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.

Seen and heard: November 2014

Poetry in Music - concert by Polymnia (the choir in which I sing) in Milton Keynes city church. Memorable discoveries for me in our programme: (1) Morton Lauridsen's beautiful song cycle 'Les Chansons des Roses', setting poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (unusually in French; sample: "contre qui, rose, avez-vous adopté ces épines?"); (2) Seamus Heaney's poem 'Postscript', graphically set by our conductor John Byron to convey the raw power of the sea and wind off the West coast of Ireland (massive swell in the music up to the word "ocean") and the force of the final lines ("Useless to think you'll park or capture it more thoroughly... as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open" - corresponding swell up to the word "open").

Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 - performed by the wonderful Sixteen in the equally wonderful Saffron Hall. Top quality singing, of course, with a small but perfectly constituted orchestra: organ and harp at the core, with the addition of strings for richness, and trios of cornets and sackbuts when the music called for a bit more welly. Only problem, with this as with any performance: how do you follow the Ave Maris Stella?

Sorcery - ingenious and smooth touch-screen realisation of Steve Jackson's 'Fighting Fantasy' gamebooks (of the variety often called choose-your-own-adventure, though that was actually the brand name of a different series). The core gamebook engine, developed by two Cambridge software engineers with a solid track record in interactive fiction, is also publicly available in a cut-down form as Inklewriter; I can see a lot of applications for that, as a nicer and easier alternative to, say, the Quest engine.

Dreamfall Chapters - long-awaited sequel to classic adventure games The Longest Journey (1999) and Dreamfall (2006), from the keyboard of Ragnar Tørnquist. As before, top quality scripting and voice acting, and as in 'Dreamfall' vividly realised 3D environments - in this case, the dystopian futuristic city of Europolis. For fans of the original ('The Longest Journey' inspires particular affection, regularly featuring in charts as the best adventure game ever, and recently remastered for iOS), this is essential playing, because 'Dreamfall' ended with Zoe Castillo in a coma, Kian Alvane due to be executed, and April Ryan stabbed and presumed dead ('Chapters' opens with her funeral, which would seem to confirm that - except that 'Journey' shows her as an old woman, Lady Alvane, so that can't really be the end of her story).

Information Age – new gallery at the Science Museum. Exhibitions of new technology are prone to dating very quickly, but cleverly the curators have given this gallery a better visitor-life by arranging it around six technologies, each treated historically: Cable (telegraph), Exchange (telephone), Broadcast (radio and television), Constellation (satellite networks), Web (computer networks), Cell (mobile phones). Of special interest to me were the exhibits showing the instructions to users which were needed when the technologies were new: the demo telephones on which to practice dialling, the notice of penalties for telegraph operators who altered or allowed a non-recipient to see a message, the guidance to BBC scriptwriters on the narrative devices and effects possible with radio broadcasting.

Clare Teal singing Doris Day - live at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Not only great singing (of course), and great backing from a (little) big band, but lovely dialogue with the audience; I think she's specially careful to give her live performances something you can't get from a recording. Big enough also to ask the audience whether, after leaving the show, they'd buy a CD of her tribute act (if she were to make one) or instead look out a recording of Doris Day. Interesting question, and respondents were divided about 50:50. Respect also to Doris Day herself: still alive, and just turned 90.

Befriending Chaos – psychotherapy / spirituality workshop at Turvey, Monastery of Christ our Savour, with key talks by Pat McGrath and Tony Ang. A lot of emphasis on the positive aspect of chaos (sample quote from Nietzsche: “One must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star”), so I was glad that at the end of the day we came back to chaos's destructive aspect. I remembered Seamus Heaney's 'Postscript' when Pat talked about the sea off the West coast of Ireland, where he comes from, which is apparently one of those places where the fishermen don't learn to swim, because there's no point; if you go overboard you're done for. You're dependent on your boat in order to survive. Which is not to say that some people can't survive in the water very well, as in this video of a French freediver already noted.

