Cuttings: February 2018

Jo Brand: ‘Bullies are lurking around every corner' - interview by Eva Wiseman in The Guardian. "Another Friday night, another comedy panel show, another biscuit, maybe two. And then suddenly, we sedentary viewers of  'Have I Got News For You' sat up. It was early in November and, responding to a headline about an MP taking his personal trainer to the cinema, Ian Hislop had chuckled: 'Some of this is not "high-level" crime, is it?' But Jo Brand, hosting, didn’t smile. The temperature changed quite suddenly. 'If I can just say,' she began, 'as the only representative of the female gender here today – I know it’s not high-level, but it doesn’t have to be "high-level" for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the House of Commons. Actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up, and that wears you down.' There was a pause. Then the audience started cheering.... When John Humphrys’ conversation with Jon Sopel was leaked, and they appeared to joke about the BBC’s pay gap row, Brand 'enjoyed that window into John Humphrys’ mind. Though we all take the piss when we think we’re safe. But it does show what they really think about the pay gap – that they don’t take it seriously. It pisses women off when we feel a genuine cause for anger, and are unsupported by men. Whether it’s something like the pay gap, or someone shouting, "Great knockers!" at a woman in the pub, it’s really common that men will just look away. Things are only going to change when the majority of men step up and support women.'"

Britain’s imperial fantasies have given us Brexit - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. When the outgoing German ambassador to Britain claimed this week that Brexiteers were fixated on the second world war, he was on to something. ... But Ammon was only half right. For while the Brexit vote was certainly underpinned by a melancholic longing for a glorious past, the era it sought to relive was less the second world war than the longer, less distinguished or openly celebrated period of empire. ... Our colonial past, and the inability to come to terms with its demise, gave many the impression that we are far bigger, stronger and more influential than we really are. ... Douglas Carswell, the sole Ukip MP during the referendum, was raised in Uganda; Arron Banks, who bankrolled Ukip and the xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, spent his childhood in South Africa, where his father ran sugar estates, as well as in Kenya, Ghana and Somalia; Henry Bolton, the current head of Ukip, was born and raised partly in Kenya; Robert Oxley, head of media for Vote Leave, has strong family ties to Zimbabwe. One can only speculate about how much impact these formative years had on their political outlook, (Carswell attributes his libertarianism to Idi Amin’s 'arbitrary rule') but it would be odd to conclude they didn’t have any."

The brave Brexit speech Theresa May is afraid to give? Here it is - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Public opinion is still divided on Brexit. It is not divided on retaining close trade links with Europe, which is supported by some 70%. There is no way we can achieve tariff-free or frictionless access to EU markets other than by accepting the disciplines of those markets. Links with the EU have grown close over 40 years of membership. I ask my colleagues to accept that there is no move among the British people to reverse them. The overwhelming opinion of my advisers and those with whom we have been consulting this past year is that we should retain the existing tariff-free access. This is most simply achieved by being within the European Economic Area (EEA), the so-called Norway option. I know I have rejected the EEA in the past. But I now propose that we should treat it as the template for long-term negotiation, with a cross-party agreement to revisit it in 10 years."

How Democracies Die: Trump and the shredding of norms - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "In early 2016,... the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant [President Obama's supreme court nominee] a hearing.... Their shared view [was] that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that.... This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. ... Levitsky and Ziblatt want to get away from the idea that so long as the constitutional order is intact, democracy will be OK. They are deeply suspicious of any naive faith that deviant politicians can be 'contained' by the right institutions, and not just because it didn’t work out for Weimar Germany with Hitler. They point out that US history is littered with examples of political behaviour that stayed within the letter of the law but still did catastrophic damage to democracy. The racist regime that prevailed in the American south during the first half of the 20th century was underpinned by a set of norms that made hard-won African American voting rights meaningless. The constitution did not have to be overridden to allow this to happen."

