how to mentally step back from the subject, the information, to reflect on the learner’s experience of its study; by internalising this supervisory voice, the learner eventually becomes better able to evaluate and regulate their learning for themselves.

The temptation when writing learning materials is to be factual and presentational. Getting personal, addressing the reader directly – and thinking about how they would like to be addressed – is something to which writers need to give deliberate attention .

References

[1] See for example Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990), ‘Positioning: the discursive production of selves’, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol 20, pp. 43-65.

[2] This point was powerfully illustrated by one of Michael Wesch’s anthropology students in the early years of YouTubeing, when she held up a mirror to her webcam to show us what she was actually talking to (in other words, not us) while making her video. (Wesch included the short video clip in his talk An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, timecode 21:38 to 22:03.)

[3] Rowntree, D. (1994), Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, London, Kogan Page, p. 14. Lockwood, F. (1992), Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, London, Kogan Page, p. 25. See also my blog post ‘Alternatives to telling: what are we forgetting when we put education online?’

What is immersive VR good for?

I’m coming to the view that online education has reached its climax state. As with Microsoft Word or the Apple iPhone, we’re at the stage where we don't expect the future to bring anything significantly different or game-changing; new versions and new products only improve the features that are already there, they don’t add whole new areas of functionality.

“What about virtual reality?” asked a colleague with whom I shared this view. “Isn’t that going to change anything?” I replied that I didn’t think it would, except perhaps in a few specific subject areas. Like most new technologies with a powerful visible impact, its transformative power has been hyped. If you can't get your students to pay attention and learn something in a real classroom, why should it be any different in a virtual one?

The key thing which virtual reality offers is a sense of immersion in a scene, a setting or a scenario, and while immersion can be critical to some kinds of teaching and learning you don't necessarily need high technology to achieve it. People can experience immersion through text; most of us who have grown up reading books have had the experience of being so engrossed in a story that it was a wrench to return to the real world. Films too can be immersive: the effect is enhanced by a darkened room and an image that fills the field of vision but these are not essential. What matter is how good the story is; if it gets you in its grip, you can be fully immersed even when watching on a small screen – and if the story fails to grip you, even an iMax screen won’t make any difference to your lack of involvement. Computer games too can create involvement and immersion on the small screen, the focus of attention on your game character and their actions putting you in the game scene to the exclusion of the real world around you; I’ve written elsewhere how clever interactive design can enhance character identification and emotional involvement in even a highly linear and cinematic narrative game.

It all comes down to the quality of writing and design, which in the context of teaching and learning means learning design. If your aim is to put your learner into a certain environment, the fundamental design question is (as I have previously noted): what aspects of that environment are you going to simulate? (The very concept of virtual reality is flawed, to the extent that one can never simulate reality in all its aspects; one has to choose which aspects you are going to privilege.) What kind of simulation you need depends on the learning outcomes you are trying to enable. What you want to represent authentically are your chosen tasks and difficulties, with a realistic possibility of success or failure or some kind of feedback on your learners’ actions. In almost all cases, those are things that can be done without virtual reality, and probably done better without it.

For example, ‘Could you lead an ethical investigation?’ is an example of a text-only simulation, based on multiple choice questions; the technology couldn’t be simpler, but the situation could hardly be more challenging. Based on Richard Feynman’s experience after the Challenger space shuttle disaster, it places you in the role of a scientific expert on a committee of inquiry investigating a major accident. It presents you with a number of situations and for each offers you a number of choices; for example, when the Chair says that one of the organisations involved has “done an excellent” job and that they may never be able to identify the cause of the accident, do you say nothing? Accuse the Chair of bias? Ask the other committee members for their views? Ask what’s the point of the inquiry if they don’t expect to find a cause? None of these choices is absolutely right or absolutely wrong, though some would be more or less wise for yourself, and all could have more or less helpful consequences. What the simulation invites you to practise is your ethical principles, your practical knowledge of how inquiries operate, and your sensitivity to power play in the working of committees. The tests are one of judgement, which doesn’t require anything more than text. A full-blown virtual reality simulation of a committee meeting would not only be impossibly impractical to recreate, it could actually be a distraction from the focus of the learning.

