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.

7 questions about branching scenarios

(Copied from my original post 20.11.2019 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)

While writing a branching scenario about absence management as a proof-of-concept for simulating difficult conversations, I found that I needed to answer some basic questions.

1. What is a branching scenario?

A branching scenario is a story, but one which is presented to you step by step, and in which what happens next is dependent on the choices you make – like the old “chose-you-own-adventure” gamebooks, only digital. (Related concepts: interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, adventure games.)

2. What use is a branching scenario?

In education or training, a branching scenario can enable learners to practice or test their skills. The scenario will be based on a workplace situation, like a case study but with the addition of interactivity: learners are required to go through the steps and make the decisions themselves. In this sense, a branching scenario is comparable to virtual reality, which may be useful in training where the situations are physical and the skills required are visual; but in human situations where the skills required are communicative, a text-based branching scenario will usually be more appropriate, as well as considerably cheaper to produce.

3. How can people learn from a branching scenario?

The big advantage of a branching scenario is that learners are engaged right away. A realistic practical situation, of a kind that learners might actually have to deal with, presents them with a challenge they can’t ignore. Furthermore, unlike a case study or set of process instructions, in which it’s too easy to think that the learning points are obvious, learners are forced to remember or work out what to do at each step. The relevance and the difficulty of the challenge are evident.

At its heart, a branching scenario enables learning by doing, by providing a simulated environment in which learners can practice and make errors safely. A scenario can also include feedback for the learners’ choices, ideally built into the narrative, to complete the learning cycle.

4. How do you prevent the tree becoming massive?

Say you provide three choices at the first decision point, and each of those branches leads to another three choices and so on. After three decision points there will be 27 branches, after four decision points there will be 81, and after five decision points there will be 243! How can you possibly write so many storylines?

The answer is, of course, that you don’t. You don’t need to cover every possible choice which a learner might make, just those mistakes which a learner is most likely to make in a real situation. (The need to simulate errors follows directly from active learning theory, but it nevertheless needs emphasising because of subject-matter experts usual tendency to focus solely on the correct course of action. See my blog post “What should a simulation simulate?”)

In my absence management scenario, the main mistakes which I wanted to include were: failing to prepare properly for a return-to-work interview with Pam, a frequently-absent member of staff; not holding the interview in a private meeting room; and challenging Pam on the genuineness of her sickness when there’s no conclusive evidence of her malingering.

5. How do you prevent the choices being obvious?

The problem here is the same as with multiple-choice questions: since the correct choice has to be in plain view, learners don’t need to think of it for themselves, so doesn’t this remove the challenge if all they need to do is recognise it?

The answer is that you can make the target choices less obvious by careful wording, so that recognising them as correct requires understanding of the situation and thinking through the implications of the choice. For example, in my absence management scenario, the choice which I gave learners was not between “Go to a meeting room” and “Don’t go to a meeting room” but between the dialogue lines “Come and sit down for a chat” and “We need to have a proper talk”. Because I’ve already established that you’re in an open plan office, the first option should be easily recognised as inappropriate if you’re thinking properly about the difficult conversation you’re about to have with Pam, yet the second option isn’t shouting its correctness.

It’s worth bearing in mind that there are many narrative games (see for example Life is Strange 2, Heaven’s Vault, Tacoma, Tales from the Borderlands) which are successful in creating both challenge and surprise, despite being effectively based around multiple choice options. And since our aim is education and training, even an obviously wrong choice may prompt thought and hence learning. In my absence management scenario, for example, learners are repeatedly presented with the option of bottling out of doing a return-to-work interview with Pam. (The team is under pressure, deadlines are looming, and the temptation to focus on tasks at hand is strong.) This is fairly obviously incorrect, and yet its inclusion serves to make the point that determination and a conscious decision may be necessary to carry through with a difficult conversation they would rather not have.

6. Can’t learners just try every choice until they get it right?

The whole point of a branching scenario for education or training is that learners should be learning to think differently and better, so if they’re making choices at random or systematically working their way through the choices then something is wrong with the design.