Cuttings November 2014

Couch potatoes have killed the internet dream - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "Earlier this year engineer Dr Craig Labovitz testified:....'Whereas internet traffic was once broadly distributed across thousands of companies,... we found that by 2009 half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content-distribution companies. By May of 2014, this number had dropped by a factor of five. Today, just 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, contribute on average more than one half of all internet traffic in the United States during prime-time hours.' To those of us who were accustomed to thinking of the internet as a glorious, distributed, anarchic, many-to-many communication network in which anyone could become a global publisher, corporate gatekeepers had lost their power and peer-to-peer sharing was becoming the liberating norm, Labovitz’s brusque summary comes as a rude shock....What we failed to appreciate was the passivity of most of humanity and its inexhaustible appetite for consumption, entertainment and 'infotainment'. The spread of high-speed broadband connections did not liberate human creativity but instead created Couch Potato 2.0, a creature that sees the internet mostly as zillion-channel TV. In that sense, it’s no accident that the corporations which now dominate network traffic are outfits like Google and Netflix, beaming YouTube and movies to you in the comfort of your own settee."

How Made in Chelsea and Gogglebox make sure they don’t miss a beat - article by Stuart Kemp in The Guardian. "A beat is ... a scriptwriting technique originally developed in feature films: the use of dramatic pauses, or the timing of key events, decisions, discoveries. Constructed reality series on American TV mimicked the movies by adopting them, and now beats are being used by the makers of similar UK shows such as The Only Way Is Essex (Towie), Geordie Shore and Made in Chelsea. British producers are increasingly familiar with the US term 'beat sheet', outlining what they want to achieve from each scene. 'You’ve got four or five key points to get to in the episode, then in the edit you beat out each scene again,' says Derek McLean, head of non-scripted programming at Lime Pictures and executive producer of Towie and Geordie Shore, of the US practice. At the moment in the UK, he says, it’s more about beats in the edit. 'You say "give that a beat". It’s about pausing to highlight the key points,' he explains. 'With Towie, if you’re filming and there’s a breakup, we know we have to follow that story over three parts of a show. So what we do is make sure the highlight or conclusion happens in part three rather than at the beginning.'"

Want to succeed? You need systems not goals - Oliver Burkeman column in The Guardian. "As anyone whose employer foists 'performance targets' upon them already knows, a fixation with goal-setting has many downsides. But Adams [Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonst] adds one more: when you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure”. Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose – so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again. A system, by contrast, is 'something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run', regardless of immediate outcome. Drawing one cartoon a day is a system; so is resolving to take some kind of exercise daily – rather than setting a goal, like being able to run a marathon in four hours. One system that’s currently popular online goes by the name 'No Zero Days': the idea is simply not to let a single day pass without doing something, however tiny, towards some important project."

We're Sexist Toward Robots - article on Motherboard website, cited in MindHacks blog. "What’s weirder than our insistence on assigning gender to non-sentient machines is that we then sometimes treat them differently as a result. We’re sexist to robots. It would be funny in its absurdity, if it didn’t so harshly reflect the prejudices already ingrained in human society, and risk entrenching them even further. Take for instance a study published last year that asked participants to interact with a robot security guard, a stereotypically male occupation in the human world. Half of the participants met a robot that was given the typically male name 'John,' and the other half met a robot with the typically female name 'Joan.' John had a male text-to-speech voice, and Joan a female voice, but otherwise the robot remained identical. After doing some security tasks, like detecting an intruder on CCTV, the participants rated the robots. They rated John higher than Joan. He was considered more useful and more acceptable as a security bot than his female twin. It’s a curious experiment, and the results are rage-inducingly reminiscent of past findings that have shown a similar gender bias when we judge male and female humans."