But sometimes distractions and sources of confusion will be part of the challenges which you want to simulate, if the skill to be practised is one of making decisions under pressure. This simulator for medical triage, for example, puts you on a city street after some kind of explosion: sirens and alarms are going off, and there are injured or dying people on the ground all around in pools of blood, crying out and begging for help. The task is to examine each person and categorise them as Immediate, Urgent, Delayed or Dead. The shocking and alarming appearance of the scene is clearly essential to the simulation, the aim being to reproduce something of the circumstances in which paramedics may need to make triage decisions. Yet how much more would be added by presenting the scene in virtual reality? The small screen presentation using games technology (it was produced by the simulation division of a games company) already provides a considerable degree of immersion, arguably as much as is needed, short of actual practical experience.

I can only think of one simulation example for which virtual reality is essential, and that’s a fictional example from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode ‘Thine Own Self’, Deanna Troi is taking the bridge officer’s test; as ship’s counsellor she already has an officer’s rank, but that is a honorary status like the rank of an army chaplain, and she wants to see if she actually has command ability. We see her in Engineering, facing a disaster and the imminent destruction of the ship. Even with Worf and Chief Engineer Georgi La Forge to help her, no matter what she does the problem gets worse until the ship blows up – and then we discover that all this, including the presence of Worf and Geordi, has been a simulation taking place on the ship’s holodeck. She tries the simulation again, and again she fails. Only when she reflects on what a colleague says about the first duty being towards the ship does she realise what she needs to do. Running the simulation one last time, she confirms with Geordi that the damage can be repaired from within a certain crawl way, though the radiation there will be fatal to whoever attempts it. Looking him straight in the eyes, she orders him to enter the crawl way and repair the damage – and that turns out to be the solution. The simulation isn’t a test of engineering knowledge but of command ability: whether the officer can, if the situation requires it, order a friend and colleague to their death.

Now that is something which couldn’t be simulated by a multiple-choice test, or by a cinematic presentation no matter how immersive. And this example is actually not that extreme: most of us will not be in an occupation where we might have to order a person to their death, but if we are a doctor we may very well have to give a patient bad news, and if we are a manager we may very well have to give an employee the sack, or to call them out for poor attendance or poor work. The difficult part is not deciding what needs to be done or thinking of the words to say, but saying them to another human being, standing in front of you in the same space. And to simulate that would be a good use of virtual reality.

(And then again, one could just simulate it through role play, as the best training for doctors and managers does today!)

Re-blog: active learning and teaching in online spaces

I know what a re-tweet is, but is there such a thing as a re-blog? Well, here's one anyway.

I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.

There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students.

Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ... 

Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ... 

Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....

(Read more)

Technology: an enhancer or enabler of learning?

(An online discussion at the Open University recently posed the question: is technology an enhancer or an enabler of learning? Here is my answer.)

Technology, according to Danny Hills and Douglas Adams, is everything that doesn’t work yet: when it starts to work reliably, it becomes part of the background and we cease to see it as technology. So when we talk about technology-enhanced or technology-enabled learning, it’s to give people a reason why they should put up with something that doesn’t yet work properly: despite the problems, we’re saying, it’s worth persevering with the technology because it will allow us to do better or more efficiently something which we’re already doing (technology-enhanced) or to do something which we currently can’t do at all (technology-enabled).

I can only think of three things in learning and teaching which are genuinely enabled, rather than enhanced, by technology. Learning at a distance is not one of them, because you can (as the OU did for many years) operate through postal and courier services for the delivery of materials and messages. Remote co-presence, however, is really only achievable through audio or video conferencing, such as we regularly use in online tutorials. This is more than a simple matter of communication: the synchronous nature of the medium supports the constant and continuous engagement of participants, which allows a different kind of conversation, not merely a faster one. Even participants who are not actively communicating can have their motivation and relationship strengthened, simply by being present at the virtual event.

The second thing enabled by technology is automated rapid feedback, such as is provided by computerised tests. The promptness of feedback, we know, is massively important for learning, and it also increases motivation when it provides immediate sense of progress or achievement. Automation can also bring the testing more under the learner’s control, allowing them to take it at a time of their choosing, to repeat it if they wish until they are successful, and to interpret and act on the result as they wish. Students, we know, like on-screen tests for precisely these reasons, though unfortunately they are only really effective in areas of knowledge and skill which are capable of being broken into discrete elements and for which questions can have closed answers.

