(An online discussion at the Open University recently posed the question: is technology an enhancer or an enabler of learning? Here is my answer.)
Technology, according to Danny Hills and Douglas Adams, is everything that doesn’t work yet: when it starts to work reliably, it becomes part of the background and we cease to see it as technology. So when we talk about technology-enhanced or technology-enabled learning, it’s to give people a reason why they should put up with something that doesn’t yet work properly: despite the problems, we’re saying, it’s worth persevering with the technology because it will allow us to do better or more efficiently something which we’re already doing (technology-enhanced) or to do something which we currently can’t do at all (technology-enabled).
I can only think of three things in learning and teaching which are genuinely enabled, rather than enhanced, by technology. Learning at a distance is not one of them, because you can (as the OU did for many years) operate through postal and courier services for the delivery of materials and messages. Remote co-presence, however, is really only achievable through audio or video conferencing, such as we regularly use in online tutorials. This is more than a simple matter of communication: the synchronous nature of the medium supports the constant and continuous engagement of participants, which allows a different kind of conversation, not merely a faster one. Even participants who are not actively communicating can have their motivation and relationship strengthened, simply by being present at the virtual event.
The second thing enabled by technology is automated rapid feedback, such as is provided by computerised tests. The promptness of feedback, we know, is massively important for learning, and it also increases motivation when it provides immediate sense of progress or achievement. Automation can also bring the testing more under the learner’s control, allowing them to take it at a time of their choosing, to repeat it if they wish until they are successful, and to interpret and act on the result as they wish. Students, we know, like on-screen tests for precisely these reasons, though unfortunately they are only really effective in areas of knowledge and skill which are capable of being broken into discrete elements and for which questions can have closed answers.
The third aspect of learning and teaching enabled by technology is encounter with authentic situations, which is critical for the learning of many practical situated skills, especially the interpretation of complex situations, such as those involving people. While audio and video can enhance learning of all kinds, by providing illustration or amusement, their richness is essential for allowing the development of holistic understanding, in which the presence of micro-cues allows learners not to be limited by what can be consciously articulated. Listening and speaking in a foreign language, for example, unlike reading and writing which can be taught through text alone, require actual aural models and authentic situations in which to practice, and one can trace the use of successive technologies for sound recording and reproduction as they were developed: gramophone records and language laboratories in the 1960s, cassette tapes in the 1970s, CDs in the 1980s, multimedia DVD-ROMs in the 1990s, internet delivery in the 2000s, and mobile apps in the 2010s. The distance learning of people skills, such as is relevant to many professional practice disciplines, has also been I would say enabled (rather than enhanced) by audio and video. It remains to be seen how far virtual reality technologies, hitherto too clumsy and low quality to compete seriously with remote audio and video or with face-to-face role play, may allow these possibilities to be expanded in the future.
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
Wednesday, 17 February 2016
Seen and heard: January 2016
Tales from the Borderlands – episodic narrative game. When first reading a review, I was sceptical: I didn’t see how a highly-determinate story, with carefully planned twists, turns and surprises, could possibly be blended with interactive gameplay without the thing becoming a mess: unsatisfactory as either an animated film or a game. Well, I was wrong, and I haven’t had so much fun with a game for a long time. The dialogue, voice-acting and animation are all first rate, and the decision-making and QuickTime elements are perfectly integrated with the story to deepen your involvement while giving you real, not illusory, influence over how events unfold (though not over the overall story arc). The strong animation style and witty dialogue reminded me of the Hanna-Barbera adventure cartoons such as Jonny Quest which I used to love when growing up; in short, this made me feel like a kid again. (Though note: the violence in TFTB, especially the first episode, rightly earns it a rating of 17+ or Mature.)
War and Peace – BBC TV drama series. Sterling service by Andrew Davies (adapter), the cast and the locations manager, and some lovely moments; but it doesn’t replace in my affections the Jack Pulman 20-episode version which captivated me and my schoolmates (okay, we were a bit nerdy) when it aired on Saturday night prime time in 1972.