There are two ways to read this novel - interview with Ali Smith about her new novel in The Guardian. "How to Be Both consists of two parts, one set in the present day, concerning George, a teenage girl whose mother has died suddenly, the other imagining a life for the 15th-century Italian fresco painter Francesco del Cossa, of whose actual biography little is known. But here's the twist: the novel exists in two editions, one with George's story first, the other with Del Cossa's. Each narrative contains references to the other, but they can be read separately, and in either order. Whether you are in the bookshop or ordering an ebook (in which case, both versions will be delivered to your device), you get to choose, or to abandon yourself to chance." See also Ali Smith on the story behind How to be Both: "[It] started with the structure of painting and the notion of time and the notion, too, of the time we take (or don't take) to use our eyes."

Trouble in Paradise and Absolute Recoil by Slavoj Žižek - review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "[Žižek] ... sees the world as divided between liberal capitalism and fundamentalism – in other words, between those who believe too little and those who believe too much. Instead of taking sides, however, he stresses the secret complicity between the two camps. Fundamentalism is the ugly creed of those who feel washed up and humiliated by a west that has too often ridden roughshod over their interests. One lesson of the Egyptian revolt, Žižek argues in Trouble in Paradise, is that if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical left, 'they will generate an unsurmountable fundamentalist wave'. Toppling tyrants, which all good liberals applaud, is simply a prelude to the hard work of radical social transformation, without which fundamentalism will return. In a world everywhere under the heel of capital, only radical politics can retrieve what is worth saving in the liberal legacy."

Horrific pictures of dead bodies won’t stop wars - Paul Mason column in The Guardian. "The closer I get to conflict, and the people who endure it, the more I think: nothing we know about war can deter us from it. In fact, in the 90 years since [Ernst] Friedrich’s book [War Against War] came out [full of horrific war images], we’ve developed coping strategies to assuage the feelings of horror such imagery arouses.... [Martin] Adler, a Swedish film-maker murdered in Mogadishu in 2006, imbued his camerawork with an unflinching gaze. It was the absurd human situations, the disarmed honesty of the combatants and pointlessness of conflict that he was there to record, not the mutilated faces. Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photographs, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and specifically that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or simply heroic. Adler, and others like him, understood that showing absurdity is more important than showing injury."

Superheroes and Star Wars get a 16th-century makeover - picture sequence in The Guardian. "Photographer Sacha Goldberger has reimagined comic-book heroes and Star Wars characters in the style of old masters, in his photo series ‘Super Flamands’."

Wizardry is artistry - interview with Ursula Le Guin by Hari Kunzru. "I have rarely gone to visit a writer bearing so many messages of love and admiration. People want to thank Le Guin. Many readers discover her young, through her Earthsea sequence, now acknowledged as one of the great works of 20th-century fantasy.... One of my friends, a Le Guin fan of great depth and seriousness, remembers being nine years old, in pain and distress as he recovered from open heart surgery. 'Reading the Earthsea trilogy saved my life,' he wrote to me. I don’t think he was being altogether rhetorical. Escape is derided as the cheapest of literary pleasures, 'escapism' the name for a particular kind of aesthetic cowardice, a culpable flight from the real. But there are situations when what you need is teleportation. You need to get out of the surgical ward. You need to stay in Earthsea for as long as your imagination can float its little open boat."

The Peripheral by William Gibson – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In this book, there are two futures to be deciphered.... The future containing Hefty Mart is just about shouting distance from our own. We are in a smallish town in the US, where everything is more or less like it is now, only more so. There are wounded veterans from foreign wars. The only real money in the economy comes from 'building' (a perfect Gibsonian tweak) drugs. 'Homes' (aka Homeland Security) is the main power in the land. Most of what you need you either buy at Hefty Mart or get 'fabbed' at a 3D-print shop (which is where our heroine, Flynne, works). And playing video games is, for lots of people, a proper job. The other world of the novel is a desolate London, further into the future after a hazily described apocalypse known as 'the Jackpot' has wiped out 80% of the population. The streets are all but deserted – though there are androids amusing tourists in bleak Dickensian cosplay zones – and power resides in the hands of unimaginably wealthy Russian oligarchs, or 'klepts', while the police don’t like to talk about terrorism because 'terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state'.... The two worlds are linked because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called 'continua enthusiasts', that allows people to reach into the past.... The plot whirrs off: after beta-testing what she thinks is a new video game, Flynne witnesses a murder. She wasn’t, as it turns out, playing a drone-piloting simulation game: she was piloting a real drone in this divergent future."