The third aspect of learning and teaching enabled by technology is encounter with authentic situations, which is critical for the learning of many practical situated skills, especially the interpretation of complex situations, such as those involving people. While audio and video can enhance learning of all kinds, by providing illustration or amusement, their richness is essential for allowing the development of holistic understanding, in which the presence of micro-cues allows learners not to be limited by what can be consciously articulated. Listening and speaking in a foreign language, for example, unlike reading and writing which can be taught through text alone, require actual aural models and authentic situations in which to practice, and one can trace the use of successive technologies for sound recording and reproduction as they were developed: gramophone records and language laboratories in the 1960s, cassette tapes in the 1970s, CDs in the 1980s, multimedia DVD-ROMs in the 1990s, internet delivery in the 2000s, and mobile apps in the 2010s. The distance learning of people skills, such as is relevant to many professional practice disciplines, has also been I would say enabled (rather than enhanced) by audio and video. It remains to be seen how far virtual reality technologies, hitherto too clumsy and low quality to compete seriously with remote audio and video or with face-to-face role play, may allow these possibilities to be expanded in the future.

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!

What good is video in online teaching? (And what is Khan Academy doing right?)

Video lectures, we believed, those of us who've been working in distance learning for two decades or more, were bad and ineffective. The public might assume that university distance education meant putting lectures on TV or radio, or onto online video – an assumption reflected in the Open University’s original 1963 conception as ‘the University of the Air’ – but we thought we knew better. There was an old joke, we remembered, about a university lecture being a technology for transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either. We were determined not to fall into this trap, focusing our efforts instead on developing "active learning" approaches to avoid students falling into the role of passive recipients. Yet over the past few years the online video lectures of the Khan Academy have become both super-popular and super-successful, and the world of MOOCs is dominated by video lectures. What's going on? And have we been wrong all along?

The reflection in this post has been prompted by three things: first an article 'Video and online learning' by six academics from the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the MIT Media Laboratory and a blog post by Tony Bates discussing it; second an interview with Salman Khan, broadcast last year in the radio series The Educators, and still available online; and third a conference paper 'Learning is not a Spectator Sport' by academics from Carnegie Mellon University reporting an experimental study of MOOC learning.

The von Humboldt / MIT paper is based on a survey of 20 courses from 6 major MOOC platforms (Coursera, edX, Udacity, iversity, FutureLearn, and Khan Academy) and finds that “video is the main method of content delivery in nearly all MOOCs.” This seems to have been an unthinking decision by the MOOC makers, rather than a principled choice amongst alternatives: “little consideration has been given to the pedagogical affordances of video, what constitutes an effective learning video, and what learning situations the medium of video is best suited for.” What this suggests to me is that MOOC development has been steered not by people with a background in distance education, but by people with a background in technology – including the paper’s authors themselves: as Tony Bates comments, if their literature review concludes “that the use of video as an instructional tool for online learning is a notably underexplored field”, then they just haven’t looked in the right places because “what they are recommending has been known for a long time”.

So the rush to video in MOOCs doesn’t mean that those of us who have come to online learning out of the distance education tradition are wrong: MOOC designers are simply unaware of that tradition and are having to reinvent the wheel. The third paper is an example of wheel reinvention: researchers looked students taking a MOOC on introductory psychology and found that those who opted to do additional learning activities and comprehension checks did better in the final exam. Thus they re-discovered and re-justified the pedagogy of “learning by doing”, a century after Dewey.

But two elements of the von Humboldt / MIT paper are really useful. One is a typology and technical analysis of video production styles, or ways of organising the visual field of a lecture video, each of which has subtly different affordances for learning. Their 36 types, all illustrated and discussed, are: talking head, presentation slides with voice-over, picture-in-picture, text-overlay, Khan-style tablet capture, Udacity-style tablet capture, actual paper or whiteboard, screencast, animation, classroom lecture, recorded seminar, interview, conversation, live video, webcam capture, demonstration, on location, and green screen. This is a useful menu of choices for video producers to use while planning video making with academics. Even more useful is a typology of the pedagogic uses to which video can be put. Their twelve types are:

• Building rapport – establishing an emotional connection
• Virtual field trips – access to people and places
• Manipulating time and space – macro / micro views and slow motion
• Telling stories – captivating viewers and taking them on a journey
• Motivating learners – stimulating appetite by conveying enthusiasm
• Historical footage – bringing the past to life
• Demonstrations – showing experiments and psychomotor skills
• Visual juxtaposition – creating meaning through contrasting concepts
• Multimedia presentation – combining audio-visual elements

This can be used by learning designers as a prompt list, or just a stimulus to thought, when they are trying to establish with academics why there should be video at all: what pedagogical benefit is so great as to justify the still significant expense. (Notice that ”Communicating information” is not one of them.)