Endeavour, Midsomer Murders, Young Montalbano, Vera – so many great location-based detective series on the box at the moment, it’s sometimes hard to keep the storylines distinct. Isn’t this episode of Endeavour like the one we had last week? No, wait, that was in Young Montalbano. Highlights for me include a Jaws homage in Endeavour ('Prey'), a heart-warming story about an honest third in Montalbano, and Vera showing she’s the sharpest knife in the box in interrogation scenes ('Tuesday's Child'). I used to want to be as clever as Jim Phelps in Mission Impossible; now I think I’d like to be as clever as Vera Stanhope.
The Story of China – BBC TV series presented by Michael Wood. Like David Attenborough, Michael Wood is a presenter who’s worth watching whatever his programme is on, because of his infectious enthusiasm and his ability to relate, not to animals in his case, but people: scholars gathering at the birthplace of Confucius (“We know why we’re here, but you: why are you here?”), schoolchildren studying Tang dynasty poetry, the museum keeper of the relics of China’s first ocean-going vessels.
Hack Day 'Designing online learning for the future' – a creative workshop in staff-student teams organised by our Learning Innovation team on 20 January, about which I’ve already blogged. All the team’s pitches are also up for viewing, though I don’t know that the videos really capture the intensity of the day. You had to be there…
War and Peace – BBC TV drama series. Sterling service by Andrew Davies (adapter), the cast and the locations manager, and some lovely moments; but it doesn’t replace in my affections the Jack Pulman 20-episode version which captivated me and my schoolmates (okay, we were a bit nerdy) when it aired on Saturday night prime time in 1972.
Endeavour, Midsomer Murders, Young Montalbano, Vera – so many great location-based detective series on the box at the moment, it’s sometimes hard to keep the storylines distinct. Isn’t this episode of Endeavour like the one we had last week? No, wait, that was in Young Montalbano. Highlights for me include a Jaws homage in Endeavour ('Prey'), a heart-warming story about an honest third in Montalbano, and Vera showing she’s the sharpest knife in the box in interrogation scenes ('Tuesday's Child'). I used to want to be as clever as Jim Phelps in Mission Impossible; now I think I’d like to be as clever as Vera Stanhope.
The Story of China – BBC TV series presented by Michael Wood. Like David Attenborough, Michael Wood is a presenter who’s worth watching whatever his programme is on, because of his infectious enthusiasm and his ability to relate, not to animals in his case, but people: scholars gathering at the birthplace of Confucius (“We know why we’re here, but you: why are you here?”), schoolchildren studying Tang dynasty poetry, the museum keeper of the relics of China’s first ocean-going vessels.
Hack Day 'Designing online learning for the future' – a creative workshop in staff-student teams organised by our Learning Innovation team on 20 January, about which I’ve already blogged. All the team’s pitches are also up for viewing, though I don’t know that the videos really capture the intensity of the day. You had to be there…
Cuttings: January 2016
Will video kill the lecturing star? - article by Han Dorussen, Theodora-Ismene Gizelis and Phil Arena in The Guardian's Higher Education Network. "For our modules on conflict resolution and international relations, we have created short video lectures for our students – from first-year undergraduates to master’s – to watch at home. And when they come to class, we work on applying what they have already learned. Here are our tips on how to ['flip the classroom']: Keep it brief... Track engagement... Flip the reading... Keep content in one place... Check your stats... Have a clear message... Think about the future... Flip back sometimes."
New Year, New You? Forget It - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "Behind the seductive lure of 'New Year, New You' lies another kind of mistake, too: the idea that what we require, in order finally to change, is one last push of willpower.... But the real reason that transformation is hard ... is that people (and organisations) have powerful 'competing commitments', or reasons not to change. To use weakness of will to explain why you take on too much, or overeat, or date disastrous people, is to neglect the fact that those habits make you feel indispensable, or assuage feelings of loneliness, or distract you from inner conflicts you’d rather not address.... One useful way to shift perspective is to hand both Old You and New You their marching orders, and narrow your focus to Present You. Don’t resolve to become 'the kind of person' who runs, meditates, or listens to your spouse. Instead, just do that thing, once, today. Preferably now."