William Gibson webchat – on The Guardian website.
[On the technology he didn't predict.] "Cellphones. If I were a smart 12-year-old reading Neuromancer for the first time, I would decide that the mystery must hinge on where all the cellphones have gone. Why are there payphones in the background?"
[On immersive Virtual Reality.] "I've tried Oculus Rift, the latest developers' version, and I found it very impressive....it did what the 90s Sunday supplements advertised VR as doing. But I'm still in doubt as to whether very many people will want to do it. We already attain full immersion with flat screens, simply by being very interested in the content."
[On 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 thrift [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."

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner - review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In an extended opening image, as beautiful as it is useful, Marina Warner asks us to imagine the history of fairytale as a world map. The two beacons – and the term is used properly here, rather than as a hyperbolic adjective – are Charles Perrault in Paris and the Grimms in Saxony.... Perrault may have picked up the kernel of his stories from various Mother Gooses gabbling away in cottage kitchens, but the tales’ polished delivery, complete with references to contemporary events and places, was entirely down to him. Something similar happened but in reverse with the Grimms more than 100 years later. Setting out to record the true voice of the people, the scholar brothers found themselves sifting through stories that sounded suspiciously as though they had started life in a French salon or even a Persian souk. The young researchers’ first solution was to purge their tales of anything that might fix them in a particular place or moment – a named battle, city or king. The second was to create a narrative voice that sounded as if it had bubbled up from a collective unconscious as old as the hills of Westphalia. Shorn of anything like modern psychology or social logic, the tales as told by the Grimms now took on their characteristically creepy power...."

Evidence-based debunking - post on MindHacks blog. "We all resist changing our beliefs about the world, but what happens when some of those beliefs are based on misinformation? Is there a right way to correct someone when they believe something that’s wrong? Stephen Lewandowsky and John Cook set out to review the science on this topic, and even carried out a few experiments of their own. This effort led to their “Debunker’s Handbook“, which gives practical, evidence-based techniques for correcting misinformation about, say, climate change or evolution. The first thing their review turned up is the importance of “backfire effects” – when telling people that they are wrong only strengthens their belief.... What you must do, they argue, is to start with the plausible alternative (that obviously you believe is correct). If you must mention a myth, you should mention this second, and only after clearly warning people that you’re about to discuss something that isn’t true."

Simulations and games, feedback and scores

Talking about simulations with some academic colleagues recently, I showed them two examples publicly available on OpenLearn: "A Day in the Life of a Social Worker", in which you play a junior social worker in a busy department, and "Saving Setrus", in which you play the President of an imaginary African country. Both have high production values, with rich graphical interfaces to immerse you in the setting, but there are big differences in the feedback you receive on your actions - which as I've written elsewhere is the critical component of any simulation intended for learning and not simply for entertainment. Does giving a numerical score for your actions as President mean that, as one of my colleagues thought, "Saving Setrus" is really a game and not a simulation?

"A Day in the Life of a Social Worker" consists of three sections: an in-tray exercise, in which you have limited time to deal with incoming tasks; a case conference, in which you have to choose appropriate dialogue responses to the various participants; and a home visit, in which you have to choose appropriate actions and responses to achieve the visit's objectives, despite the uncooperative attitude of your interlocutor. The feedback to the in-tray exercise is clear and plausible: your simulated line manager calls you in for a chat and discusses the tasks you selected and the tasks you didn't, commenting in each case on the wisdom or otherwise of your choices, and throughout the rest of the day you may get messages from colleagues giving you indirect feedback; for example, you may get an angry text from a senior colleague if you fail to rearrange an appointment because you didn't check your diary and so didn't see the conflict. The feedback to the other two sections is less striking because the possible actions for the learner are more constrained - especially since some of the options are patently silly - but still it is delivered within the game setting, without breaking the immersion.

