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.

Talking teaching or technology? A lesson from Pixar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Seen and heard - November 2011

"Living in the Material World" (film biography of George Harrison, on TV) - the quiet but interesting Beatle
"Strictly Gershwin" (ENB Ballet, at Milton Keynes Theatre)
The Invincible, by Stanislaw Lem (1964 hardcore SF novel from the innovative Polish writer, author of Solaris and The Cyberiad)
"The Making of the Drum" (choral piece by Bob Chilcott) - sung with chamber choir Polymnia, powerful African-inspired text on the sacred process involving death (killing the goat, cutting the tree) and voices ("speak when we touch you")
"The Elusive Technological Future" - John Naughton's keynote speech at Alt-C in September 2011.

24 words on how to write a restaurant review

In higher education, we tend to assume that students all know how to communicate online: that they instinctively know the right genre, register and tone for the context. And then we're surprised when forum communication either fails to take off or goes up in flames.

The Qype website makes no such assumptions. Beside the box allowing you to post a review of, for example, a restaurant, it carries the following instructions:

Write as if you were talking to a good friend (in front of your mother) No spam, no self promotion and no offensive language.

No long guidance document, no course in study skills. Just 24 words, which anyone about to make a comment is bound to see. Neat!

Seen and heard October 2011

Obituaries and memories of Steve Jobs (1955-2011), including a quote on design as not merely surface veneer but the soul of a device
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (the 1979 TV series with Alec Guiness as George Smiley) - after rewatching this on DVD, the new film seemed pretty trite and superficial
"Copenhagen" (play by Michael Frayn about Werner Heisenberg's mysterious 1941 visit to Niels Bohr in German-occupied Denmark) - repeat of the tremendous TV film version
"Mixed Britannia" (on the history of mixed-race people in Britain) - sensitive and moving TV documentary series by George Alagiah
"Strictly Come Dancing" and "Merlin", new seasons - so that's Saturday evenings sorted then
"Lavinia" by Ursula Le Guin (novel telling the story of the Latin woman married by proto-Roman Aeneas) - lovely re-writing of Virgil, more about household gods than battles
"Downton Abbey", second series - increasingly-soapy, but still hugely compelling
The Plenary Producer - wonderful resource with zillions of ideas for group activities by schoolteacher Mark Gershon

What can online teaching add to printed materials?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile vs desktop vs print

If you’re trying to predict which delivery medium will predominate in the distance learning of the future, there are some wise words – supported as usual by decent empirical data – in a recent post from Jakob Nielsen on how people use mobile devices and desktop computers for accessing the internet.

His first prediction is that – contrary to the sayings of some enthusiasts – mobile devices will not be replacing desktop computers. (In general, new technologies seldom displace older ones entirely; theatre, radio and cinema co-exist alongside television, YouTube and download services.) People prefer, if they can, to have all options open to them. The question is how they use them.

His second prediction is that “highest-value use will stay predominantly on desktop”. Even if the split of time-spent-on-internet swings increasingly towards tablets and smartphones (because the best computer for an immediate need, like the best camera, is the one you have with you), desktop machines will retain users’ preference for a large proportion of complex high value tasks, because of their superior screen size and keyboards, as well as (currently) superior internet speed and printing connectivity.

Nielsen’s predictions are about internet use in general. How might they apply to distance learning?

First, they confirm the correctness of the Open University’s strategy of giving students flexibility of delivery medium as far as possible. An increasing proportion of them will own one or more mobile devices in addition to a desktop computer and will expect to be able to transfer study materials and their own notes between them. The new feature enabling students to re-render onscreen structured content on formats for eBook readers and MP3 players, as well as printing, will go a long way towards meeting these expectations.

Nevertheless, Nielsen’s observations suggest that students will still prefer to do much of their work through print (whether supplied by us or printed by themselves) or on a desktop computer. The “high value use” which requires a large screen (or printed page) and keyboard (or physical notebook) is the reading of complex texts, requiring regular scanning and skipping backwards and forwards, and the simultaneous taking of content-rich notes: the core study activities at higher education level. Though small-screen devices such as smartphones will be increasingly used for brief, low-intensity activities such as checking the due-date for a TMA or monitoring activity on a forum, their use for core study activities is likely to be secondary and less-preferred – though still convenient as a backup mode, for example when taking study materials to work on during a child’s evening class.

(For Open University staff: updates on our ongoing work to extend and enrich mobile access are available from:

• http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/teaching/learning-systems/development/projects/mobile-vle-development – updates on developments as part of the Roadmap Acceleration Programme
• http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/mLearn/?cat=19 – OU blog by Rhodri Thomas on mobile learner support
• http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/teaching-and-learning/mobile/guidance/module-websites/ou-staff-demonstrator-mobile-vle – simulation of the mobile view of a module website on your desktop machine)