So where do Khan Academy videos fit into this typology? What are they – to judge by their massive popularity – getting right? They certainly have their own production style, sufficiently distinctive to warrant its own category in the von Humboldt / MIT paper, but I believe they are successful not because this production style is somehow superior to all others but because it’s perfectly suited to the subject area with which the Khan Academy originated and the pedagogical approach which it adopted. Though it has now broadened its range of subjects, the Khan Academy’s original focus was on maths and mathematical physics, and its prototypical videos took the form of Salman Khan going through a mathematical problem or exercise. He was never seen himself; what the screen showed was his mathematical working, line by line, handwritten on a tablet, as he explained what he was doing to solve the problem and why. Now what this reproduces is not a lecture but a tutorial, and one of a kind which will be familiar to anyone who’s received a tutorial in maths or physics: the tutor sits in front of a sheet of paper, you sit beside them, with possibly another student on the other side (if there are more than two students in the tutorial it gets complicated), and you watch their working as they go through problems and proofs, sometimes asking you what should be done next, or asking you to complete the next step. The classic way of learning these subjects is through problems and exercises, and what the tutor does is not so much impart information, although they may do that, as model the process of thinking and helping you to reproduce it until you can do it for yourself unaided. This is what the Khan Academy videos reproduce, both in their pedagogy and in the production style which focusses attention not on the tutor but on the maths.

Sarah Montague (interviewing): It's almost as if somebody's sitting beside you...

Salman Khan: Yeah, … you don't see the face, you just see the writing on this kind of digital blackboard, and you hear the voice. And so, it's, I've had some people say it feels like I'm next to them at the kitchen table, some people say it feels like I'm in their head! (Laughs) And actually some people have even said when they do math problems their internal voice is me, which is weird, but I guess cool!

(Khan’s interview for The Educators, from 2’55”)

If this is how people experience Khan Academy videos, it shows how effective they are at enabling students to internalise their teacher – which is one of the most important ways in which learning occurs. Even though video has no general and universal utility in online teaching, and can actually be distracting and time-wasting as well as expensive, the Khan Academy is a reminder of how effective video can be – provided that its content and production style are aligned to subject matter and pedagogy.

Postscript: another important use of video is as part of a "flipped classroom" approach, helpfully described by three lecturers from the University of Essex in 'Will video kill the lecturing star?' on The Guardian's Higher Education Network.

Pushing stuff into people: how NOT to do training, by Charlie Chaplin

I was reminded of this scene from Chaplin's film 'Modern Times' recently when discussing staff development.

Credit for seeing the feeding machine as a metaphor for (bad) training goes to John O'Donoghue, who played this clip during a conference at the University of Wolverhampton's Learning Lab in 2001. His point was that e-learning (as we called it back then) was being seen by managers as a way of avoiding the expense and lost time of sending staff away on training courses, just as the manager in this clip hopes to avoid the expense and lost time of his workers stopping for lunch. But if all e-learning does is try to push information into people, it's likely to be as ineffective and impractical as the feeding machine.

In this connection, the speech from the machine salesman given in the preceding scene (ironically delivered by gramophone record) is particularly interesting, because in 2001 it did sound precisely like the way in which e-learning was being sold.

Good morning, my friends. This record comes to you through the Sales Talk Transcription Company, Incorporated: your speaker, the Mechanical Salesman. May I take the pleasure of introducing Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, the inventor of the Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work? Don't stop for lunch: be ahead of your competitor. The Billows Feeding Machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead. Allow us to point out some of the features of this wonderful machine: its beautiful, aerodynamic, streamlined body; its smoothness of action, made silent by our electro-porous metal ball bearings. Let us acquaint you with our automaton soup plate - its compressed-air blower, no breath necessary, no energy required to cool the soup. Notice the revolving plate with the automatic food pusher. Observe our counter-shaft, double-knee-action corn feeder, with its synchro-mesh transmission, which enables you to shift from high to low gear by the mere tip of the tongue. Then there is the hydro-compressed, sterilized mouth wiper: its factors of control insure against spots on the shirt front. These are but a few of the delightful features of the Billows Feeding Machine. Let us demonstrate with one of your workers, for actions speak louder than words. Remember, if you wish to keep ahead of your competitor, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of the Billows Feeding Machine.