In "Saving Setrus", the military dictator of your neighbouring country Laurania is stepping up his brutal crackdown on the political opposition, which is supported by many of your nationals in the second city Setrus. Over four simulated days, you engage in conversations with the other country's ambassador, the President of another neighbouring country, your attorney general (for advice on the legal position), an NGO working in the region, and the leaders of your armed forces. You also remotely address the UN Security Council respond to a speach by the Lauranian President. In each case, you choice is limited to dialogue options, adjusting your position with respect to each of them and with respect to international law. You cannot avoid deploying your armed forces at the end of the four days, although you do have some choice over what their orders are. The feedback which you receive at the end of each day is basically a set of three scores, rating your choices on humanitarian, legal and political scales. At the end of the simulation, there is also a brief discussion on the issues involved, but you don't get much sense of how your actions affected the outcome or even your scores.

The in-tray exercise is plausibly an introduction to being a social worker, whereas "Saving Setrus" is not plausibly an introduction to being a president. I think my colleague is right: the presentation of feedback as scores, and the invisibility of how these scores are obtained, contribute to the sense that "Saving Setrus" is really a game. This does not mean that it had no educational value; at very least, it gives a player exposure to the international law concerning military intervention and an awareness of the issues involved. But it is not really a simulation and I now think I was wrong to describe it as such.

The Waggler, the Knocker, and the sponge on a stick: science and craft at the Wedgwood Museum

I was surprised recently to hear several people in my university say that they wanted learning design to be more professional and less of a craft. I've always been proud to count myself an expert craftsman in it, so this was a bit of a blow and I wondered what they actually meant. I think they meant that they want learning design to have a better evidence base and a better grounding in theories of learning - which is fair enough, but if they're hoping to achieve the scientific certainty of being able to say "this works better than that" I believe they're going to be disappointed, because such certainties aren't available in the educational world. However good your evidence, however well-grounded in theory your learning design is, I believe when you've actually trying to make something you still have to resort to craft.

A visit to the Wedgwood Museum put the relationship between science and craft into perspective for me. One of the things for which Josiah Wedgwood is famous is the experimental quantitative rigour with which he perfected the materials for mass-producing his fabulous decorative tableware. One of the museum's iconic exhibits is a tray of ceramic slips, each having been fired with a slightly different glaze, which he used in the research for what became known as Jasperware. So that is a kind of exemplar for a scientifically based production process: the glaze needs to be mixed like this, and not like that, for the best results; the research says so.

But if you go to the demonstration area, where staff will show you how pots and vases are actually made, you get a different picture. Yes, everything which they do depends on the precisely controlled composition of their materials; the maker of slipware vases needs a plaster mould which absorbs water out of the slip at a predictable speed, they know and allow for the precise percentage shrinkage on firing (it's 12% by the way), and they can count on their glazes and pigments working properly even though their original toxic ingredients such as lead and arsenic have been replaced with less harmful substances tested and selected to still behave just as Josiah Wedgwood intended. And yet, when it comes to hands-on working, what counts is craft skill, with craft or folk terminology.

Jasperware vases usually have a decorative design in a contrasting colour. To get the decorative application out of its mould, they use a tool called a Waggler. It's rather like a handle of a spoon, precisely shaped for its job of easing out a delicate and fine-detailed sliver of clay, And they really do call it a Waggler; the demonstrator told me that there was a scientific name for it, but he couldn't remember what it was. It gets better: to firm up the clay in the moulds, they use a wooden mallet with its head covered with enough cloth to give it just the right amount of bounce, which they call a Knocker. And when they throw a pot or a vase on a wheel, to reach in and remove the excess water from the bottom after they've finished, they use a piece of bathroom sponge taped to the end of a bit of stick, which they call "the sponge on a stick".

