Filmish – nice graphic / comic introduction to film studies (seven chapters on The Eye, The Body, Sets and Architecture, Time, Voice and Language, Power and Ideology, Technology and Technophobia), with illustrations from many classic films I knew and many I didn’t. Worthwhile enterprise, though not on the same level as Scott McLeod’s Understanding Comics.
Memoryhouse – wonderful album from contemporary classical composer Max Richter, which we first heard as the music to the BalletBoyz 'Serpent'. Rather like the music of Philip Glass, for which we mistook it initially, but there’s something different and more tuneful about this. It’s also more sad, with track titles and spoken elements suggestive of poetry and reminiscences of European catastrophes. We put it on, intending just to check it out, and sat listening in silence for the whole album. Deservedly famous and successful.
A Bridge Over You – the NHS Choir’s mashup of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and ‘Fix You’, which a widely-supported campaign took to Christmas Number One - so hat tip to Justin Bieber for telling his fans to support this rather than his own competing single. Apparently the BBC insisted on producing a new video as part of their promotion. I’m biased of course, but I prefer the original 2013 video produced by my sister’s company: it positions the viewer as a patient, feeling small and vulnerable, receiving the singers’ compassion, which is why some people were moved to tears; the new video makes the viewer an observer, with the staff singing to each other around a piano, and for some reason buries the song’s words beneath the text of the marriage service (“to have and to hold…”). Gareth Malone, when he set up the workplace choirs, took pains to find a song which the people could really sing, which truly expressed them and their work, and that’s what ‘A Bridge Over You’ did and what the original video did too: it was actually in alignment with the song. The new video reduces the song to a backing track. It may have been effective as a campaign video, but I can’t imagine it moving anyone to tears.
Christmas messages from the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope – which all in their own way addressed terrible recent events and people’s sense of the world descending into chaos. Simplest and best was the Queen, quoting the Gospel of John: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."
Mercy as the Resolution of Paradox: A View from the Enneagram – webcast by Richard Rohr (Franciscan spiritual teacher) and Russ Hudson (Enneagram guru) from the Centre for Action and Contemplation. Intense but easy to follow, despite its two-hour length, which is a reminder of how effective video lectures can be with the right presenters.
Lara Croft Go – excellent turn-based puzzle game, which has made many reviewers’ Best Games of 2015 lists (Guardian, AppUnWrapper, Gamezebo, Apple). You have to figure out how to move Lara past dangerous animals (snakes, spiders, lizards) and lethal hazards (collapsing floors, rotating blades, rolling boulders, arrow traps). Tremendous “just another screen” addictive quality; effectively Monument Valley with added danger.
Sunday, 17 January 2016
Cuttings: December 2015
The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton: a big bang moment - review by Lorraine Daston in The Guardian. "Wootton’s aim is to offer a new interpretation of what he contends still deserves to be called the scientific revolution. This makes for a big book, with some historiographical chapters (and appendices) that are unlikely to be of interest to readers who are not historians of science over the age of 50.... Compressed into a few sentences, the major theses of this book sound unsurprising. The scientific revolution was not just the motor of modern history, it was the model of modernity. Rational, calculating, advancing at breakneck speed, respecting no authority: science after Newton seemed to embody the power and ever expanding possibilities of a society fixated on the future rather than the past. This is the narrative upon which university professorships and whole departments of the history of science were established after the second world war, and the narrative that a whole generation of historians of science were weaned on. Yet Wootton believes that historians of what he calls the 'post-Kuhn generation' – that is, roughly those who came of age in the 1980s and 90s – have broken with the faith and denied the scientific revolution’s significance as “the big bang” moment of modernity."
Iris Murdoch is ‘promiscuous’ while Ted Hughes is ‘nomadic’. Why the double standards?- article by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe in The Guardian. "We have been astonished by the number of reviewers who have been so fiercely judgmental of Murdoch’s personal life;... it is particularly galling to see many reviewers concentrating, sometimes rather salaciously, on Murdoch’s sex life and savagely criticising her for 'promiscuit'. John Carey uses the word twice in his article (Sunday Times) and Jonathan Gibbs is uneasy about 'the promiscuity of Murdoch’s intellectual affairs' (Independent). Roger Lewis writes rather shockingly that 'had she been from the working class, instead of a fellow of an Oxford college with heaps of honorary degrees, she’d have been a candidate for compulsory sterilisation' (Times). We have yet to read similar personal attacks on the behaviour of Michael Oakeshott – the political theorist and one of Murdoch’s correspondents – who was nicknamed 'dipstick' during his army years because of his sexual philandering. ... So men are glorious phallic trail-blazers when they tear through many women’s lives whereas women who have had many lovers are 'ruthless' and 'self-indulgent'. How have such double standards survived in an intelligent reading population of the 21st century?"
Are scientists easy prey for jihadism?- article by Paul Vallely in The Guardian. "A study of 18 British Muslims implicated in terrorist attacks found that eight had studied engineering or IT, and four more science, pharmacy and maths; only one had studied humanities. ... This is no coincidence, concludes Martin Rose, the British Council’s senior consultant on the Middle East and north Africa. Immunising the Mind – his report – gathers a wide spectrum of opinion in support of the contention that science education fails to inculcate critical thinking in the way that the debates within arts teaching do. Rose coins the notion of 'an engineering mindset', which makes science students easier prey for terrorist recruiters."
‘How do we keep up the fight for democratic values? With solidarity and storytelling’- article by Shami Chakrabarti, extracted from her Reading Agency lecture 'On Liberty, Reading and Dissent', in The Guardian. "Months before the recent Paris atrocity, senior British politicians rushed to the French capital to say 'Je suis Charlie' in passionate defence of the free expression of murdered journalists, only to return to London with promises of crackdowns on debate in mosques and universities as part of their 'domestic extremism' agenda. The relevant consultation paper talks of refusing to engage with and denying platforms to extremist people who fail to share our 'British values', thus denying the universal values that we share with all democrats and the vital importance of winning the battle of hearts and minds with open engagement and fierce debate.... To be clear, just as libraries should be free and open, and books must be saved from the fire every time, debates, however shocking, difficult and painful, must be had. There is no such thing as no platform in the internet age, merely closed and narrow platforms where hate goes unedited and unchallenged by humanity and reason."
How Jane Austen’s Emma changed the face of fiction - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Emma, published 200 years ago this month, was revolutionary not because of its subject matter: Austen’s jesting description to Anna of the perfect subject for a novel – 'Three or four families in a country village' – fits it well. It was certainly not revolutionary because of any intellectual or political content. But it was revolutionary in its form and technique. Its heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to share her delusions. The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind. Though little noticed by most of the pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Flaubert or Joyce or Woolf.... Austen ... was perfecting a technique that she had begun developing in her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility. It was only in the early 20th century that critics began agreeing on a name for it: free indirect style.... It describes the way in which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. Before Austen, novelists chose between first-person narrative (letting us into the mind of a character, but limiting us to his or her understanding) and third-person narrative (allowing us a God-like view of all the characters, but making them pieces in an authorial game). Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external."
The science of learning: five classic studies - article by Tom Stafford in The Guardian. "A few classic studies help to define the way we think about the science of learning.... I’m a psychologist, so you won’t be surprised that my choice of classic studies concern the mental processes rather than the social processes involved in learning.... 1. Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts'. Frederick Bartlett was a Cambridge psychologist who used a native American folk story called War of the Ghosts to show something fundamental about our memories. The story, and the research study he used it in, are related in his 1932 book Remembering.... 2. Skinner's rats and pigeons. BF Skinner is famous as the father of behaviourism, the school of psychology known for training behaviours in pigeons and rats.... His great achievement was to show how schedules of reinforcement, such as the delivery of food pellets to hungry rats, could condition behaviour.... 3. Dissociable memory systems.... Pioneering work led by Larry Squire showed that amnesic patients who had trouble remembering episodes of their lives had no trouble performing a new skill they had learned. Brain imaging has confirmed the basic division of labour between so-called declarative memory, aka explicit memory (facts and events), and procedural memory, aka implicit memory (habits and skills).... 4. Inside the mind of the chess masters.... Adriaan de Groot was a Dutch chess master as well as a psychologist.... One of his findings was that chess masters have an amazing memory for patterns on the chess board – able to recall the positions of all the pieces after only a brief glance. Follow-up work showed that they only have this ability if the patterns conform to possible positions in a legal game of chess.... The result confirms the idea that knowledge is a web of associations – when you have a large existing store of knowledge it is easy to spot patterns and so remember the positions of all the pieces. 5. Ericsson's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson is famous for claiming that all world-class performers have in common is that they have all invested at least 10,000 in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means effortful, structured practice focusing on reducing your failings and errors, constantly pushing yourself to improve."