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?

The design of free exploration learning: lessons from Gone Home

Gone Home, according to some computer games players, is one of the best games of 2013, and according to others it's not a game at all. Like the now-legendary Myst, it's a first-person exploration game, but with a naturalistic setting of 1990s small town America: your character, Katie, arrives at the family home after a pre-college European trip to find the house deserted with a note from her younger sister Sam on the front door; the game consists of your going round the house discovering notes and objects in order to find out what's happened. There are no hidden menaces, no jump scares (though the building's reputation as "the psycho house" and the dark and stormy night in which the events take place may mis-cue you into thinking there's a horror theme); just the real stuff of people's lives, their conflicts and disappointments - and, perhaps, a few inklings of hope and redemption.

Those players who get into the game seem to really get into it; those expecting something to shoot or even puzzles of a clearly-defined kind (as distinct from puzzles of interpretation) are disappointed. (The game's designer has produced a wickedly funny spoof trailer for a version of the game reworked as the first-person shooter - "Gun Home" - some players would clearly have liked it to be.)

As a learning designer, I was interested in how the game is designed to allow free exploration and yet lead you forwards on a journey of discovery; locked doors, filing cabinets, and so on, are used to prevent you from seeing certain things until you've seen others, so that you can't experience the backstory in the wrong order. Mum, Dad and Sam each have their own storyline, though Sam's is privileged; her audio journals to Katie give you direct access to her thoughts, and the attic - the final room you can reach - includes the objects which mark the conclusion of her storyline.

Like many players, of both genders and sexual orientations, I was both engaged and moved by the story of Sam's developing relationship with another girl from school, but I was also taken with the father's story: author of a moderately successful thriller some years ago, he failed to follow it with anything other than inferior sequels and he's now reduced to writing reviews for hi-fi magazines. After completing the game (as I thought), I was surprised to discover just how much of the father's storyline I'd missed. As this online comment shows, there are enough clues distributed around to reconstruct what happened to him as a child and why the house (which originally belonged to his Uncle Oscar) was known as "the psycho house", and also to give his storyline a happier ending than I originally thought. I wouldn't have seen all this without help though, because the game doesn't put pressure on you to uncover it, as it does with Sam's secrets.

That's the problem with designing games, or online courses, which are based on free exploration: you need to reconcile yourself to spending time and effort on developing features or branches which some of your players or learners are never going to experience.

What should a simulation simulate?

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.)

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.

What are libraries for?

At some time or another over the last decade or so, probably every librarian in the world has asked themselves what the purpose of libraries is, in an internet-equipped world where all the information and literature of the world is available (at least in our imagination) with speed, ease and convenience at our own desk or in our own palm.

A photograph of a medieval library, in a recent article in the Cambridge Alumnus Magazine (Issue 71, pp 28-33), reminded me of how much things have changed. When that library was built, books were so scarce that there was no need for bookshelves: each book had its own reading desk, to which it was chained. There was no question of borrowing books; to read a particular book, you had to travel to a particular library and sit down at a particular desk. There was no presumption that a library's purpose was to make books available; in fact, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose only required a slight imaginative twist to conceive of a monastic library actually designed to prevent would-be readers from accessing the books therein.

The huge libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century were designed in a period in which it seemed an achievable ambition to gather all human knowledge, or a pretty good approximation to it, within the compass of four walls and a very large number of bookshelves. My old university's library was one of the handful in the country designated as "copyright libraries" (the British Library, formerly the British Museum, being the most famous) legally entitled to claim a free copy of every book and periodical published in the UK - a right that even before the advent of the internet was becoming increasingly difficult to exercise.

Now public libraries are re-branding themselves as information resource centres, and librarians spend as much or more time with digital materials as with printed books. At the Open University, where I currently work, and where only a tiny fraction of its students are able to visit the Library in person, the shift to online resources is a natural complement to our distance learning - though it does make the Library building a curiously empty space, with the librarians hidden behind Staff Only doors and the reading desks inhabited by a handful of African research students in need of somewhere to work.