The custom-made tools, or tools put together from things lying around, and the folksy names for them, are characteristic of craft and its culture. You couldn't ask for a clearer demonstration that no matter how scientific you get, you still need a Waggler, a Knocker, and a sponge on a stick.

The Waggler

The Knocker

The sponge on a stick

Cuttings: October 2014

The Marshmallow Test review – if you can resist, you will go far - review of Walter Mischel The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-Control and How to Master It, by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “Walter Mischel's study into impulse control began in the 1960s…. He tested pre-school kids on their self-control. It was simple: they could have one marshmallow immediately, or wait, alone in a room, for a given number of minutes, ring a bell and the researcher would give them two. The results were astonishing to the team: good impulse control turned out to be a predictor of success in disparate areas, from academic results to health in later life…. [Mischel's concern in this book] is with the lived experience of impulse control, the moment of failure, the moment of success, what can be learned and what unlearned…. Children who can be persuaded to think of marshmallows as puffs of cloud are more likely to overcome their temptation than children encouraged to think of the squidge and the sweetness…. Children who were able to imagine the marshmallow with a frame around it, as an image rather than the thing itself, found it easier to defer gratification, too. Children who distracted themselves performed better. Hot and cool perception interlace with abstraction and diversion to create the person who, down the line, when you've seen their Sats scores and healthy internal organs, you'd call more ‘rounded’.”

We need a bold scandalous feminism – article by Jacqueline Rose in The Guardian. “It is time to return to what feminism has to tell us. It is time to make the case for what women have to say about the perils of our modern world. But the case cannot be made along the lines that have become most familiar. We cannot make it only by asserting women's right to equality or by arguing that women are qualified to enter the courts of judgment and the corridors of power. Those claims are important but they tend to be made – loudly, as they must be – to the detriment of another type of understanding, less obvious but no less vital, that makes its way into the darker spaces of the world, ripping the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves. This we might call the knowledge of women. In its best forms, it is what allows women to struggle for freedom without being co-opted by false pretension or by the brute exertion of power for its own sake.”

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris by Colin Jones – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this compelling Cheshire cat of a book, Colin Jones charts the moment in the mid-18th century when Paris learned to smile. Until that point, the court, tucked away at Versailles, had insisted that everyone kept a straight face. This was partly because France's most privileged mouths had been spoiled by too much sugar, and no one wanted their black stumps flashed to infinity in the Hall of Mirrors. But it was also because smiling in general risked making you look either plebeian or insane. To understand why you have to go to the roots. Sourire, a smile, comes from sous-rire, a little laugh, and laughing was something that definitely belonged to the lower orders. Just like a yawn or a fart, a side-splitting guffaw breached the boundary between the body and the rest of the world. This inside-outsideness was fine if you were of a Rabelaisian turn of mind, but disturbing if you weren't. For in the bellylaugh's uninhibited rumble, it was possible to hear the stirrings of serious social and political dissent. No wonder the toffs at Versailles kept their mouths clamped shut, refusing to mobilise their features beyond the occasional sneer.”

The Truth about Evil – article by John Gray in The Guardian. “Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly – to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved. Paradoxically, this belief in the evanescence of evil is what underlies the hysterical invocation of evil that has lately become so prominent. There are many bad and lamentable forces in the world today, but it is those that undermine the belief in human improvement that are demonised as “evil”…. It’s in the Middle East… that the prevailing liberal worldview has proved most consistently misguided. At bottom, it may be western leaders’ inability to think outside this melioristic creed that accounts for their failure to learn from experience….”