The fight for the right to be a Muslim in America - article by Andrew Rice in The Guardian. "There is, literally, an anti-mosque playbook. Tactics were once unwritten, spread through websites and word of mouth, but more recently they were set down in a book titled Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight. Written a Texas attorney, it was published by the Center for Security Policy, an organisation headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who has long espoused the theory that Muslims are engaged in a secret plot to impose sharia law on the US. Gaffney writes in the book’s introduction that it is a 'how-to manual for patriotic Americans who are ready to counter the leading edge of Islamic supremacism'."

Talk is cheap: the myth of the focus group - article by Liza Featherstone in The Guardian, based on her book Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation. "In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker company had a problem: American housewives liked the idea of cake mix, but they weren’t actually buying it.... Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist who had pioneered a new kind of market research, ... set out to answer the question using a relatively new tool: the focus group. Dichter’s groups for Betty Crocker diagnosed the trouble – women felt guilty that they were not doing the work of baking the cake for their families. Serving prepared foods made them feel inadequate... Focus groups were developed first in academia – by scholars with government contracts tasked with selling the second world war more effectively to the American people. Almost at the same time, similar methods were being developed by the British Labour party, to help them understand why so many working-class voters were turning Conservative.... But what if focus groups have also been part of a process in which citizenship has been reduced to consumerism – a set of choices made passively, under constraint? Focus groups reveal our desires – for a better life, for participation, for power, to be heard – but do they also limit them? Perhaps it is a process through which our aspirations become much smaller. We talk, we feel perhaps that someone has listened, and we demand nothing more."

Look at me: why attention-seeking is the defining need of our times - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian, based on his book Consent. "Everyone needs attention, like we need to eat.... Facebook alone harvests and sells the attention of 1.4 billion people every day. That’s about a fifth of the world.... But we can’t know what to make of it until we understand what people need attention for. Attention is other people thinking about you, and if there were ever humans who didn’t need it, they are now extinct.... Specifically, people have been shown to need a type of attention that psychologists call belonging.... Belonging means getting positive attention from people who know you well.... People who feel they don’t belong suffer terribly, and experience health problems comparable to smoking or obesity.... The word loneliness is a good description of the feeling, but not its cause, which in reality has little to do with being alone.... Some lonely people themselves conclude that they aren’t worthy of attention, and withdraw from the world still further. Others search for a feeling of belonging, not always in the best way."

Brave by Rose McGowan: Hollywood’s avenging warrior speaks out - review by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "That McGowan has turned out to be an avenging warrior, determined to expose Hollywood’s toxic lies and cover-ups, would have once seemed as improbable as the most ludicrous superhero movie; a spoilt rich guy saving the city while dressed as a bat has nothing on her tale. ... McGowan’s book will not be the best book about the Weinstein scandal, but it may be the most visceral. Anger burns from every page. ... The problem with burning everything down is that it all becomes an indistinguishable pile of ash. The misogyny of gossip blogger Perez Hilton is a worthy target for McGowan; that actors occasionally have to perform wedding scenes is not.... This reads like a book written by a woman driven to near derangement by decades of abuse and gaslighting. At times I wished McGowan could filter her anger, highlighting the real abuses as opposed to folding them in among the generalised sexist garbage. But if she had been able do that she probably wouldn’t have written this book: self-control isn’t helpful when you are kicking down doors. McGowan set out to write a book that examines abuse, and she has done just that. She has also, inadvertently, shown how much damage abuse can wreak in even the toughest of women."

Ms Mansplaining - post by John Naughton, in his Memex 1.1 blog. "I’ve often wondered vaguely where the term 'mansplaining' — the patronising way in which men who know nothing about a subject insist on explaining it to a woman — came from. Now I know... The phrase was coined by the American writer and essayist, Rebecca Solnit. It was prompted by an experience she had at one of those high-end Aspen think-rests in which rich members of the US elite persuade themselves that they are really reallyinterested in ideas. Reflecting on it later, she published a wonderful essay, 'Men Explain Things to Me' in Guernica. ... 'Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway. But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless – for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.'"