So it was a joy to visit the new Library of Birmingham: a building conceived and designed not just to replace the old Birmingham City Library but to create a new role for itself. No public library is going to compete with the digital resources of the internet, but it can do something which the online environment can't: it can provide a physical space which is a nice place to be. And that the Library of Birmingham has done beautifully. Visiting it on a Sunday afternoon, with my wife and an old friend now a Librarian at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, we were struck by the number of families enjoying the building: browsing, exploring, having a good time.

From the outside, the building looks like a gold and silver jewellery box, but inside nothing is box-like: the internal walls all seem to be curved, running around like a snail's shell. The only obvious straight lines are the escalators, slicing across the central atrium at jaunty angles. Riding them up to the top of the building is like going on a non-scary theme park ride: vaut le voyage just for the pan-optical views alone. The books are arranged so as to be meaningful and convenient to users, rather than librarians and catalogues: there are books for browsing, the one (mainly fiction) most likely to be borrowed; there are books for finding things out (mainly non-fiction), arranged in radial shelves; and there are books purely for reference (such as the Statutes of England), which most users will never consult but look great on the shelves in their identical bindings and are located where they can best be decorative, as a sort of literary wallpaper.

At the top of the building is an observation deck, with large red sofas in which to relax and look out across the cityscape. There's also the Shakespeare memorial room: an elegant Elizabethan-style wood-panelled room, transported from the original library where it was built in 1882. A stone panel from 1887 cryptically connects the Library to its nineteenth century past and remoter medieval history. There's even a (well-signposted) secret garden. On the ground floor is a cafe, where we rounded out our happy afternoon with tea and cakes.

One of the tests of a library is what unexpected discoveries you make there. My unexpected and unlooked-for discovery, from a facing-out display in the non-fiction section, was a book called Writing for New Media - modern in this context meaning 1998,but still deeply relevant and inspirational in several intriguing chapters on the grammar of interactivity. (I've since ordered the book and will no doubt be posting about it soon.) May all the users of this great new library enjoy, as we did, happy afternoons and serendipitous discoveries.

Why kids learn to use technology quickly

Here's an interesting take on the well-known phenomenon of small children using complex pieces of technology with ease. And it's so obvious that I'm surprised it never occurred to me before, nor have I seen it in any other writing about young people and technology.

I saw it in a passing comment by technology journalist Alex Wiltshire. He was talking about Minecraft, which in case you don't know is a hugely popular game, played either solo or co-operatively online by children as well as adults, though the game was not specifically designed for them. As he observes: "When it first came out everyone was confused as the developer gave little or no guidance. It didn't specifically say you had to cut down a tree to get some wood, whereas games that are produced by big companies give instructions – the last thing they want is for people not to understand how to play. With Minecraft, which had an indie developer, the player had to work things out for themselves."

And here's the key bit. "Because you learn so much when you're young, kids are used to the idea of a world they don't fully understand, so they're comfortable with having to find things out for themselves."

Now this is quite an unexpected way of looking at the phenomenon. We tend to think of kids as having some sort of special technical ability, ascribing it an essentialist explanation such as them being "digital natives" or their brains being wired differently. But of course, as he says, for children >everything< is strange and unknown, and given that kids are able to figure out adults and the rules by which they operate - far more complex than any technology, and far more critical to a child's survival - it should not be surprising that they can cope with a multi-channel television service or an iPad.

This perspective also reminds us that, though we adults may envy kids' facility with technology, it comes at a price: that of living in a world which they don't fully understand and which many things are strange and potentially threatening.

References

Marc Prensky, (2001) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon, 9 (5), pp 1-6.

Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger (eds), Educating the Net Generation (Educause, 2005)

David White (2009), "Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’", TALL blog

David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011), "Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement" First Monday, 16 (9).

High stakes tutorials

Most computer games start with some kind of tutorial, in which you as a novice player learn how to play the game. Game tutorials used to be somewhat bland: being afterthoughts, planned only once the rest of the game was largely complete, nothing of significance could happen in them. You were introduced to the controls and given the chance to find out what kind of moves you could make - and that was it.

But the two most recent games I've played have tutorials which both work as tutorials - technically simple and offering extra support to the player - AND advance the plot, indeed start it off with a bang.