What Orwell can teach us about the language of terror and war - extract from Rowan Williams' 2015 Orwell lecture in The Guardian. "Creating a language that cannot be checked by or against any recognisable reality is the ultimate mark of power. What [Thomas] Merton characterises as “double-talk, tautology, ambiguous cliche, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity and pseudoscientific jargon” is not just an aesthetic problem: it renders dialogue impossible; and rendering dialogue impossible is the desired goal for those who want to exercise absolute power.... Both Merton and [George] Orwell concentrate on a particular kind of bureaucratic redescription of reality, language that is designed to be no one’s in particular, the language of countless contemporary manifestos, mission statements and regulatory policies, the language that dominates so much of our public life, from health service to higher education.... Bad writing is politically poisonous; good writing is politically liberating – and this is true even when that good writing comes from sources that are ideologically hostile to good politics (however defined). The crucial question is whether the writing is directed to making the reader see, feel and know less or more. And the paradox is that, even faced with systems that stifle good writing and honest imagining, the good writer doesn’t respond in kind but goes on trying to fathom what the terrorist and the bigot are saying, to make sense of people who don’t want to make sense of him or her. Failing to do that condemns us to bad writing and bad politics, to the language of total conflict and radical dehumanisation."
The Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas Sermon by Justin Welby. "What the shepherds glimpsed that silent night outside Bethlehem was an apocalypse, which means an uncovering of God’s final purpose for all the universe.... Today, across the Middle East, close to the area in which the angels announced God’s apocalypse, ISIS and others claim that this is the time of an apocalypse, an unveiling created of their own terrible ideas, one which is igniting a trail of fear, violence, hatred and determined oppression. Confident that these are the last days, using force and indescribable cruelty, they seem to welcome all opposition, certain that the warfare unleashed confirms that these are indeed the end times.... The shepherds see the truth, eternal, unwavering, divine truth, defined not by them, but by God: it was truth for them then, it is truth with us today. Goodness knows what they were expecting, but what they find is a new-born child – tiny, helpless and vulnerable. Yet they bow down in worship. The shepherds get this apocalypse.
Secret Teacher: WALT, WILF, EBI – we're awash with useless acronyms - article by 'The Secret Teacher' in The Guardian, Teacher Network. "When WALT and WILF made their grand entrance, telling the children what “We Are Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For”, it was as though nobody in teaching had ever thought to mention what they were going to do in a lesson and why students needed to do it.... Good teachers, trained properly, do not need WALT or WILF (sorry, guys) for their students to do well. And children will still learn less in badly taught lessons whether WALT and WILF are present or not. It was the same when the new girls in town – WWW (What Went Well) and EBI (Even Better If) – were expected to transform marking standards. The result was that those who already marked diligently now took three times longer to get through a set of books, putting further strain on their work-life balance and causing increasing discontent. Those who weren’t marking properly before, still didn’t bother. This frustration can quickly turn into negativity and before you know it, you have committed teachers feeling inhibited by the rigidity of the system, while their less conscientious colleagues remain unfazed."
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe – review by Naomi Alderman in The Guardian. "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is an illustrated 'how things work' book. Munroe’s beautiful, ligne claire-style illustrations are perfect for this task: you can pick out the tiny individual chairs in a recreation room on an oil rig, or the parcels in the hold of a tall ship. He has chosen a diverse range of things to explain: from helicopters to a human cell, from the table of elements to the machines in a hospital room. And there’s that gimmick from 'Up-Goer Five': the book is written using only the top thousand (or 'ten hundred') words most commonly used in the English language. At some points, this produces passages of such startling clarity that one forgets there was ever anything difficult to understand about these phenomena. Explaining why there are U-shaped tanks of water in the centre of skyscrapers, the caption reads: 'This room is very carefully shaped so that when the building leans one way, the water runs the other way and hits the wall, pushing the building back up.' No jargon needed there; it’s precise, to the point and absolutely fascinating."
Patrick Ness: ‘You’re 10, a refugee in a foreign country. What the hell do you do?’- interview by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. " 'I love the chosen-one narrative; long may it reign,' Ness says. 'But it seems to me there are two periods of challenge in a teenager’s life. The first is when you become a teenager and realise: "I’m separate from my family." That experience is vital but it’s also kind of violent, and the chosen-one narrative offers an amazing explanation: it says, everyone feels this way, there’s power in this decision you’ve made. The second is the end of school. You’ve spent time figuring out what you believe and where your boundaries are, and you’re just getting back on your feet when everything ends. And the chosen one is less good at dealing with that. I wondered if the two were entwined: do you feel less chosen the older you get? Then there are all those millions of kids – and I was certainly one of them – who would never have got the Hogwarts letter. It’s not even that I’d have been in a different house from Harry – I’d never have gotten the letter in the first place.'”
Why Star Wars is a political Force to be reckoned with - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "It was noted in 1977 that A New Hope, both in its tone and in its reception, represented a kind of wish-fulfilment after Vietnam, the rebuilding of shared moral absolutes after a visceral pasting. Two decades on, a sad adaptation to a new reality had taken place, where the living incarnation of all that is noble – the Jedi – are critically limited by the rather limp and indecisive democracy that governs them. This is inevitable, if the highest beings are aristocrats but the highest stated value is democracy. The ideas that all citizens share the dignity of being born equal, and the best among them are more equal than the others, are simply incompatible. This explains why the goodies are suddenly so complicated while the baddies’ motivation is intact and as strong as ever."
Iris Murdoch is ‘promiscuous’ while Ted Hughes is ‘nomadic’. Why the double standards?- article by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe in The Guardian. "We have been astonished by the number of reviewers who have been so fiercely judgmental of Murdoch’s personal life;... it is particularly galling to see many reviewers concentrating, sometimes rather salaciously, on Murdoch’s sex life and savagely criticising her for 'promiscuit'. John Carey uses the word twice in his article (Sunday Times) and Jonathan Gibbs is uneasy about 'the promiscuity of Murdoch’s intellectual affairs' (Independent). Roger Lewis writes rather shockingly that 'had she been from the working class, instead of a fellow of an Oxford college with heaps of honorary degrees, she’d have been a candidate for compulsory sterilisation' (Times). We have yet to read similar personal attacks on the behaviour of Michael Oakeshott – the political theorist and one of Murdoch’s correspondents – who was nicknamed 'dipstick' during his army years because of his sexual philandering. ... So men are glorious phallic trail-blazers when they tear through many women’s lives whereas women who have had many lovers are 'ruthless' and 'self-indulgent'. How have such double standards survived in an intelligent reading population of the 21st century?"
Are scientists easy prey for jihadism?- article by Paul Vallely in The Guardian. "A study of 18 British Muslims implicated in terrorist attacks found that eight had studied engineering or IT, and four more science, pharmacy and maths; only one had studied humanities. ... This is no coincidence, concludes Martin Rose, the British Council’s senior consultant on the Middle East and north Africa. Immunising the Mind – his report – gathers a wide spectrum of opinion in support of the contention that science education fails to inculcate critical thinking in the way that the debates within arts teaching do. Rose coins the notion of 'an engineering mindset', which makes science students easier prey for terrorist recruiters."