Why Adventure Games suck - blog post by Rob Gilbert, reproducing classic 1989 article from The Journal of Computer Game Design, written while he was designing 'Monkey Island'. "There is a state of mind called 'suspension of disbelief'. When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost....The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone. At this time he is most likely to shut off the computer and go watch TV, at which point we all have lost. I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right. In Maniac Mansion, in one place or another, I violated all but one of these rules. Some of them were violated by design, others by sloppiness. If I could redesign Maniac Mansion, all the violations would be removed and I'd have a much better game."

Is Facebook for old people? Over-55s flock in as the young leave - article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. "It’s official: Facebook is for old(er) people. Teens and young adults are ditching Mark Zuckerberg’s social network as popularity among the over-55s surges, according to a report. In 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, 700,000 fewer than in 2017, as younger users defect to services such as Snapchat, according to eMarketer. A surge in older users means over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year."

Dawn of the techlash - article by Rachel Botsman, based on her book Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart. "How did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle.... in 2002, [Scott Heiferman] founded Meetup, a social networking platform to help people with a common interest find each other and arrange to meet, face to face. ... In early 2003, ... more than 140,000 Howard Dean grassroots supporters used Meetup to mobilise support.... From attempting to aid revolutions in the Arab spring, to co-ordinating the Occupy Wall Street movement, social networks soon brimmed with ambitions to level the playing field. It was all wildly promising. The internet would be a transparent environment that made it easier for people to hold political leaders accountable and even strengthen people’s capacity to relate to one another. On it went, the golden dream of the digital age, before the invaders arrived. Were we naive? As unprecedented numbers of people channelled their political energies and beliefs into social media, shouldn’t we have foreseen the way the platforms could become vulnerable to manipulation and the spread of misinformation? Probably, but most of us failed to imagine the imaginable."

Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand - article by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned [Peter] Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, ... I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by.... The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. [James Dale] Davidson and [William] Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. 'The new Sovereign Individual,' they write, 'will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.' It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn. Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a 'domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age'."

Pushing back: why it's time for women to rewrite the story - article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. "In 1938 a play debuted at the Richmond Theatre, which opens with a Victorian husband telling his wife that though she has been 'very good lately', she mustn’t 'read meanings into everything' or 'imagine things'. ...Her husband is systematically working to extinguish her perspective, to convince her that she is mad. Every night as he searches their attic (for jewels he believes are there), his movements cause the gas lamps to flicker. ... 'Gaslighting' soon came to denote psychological warfare, the deliberate undermining of another’s sanity. More recently, it has been resuscitated as a metaphor for the cultural sabotage of women’s perceptions, for trivialising their concerns as imaginary. ... The question of credibility gained new currency after allegations about Harvey Weinstein triggered the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns – the latest battles in a war women have been waging for centuries against the prerogatives of patriarchy. Storytelling is a key battleground: ... male privilege is the entitlement to be the centre of the story, for male voices to dominate, for male interpretations to define it, for a woman to be dismissed, in the words of the husband in Gas Light,as 'a perfect little silly'.

Five books to understand the left - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "[William] Davies’ book The Limits of Neoliberalism sums up the wider thinking of the UK left about the system it is trying to replace. It identifies the coercive imposition of competition by a centralised state as the core problem, and contains the most succinct definition of neoliberalism in the English language: 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'.... The most influential book [of the 2011 protest movements] is the 2009 manifesto The Coming Insurrection, by the French anarchist Invisible Committee, ...its key [being] that the proletariat was over, that the networked human being was the agent of change.... David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years ... showed that a historical method derived from Marx could be applied to new anthropological evidence to explain one of the most pressing facts of modern economics: the strangulation of economic dynamism by debt.... If there is a single book that embodies the activist left’s turn towards electoral politics it is Pablo Iglesias’s Politics in a Time of Crisis.... Kimberlé Crenshaw ... pioneered intersectionality theory: ... the most influential framework for understanding the multiple, overlapping oppressions we face, and their relationship both to colonialism and economic exploitation."