How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, by Margaret Meek. “Understanding authorship, audience, illustration and iconic interpretation are part of the ontogenesis of ‘literary competences’. To learn to read a book, as distinct from simply recognizing the words on the page, a young reader has to become both the teller (picking up the author’s view and voice) and the told (the recipient of the story, the interpreter). This symbolic interaction is learned early. It is rarely, if ever, taught, except in so far as an adult stands in for the author by giving the text a ‘voice’ when reading to the child. Wendy and Stephen [the dedicatees of Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins, the book under discussion] are replaced by other nameless children, in this case thousands of them, whose interpretations of the words and pictures may be as numerous, but are scarcely ever inquired into or understood for what they are.” (p 10) [See also discussion here.]

Humans, 150,000 years ago, wouldn’t figure on a list of the five most interesting species on Earth – interview with Jared Diamond by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. “Diamond has enjoyed huge success with several “big books” – most famously, 1997’s Guns, Germs and Steel – which ask the most sweeping questions it is possible to ask about human history. For instance: why did one species of primate, unremarkable until 70,000 years ago, come to develop language, art, music, nation states and space travel? Why do some civilisations prosper, while others collapse? Why did westerners conquer the Americas, Africa and Australia, instead of the other way round? Diamond, who describes himself as a biogeographer, answers them in translucent prose that has the effect of making the world seem to click into place, each fact assuming its place in an elegant arc of pan-historical reasoning. Our interview itself provides an example: one white man arriving to interview another, in English, on the imposing main campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a landscape bearing little trace of the Native Americans who once thrived here. Why? Because 8,000 years ago – to borrow from Guns, Germs and Steel – the geography of Europe and the Middle East made it easier to farm crops and animals there than elsewhere.”

Jacques Tati’s Playtime: Life-Affirming Comedy – article by Jonathan Romney in The Guardian. “In its quiet way, Playtime expresses a satiric outrage at the antiseptic nature of modern life, but its take on urban alienation is nothing if not joyous. Tati celebrates human character (and French character in particular) as indomitably resistant to imposed order, especially if that order smacks of transatlantic-style bureaucracy…. The sprawling cast fills the screen, especially in the increasingly manic second hour, which features the chaotic opening night of the pretentious Royal Garden restaurant. Hulot is present there, but often disappears into the throng, Where’s Wally?-style. Tati had already wearied of the character, and constantly subverts his audience’s desire to see him at centre stage. Playtime teems with confounding Hulot lookalikes, equipped with his trademark hat, pipe and raincoat. Tati also hides himself in the action, camouflaged; in one shot, he plays a policeman directing traffic in jerky semaphore, but stays in the background, just a living part of the overall scenery. The film’s mesmerising strangeness rises partly from a tension between the delicacy, even discretion, of the gags and the vastness of the conception. This is minimalist humour mounted on a maximalist scale. The timing disconcerts: jokes are barely signalled, and are often over before we’ve quite registered them. The most audacious sight gag, the spontaneous shattering of a glass door, is done with scant ceremony, and the joke then becomes the doorman’s attempts to carry on as if the door were intact. Other routines don’t gel as gags in the usual sense; two adjacent flats are shot to look like a single space, so that neighbours appear to inhabit the same room. But Tati works this set-up less for laughs than for an unsettling detached oddness.”

Seen and heard: October 2014

Margaret Meek, How Texts Teach What Readers Learn - a slim pamphlet (just 32 pages) but full of insight into the assumptions about reading which we take for granted (such as, that a book may be written for certain people but read by others, that the "voice" may or may not be that of the author let alone the person reading it aloud, that the book may refer to things which bear a closer or more distant relationship to the reader's lived experience) but which children learning to read have to figure out, because these things are usually not taught explicitly. (For an example of the discussion the pamphlet inspires see here.) Overall, it's a plea that school reading should not be limited to functional reading, but what it prompted in me was the realisation that reading of academic or historical texts is "difficult" in a similar way, and that this is something which students have to learn. At my university, the team devoted to English for academic purposes are working on interesting ways to teach academic reading as an explicit skill, in the recognition that this is something which many people, perhaps most, do not do naturally or spontaneously. I'm watching with interest....