There are several ways of encouraging learners to think about their choices. The most important is to embed feedback into the scenario as far as possible, so that they can quickly get a feeling for whether a past choice was good, bad or neutral. For example, in my absence management scenario, if you remain in the open plan office and start to ask Pam about her illness and whether she has any problems with work colleagues, then the text will tell you that you wish you’d gone to a meeting room and Pam will cut the interview short. (The excellent Cathy Moore has a blog post about the importance of feedback being embedded, rather than delivered by the Voice of God.)

Another trick, which can be used to force learners to prioritise, is to impose a limit on the number of alternative choices which can be pursued. For example, in my absence management scenario, the preparation choices before the return-to-work interview are: ask a colleague for advice, look at HR guidance, check Pam’s absence record, look for her self-certification forms, or do nothing – but there’s an artificial time limit which means you can only do one of these things. (Spoiler: all are informative, but you can’t achieve the best possible ending without checking Pam’s absence record and printing it out, which enables you to confront her with just how often she’s been off sick.)

A third technique, which as well as being realistic makes systematic exploration of choices more difficult, is to have the availability of certain choices dependent on other choices made earlier. In a healthcare scenario where you’re interviewing a patient, for example, certain dialogue choices would only appear if you’ve previously read the case notes and talked to other professionals so that you know to ask about those topics.

7. How does a branching scenario end?

Many narrative games now include a number of distinct endings, and in imitation of this I planned my absence management scenario to have five: you fail to deal with Pam’s absenteeism problem, you attempt to hold a return-to-work interview but get nowhere with it, you accuse Pam of faking illness whereupon she gets angry and makes a complaint of bullying, you get her to agree to obtain doctor’s certificates for any future sickness absence, and – the best ending – you confront her with her absence record and get her commitment to improve.

If you expect or want learners to replay a scenario, then they should be enabled and motivated to do so. In my absence management scenario, I did this by finishing it with feedback on the main choices taken and suggesting that a good ending was possible. I also put in two restart links: one to restart from the beginning of the scenario and one to restart from the beginning of the conversation with Pam.

I wrote the absence management scenario as a demonstration piece, a proof-of-concept, and it’s confirmed for me that branching scenarios of this kind have great potential for education and training in communications and people-management skills. They’re not a substitute for didactic presentation or for formal assessment, but because of their potential to engage learners and to encourage them to think differently and better about practical human problems, I believe they should be part of the genre library of all producers of training materials.

Why is writing learning materials hard for academics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Alternatives to telling: what are we forgetting when we put education online?

Most people experienced in online education are clear that it’s not just about presentation of subject matter. Even if that’s your starting assumption – and such is the pernicious influence of IT thinking that even good educators find themselves thinking of teaching as the transmission of information – you quickly realise that online lectures, whether text, audio or video, don’t necessarily lead to learning. So online educators turn to the medium’s great potential for discussing, sharing and collaborating, and supplement online presentations with activities for learning through online social interaction. For many people these days, online education means presentation plus group learning activities.

But if we think like that, we’re forgetting the possibility of individual learning activities. From the earliest years of The Open University, these were the distinctive core of its approach to distance learning, as a deliberate and conscious effort to implement an active constructivist pedagogy through printed materials. As Fred Lockwood tells the story, the approach originated in a 1973 memo by Derek Rowntree, in which he asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time.

Rowntree argued that … it was highly unlikely that you would simply talk at the learner for hour after hour; he didn’t believe it would happen. Instead he thought you would probably regard a one-to-one tutorial as an ideal form of teaching when information, source materials, procedures, techniques, arguments, research findings, raw data, etc. would be communicated and learners would be asked to respond to a variety of questions. In some cases the actual answer would be provided, in others a commentary or feedback. In such a context a learner could be asked a whole series of questions, dependent upon the nature of the topic and form the teaching was to take. The learner could be asked to recall items of information, to define concepts, draw together arguments, justify particular statements, consult other sources, interpret data, compare different interpretations of the same data, work out examples, discuss things and perhaps produce something themselves. In short, teachers would expect the exercise of certain study skills by which the learner constructs his or her own picture of the subject and learn to integrate what has just been taught with what had been learnt before feedback was provided.