‘How do we keep up the fight for democratic values? With solidarity and storytelling’- article by Shami Chakrabarti, extracted from her Reading Agency lecture 'On Liberty, Reading and Dissent', in The Guardian. "Months before the recent Paris atrocity, senior British politicians rushed to the French capital to say 'Je suis Charlie' in passionate defence of the free expression of murdered journalists, only to return to London with promises of crackdowns on debate in mosques and universities as part of their 'domestic extremism' agenda. The relevant consultation paper talks of refusing to engage with and denying platforms to extremist people who fail to share our 'British values', thus denying the universal values that we share with all democrats and the vital importance of winning the battle of hearts and minds with open engagement and fierce debate.... To be clear, just as libraries should be free and open, and books must be saved from the fire every time, debates, however shocking, difficult and painful, must be had. There is no such thing as no platform in the internet age, merely closed and narrow platforms where hate goes unedited and unchallenged by humanity and reason."
How Jane Austen’s Emma changed the face of fiction - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Emma, published 200 years ago this month, was revolutionary not because of its subject matter: Austen’s jesting description to Anna of the perfect subject for a novel – 'Three or four families in a country village' – fits it well. It was certainly not revolutionary because of any intellectual or political content. But it was revolutionary in its form and technique. Its heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to share her delusions. The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind. Though little noticed by most of the pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Flaubert or Joyce or Woolf.... Austen ... was perfecting a technique that she had begun developing in her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility. It was only in the early 20th century that critics began agreeing on a name for it: free indirect style.... It describes the way in which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. Before Austen, novelists chose between first-person narrative (letting us into the mind of a character, but limiting us to his or her understanding) and third-person narrative (allowing us a God-like view of all the characters, but making them pieces in an authorial game). Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external."
The science of learning: five classic studies - article by Tom Stafford in The Guardian. "A few classic studies help to define the way we think about the science of learning.... I’m a psychologist, so you won’t be surprised that my choice of classic studies concern the mental processes rather than the social processes involved in learning.... 1. Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts'. Frederick Bartlett was a Cambridge psychologist who used a native American folk story called War of the Ghosts to show something fundamental about our memories. The story, and the research study he used it in, are related in his 1932 book Remembering.... 2. Skinner's rats and pigeons. BF Skinner is famous as the father of behaviourism, the school of psychology known for training behaviours in pigeons and rats.... His great achievement was to show how schedules of reinforcement, such as the delivery of food pellets to hungry rats, could condition behaviour.... 3. Dissociable memory systems.... Pioneering work led by Larry Squire showed that amnesic patients who had trouble remembering episodes of their lives had no trouble performing a new skill they had learned. Brain imaging has confirmed the basic division of labour between so-called declarative memory, aka explicit memory (facts and events), and procedural memory, aka implicit memory (habits and skills).... 4. Inside the mind of the chess masters.... Adriaan de Groot was a Dutch chess master as well as a psychologist.... One of his findings was that chess masters have an amazing memory for patterns on the chess board – able to recall the positions of all the pieces after only a brief glance. Follow-up work showed that they only have this ability if the patterns conform to possible positions in a legal game of chess.... The result confirms the idea that knowledge is a web of associations – when you have a large existing store of knowledge it is easy to spot patterns and so remember the positions of all the pieces. 5. Ericsson's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Anders Ericsson is famous for claiming that all world-class performers have in common is that they have all invested at least 10,000 in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means effortful, structured practice focusing on reducing your failings and errors, constantly pushing yourself to improve."
What Orwell can teach us about the language of terror and war - extract from Rowan Williams' 2015 Orwell lecture in The Guardian. "Creating a language that cannot be checked by or against any recognisable reality is the ultimate mark of power. What [Thomas] Merton characterises as “double-talk, tautology, ambiguous cliche, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity and pseudoscientific jargon” is not just an aesthetic problem: it renders dialogue impossible; and rendering dialogue impossible is the desired goal for those who want to exercise absolute power.... Both Merton and [George] Orwell concentrate on a particular kind of bureaucratic redescription of reality, language that is designed to be no one’s in particular, the language of countless contemporary manifestos, mission statements and regulatory policies, the language that dominates so much of our public life, from health service to higher education.... Bad writing is politically poisonous; good writing is politically liberating – and this is true even when that good writing comes from sources that are ideologically hostile to good politics (however defined). The crucial question is whether the writing is directed to making the reader see, feel and know less or more. And the paradox is that, even faced with systems that stifle good writing and honest imagining, the good writer doesn’t respond in kind but goes on trying to fathom what the terrorist and the bigot are saying, to make sense of people who don’t want to make sense of him or her. Failing to do that condemns us to bad writing and bad politics, to the language of total conflict and radical dehumanisation."
The Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas Sermon by Justin Welby. "What the shepherds glimpsed that silent night outside Bethlehem was an apocalypse, which means an uncovering of God’s final purpose for all the universe.... Today, across the Middle East, close to the area in which the angels announced God’s apocalypse, ISIS and others claim that this is the time of an apocalypse, an unveiling created of their own terrible ideas, one which is igniting a trail of fear, violence, hatred and determined oppression. Confident that these are the last days, using force and indescribable cruelty, they seem to welcome all opposition, certain that the warfare unleashed confirms that these are indeed the end times.... The shepherds see the truth, eternal, unwavering, divine truth, defined not by them, but by God: it was truth for them then, it is truth with us today. Goodness knows what they were expecting, but what they find is a new-born child – tiny, helpless and vulnerable. Yet they bow down in worship. The shepherds get this apocalypse.
Secret Teacher: WALT, WILF, EBI – we're awash with useless acronyms - article by 'The Secret Teacher' in The Guardian, Teacher Network. "When WALT and WILF made their grand entrance, telling the children what “We Are Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For”, it was as though nobody in teaching had ever thought to mention what they were going to do in a lesson and why students needed to do it.... Good teachers, trained properly, do not need WALT or WILF (sorry, guys) for their students to do well. And children will still learn less in badly taught lessons whether WALT and WILF are present or not. It was the same when the new girls in town – WWW (What Went Well) and EBI (Even Better If) – were expected to transform marking standards. The result was that those who already marked diligently now took three times longer to get through a set of books, putting further strain on their work-life balance and causing increasing discontent. Those who weren’t marking properly before, still didn’t bother. This frustration can quickly turn into negativity and before you know it, you have committed teachers feeling inhibited by the rigidity of the system, while their less conscientious colleagues remain unfazed."
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe – review by Naomi Alderman in The Guardian. "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is an illustrated 'how things work' book. Munroe’s beautiful, ligne claire-style illustrations are perfect for this task: you can pick out the tiny individual chairs in a recreation room on an oil rig, or the parcels in the hold of a tall ship. He has chosen a diverse range of things to explain: from helicopters to a human cell, from the table of elements to the machines in a hospital room. And there’s that gimmick from 'Up-Goer Five': the book is written using only the top thousand (or 'ten hundred') words most commonly used in the English language. At some points, this produces passages of such startling clarity that one forgets there was ever anything difficult to understand about these phenomena. Explaining why there are U-shaped tanks of water in the centre of skyscrapers, the caption reads: 'This room is very carefully shaped so that when the building leans one way, the water runs the other way and hits the wall, pushing the building back up.' No jargon needed there; it’s precise, to the point and absolutely fascinating."
Patrick Ness: ‘You’re 10, a refugee in a foreign country. What the hell do you do?’- interview by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. " 'I love the chosen-one narrative; long may it reign,' Ness says. 'But it seems to me there are two periods of challenge in a teenager’s life. The first is when you become a teenager and realise: "I’m separate from my family." That experience is vital but it’s also kind of violent, and the chosen-one narrative offers an amazing explanation: it says, everyone feels this way, there’s power in this decision you’ve made. The second is the end of school. You’ve spent time figuring out what you believe and where your boundaries are, and you’re just getting back on your feet when everything ends. And the chosen one is less good at dealing with that. I wondered if the two were entwined: do you feel less chosen the older you get? Then there are all those millions of kids – and I was certainly one of them – who would never have got the Hogwarts letter. It’s not even that I’d have been in a different house from Harry – I’d never have gotten the letter in the first place.'”