What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson: hope, as distinct from optimism - review by Diana Birch in The Guardian. "Marilynne Robinson is a stubborn nonconformist, and her new collection of essays confirms the distance between her combative ideas and the dominant values of the west. ... Her purpose is to claim the respect for human potential, which she sees as the bedrock of Christianity, as a means of countering what she characterises as the 'thinking that tends to devalue humankind, which is an influential tendency in modern culture'. Again and again she attacks the kind of 'cost-benefit analysis' or unthinking 'self-interest' that undermines the responsibility of 'the self as an intelligent moral actor'. She returns to the primacy of the individual that characterised early Protestantism, not as a vindication of the self-seeking economic competition that she sees as a corroding force in the public life of the west, but as an exacting personal obligation to seek the good of others. An especially engaging essay, Grace and Beauty, considers the relation between Robinson’s theological position and her aesthetic practice. 'The standard I use is strictly experiential.' The wish to reauthorise 'experience, felt reality, as one important testimony to the nature of reality itself' is a reminder of her closeness to the traditions of dissenting spiritual autobiographies as testament to an authentic interpretation of our world. No preconceived or willed model for the novel can be a substitute for the strenuous work of the imagination, which is for Robinson always a consequence of a moral understanding of action."

Jessica Jones: mind control and redemption: the timely return of a feminist superhero - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Jones has superpowers; quite poorly defined ones that mainly involve throwing people... Emotionally, she is held in suspended animation by her PTSD, which was triggered by a series of harrowing events contributing to her traumatic backstory. She is caught in the eye of a three-way storm: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Kilgrave; the car crash that killed her entire family; and the institutional violence that somehow bestowed superpowers upon her while she was in a coma... Kilgrave’s abuse ... left her with more than ambient trauma; it hollowed out her belief in her own power as a force for good. In Jessica Jones, the past never passes, just crashes back into the present... The show is ensconced in a noir atmosphere – a feeling prompted by the sense Jessica Jones is so close to the hero that nearly but never was: she is the female Humphrey Bogart. ... Yet there is one trope more unusual still: the strong victim. As a dramatic construct, the victim functions as a frame and counterpoint to the hero. But in the case of Jessica Jones she is both victim and hero. Despite the fact we repeatedly see examples of Jones’s weakness against Kilgrave and a backstory that reveals rape and forced murder, she is not the damsel in distress but the knight."

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.

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.

Talking on the radio or on the web

Reading Charlotte Higgins' excellent history of the BBC, and its accompanying articles in The Guardian, I've been struck by the analogies between the early broadcasters, working out how to use the new medium of radio, and those of us in universities working out how to use the online medium.

This passage from a letter by Hilda Matheson, BBC Director of Talks between 1926 and 1931, seems particularly relevant to our making of audio and video in which academics talk to students.

The thing broadcasting does, or can do, its chief claim as far as the spoken word is concerned, is that it provides not a silent-printed word, a dead word if you like, but a living and very personal contact with an individual. The crucially affectionate link that grows between listeners and announcers, between listeners and regular broadcasters ... is something quite peculiar to broadcasting. [p 35]

If a lecturer's audio or video is doing nothing more than delivering information, then we might as well have put that information in text and saved some money, as well as improved convenience for students. But of course, we are not in the business of content delivery: we are in the business of education, for which the relationship - the personal relationship - between teacher and student is a vital part of the magic, the spell, the spiel.

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.)

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 singers and the song

One of the lovely things about Gareth Malone's TV series Sing While You Work is that he makes putting together a workplace choir not just about getting people to sing but about finding their voice. The bits of the programmes where he learns about the singers and their jobs, and what really moves them about their work, are the mose unique and usually the most moving parts. And one of the things he does is to find a song which sums up what they do and which they can really sing and mean it. As with The Zimmers performing My Generation, it's not so much the song or the singing which makes the impact: it's who the singers are.

So here's the Lewisham and Greenwich choir from Series 1, performing Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, mashed up with Coldplay's Fix You. Have a tissue ready; this one goes to the heart.



Even though not on sale until 9 December (£1.98 from the iTunes store), the bookies have this as joint fourth favourite to be Christmas Number 1 - which would be a welcome change!

Disclosure: the video was produced by my sister's company London Video Productions.

Short writing (2): Virgin media short

My sister's two-minute film The Test has just been entered for the Virgin Media Shorts competition.