(Lockwood, 1992 p 25) 

This “tutorial-in-print” approach came to be the defining characteristic of Open University materials. When I was taught to write distance learning materials on an OU model in the early 1990s, I learned to give priority to such learning activities, preferably planning them before starting to write any subject matter presentation. One set of course materials on which I worked was designed to consist only of individual learning activities, the presentational element being supplied by existing published readings to which learners had access through their professional libraries. When computer-based and internet-based technologies arrived in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I recognised the possibilities which they afforded for interactivity, free exploration of resources and social learning, but we saw these as supplements to individual learning activities, not replacements.

But one starts from what one knows. When recently I asked a new OU lecturer what she was planning to add to her throughly planned presentation of subject matter, she responded in terms of online group activities; reasonably enough, she thought of delivering online versions of the lectures and classes with which she was familiar. So it’s not so surprising that individual learning activities should be absent from the online learning design of universities with no previous background in distance learning, such as Phoenix or Northampton.

What’s more surprising is that individual learning activities don’t feature in the OU’s own framework for learning design, even though they are still to be found in OU course materials, both printed and online. In the OU’s typology of learning activities, the only category in which they could plausibly fit is that of “Assimilative activities”, in which the root metaphor does at least connote the building up of structures. However, according to its definition, this category includes nothing more than “attending to information”, with the core task verbs being “read, watch, listen” [1], described as “essentially passive in nature” (Conole 2007, p 84) – bizarre in a typology of learning activities (how can one have a passive activity?) and certainly leaving no room for anything like a “tutorial in print”. But then this typology was developed at the University of Southampton, as part of a programme for promoting the use of educational technology[2], without reference to the tradition of distance learning, at the Open University or anywhere else.

Does it matter if we forget individual learning activities and omit them from our learning design thinking? I think it does, because group activities are not always appropriate ways of making learners active and developing their competence with the subject. For one thing, social learning is not suitable for some learners, most obviously for those in prison or other secure environments in which contact with other learners is limited or impossible. More importantly, group activities are time-consuming ways of working with a topic – typically each learner has to wait for responses from others before they can complete the activity for themselves – meaning that in practical terms they are only suitable where that investment of time is warranted. Most fundamentally, group activities are not appropriate where the range of possible correct responses is limited, so that there’s little for learners to discuss or share. Learners’ time may be better spent initially practicing new concepts on their own, learning to get them right before using them in discussion with others.

Forgetting about individual learning activities also lets authors off the hook of thinking properly about how learners are actually going to achieve competence in the subject. If all learners are going to do is to discuss the subject matter presented to them, that encourages authors to plan and write their materials as if for a textbook, without thinking about learning activities – group or individual – until the presentation is substantially finished. And that is bad, because whereas textbooks have to be complete, covering thoroughly all the topics in their scope, for learning materials completeness is usually not desirable. Rather than presenting a definitive account of the subject, it is actually more effective to leave gaps for learners to fill in for themselves. “Never tell learners anything you can have them work out for themselves,” was the maxim given me by Richard Freeman (formerly of the National Extension College and the Open College) when I started writing distance learning materials; like all maxims, it’s an overstatement, but it reflects the ideal, the ambition which should be ours, as writers and designers of learning materials. We need to be constantly alert to all the alternatives to telling we can think of, and we cannot afford to forget any of them.

Notes

[1] The three original task verbs of “Read, Watch, Listen” have recently been supplemented by “Think about, Access, Observe, Review, Study”, which while at least allowing for a learner taking an active stance does not suggest the kind of focused direction characteristic of an individual learning activity. To include proper constructivist activities, the category should include task verbs such as Summarise, Identify, Classify, Interpret, Compare and contrast, Apply, Analyse and Evaluate. See my post 'Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?'

[2] A conference presentation (Fill et al 2004) locates the development of the DialogPlus toolkit, which embodied the typology, in the perceived gap between the potential of educational technologies and the application of good pedagogic principles.