Why a simple spreadsheet spread like wildfire - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Years ago, I began to wonder if the popularity of spreadsheets might be due to the fact that humans are genetically programmed to understand them. At the time, I was teaching mathematics to complete beginners, and finding that while they were fine with arithmetic, algebra completely eluded them. The moment one said 'let x be the number of apples', their eyes would glaze and one knew they were lost. But the same people had no problem entering a number into a spreadsheet cell labelled 'Number of apples', happily changing it at will and observing the ensuing results. In other words, they intuitively understood the concept of a variable."
Do we really need more guides to mindfulness? - article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "You’d be forgiven, amid this deluge [of mindfulness-mania and mindfulness-debunking], for having forgotten – or maybe never having quite grasped in the first place – what mindfulness actually is. Often, the word just functions as a non-religious, de-hippified synonym for formal meditation practice, which most commonly involves sitting quietly and following the breath. But it’s perhaps most usefully understood not as a practice but a state: a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience, conducted in a non-judgmental spirit, and without undue focus on the achievement of any particular goal.... Contrary to the debunkers, the point certainly isn’t that mindfulness is rubbish. It’s that it’s so non-rubbish – so much a crucial foundation of a fulfilling life – that you shouldn’t relegate it to the status of a minor hobby, something to be done with your downtime. And that you might already be doing it."
Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche: why mainstream culture, not the universities, is doing our best thinking - review by John Gray in The Guardian. "Nietzsche argues that education (he uses the German word Bildung, a term with multiple senses but that broadly means the formation of culture and individual character) has been degraded by being subordinated to other goals. Both the German gymnasium – the secondary school that prepared students for university – and universities themselves had forfeited their true vocation, which was to 'inculcate serious and unrelenting critical habits and opinions'. Instruction in independent thinking had been renounced in favour of 'the ubiquitous encouragement of everyone’s so-called "individual personality"' – a trend Nietzsche viewed as 'a mark of barbarity'. As a result, education was dominated by two tendencies, 'apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education.' The first extends education too widely and imposes it on a population that may not want or need it, while the second expects education to surrender any claim to autonomy and submit to the imperatives of the state....Anti-academic Nietzsche may have been, but his mistake was in pinning his hopes on 'high culture'. If you look beyond the walls of the academy, you will find a scene that is remarkably vital."
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli: quantum theory made charming - review by David Kaiser in The Guardian. "In the early 1960s, famed physicist Richard Feynman developed a new lecture course for new undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology. Feynman aimed to turn the standard physics curriculum on its head, introducing young students to some of the most exciting questions in the field right away, rather than slogging through the usual staid topics en route to the research frontier. By most accounts (including Feynman’s own), the classroom experiment was a flop. Even in the hands of such an acclaimed teacher, the leap was just too far for most incoming students to handle. Yet all was not lost. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, first published in 1964, have become some of the most admired – even, cherished – lectures in modern science. Sales of the English-language edition have topped 1.5m copies, and counting."