Why Star Wars is a political Force to be reckoned with - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "It was noted in 1977 that A New Hope, both in its tone and in its reception, represented a kind of wish-fulfilment after Vietnam, the rebuilding of shared moral absolutes after a visceral pasting. Two decades on, a sad adaptation to a new reality had taken place, where the living incarnation of all that is noble – the Jedi – are critically limited by the rather limp and indecisive democracy that governs them. This is inevitable, if the highest beings are aristocrats but the highest stated value is democracy. The ideas that all citizens share the dignity of being born equal, and the best among them are more equal than the others, are simply incompatible. This explains why the goodies are suddenly so complicated while the baddies’ motivation is intact and as strong as ever."
Saturday, 5 December 2015
Cuttings November 2015
To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw – review by Susan Pedersen in The Guardian. "For today, when they look at Europe between the wars, many of my students don’t only ask: 'Why Nazis?' They also ask: 'Why empire?' They are puzzled as much by the paradox of Europe’s democracies struggling to preserve imperial rule as they are by the paradox of cultivated Europe sinking (as Kershaw puts it) 'into the pit of barbarism'. Why were Britain and France determined to keep hold of the Middle East after 1919? How central was racism to what historians sometimes call 'the imperial project'? How can one explain the coexistence of imperial and liberal-democratic values?"
Twitter’s heart hits the wrong beat - article by Emily Bell in The Guardian. "The replacement by Twitter of its star icon with a heart last week sent its most ardent users into a thumbs down frenzy of only mildly contained #emojirage.... People who wished to register a coolly ironic acknowledgment of a fellow tweeter’s bon mot suddenly found that instead of the neutral 'I see what you are doing there' star, their thumb was hovering over a tiny red love heart. I found myself not bookmarking, as I would have done a day earlier, a horrifying image retweeted by journalists depicting men using phones to film a woman being stoned to death for adultery. I did not 'like' let alone 'love' the image but wanted to note it as important. We must have a system which allows for capturing the significant as well as the appealing."
The real history of the ‘safe space’ - article by Vaughan Bell in MindHacks blog. "The concept of the ‘safe space’ ... started [with] the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin. ... In the late 1940s, Lewin was asked to help develop leadership training for corporate bosses and out of this work came ... the invention of sensitivity training which was a form of group discussion where members could give honest feedback to each other to allow people to become aware of their unhelpful assumptions, implicit biases, and behaviours that were holding them back as effective leaders. Lewin drew on ideas from group psychotherapy that had been around for years but formalised them into a specific and brief focused group activity. One of the ideas behind sensitivity training, was that honesty and change would only occur if people could be frank and challenge others in an environment of psychological safety. In other words, without judgement. Practically, this means that there is an explicit rule that everyone agrees to at the start of the group. A ‘safe space’ is created, confidential and free of judgement but precisely to allow people to mention concerns without fear of being condemned for them, on the understanding that they’re hoping to change."
Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage: the emotional effect of class – review by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. "Savage and his colleagues in the London School of Economics’ sociology department have used the results of the class survey to create a seven-class schema, which reveals the vast and growing disparity in wealth and power between the 'elite' and the 'precariat'.... The new elite is followed by the 'established middle class' – well-off, socially gregarious and keen on the arts.... Members of the 'technical middle class' have as much money as the established middle class but don’t know as many people or possess as much cultural capital. The 'new affluent worker' is working class, but relatively well off and keen to live the good life, as are the group of 'emergent service workers' below them. But it’s the last two groups – 'traditional working class' and 'precariat' – that have suffered most both in relative and absolute terms. The 'precariat' are those whose lives are characterised by unstable, low-earning jobs, who cannot afford to make long-term plans, and whose social connection to those at the very top has grown weaker as the elite class ceases to use public services."
How The Hunger Games staged a revolution - article by Danny Leigh in The Guardian. "As YA fiction has swept all before it commercially, the most frequent explanation is that it acts as a mirror to adolescent life: the toxic cocktail of peer and academic pressures analogised into puppet-masters and epic battles. At one level, this is what The Hunger Games does too. But it also combines the fear of the now with the fear of what’s next. Like teenagers across the west, the girls here have been hit hard by austerity; many of [the] pupils [at the London school where the interviews for this article took place] are bright kids who now see university as priced beyond them. 'One perspective about The Hunger Games is the feeling among the young that what awaits them in adulthood is very unforgiving,' [says] Jacobson [the producer of the Hunger Games series of films]. 'I get that. The world we’ve made for them is a harsh arena.' "
The Face of Britain: The Nation Through Its Portraits by Simon Schama: comforting myths of British national character – review by John Gallagher in The Guardian. "Imagine one of the country’s great art collections was opened up to you – you could move things around, dust off the half-forgotten stuff in the basement, shine light on the works you love. What would you do? What story would you tell? This is the idea behind Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain, a book and TV series based on the National Portrait Gallery. First founded to house the portraits of 'those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature or in science', the gallery becomes, in Schama’s hands, the basis for a new face-to-face history of the UK."
Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine: a breakthrough collection of graphic short stories – review by Chris Ware in The Guardian. "There’s a certain alchemical balance required when planning a comics story, unpredictable yet based on a few measurable quantities – such as how characters are drawn, move and act around one another – which can either open up avenues of possibility in the author’s mind or set up roadblocks and shut down all dramatic throughways. Clearly, Tomine has found the former passage, especially in "Amber Sweet", a story about a girl frequently mistaken for an internet porn star. Here we see an all-too-rare use of the unreliable narrator in a visual medium that, until only very recently, has unimaginatively taken things at face value. The spaces between Tomine’s panels connect with the mature cartoonist’s electromagnetic spark; he knows exactly which facial expressions and gestures to string together as his characters try to convince others of their authenticity or aims. It’s the reader, however, who must make the largest connections, such as between the narrator of "Amber Sweet" and the sudden appearance of a daughter in another story. Tomine’s omissions are not devious or artsy, but the work of a confident writer mirroring how we conveniently edit out events and people from our memories to suit the narratives we wish had happened. The cumulative leanness and efficiency of these stories have a sharpening effect on one’s own mind."
Violence, victors and victims: how to look at the art of the British empire - article by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. "This month, The Remnants of an Army [by Elizabeth Butler, 1879] returned to Tate for the first time in half a century. ... Also being touched up and nursed back to health after more than half a century of neglect, [are] similar images of the age of empire... The occasion for this reassessment of Tate Britain’s vast but until now almost invisible holdings of imperial art is the mounting of an important, brave and well-judged show about this supremely touchy subject...: Artist and Empire – Facing Britain’s Imperial Past. Astonishingly, it is the first major show on British soil to attempt to give a sample of the art of the British empire since that empire imploded in the decade after 1945. It is not hard to see why it has taken so long for an exhibition like this to be mounted. The traditional British response to embarrassment has typically been to pretend something isn’t happening, and it is difficult to think of a subject that is surrounded by a more formidable minefield of potential awkwardness than the art of imperialism.
Celebrating HG Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights - article by Ali Smith in The Guardian. "Here’s Wells, writing 75 years ago: 'The enormous change in human conditions to which nearly all our present stresses are due, the abolition of distance and the stupendous increase in power, have flung together the population of the world so that a new way of living has become imperative … The elaboration of methods and material has necessitated a vast development and refinement of espionage, and in addition the increasing difficulty of understanding what the warfare is really about has produced new submersive and demoralising activities of rumour-spreading, propaganda and the like, that complicate and lose contact at last with any rational objective … The uprooting of millions of people who are driven into exile among strangers, who are forced to seek new homes, produces a peculiar exacerbation of the mental strain. Never have there been such crowds of migrating dep-ressing people. They talk languages we do not understand … they stimulate xenophobia without intention … Their necessary discordance with the new populations they invade releases and intensifies the natural distrust and hostility of man for man – which it is the aim of all moral and social training to eliminate … For the restoration and modernisation of human civilisation, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen who we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.' Given how familiar all this sounds, it is interesting that our own Human Rights Act is right now coming under attack."