References

Conole, G. (2007), 'Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice', and Appendix 7 'Taxonomy of learning activities', in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.

Fill et al (2004), 'Supporting teachers: the development and evaluation of a learning design toolkit', presentation at Alt-C conference Exeter, abstract at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126075256/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=79 (Accessed 22 October 2017), PowerPoint at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126114429/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/files/79/DialogPlus%20Toolkit.ppt (Accessed 22 October 2017).

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

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)

Learning design and educational technology: what’s the relationship?

Many writings about learning design assume or argue that learning design has something to do with educational technology. In Conole et al. (2004), for example, learning design is what links educational technologies to learning theories: theory-enabled design points to which technology to use, and one can read back from an educational technology to the theory which informed its design.

It’s certainly the case that many people turn to learning design because of questions about how to use educational technology or laudable concerns not to use it badly. However, after 20 years of practice in producing online distance learning, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best summary of the relationship between learning design and educational technology is: None at all.

Learning design, if it's a kind of design, is about matching form and function, means and ends: in particular, it is about working out what learning activities will enable students or other learners to reach certain learning outcomes. So the typical output of a learning design process is a set of learning activities, on the principle that learners are only going to learn as a result of what they, as learners, do, not what you, as teachers, do. (See previous post.) But those learning activities could be implemented through many different technologies, and which one you choose will depend on what is available to you, is reliable, and (crucially) is available to learners.

If you have an activity which calls for some kind of group discussion, that could be done face-to-face in a seminar or workshop, remotely and synchronously using online conferencing, or asynchronously using online forums; or learners could watch a recording of such a discussion, or read a transcript, and make some response of their own – probably less satisfactory, but for learners in prison (for whom my university has to make provision on many of its courses) it may be the only practical option.

If you are going to have learning activities designed around some sort of PDP or portfolio function, then you need to consider that particular products for supporting these may come and go. Over an eight or ten year lifespan, which is the norm for courses at my university, then the prevailing technologies are likely to change at least once during that period. Under those circumstances, it seems to me clear that the course’s learning design, the top-level description of the activities which learners will do, is that part of the design which does not change. The question of which technology can best implement those activities is also a design question, but a separate one.


Reference
Conole et al. 2004, 'Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design', Computers and Education, vol 43, pp 17-33.

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.

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?

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.”

Where e-learning went wrong

You know those insights which come out of the blue, so that suddenly you understand something clearly, and it seems so obvious that you can't think why you never saw it before? I had one of those the other day, when I knew, clearly and distinctly, where it was that e-learning has been going wrong all these years.

The background to this was that I'd been listening to an interview with John Hattie, part of the Radio 4 series (and OU co-production) The Educators. Hattie has made a massive survey of the research literature on teaching and come to the conclusion that which pedagogic approach a teacher uses is pretty much irrelevant to how well their students do. What is much more significant is how much experience the teacher has had - which is not necessarily a popular message for educational theorists or politicians, or even for teachers.

I'd found myself saying something similar a little while ago, when some colleagues were talking about how to get themselves to a certain level of expertise in learning design. Those of them from a project management background were rather hoping that learning design was a determinate procedure which you could follow and get good results, as long as you understood it and followed it correctly; maybe there was a book or an online tool somewhere which set it out? I had to disillusion them. Theories and books and online tools can all help, but basically to become good at learning design you need to put in what I called the "flying hours". If you want to qualify as a pilot, you need to know the science and the theory and be able to pass some practical tests; but in addition to all of that you need to have logged a certain number of hours at the controls. You just need to have done a lot, and seen a lot of things. (This is of course the message of Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, that the expertise of acknowledged greats such as The Beatles required an estimated 10,000 hours of practice - in the case of The Beatles, acquired during their time in Hamburg.)

And then I remembered that back in the 1980s, when computers became small and cheap enough for individual people to afford, and we first started wondering about their use in education, it was practice that we were thinking of. The great hope we had was that computers would be a way to give learners a huge amount of practice; they could try problem after problem after problem, in whatever domain of skills they were trying to perfect - especially numeracy, literacy and all the key skills - and the computer would never get tired or bored or irritable, but give them all the practice they needed or could cope with.