I think it's great! (And that's not just fraternal loyalty.) But I'm also interested to see how the script has changed since the first draft I saw. She set herself the task of telling a pretty complex story in just two minutes, and the problem from the start was: just how explicit does it have to be, so that viewers can understand what's going on?

The answer turned out to be: pretty explicit. To begin with, people who read the script were saying that they weren't getting it first time (and one can't count on people watching a film more than once), so Ros had to find ways to make the story clearer without increasing the length and weighing the film down. For educational writers and learning designers, this is this is the take-away point: making things explicit doesn't mean using a lot of words and trying to say everything. In the case of this film,visual cues, slight changes to the wording, and a few captions give viewers enough pointers to work out the rest for themselves.

I'm particularly pleased that she used my suggestion to have Adi snap his fingers at one key point - which tells the viewer that the transition which follows is something which he wills to happen, and not a fantasy or a flashback. If that doesn't make much sense without the context, you'll just have to watch the film!

iTunes University: better than the real thing?

Reviewing some draft course materials about the evaluation of e-learning innovations, I was reminded of a rather nice piece of evaluation research which caused quite a stir when it was published in 2009. The nice thing about it is that it's very simple, yet perfectly illustrates the importance of not taking evaluation data at face value and looking at what's going on beneath the surface.

The experiment was very simple. A university psychology class was divided into two; half went to a regular lecture, and half were given an audio podcast of the same lecture. A week later they took a test on the lecture content - and guess what happened? The students who'd had the podcast scored significantly higher.

Cue headlines in the educational press and blogosphere, along the lines of "iTunesU better than the real thing!", and delight for the proponents of new technology (such as here, here, and here). But there was something puzzling about the result. As any lecturer who has tried producing audio teaching materials knows all too well, the average lecture  makes a pretty poor podcast: stripped of the motivation and engagement factors which come from physical presence at a live lecture, the soundtrack on its own tends to be dull and slow - unless the lecturer is a truly stellar performer, which most are not. So how was it that the students who had the lecture podcast did better in the test?

The answer of course lies in the use which students made of the podcast (which was only reported by some of the commentators, such as here and here). Most of these students took notes, and took really good notes, some of them listening to the podcast several times to make sure they'd understood everything. That they scored highly is not surprising! Those students who DIDN'T take notes from the podcast  - one listened to it while working out at the gym - got rubbish scores. So the real finding turns out to be, not that a podcast is better than a live lecture, but that taking notes is better than not taking notes - and a podcast can be one way of helping students take good notes.

There are two lessons I see I this in story. The first is that evaluation of learning technology needs to get down to the level of student activity, because it's there, in what students do or don't do, that changes need to occur for there to be benefit. The second is that when we introduce new learning technologies, we need also to work on students' understanding of how to use them. There's a cultural norm that you take notes in university lectures, but there's no such common understanding in the case of podcasts. In fact, the cultural norm is rather then other way, a podcast being something you listen to while doing something else, such as working out at the gym. The associations of the technology encourage students to assume that they will learn the information simply by listening to it.

The malignant way in which information technology supports a view of education as the transmission of information is something on which I'm intending to blog in a future post.

References
Dan McKinney, Jennifer L. Dyck and Elise S. Luber, "iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?", Computers and Education, 52 (2009), 617-623
Hannah Fearn, "Coming to a screen near you", Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 June 2009, p 38

Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?

To take in something external and make it part of oneself: assimilation or digestion is a powerful metaphor for learning. It's a long-established one too; the Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer famously asks that believers should "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the holy scriptures.  Today, "assimilative tasks" are one of the categories of learning activities in the classification system used by learning designers at the Open University. According to this system, the characteristic "assimilative tasks" are reading, viewing and listening, which even in the digital world remain the core activities of a university student.

But there's something slightly pejorative about the label "assimilative" in that classification, especially when set alongside the other categories: experiential, information-handling, communicative, productive and adaptive (simulations to you and me). Grainné Conole puts her finger on it when she describes assimilative tasks as "essentially passive in nature" (Conole 2007, p 84). Taking it for granted that we're all aiming to get students to be active in their learning, the implication is that reading text, watching video or listening to audio is somehow less active than, say, communicating, handling information or getting new experiences.