Twitter’s heart hits the wrong beat - article by Emily Bell in The Guardian. "The replacement by Twitter of its star icon with a heart last week sent its most ardent users into a thumbs down frenzy of only mildly contained #emojirage.... People who wished to register a coolly ironic acknowledgment of a fellow tweeter’s bon mot suddenly found that instead of the neutral 'I see what you are doing there' star, their thumb was hovering over a tiny red love heart. I found myself not bookmarking, as I would have done a day earlier, a horrifying image retweeted by journalists depicting men using phones to film a woman being stoned to death for adultery. I did not 'like' let alone 'love' the image but wanted to note it as important. We must have a system which allows for capturing the significant as well as the appealing."
The real history of the ‘safe space’ - article by Vaughan Bell in MindHacks blog. "The concept of the ‘safe space’ ... started [with] the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin. ... In the late 1940s, Lewin was asked to help develop leadership training for corporate bosses and out of this work came ... the invention of sensitivity training which was a form of group discussion where members could give honest feedback to each other to allow people to become aware of their unhelpful assumptions, implicit biases, and behaviours that were holding them back as effective leaders. Lewin drew on ideas from group psychotherapy that had been around for years but formalised them into a specific and brief focused group activity. One of the ideas behind sensitivity training, was that honesty and change would only occur if people could be frank and challenge others in an environment of psychological safety. In other words, without judgement. Practically, this means that there is an explicit rule that everyone agrees to at the start of the group. A ‘safe space’ is created, confidential and free of judgement but precisely to allow people to mention concerns without fear of being condemned for them, on the understanding that they’re hoping to change."
Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage: the emotional effect of class – review by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. "Savage and his colleagues in the London School of Economics’ sociology department have used the results of the class survey to create a seven-class schema, which reveals the vast and growing disparity in wealth and power between the 'elite' and the 'precariat'.... The new elite is followed by the 'established middle class' – well-off, socially gregarious and keen on the arts.... Members of the 'technical middle class' have as much money as the established middle class but don’t know as many people or possess as much cultural capital. The 'new affluent worker' is working class, but relatively well off and keen to live the good life, as are the group of 'emergent service workers' below them. But it’s the last two groups – 'traditional working class' and 'precariat' – that have suffered most both in relative and absolute terms. The 'precariat' are those whose lives are characterised by unstable, low-earning jobs, who cannot afford to make long-term plans, and whose social connection to those at the very top has grown weaker as the elite class ceases to use public services."
How The Hunger Games staged a revolution - article by Danny Leigh in The Guardian. "As YA fiction has swept all before it commercially, the most frequent explanation is that it acts as a mirror to adolescent life: the toxic cocktail of peer and academic pressures analogised into puppet-masters and epic battles. At one level, this is what The Hunger Games does too. But it also combines the fear of the now with the fear of what’s next. Like teenagers across the west, the girls here have been hit hard by austerity; many of [the] pupils [at the London school where the interviews for this article took place] are bright kids who now see university as priced beyond them. 'One perspective about The Hunger Games is the feeling among the young that what awaits them in adulthood is very unforgiving,' [says] Jacobson [the producer of the Hunger Games series of films]. 'I get that. The world we’ve made for them is a harsh arena.' "
The Face of Britain: The Nation Through Its Portraits by Simon Schama: comforting myths of British national character – review by John Gallagher in The Guardian. "Imagine one of the country’s great art collections was opened up to you – you could move things around, dust off the half-forgotten stuff in the basement, shine light on the works you love. What would you do? What story would you tell? This is the idea behind Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain, a book and TV series based on the National Portrait Gallery. First founded to house the portraits of 'those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature or in science', the gallery becomes, in Schama’s hands, the basis for a new face-to-face history of the UK."
Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine: a breakthrough collection of graphic short stories – review by Chris Ware in The Guardian. "There’s a certain alchemical balance required when planning a comics story, unpredictable yet based on a few measurable quantities – such as how characters are drawn, move and act around one another – which can either open up avenues of possibility in the author’s mind or set up roadblocks and shut down all dramatic throughways. Clearly, Tomine has found the former passage, especially in "Amber Sweet", a story about a girl frequently mistaken for an internet porn star. Here we see an all-too-rare use of the unreliable narrator in a visual medium that, until only very recently, has unimaginatively taken things at face value. The spaces between Tomine’s panels connect with the mature cartoonist’s electromagnetic spark; he knows exactly which facial expressions and gestures to string together as his characters try to convince others of their authenticity or aims. It’s the reader, however, who must make the largest connections, such as between the narrator of "Amber Sweet" and the sudden appearance of a daughter in another story. Tomine’s omissions are not devious or artsy, but the work of a confident writer mirroring how we conveniently edit out events and people from our memories to suit the narratives we wish had happened. The cumulative leanness and efficiency of these stories have a sharpening effect on one’s own mind."
Violence, victors and victims: how to look at the art of the British empire - article by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. "This month, The Remnants of an Army [by Elizabeth Butler, 1879] returned to Tate for the first time in half a century. ... Also being touched up and nursed back to health after more than half a century of neglect, [are] similar images of the age of empire... The occasion for this reassessment of Tate Britain’s vast but until now almost invisible holdings of imperial art is the mounting of an important, brave and well-judged show about this supremely touchy subject...: Artist and Empire – Facing Britain’s Imperial Past. Astonishingly, it is the first major show on British soil to attempt to give a sample of the art of the British empire since that empire imploded in the decade after 1945. It is not hard to see why it has taken so long for an exhibition like this to be mounted. The traditional British response to embarrassment has typically been to pretend something isn’t happening, and it is difficult to think of a subject that is surrounded by a more formidable minefield of potential awkwardness than the art of imperialism.
Celebrating HG Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights - article by Ali Smith in The Guardian. "Here’s Wells, writing 75 years ago: 'The enormous change in human conditions to which nearly all our present stresses are due, the abolition of distance and the stupendous increase in power, have flung together the population of the world so that a new way of living has become imperative … The elaboration of methods and material has necessitated a vast development and refinement of espionage, and in addition the increasing difficulty of understanding what the warfare is really about has produced new submersive and demoralising activities of rumour-spreading, propaganda and the like, that complicate and lose contact at last with any rational objective … The uprooting of millions of people who are driven into exile among strangers, who are forced to seek new homes, produces a peculiar exacerbation of the mental strain. Never have there been such crowds of migrating dep-ressing people. They talk languages we do not understand … they stimulate xenophobia without intention … Their necessary discordance with the new populations they invade releases and intensifies the natural distrust and hostility of man for man – which it is the aim of all moral and social training to eliminate … For the restoration and modernisation of human civilisation, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen who we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.' Given how familiar all this sounds, it is interesting that our own Human Rights Act is right now coming under attack."
Friday, 4 December 2015
Seen and heard: November 2015
80 Days – addictive
and educational (sort of) game from Inkle Studios, based (a bit) on
Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Essentially a resource
management game, you play Passpartout making decisions about time and
money to travel all around the world in the 80 days allotted while
keeping your master Phileas Phogg comfortable. The world is a steampunk
version of the 1880s, so long-distance airships, underwater trains and
so on to provide many more alternative routes than were actually
available to Verne’s travellers. Along the way, Passepartout encounters
real contemporary situations and events, which is an educational aspect.
But more than that, it’s great fun, and once you’ve got around the
world once inevitably you want to try it again with a different route. (See Adventure Gamers review.)
Telltale Games: story mode – intelligent YouTube 30 minute documentary about the games company currently leading the field in narrative games such as The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. As one of their ex-LucasArts Games founders says, they ended up specialising in four things on which most other games companies had given up: digital distribution, episodic gaming, licensed gaming and interactive narrative.
Let Us Entertain You – BBC documentary series by Domenic Sandbrook, presenting his thesis that Britain’s historic manufacturing pre-eminence has been replaced by pre-eminence in the creative and entertainment industries. Certainly entertaining, if you’re prepared (as the reviewer of the book comments) to go along with his celebration of popular culture to the exclusion of high art.