What went wrong? How did we get side-tracked? I blame the baleful influence of the IT industry, which as I've argued elsewhere has led us to think of the use of computers in terms of the transmission of information. And when the term e-learning was coined in 1999 - as, confusingly but revealingly, a new approach to teaching - the damage was done. Instead of practice, practice, practice, we've ended up with presentation, presentation, presentation.

The 1980s is back in fashion now; my granddaughter's been learning about it in primary school and is the proud owner of a home-made "I [heart] the 1980s" T-shirt. Perhaps it's time for us all to imitate Back to the Future and return to recover what we lost back then, before e-learning went wrong.

Reference
The term "e-learning" was coined or at least popularised by the American technologist Jay Cross in 1999, as "a model for what corporate training [using the internet] can become". 'Elearning: Winning Approaches to Corporate Learning on Internet Time', Internet Time Group, p. 1. Available from http://www.internettime.com/Learning/articles/eLearning.pdf [Accessed 30 November 2014.

Learning design: through the square window

Any book or guide on learning design will tell you that you're supposed to start by working out learning outcomes. But anyone who's worked on the learning design of a university course will tell you that that's something which academics find it very hard to do. It's the same if you try to get them to start by working on any other abstract and high-level design aspect, such as pedagogic approach, assessment strategy, or even media mix. What they want to work on first is the syllabus: the subject matter which the course is going to teach.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Academics' core competence lies in their subject matter knowledge; it's the essential part of their identity, where they see their value and self-worth as lying - and it's what they most enjoy thinking about. I've recently been working with two groups of academics, who were very willing to do the learning design activity our university now requires of them, but who had great difficulty getting to grips with it until they'd done what they wanted to do first, which was work out their syllabus. It was remarkable how much better and productive the discussions about learning design went after that.

I think the books are wrong and that it doesn't actually matter if academics want to start with subject matter. I came to this conclusion five years ago, when I started my present job, and I came up with a workshop device to embody it. The device is a simple 2x2 window, which I called my Play School window. (See note below.) The four panes were labelled: Subject matter, Learning outcomes, Learning activities, and Assessment tasks. The point is, it doesn't matter which pane you start with. If academics need to start with subject matter in order to feel comfortable, then that's fine, and it may actually be better to have some concrete examples of syllabus topics on the table when thinking about other design aspects. They can't (or shouldn't) get far working out a syllabus before the question arises: what do we want students to be able to do as a result of studying this? Repeat back all the presented information word-for-word? No, of course not; so then, what? And hence looking at syllabus or subject matter can be moved easily into a discussion of learning outcomes, and then into a discussion of assessment tasks - or what students are going to do to show that they've achieved the learning outcomes - and then into a discussion of learning activities - or what students are going to do to develop those abilities. And that will enable a more focussed discussion of the syllabus and subject matter to be covered, and so on.

You can start on any pane and go through them in any order, as many times as you need. All that matters is that you have them all filled in at the end of the day, and that they all align: that the learning activities supported by the subject matter will enable students to achieve the learning outcomes, which they demonstrate by performing the assessment tasks. This is what John Biggs some years ago called "constructive alignment", which is or ought to be one of the fundamental concepts of learning design.

Reference on "constructive alignment"
John Biggs, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd edn (Buckingham: SRHE and the Open University Press, 2003). “A good teaching system aligns teaching method and assessment to the learning activities stated in the objectives so that all aspects of the system are in accord in supporting appropriate student learning” (p. 11). A fourth edition of this work, rewritten with Catherine Tang, is now available (2011) from the same publisher. See also his own website and the wikipedia entry for Constructive alignment.

Note on Play School
For those not of my generation or not in the UK, Play School was a TV programme for pre-schoolers, in which each episode included a film clip, showing something interesting or wonderful, as seen through one of three windows in the studio. In addition to the Square Window, there was also the Round Window and the Arched Window, but those don't fit the needs of learning design so well.)

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.)

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.

Boring messages: how to make them interesting?