"Cognition" starts with FBI agent Erica Reed racing to the cemetery where the serial killer whom she's been pursuing has taken her kid brother. Dialogue with her partner ramps up the tension and increases the urgency: she has to find Scott before the killer does something awful to him. Arriving at the cemetery, checking the gates and finding them locked teaches you how to examine and manipulate objects; having Erica draw her gun and shoot off the padlock teaches you how to use objects from your inventory - as well as increasing the tension still further. Inside the cemetery, the tutorial shows you how to use Erica's psychic powers - the "cognition" of the title - to find where Scott is and to enter the vault where he's been taken. Inside, you discover him strapped to a table beneath a machine which is clearly going to kill him if you tamper with it. This is your summative assessment: as a timer ticks down from ten minutes, you need to use everything you've learned in the tutorial to deactivate the machine; if you take too long, or cut the wrong wire, Scott will die. (He's going to die shortly anyway, but that's part of the story.)



The tutorial in "Ghost Trick" is similarly founded on jeopardy: you start by seeing a woman about to be shot by a hit man. Your character's ability to do anything about this is restricted by the fact that you're dead yourself; you are in fact a ghost. A disembodied voice (you find out whose it is later) instructs you how to use your "ghost tricks" to inhabit and move between objects and manipulate them to produce physical effects - which you then use to distract the hit man and make him miss his target. The woman is saved, but only briefly, because when she runs away the hit man catches up with her and this time he does not miss. The disembodied voice then introduces you to your most powerful ghost trick: to rewind time to four minutes before a death and prevent it from happening. Working against the clock, you need to figure out how to get around the junkyard in which the events are taking place and move objects into a position from which you can save the woman's life. When you release the wrecking ball above the head of the hit man just before he pulls the trigger, it's an enormously satisfying moment.

Educational courses too have traditionally been rather bland and boring in their opening sections. As with old-fashioned game tutorials, the thinking has been that you can't present too much of a challenge while your learners are still finding out how things work. This has been compounded by well-meaning pedagogical ideas about the proper way to start a course - for example, with an academic overview of the subject, or a discussion of its principles, or a reflective exercise to get the learner to find out what they know about it already - which tend to produce teaching which is general and abstract, and hence boring, or which relies on learners to supply the content, and hence is dull and bland unless they put in a lot of effort. I think this is a problem: we know how difficult it is for learners to keep finding the time to stay with a distance learning course, whether in print or online, which is why the biggest challenge for all learning designers is arousing and sustaining learner motivation.

Is it possible to design course openings which are not bland and boring? These two game tutorials suggest to me that it is. I've previously blogged about the principle of starting with your best and most exciting material, instead of saving it for later, in order to remind learners of why they're doing your course. To that, I'm now adding the principle of high stakes: giving them something to achieve which they can feel is really meaningful and important. Of course it still needs to be sufficiently simple for them to accomplish, no matter what their previous skill and knowledge. But that doesn't mean that it needs to be bland or boring.

When I say that course openings should be more like these two games tutorials, I don't mean that they need to have action and violence. Excitement, in an educational context, has different roots, but we still need to tap into it. What gives a learner the biggest buzz? It's finding they can do something they couldn't do before and which is really meaningful and important to them. Get that at the start of your course, and you'll have your learners as thoroughly hooked as they can be.

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.

Learning design: where do you get your ideas from?

A recent Guardian Review feature invited several novelists to write about the art forms other than novels which had inspired them. It turned out that, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro got inspiration from films, Colm Tóibín from opera, and John Lanchester from video games. In the editor's introduction, there was a hint that there was something surprising or unexpected about this - which I myself found surprising, because I've always found ideas for my own work in all kinds of places, as is testified by the diverse entries in this blog. Learning design in particular, because it is a form of design - that is, of matching means to ends, of creating a product or structure which will produce certain intended results - is a craft in which it's always possible to learn from designers in other fields, especially those concerned with achieving effects on people's minds, whether cognitive, aesthetic, or affective.

So here are some of the things, other than learning, from the designers of which I've learned.