Periodic Tales – tremendous exhibition at Compton Verney art gallery, themed around the periodic table of chemistry and stocked with artworks based on the cultural associations of certain elements: gold, silver, iron, lead, copper, cobalt, aluminium, uranium. Highlights were Cornelia Parker's Thirty Pieces of Silver and Anthony Gormley's FUSE 2011.
Memoryhouse – really lovely album from contemporary classical composer Max Richter previously only name to me, but whose music we heard and loved as the accompaniment to the ballet ‘Serpent’ in BalletBoyz at the Roundhouse. Like Philip Glass, but different. An album to put on and just hear, doing nothing else
Telltale Games: story mode – intelligent YouTube 30 minute documentary about the games company currently leading the field in narrative games such as The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. As one of their ex-LucasArts Games founders says, they ended up specialising in four things on which most other games companies had given up: digital distribution, episodic gaming, licensed gaming and interactive narrative.
Let Us Entertain You – BBC documentary series by Domenic Sandbrook, presenting his thesis that Britain’s historic manufacturing pre-eminence has been replaced by pre-eminence in the creative and entertainment industries. Certainly entertaining, if you’re prepared (as the reviewer of the book comments) to go along with his celebration of popular culture to the exclusion of high art.
Periodic Tales – tremendous exhibition at Compton Verney art gallery, themed around the periodic table of chemistry and stocked with artworks based on the cultural associations of certain elements: gold, silver, iron, lead, copper, cobalt, aluminium, uranium. Highlights were Cornelia Parker's Thirty Pieces of Silver and Anthony Gormley's FUSE 2011.
Memoryhouse – really lovely album from contemporary classical composer Max Richter previously only name to me, but whose music we heard and loved as the accompaniment to the ballet ‘Serpent’ in BalletBoyz at the Roundhouse. Like Philip Glass, but different. An album to put on and just hear, doing nothing else
Seen and heard: October 2015
An Inspector Calls – BBC dramatisation of the JB Priestley play. Powerful, but made the same mistake as the Alastair Sim film version of showing the dead woman in flashback, thus establishing that all the family did indeed encounter the same person and thus successively and collectively bring about her suicide. The point is that it doesn’t matter whether it actually was the same person or not; even if it wasn’t, their guilt remains. “Well, he jolly well inspected us, didn’t he.”
Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You – BBC documentary series about uterine development from conception to birth, with memorable contributions from people for whom the process was unfortunately disrupted – lovely people, great interviews.
The Gamechangers – BBC drama about the making of Grant Theft Auto V and the American lawyer who sued the company on the grounds of its violent influence. Gripping performances by Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser of Rockstar Games and Bill Paxton as the lawyer Jack Thompson.
Charles III – Mike Bartlett stage play, imagining a future king’s political crisis in the style and blank verse of a Shakespearean history play, with Robert Powell in the title role at Milton Keynes Theatre. Great theatre, making me think about what it must have been like for Shakespeare’s audiences, for whom his references to (for them) recent history and contemporary popular culture would have just worked, as Bartlett’s did for us. Great gags too, such as the ghost of Diana appearing to give Charles a prophecy, and the Duchess of Cambridge behaving like Lady Macbeth quite contrary to her popular image.
Tengami – graphically brilliant puzzle game, set in a world of pop-up paper structures, in which folding the scenery up and down is part of the puzzle-solving as much as the navigation. A bit short, and the puzzle types are quite limited, and not in the same class as Monument Valley, but still a great game on the iPad.
The Face of Britain by Simon Schama – series of five films, in association with the National Portrait Gallery. If you’re going to do lectures on video or TV, this is how to do it, if you have the budget, and a lecturer as stylish and compelling as Schama. Lovely discussions, around five themes (Power, The People, Fame, Love and Self-portraiture), though as the reviewer of the book comments his power-analysis isn’t all that it might be.
Rugby world cup, Fiji v. Uruguay at MK Stadium – Polymnia, in which I sing, was honoured to sing their national anthems before the match.
BalletBoyz at the Roundhouse – BBC televisation of the all-male dance company’s 2014 London performance of ‘Serpent’ and ‘Fallen’. with live music by Max Richter and Armand Amar. Absolutely stunning.
Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You – BBC documentary series about uterine development from conception to birth, with memorable contributions from people for whom the process was unfortunately disrupted – lovely people, great interviews.
The Gamechangers – BBC drama about the making of Grant Theft Auto V and the American lawyer who sued the company on the grounds of its violent influence. Gripping performances by Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser of Rockstar Games and Bill Paxton as the lawyer Jack Thompson.
Charles III – Mike Bartlett stage play, imagining a future king’s political crisis in the style and blank verse of a Shakespearean history play, with Robert Powell in the title role at Milton Keynes Theatre. Great theatre, making me think about what it must have been like for Shakespeare’s audiences, for whom his references to (for them) recent history and contemporary popular culture would have just worked, as Bartlett’s did for us. Great gags too, such as the ghost of Diana appearing to give Charles a prophecy, and the Duchess of Cambridge behaving like Lady Macbeth quite contrary to her popular image.
Tengami – graphically brilliant puzzle game, set in a world of pop-up paper structures, in which folding the scenery up and down is part of the puzzle-solving as much as the navigation. A bit short, and the puzzle types are quite limited, and not in the same class as Monument Valley, but still a great game on the iPad.
The Face of Britain by Simon Schama – series of five films, in association with the National Portrait Gallery. If you’re going to do lectures on video or TV, this is how to do it, if you have the budget, and a lecturer as stylish and compelling as Schama. Lovely discussions, around five themes (Power, The People, Fame, Love and Self-portraiture), though as the reviewer of the book comments his power-analysis isn’t all that it might be.
The Perils of Man – appealing and well-received Swiss German adventure game, about a teenage girl living alone with her agoraphobic mother who discovers a message from her scientist ancestors and their secret technology which enables her to perceive risk. Good puzzling and voice acting, and some big human themes addressed; but it didn’t quite wrap up into a whole for me.
Rugby world cup, Fiji v. Uruguay at MK Stadium – Polymnia, in which I sing, was honoured to sing their national anthems before the match.
BalletBoyz at the Roundhouse – BBC televisation of the all-male dance company’s 2014 London performance of ‘Serpent’ and ‘Fallen’. with live music by Max Richter and Armand Amar. Absolutely stunning.
Tuesday, 3 November 2015
What good is video in online teaching? (And what is Khan Academy doing right?)
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
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...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.
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”)
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.
Monday, 2 November 2015
Cuttings: October 2015
[Hindu] Practice: Darshan and Namaste - 'Daily Meditation' by Richard Rohr. "In the Hindu tradition, darshan (or darsana) is to behold the Divine and to allow yourself to be fully seen. Many Hindus visit temples not to see God, but to let God gaze upon them--and then to join God's seeing which is always unconditional acceptance and compassion."
How the magic of cinema unlocked one man’s coma-bound world - article in MindHacks blog. "Lorina Naci has used cinema to show just how sophisticated conscious awareness can be in a ‘minimally conscious’ patient. The trick they used involved an 8 minute edit of 'Bang! You’re dead', a 1961 episode of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'. In the film, a young boy with a toy gun obsession wanders around aiming and firing at people. Unbeknownst to him, and the adults he aims at, on this day he has found a real gun and it has a live bullet in the chamber.... Naci showed the film to healthy participants. To a separate group she showed a scrambled version involving rearranged one-second segments. This ‘control’ version was important because it contained many of the same features as the original; the same visual patterns, the same objects, the same actions. But it lacked the crucial narrative coherence – the knowledge of the bullet – which generated the suspense.... Next the researchers showed the film to two patients in wakeful comas. In one, ... who had been hospitalised and non-responsive for 16 years, his brain response matched those of the healthy controls who’d seen the film. Like them, activity across the cortex rose and fell with the action of the film, indicating an inner consciousness rich enough to follow the plot."