Now it's certainly possible to listen passively to a lecture or a podcast, or to read through written words passively without thinking about their meaning. But that's not assimilation: that's swallowing. To take in food takes minutes, or seconds; to digest it takes hours, and that digestion is a very active process, involving peristaltic movement, gastric acids, enzymes and so on. If we're to take assimilation as a model of learning, then the important part isn't putting the stuff in the mouth, or eyes or ears, but working on it to break it down and make it part of oneself. And that's the part on which a good teacher will focus.

This is something in which the Open University has excelled for the past forty years. The reasons its course materials are so good is not that the information is well-organised or that the explanations are clear - although they are - but that they're always accompanied by learning activities to help students build their own understanding of the subject. It's these activities, rather than the reading, viewing and listening, which are the real assimilative tasks. Here are some of the most common types, divided for convenience into three levels:

Basic

• summarising - for example: "List the three most important characteristics of theory X." "Write a single sentence explanation of concept Y."
• representing diagrammatically - for example: "Draw a mind map to show the relationship between the concepts of theory X., including examples from case study Y."
• organising - for example: "List the different aspects of this topic, and create a system for arranging them."
• classifying - for example: "Sort the instances A., B., C.… into the categories / concepts X., Y., Z.."
• comparing and contrasting - for example: "List points of similarity and difference between X. and Y."
• identifying - for example: "Identify the features of concept X. which make it an instance of concept Y."
• exemplifying - for example: "Find an example of concept X. in material Y., or in your own experience."

Intermediate

• interpreting - for example: "Describe the most important features of case X., according to theory Y."
• analysing - for example: "Outline the structure of case X., according to theory Y."
• applying - for example: "Describe what you would do in case X., according to principles / procedure Y." "Identify the salient features of case A., according to theory B."
• reflecting - for example: "Interpret your experience of X. according to theory / framework / protocol Y."

Advanced

• contextualising - for example:  "Relate case X. to its theoretical / social / historical / political / environmental etc. context."
• evaluating - for example: "Say how far case X. meets standards Y., and give reasons for your judgements."
• discussing critically (in the academic sense) - for example: "Argue for an interpretation of case X., and give reasons for preferring this over other possible interpretations."

A better name for this category of tasks might be "comprehension and application", rather than "assimilative", if assimilation is going to be mistaken for simple reception of material. But whatever we call it, properly conceiving the acquisition of knowledge and understanding as an active process is vital to higher education, since every academic discipline requires it to a greater or lesser extent. In the face of subject matter experts' tendency to teach a subject just by expounding it, the reminder which we need is that good teaching requires not only clear exposition but a process for learners to assimilate it.

References

Book of Common Prayer (1662), Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent.

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.

Audio (and video) feedback on written assignments (3)

Russell Stannard - confusingly, not the Open University emeritus professor of physics, but the University of Westminster lecturer in multimedia and ICT of the same name - has been having great success it seems with audio-visual screen recordings (using Camtasia) of his feedback on students' written work. It seems it enables him to be much more detailed in his comments, combining the benefits of audio feedback with the ability to point to precisely the parts of the students' work he's talking about (the example mentioned is correcting the grammar of Chinese students).
See this article in The Independent, and his own write-up of the work.

Don't you wish your professor was cool like mine

Here's a great video of a 20 minute talk by Ken Robinson, former Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick, on how schools kill creativity.

Reasons why this is worth seeing:
(1) It's LOL funny. (I had dealings with Ken Robinson nearly 20 years ago, and I knew he spoke very well, but never dreamed he'd be so good at stand-up!)
(2) There's an interesting and provocative message: that creativity should be as important as literacy and numeracy in the curriculum
(3) The parent website TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a useful source of videos of inspiring talks on a range of subjects
(4) It's a reminder of how good a good lecture can be - useful to remember when people cite "the lecture" as the archetype of a passive-receptive transmission-of-knowledge pedagogy which has no place in the Web 2.0 world.