If you've ever fantasised about making a boring message more interesting by setting it to music, then you should see what Virgin America have done with their in-flight safety video.

It's great fun, of course, but this just confirms my doubts how much of a solution this is to the problem of a boring message. How much attention would you pay this video on the second or third in-flight viewing, let alone the tenth or the fiftieth?

But there are some nice touches. I particularly like how they deal with the problem of soundng like a prat when compelled by legislation to say things which pretty much everyone knows. Their approach is to acknowledge the problem and become arch. ("For the 0.001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before - really?....") It's one way of retaining dignity and credibility under impossible requirements.

The secret of learning design - on a T-shirt

This excellent T-shirt is produced by the same designers who produced the much-circulated graphics on How to Care for Introverts / Extroverts.

As soon as I saw the design, I forwarded the link to a friend who finds some of her work colleagues need to have the same things explained to them repeatedly, or think that if they're sent on a training course they'll magically be able to do their job. She loved the design, as I knew she would.

But it later occurred to me that this T-shirt slogan also goes to the heart of learning design, along the same lines as my previous effort to summarise everything one needs to know about it in two principles. What it says is that you can explain as much as you like, and produce texts and videos and websites, and none of it guarantees anything. Or as I put it in my previous post: people learn because of what they do, not what you do.

Of course, if you're a teacher, this doesn't mean that you can just explain things and leave the rest up to the learner. If you're going to take your responsibility seriously, and if you have learners who you can't be sure will be able to take charge of their own learning, then you need to prompt them into doing things which will enable them to learn from your explanations. It's in that interaction that the magic happens, which is why learning design is a creative craft. As the T-shirt reminds us, the learning begins when the explanation ends: when the teacher stops talking and the learner becomes active.

Which to Teach, Procedure or Understanding?

When I’m showing a colleague how to do something on their computer and I try to explain why it works that way, often they’ll say: “Don’t tell me how it works, just tell me what I need to do.”

The reason I try to explain how it works is that referring back to the underlying system is how I myself remember things. It is, I think usually a better strategy overall: it equips one better to cope with unexpected situations, such as a software upgrade which moves the buttons or changes their names. But what I have to remind myself is that many people really don’t want to know all that; they just want to know what to do.

The trouble is that it’s sometimes very hard to devise a procedure – what the mathematicians call an algorithm, or sequence of instructions – which is really robust so that someone without any understanding at all can follow it and get the desired result every time. For example, what instructions would you give someone to enable them to get across a city by bus, if they don’t really understand what a bus route is or what governs a bus’s starting and stopping?

In the magnificent from-the-inside book about autism Send in the Idiots, that was the problem which confronted Henry and Sheila, who wanted to teach their autistic daughter Elizabeth (age 23) to get from their house to the public library, which she loved, by bus on her own. They’d shown her the way to the bus stop and explained the bus numbers and how the motions made by people at the bus stop attract the driver’s attention and make the bus pull over. “She might not have realized [that there was a correlation between people sticking out their hands and the bus pulling in], not because she lacked deductive reasoning but because she might have noticed the green stain on the person’s sneakers instead, the misplaced apostrophe in the advertisement on the side of the bus.”

Next they had to teach her when to get off the bus. They started with a street map and a bus route map, and she understood the differences between them. But when they tried the trip together, with a portable copy of the bus map, she couldn’t follow their route. “Each time the bus stopped, Elizabeth thought that she was to count off a dot, except that the bus stopped for traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, as well as to pick up or let off passengers. And, to make things worse, it also didn’t stop every time that it was supposed to. There weren’t passengers to let off or pick up at every point designated on the map.” Trying to follow the bus map, she became increasingly confused and distressed, to the point where Sheila had to take her off the bus.