The latest episode in the ‘Can women have it all?’ soap opera" - review of Anne-Marie Slaughter's Unfinished Business by Helen Lewis in The Guardian. "The book practises what it preaches by having rather a lot to say to anyone with a Y chromosome. Slaughter pinpoints something called 'Halo dad syndrome', where fathers are praised for the slightest achievement, such as remembering to pick the kids up from school. This is patronising, she points out, and reaffirms the existing cultural belief that men are not 'naturally' suited to childcare. In one of the best passages of the book, Slaughter flips such compliments around: 'Imagine that as a woman you’re praised for writing a good report at work, a completely routine action for a man, and praised in a way that makes clear that the person who is complimenting you didn’t actually expect you could do it so well.' ”
Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical - article by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "Thomas More's Utopia, a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a 'conspiracy of the rich'. Such men, the book announces, are 'greedy, unscrupulous and useless'. ... Alternative universes are really devices for embarrassing the present, as imaginary cultures are used to estrange and unsettle our own. As such, they have been largely the product of the left. The finest of all such works in Britain is the Marxist William Morris’s, one of the very few utopian visions to offer a detailed account of how the political transformation actually came about.... The word 'utopia' means 'nowhere', but it isn’t clear whether this is because the place could exist but happens not to, or whether it is nowhere in much the same sense that a humble Richard Dawkins or a coy Chris Evans is."
Intellectual snobs beware - review of Dominic Sandbrook's The Great British Dream Factory by Matthew Sweet in The Guardian. " 'Whether British culture is the world’s best is an unanswerable and ultimately pointless question,' [Sandbrook] writes, at the beginning of his latest doorstopper. 'But it has a very good claim, pound for pound, to be its most successful.' He has the numbers to prove it: £30m in the bank account of Oxford University after it invested in the software that powered Grand Theft Auto; 400m Harry Potter books, 1bn Beatles albums and 2bn Agatha Christie novels sold. The triumph of Downton Abbey in China, Top Gear in Iran and Doctor Who everywhere. (The Doctor, pleasingly, is never far from Sandbrook’s thoughts.) These are the figures that make us, Sandbrook argues, 'a cultural superpower'. "
‘I was passionate about Austen's anonymity’ - article by Elena Ferrrante in The Guardian. " Elinor’s 'sense' [in Sense and Sensibility] is, in short, the art of living in the world with equilibrium, satisfying her own desires without hurting other women but, rather, offering herself as a support for their fragility.... It seems to me that Austen, by not putting her name on the books she published, did the same thing as Elinor, and in an extremely radical way. She uses neither her own name nor one that she has chosen. Her stories are not reducible to her; rather, they are written from within a tradition that encompasses her and at the same time allows her to express herself. In this sense they are indeed written by a lady, the lady who does not fully coincide with everyday life but peeks out during the often brief time when, in a common room, a space not hers, Austen can write without being disturbed: a lady who disappears whenever something – the disorderly world of the everyday – interrupts her, forcing her to hide the pages. This lady doesn’t have Jane’s anxieties or her reserve. The lady-narrator describes the ferocity of the male world that clusters around income, is afraid of change, lives idly, contends with futility, sees work as degrading. And above all she rests a clear gaze on the condition of women, on the battle between women to win men and money. But she doesn’t have Jane’s natural resentments toward daily life."
In Online Courses, Students Learn More by Doing Than by Watching - article by Ellen Wexler in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "When students enroll in MOOCs, they almost always watch a series of video lectures. But just watching videos — without also engaging interactively — is an ineffective way to learn, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.... All of the students [on an Introduction to Psychology MOOC] were assigned 11 weekly quizzes and a final examination. Those in the MOOC-only course scored an average of 57 percent on the final. Those in the combined course scored an average of 66 percent. And when students in the combined course completed an interactive activity, they learned six times as much as those who only read the material or watched a video. 'When one is watching a lecture or reading material, there’s an illusion of learning,' says Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and an author of a report on the study. 'Lessons communicated in a lecture don’t stick.' "
Catching Violence at the Beginning - 'Daily Meditation' by Richard Rohr. "One of the reasons I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation twenty-eight years ago was to give activists some grounding in spirituality so they could continue working for social change, but from a stance much different than anger, ideology, or willpower pressing against opposing willpower. Many activists I knew loved Gandhi's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s teachings on nonviolence. But it became clear to me that theirs was often an intellectual appreciation rather than a participation in the much deeper mystery. I saw people on the left playing the victim and creating victims – exactly what Jesus did not do. It was much more subtle than the same game on the right, but it still proceeded from an unkind and self-righteous heart."
Extremely rare Wicked Bible goes on sale - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "To commit adultery, or not to commit adultery – for hundreds of readers in the 17th century, the answer depended on which bible they consulted, after an unfortunate error in a certain edition of the text omitted to include a vital “not”. Known as the 'Wicked' Bible, the text, printed in 1631, leaves the word 'not' from the seventh commandment. This means that amid exhortations that 'thou shalt not kill', and 'thou shalt not steale', readers are also informed that 'thou shalt commit adultery'. One thousand copies of the text, which also came to be known as the Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible, were printed, with the printing error only discovered a year later."
From cold war spy to angry old man: the politics of John le Carré - article by Adam Sisman in The Guardian, based on his John le Carré: The Biography. "One reason why The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made such an enormous impact was its seeming authenticity. This, apparently, was the real world of spying: one in which there were no heroes, and the line between right and wrong was at best blurred. The protagonist, Alec Leamas, is not a glamorous figure: he is a tired, middle-aged man on the edge of burnout. ... The moral ambiguities of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are in marked contrast to the unquestioning certainties of the James Bond books. To readers in the early 1960s, accustomed to the messy compromises of the cold war, they seemed far more truthful. Similarly, le Carré’s squalid settings seemed more realistic than the five-star hotels and high-rolling casinos frequented by Bond."
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea: a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin - article by David Mitchell in The Guardian, based on his introduction to A Wizard of Earthsea. "If Earthsea is one of literature’s best-written fantasy worlds, it is also one of the most cerebral. Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power.... From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name.... The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called 'individuation', in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin ...: 'In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the "axis of evil" is within them.' "
What does ‘radical’ actually mean? Well, it depends who you ask … - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. " Can we draw any helpful lessons from [the] confusing tangle of uses [of the word 'radical']? It would be good to know when 'radical' means something nice and when it means something nasty. Should I take a radical attitude to obeying laws I find preposterous? Should you advertise yourself as a baker of radical cronuts? In the end, the political valency of 'radical' simply depends on the power relations between groups. Labour is circumspect about calling itself radical because it doesn’t want to frighten the horses. But the Tories can call themselves radical because they are in office for the next five years and can do whatever they like, which apparently includes cutting working tax credits after promising not to during the election campaign. Now that’s a radical approach to governing with the public’s consent."
How to make a wildlife epic - article by Vincent Graff in Radio Times, 31 Oct to 6 Nov 2015, pp. 8-13. "The narrator for this series is David Attenborough, whose famous authoritative, whispery tones are central to its appeal... 'A good narration is sparse,' he says, 'Don't use any unnecessary words, The visual is always more powerful than the words - so you should only add information that is necessary to fully understand the pictures. You shouldn't repeat what the pictures say.' The narrator must resist the temptation to be too clever, he adds. 'Although all sorts of poetic similes may come into your mind, similes are there for the printed word, in order for you to invoke a picture. If you've already got a picture, there's no point in a simile.' ... However, says Attenborough, 'rhythm is important. You have to tailor the words so that they hit the right picture – the right close-up, the right cut, whatever it is. Pauses are rather more important than the words.'"
How the magic of cinema unlocked one man’s coma-bound world - article in MindHacks blog. "Lorina Naci has used cinema to show just how sophisticated conscious awareness can be in a ‘minimally conscious’ patient. The trick they used involved an 8 minute edit of 'Bang! You’re dead', a 1961 episode of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'. In the film, a young boy with a toy gun obsession wanders around aiming and firing at people. Unbeknownst to him, and the adults he aims at, on this day he has found a real gun and it has a live bullet in the chamber.... Naci showed the film to healthy participants. To a separate group she showed a scrambled version involving rearranged one-second segments. This ‘control’ version was important because it contained many of the same features as the original; the same visual patterns, the same objects, the same actions. But it lacked the crucial narrative coherence – the knowledge of the bullet – which generated the suspense.... Next the researchers showed the film to two patients in wakeful comas. In one, ... who had been hospitalised and non-responsive for 16 years, his brain response matched those of the healthy controls who’d seen the film. Like them, activity across the cortex rose and fell with the action of the film, indicating an inner consciousness rich enough to follow the plot."