Websites and interfaces. Like many others, I'm a fan of the writings of Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman, who in the 1980s between them pretty much invented the whole field of usability, in response to the problems posed by new consumer technologies which people were unable to use. Apart from Norman's own book, the other two great classics of usability and human-machine interaction are John Carroll's observations of office workers trying to use a new IBM personal computer and Lucy Suchman's study of dialogues from people puzzling out the operation of their first duplex sorting photocopier. Their writings, and Nielsen's ongoing Alertbox newsletter, are a rich source of design exemplars, good and bad - the bad ones being especially interesting for the poor design thinking which they reveal: designing for people like oneself instead of actual users, forgetting that users come with and develop mental models of what's going on and what they can do, assuming that users will be happy to read and memorise complex instructions when in fact all they want to do is get on. Learning design, of course, can go wrong in precisely the same ways.

Computer games. There's a close analogy, about which I've written and blogged, between the design of games and the design of learning: in both cases, you're designing a system of resources and affordances which will result in a good and rewarding experience for the player / learner - while having no control at all over what they do with what you've provided. The ways in which games and learning experiences can fail are also analogous: no grab or motivation, too hard, too easy, too boring. The key book on games design, for my money, is Salen and Zimmerman's Rules of Play.

Marketing and publicity. Again this is all about producing an effect (for example, Awareness, Interest, Desire or Action, as they say in marketing) in the minds of people you do not know and with whom you have no direct contact, and whose attention you cannot assume. One blog which I follow is Writing Matters, from an American consultancy which specialises in writing online communications for marketing and sales: mailshots, order processing, complaint handling. Pretty much everything they write about creating and sustaining a good relationship with customers and potential customers is relevant to creating and sustaining a good relationship with learners.

Literature, film, TV drama, comics. Here the central craft is storytelling, of which the basic requirements are the same across all media: creating tension and resolution; changing pace, direction or point of view; establishing voice and relationship; engaging and directing attention; generally taking a narrative from start to conclusion). I enjoy the writings of expert practitioners (such as Ursula Le Guin, Alexander Mackendrick and Scott McCloud), who are both willing and able to reveal the techniques of their own special area (fiction writing, film-making and comic creation respectively). And alongside the techniques of storytelling there are the techniques for planning and coordinating the telling, such as the storyboarding most spectacularly used by Pixar, which allows their animators to check the shape and pace and punch of a storyline, beat by beat, before they ever switch on their computers.

Painting and graphic art. A picture can also tell a story, despite presenting only a single moment in time, by its implication or assumption of a past, its suggestion or promise of a future. I'm particularly interested in pictures which create gaps or spaces, calling on the viewer to fill these with their own imagination: Dutch interiors, such as Vermeer's The Letter, are supreme examples of this, and I have already blogged about The Reader - which as I observed is a picture about what is not on the page. I'm also interested in medieval stained glass and wall paintings, such as the spectacular series at Eton College, which were designed with the deliberate intention of educating a largely illiterate population: a useful corrective for those of us who find it difficult to think of teaching other than in words.

Music. Lyrics and libretti aside, this too is a craft which is essentially non-verbal, operating at a non-cognitive, visceral level. If, like me, you're concerned about the affective as well as the cognitive aspect of teaching and learning, it can be encouraging to be shown or reminded - as composer Howard Goodall does in his TV programmes - that the power of music to move and excite is the result of skill and design technique, and not just god-given inspiration. I have a favourite story (which I have just retold) about George Martin, the record producer of the Beatles, who with one small intervention turned a so-so song into the quintessential hit of the band's early years; the beauty of the story is that the George Martin trick is applicable to the design of writing, especially web writing, also.

Psychotherapy and spirituality. Even more obviously than with the other crafts listed here, these are all about the effect on the audience (the client or pilgrim) because there is no persistent mediating artefact: any words spoken are evanescent and their meaning is peculiar to their local situation. Furthermore, these are crafts which depend on the client doing the majority of the work; the ideal therapist, like the ideal teacher, does nothing except create the safe environment necessary for the work and awaken the client's own inner teacher. For these reasons, the design of psychotherapeutic and spiritual practices are difficult to discuss meaningfully, except in an experiential way. There are books about psychotherapy and spirituality, of course; but these are not the craft itself; as Freud remarked, writing about psychoanalysis doesn't cure people, any more than distributing menus relieves hunger during a famine. In these crafts, perhaps more than any other, the best influence on one's own practice is being party to good practice oneself. Writing and talking about learning design can only accomplish so much; to really understand what good learning design is and what it can do, one needs to experience some well-designed learning