The next strategy was to teach her to count streets, to use just the street map and to count the streets to her [destination]. However, when they tried this, she disputed their interpretation of a street. She wanted to count everything that was paved as a street. Again the map didn’t match what she was seeing. Elizabeth’s parents tried to wean her off this by telling her to count only those paved routes that had street signs. This had the potential for excluding entrances to parking garages and walkways. She was good at noticing details, so it seemed safe to assume that she would notice every street sign and cross-reference it with the map. However, not every street on the map had a sign – far from it, especially when they got downtown. They also tried by counting only streets that had white lines drawn on them. But some of the wider streets had several lanes – so several white lines – and some of the narrower streets had no lines. This didn’t work either.

They’d been trying for three weeks, when Elizabeth’s distress during another unsuccessful attempt Elizabeth’s distress forced them to get off the bus early yet again. They were feeling a deep sense of failure. Blind people travelled on buses. So did children. But their grown-up daughter couldn’t.

‘Where are we, anyway?’ exclaimed Sheila.

‘Twelve,’ replied Elizabeth….

‘What?’ asked Henry. ‘Why twelve?’

Elizabeth pointed to the bus stop.

She had worked out that the bus map wasn’t at all abstract. It was only abstract if you were comparing it to the street map, or if you assumed that the bus had to stop at every dot. Instead, the bus map was a map of all the bus stop signs with the same logo as was in the bottom righthand corner of the map. In fact, you didn’t even need the map. You just needed to know the number of signs from the point of embarkation to the point of disembarkation. They were at twelve. They needed to get to fifteen.

So a triumph of sorts. But what a distance there is between Elizabeth’s algorithm for working out when to get off the bus and anything like a systemic understanding of the situation, in which the counting of bus stops relates to her progress across the city. And how good is her algorithm really? Would she know how to adjust it, if say a bus stop was suspended due to road works, or the bus route was diverted? Nevertheless, this story was a reminder to me that, if what you’re most concerned about is a practical outcome, it may be a good idea to abandon the goal of teaching understanding: even with non-autistic people, the effort may simply not be worth the benefit, for everyone concerned

Reference

Kamran Nazeer, Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism (Bloomsbury, 2006), pp 147-150.

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

Are MOOCs progressive or regressive?

At the ELESIG's recent symposium on students' experience of MOOCs, one of the interesting questions posed by George Roberts of Oxford Brookes University was whether Open Online Courses (massive or not) would address the digital literacy deficit.

Since we had already agreed amongst ourselves that MOOCs weren't really suited to learners without significant pre-existing digital skills, as well as considerable self-confidence and the ability to drive and organise their own learning, I mischievously proposed that MOOCs would actually widen the digital divide rather than narrowing it: those who had good education already would be able to get more from MOOCs, but those unfortunate enough to have been poorly taught and given no models for self-directed learning would be left even further behind.

It's a feature of open and free systems - such as free markets - that they favour those with the power and resources - the capital - to dominate them. This connection between digital liberalism and political liberalism (that's to say, conservatism) was also made interestingly last week by a commentator on The Guardian's website, following a review of Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything , Click Here. "RO42" wrote:

This sounds a very valuable book, and one that need to be more widely read.

The thing I'm increasingly coming to notice is that technophiles are very, very conservative politically but think they're liberal. They believe in deregulation and hands-off governance because it is "freer", market self-regulation rather than legal frameworks for business operation because it "promotes entrepreneurism" (shades, of course, of "wealth creators") and a strange kind of philanthropic Big Society obsession where everything is "democratically" chosen and the enthusiastic amateur rather than expertise listened to.

There is a massive fear of expertise and knowledge in this new technological culture; anyone who claims to know things is lumped in with the charlatans, or even worse deemed elitist and irrelevant. There is a place for crowd-sourcing and co-operation but it should not come with the devaluing of education.

If free and open education is not just to favour the already-privileged, there need to be educational structures to protect the vulnerable and disadvantaged - which is why I hope there will always be a place for institutions such as my own, The Open University, which have a mission to do precisely that, and why even as we ourselves move into MOOCs I think ours will be rather different from those envisaged by techno-utopians.

Reference

The sessions led by Alison Littlejohn and George Roberts at the ELESIG symposium "Researching Learners' Experiences of MOOCs and other New Pedagogies" can be seen at http://elesig.ning.com/video (you need to register, free, for access to the site).