The latest episode in the ‘Can women have it all?’ soap opera" - review of Anne-Marie Slaughter's Unfinished Business by Helen Lewis in The Guardian. "The book practises what it preaches by having rather a lot to say to anyone with a Y chromosome. Slaughter pinpoints something called 'Halo dad syndrome', where fathers are praised for the slightest achievement, such as remembering to pick the kids up from school. This is patronising, she points out, and reaffirms the existing cultural belief that men are not 'naturally' suited to childcare. In one of the best passages of the book, Slaughter flips such compliments around: 'Imagine that as a woman you’re praised for writing a good report at work, a completely routine action for a man, and praised in a way that makes clear that the person who is complimenting you didn’t actually expect you could do it so well.' ”
Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical - article by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "Thomas More's Utopia, a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a 'conspiracy of the rich'. Such men, the book announces, are 'greedy, unscrupulous and useless'. ... Alternative universes are really devices for embarrassing the present, as imaginary cultures are used to estrange and unsettle our own. As such, they have been largely the product of the left. The finest of all such works in Britain is the Marxist William Morris’s, one of the very few utopian visions to offer a detailed account of how the political transformation actually came about.... The word 'utopia' means 'nowhere', but it isn’t clear whether this is because the place could exist but happens not to, or whether it is nowhere in much the same sense that a humble Richard Dawkins or a coy Chris Evans is."
Intellectual snobs beware - review of Dominic Sandbrook's The Great British Dream Factory by Matthew Sweet in The Guardian. " 'Whether British culture is the world’s best is an unanswerable and ultimately pointless question,' [Sandbrook] writes, at the beginning of his latest doorstopper. 'But it has a very good claim, pound for pound, to be its most successful.' He has the numbers to prove it: £30m in the bank account of Oxford University after it invested in the software that powered Grand Theft Auto; 400m Harry Potter books, 1bn Beatles albums and 2bn Agatha Christie novels sold. The triumph of Downton Abbey in China, Top Gear in Iran and Doctor Who everywhere. (The Doctor, pleasingly, is never far from Sandbrook’s thoughts.) These are the figures that make us, Sandbrook argues, 'a cultural superpower'. "
‘I was passionate about Austen's anonymity’ - article by Elena Ferrrante in The Guardian. " Elinor’s 'sense' [in Sense and Sensibility] is, in short, the art of living in the world with equilibrium, satisfying her own desires without hurting other women but, rather, offering herself as a support for their fragility.... It seems to me that Austen, by not putting her name on the books she published, did the same thing as Elinor, and in an extremely radical way. She uses neither her own name nor one that she has chosen. Her stories are not reducible to her; rather, they are written from within a tradition that encompasses her and at the same time allows her to express herself. In this sense they are indeed written by a lady, the lady who does not fully coincide with everyday life but peeks out during the often brief time when, in a common room, a space not hers, Austen can write without being disturbed: a lady who disappears whenever something – the disorderly world of the everyday – interrupts her, forcing her to hide the pages. This lady doesn’t have Jane’s anxieties or her reserve. The lady-narrator describes the ferocity of the male world that clusters around income, is afraid of change, lives idly, contends with futility, sees work as degrading. And above all she rests a clear gaze on the condition of women, on the battle between women to win men and money. But she doesn’t have Jane’s natural resentments toward daily life."
In Online Courses, Students Learn More by Doing Than by Watching - article by Ellen Wexler in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "When students enroll in MOOCs, they almost always watch a series of video lectures. But just watching videos — without also engaging interactively — is an ineffective way to learn, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.... All of the students [on an Introduction to Psychology MOOC] were assigned 11 weekly quizzes and a final examination. Those in the MOOC-only course scored an average of 57 percent on the final. Those in the combined course scored an average of 66 percent. And when students in the combined course completed an interactive activity, they learned six times as much as those who only read the material or watched a video. 'When one is watching a lecture or reading material, there’s an illusion of learning,' says Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and an author of a report on the study. 'Lessons communicated in a lecture don’t stick.' "
Catching Violence at the Beginning - 'Daily Meditation' by Richard Rohr. "One of the reasons I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation twenty-eight years ago was to give activists some grounding in spirituality so they could continue working for social change, but from a stance much different than anger, ideology, or willpower pressing against opposing willpower. Many activists I knew loved Gandhi's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s teachings on nonviolence. But it became clear to me that theirs was often an intellectual appreciation rather than a participation in the much deeper mystery. I saw people on the left playing the victim and creating victims – exactly what Jesus did not do. It was much more subtle than the same game on the right, but it still proceeded from an unkind and self-righteous heart."
Extremely rare Wicked Bible goes on sale - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "To commit adultery, or not to commit adultery – for hundreds of readers in the 17th century, the answer depended on which bible they consulted, after an unfortunate error in a certain edition of the text omitted to include a vital “not”. Known as the 'Wicked' Bible, the text, printed in 1631, leaves the word 'not' from the seventh commandment. This means that amid exhortations that 'thou shalt not kill', and 'thou shalt not steale', readers are also informed that 'thou shalt commit adultery'. One thousand copies of the text, which also came to be known as the Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible, were printed, with the printing error only discovered a year later."
From cold war spy to angry old man: the politics of John le Carré - article by Adam Sisman in The Guardian, based on his John le Carré: The Biography. "One reason why The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made such an enormous impact was its seeming authenticity. This, apparently, was the real world of spying: one in which there were no heroes, and the line between right and wrong was at best blurred. The protagonist, Alec Leamas, is not a glamorous figure: he is a tired, middle-aged man on the edge of burnout. ... The moral ambiguities of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are in marked contrast to the unquestioning certainties of the James Bond books. To readers in the early 1960s, accustomed to the messy compromises of the cold war, they seemed far more truthful. Similarly, le Carré’s squalid settings seemed more realistic than the five-star hotels and high-rolling casinos frequented by Bond."
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea: a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin - article by David Mitchell in The Guardian, based on his introduction to A Wizard of Earthsea. "If Earthsea is one of literature’s best-written fantasy worlds, it is also one of the most cerebral. Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power.... From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name.... The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called 'individuation', in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin ...: 'In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the "axis of evil" is within them.' "
What does ‘radical’ actually mean? Well, it depends who you ask … - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. " Can we draw any helpful lessons from [the] confusing tangle of uses [of the word 'radical']? It would be good to know when 'radical' means something nice and when it means something nasty. Should I take a radical attitude to obeying laws I find preposterous? Should you advertise yourself as a baker of radical cronuts? In the end, the political valency of 'radical' simply depends on the power relations between groups. Labour is circumspect about calling itself radical because it doesn’t want to frighten the horses. But the Tories can call themselves radical because they are in office for the next five years and can do whatever they like, which apparently includes cutting working tax credits after promising not to during the election campaign. Now that’s a radical approach to governing with the public’s consent."
How to make a wildlife epic - article by Vincent Graff in Radio Times, 31 Oct to 6 Nov 2015, pp. 8-13. "The narrator for this series is David Attenborough, whose famous authoritative, whispery tones are central to its appeal... 'A good narration is sparse,' he says, 'Don't use any unnecessary words, The visual is always more powerful than the words - so you should only add information that is necessary to fully understand the pictures. You shouldn't repeat what the pictures say.' The narrator must resist the temptation to be too clever, he adds. 'Although all sorts of poetic similes may come into your mind, similes are there for the printed word, in order for you to invoke a picture. If you've already got a picture, there's no point in a simile.' ... However, says Attenborough, 'rhythm is important. You have to tailor the words so that they hit the right picture – the right close-up, the right cut, whatever it is. Pauses are rather more important than the words.'"
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