The Educators - excellent series on BBC Radio 4, each episode being an interview with someone whose ideas are currently shaking up educational thinking: provocative and inspirational. So far I've heard the interviews with Ken Robinson (on making creativity as important as literacy in school education), John Harrie (whose verdict after a massive review of educational research literature is that what makes a difference in teaching isn't any particular method or approach but the extent of the teacher's experience), Daisy Christodoulou (who argues discovery learning doesn't help learners who lack the basic knowledge or social capital to make use of it), Tony Little (on priorities in school education) and Paul Howard-Jones (on how games in the classroom seem to be more effective, or more motivational, when there's an element of chance in them - flying in the face of rationalist educational theory). Still to come on my playlist are the interviews with Sugata Mitra, Jo Boaler and Salman Khan (of the Khan Academy).

The Sixteen, 'Voice of the Turtledove' tour - another great concert by the vocal wonder-group, returning to their musical heartland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Bought the album straight away.

Wedgwood Museum - now happily saved for the nation, though when we planned our visit we thought it might be a literal case of "last chance to see". So much gorgeousness, with room after room of the finest craft: stunning from both the technical and design point of view; too much to take in all at once, so we're going to come back after next April, when their new galleries and facilities are open.

The West Wing - watching again from the start on box set. The political setting has dated, of course, but it was only ever partly about that. I now see it as being mainly about the struggle to do the right thing in large, complex public organisations, and abo;ut how and why things do and don't happen in them. My wife and I both felt like seeing it again anyway, but I'm watching it now partly in preparation for a management development programme. It feels more relevant than most textbooks.

What We Did on Ou Holiday - beautiful, funny, startling and moving new film, with David Tennant and Rosamund Pike as the divorcing parents of three precociously-tongued children (after the manner of Outnumbered, being produced by the same team), and a splendid performance by Billy Connolly as the children's grandfather. Cunningly constructed so that you start off sympathising with the parents in dealing with the children's weirdness, but then - in the critical middle section where they go to the beach with their grandfather, who is old and dying and doesn't care about pretending any more - you come to assume the children's point of view, and you realise that it's the growns-ups who are behaving strangely.

St Albans Cathedral - the longest nave in Europe, apparently, but more impressive to me were the organ-tuning going on during our visit (long notes, sustained until adjustment is complete, proceeding slowly upwards across a period of hours) and the tomb of St Alban. He was the first English martyr, killed for refusing to renounce the Christianity to which he had just converted - and we couldn't help but think of the hundreds being similarly martyred in our own time. An Arab family (parents and three children) came to kneel at the tomb while we were there; relatives or at least compatriots of such? Medieval times have never seemed so close.

Verulamium Museum - very child-friendly, and definitely somewhere to take our granddaughter when she does the Romans at school. Museums in general, I've been glad to discover, are much better than in my own childhood on making visible the inference process by which you get from the grotty old fragments in front of you to the reconstructed splendour of the past life, which is actually what is interesting.

Private Lives of Print: The Use and Abuse of Books 1450-1550 - exhibition at Cambridge University Library. Definitely worth the visit; it's open to the public, free admission, Monday to Saturday till 11 April 2015. There were two big insights for me. First, while I knew that manuscript production continued for a long time (centuries, they said) after the invention of printing (there was a huge industry there which wasn't about to go away) I didn't realise what an influence it had on early book production. Customers wanted their printed books to look just as splendid as their manuscripts, which meant parchment pages and manual illuminations, drawn and coloured in spaces deliberately left blank during printing. (The printer just had to hope the illuminator knew what letter they were supposed to be illuminating; the exhibition includes one example where they got it wrong.) The second insight was that production design norms and conventions had to be established for printed pages, just as in our own time we've had to establish norms and conventions for web page production and design; in the case of printing, these were copied partly from manuscripts and partly from earlier printed books, which in many cases were the source from which the text was copied, the page breaks of the source printing being marked subtly in the text of the copied version. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a typo in a Guttenberg Bible.