Together in electric dreams: how the art world embraced modern technology first - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "The first use of 'electronic superhighway' is credited not to a media theorist but to the Korean American visual artist Nam June Paik, who foresaw developments that we would now recognise as YouTube and Skype. In his 1974 essay 'Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society', Paik announced the coming 'electronic superhighways' of optical cable that would encircle the globe. He was a pioneer of video art and used bulky old analogue TV sets as modular components for sculpture.... As this exhibition shows, a lot of what we consider internet-age worries about gorging on electronic stimuli were developed first, not as a response to the internet, but in the age of television. "
Revolts, race, Russia: 60 years on, 1956 is disconcertingly similar to 2016 - article by Simon Hall in The Guardian, based on his book 1956: The World in Revolt. "Headlines filled with turmoil in the Middle East, racial violence in the United States and arguments about Britain’s place in the world. Not from 2016, but 60 years ago. Towards the end of 1956 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr – the charismatic 27-year-old leader of the Montgomery bus boycott – delivered a rousing speech before an overflow crowd at the city’s Holt Street Baptist church. In a tumultuous year that had witnessed the Suez crisis, a popular uprising in Hungary and an upsurge in anti-colonial nationalism across Africa and the Middle East, King told the supporters of the boycott – whose own year-long struggle against segregated buses was on the brink of a historic triumph – that they were 'living in one of the most momentous periods in human history'. 'We stand today,' he declared, 'between two worlds – the dying old, and the emerging new.'... This battle, between the champions of freedom and the guardians of the old order, lay at the very heart of 1956 – one of the most dramatic years of the 20th century."
The science of resilience: how to teach students to persevere - article by Judy Wallis on The Guardian's Teacher Network. "In schools today, the focus is not only on helping students pass exams, but also on improving their character by making them more resilient. Resilience in learning, as in life, is about being able to persevere through setbacks, take on challenges and risk making mistakes to reach a goal.... It’s not always clear, however, how to develop more resilient students. I believe there are three main areas to focus on: a child’s competence, their tolerance to mistakes, and their ability to set goals. These components help young people to sustain effort even when a challenge seems too great.... When students make mistakes, explain that these are not failures: they are opportunities for the brain to build a bridge that will bring them success in future."
How to formulate a good resolution - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "What we want isn’t straightforward. At bedtime you might want to get up early and go for a run, but when your alarm goes off you find you actually want a lie-in. When exam day comes around you might want to be the kind of person who spent the afternoons studying, but on each of those afternoons you instead wanted to hang out with your friends. You could see these contradictions as failures of our self-control: impulses for temporary pleasures manage to somehow override our longer-term interests. One fashionable theory of self-control ... is the ‘ego-depletion’ account. This theory states that self-control is like a muscle. This means you can exhaust it in the short-term... My issue with it is that it reduces our willpower to something akin to oil in a tank. Not only does this seem too simplistic, but it sidesteps the core problem of self-control: who or what is controlling who or what? Why is it even the case that we can want both to yield to a temptation, and want to resist it at the same time? ... [George] Ainslie’s account begins with the idea that we have, within us, a myriad of competing impulses. ... Willpower is a bargaining game played by the forces within ourselves, and like any conflict of interest, if the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable isn’t clearly defined then small infractions can quickly escalate. For this reason, Ainslie says, resolutions cluster around ‘clean lines’, sharp distinctions around which no quibble is brooked.... This is why advice on good habits is often of the form 'Do X every day'... We know that if we leave the interpretation open to doubt, although our intentions are good, we’ll undermine our resolutions when we’re under the influence of our more immediate impulses."
Spotlight: the reporters who uncovered Boston's Catholic child abuse scandal - article by Henry Barnes in The Guardian. "The Spotlight team had identified 12 priests who they knew had been implicated in child sex abuse. They wanted to get the names out there, but Baron told them to hold their fire and aim for the bigger target: the Catholic church itself. 'Would an editor have that sort of restraint now?' asks [Josh Singer, co-writer of the film Spotlight]. 'As opposed to just throwing what you have up on the web? If you’d just run those names it would have been a he-said-she-said with every single one. Instead of talking about the bigger story, which is the system.' 'The internet has forced us to think in short bursts,' says [journalist Walter "Robby"] Robinson. 'We seldom have time to get a really strong grasp on what the full story is. Everybody’s trying to get morsels out there, instead of the full meal.' "
As Mein Kampf returns to Germany, the world is again awash with hatred - column by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Since 1945, every generation in the educated world has been taught “the lessons” of the rise of Nazism. But surveying the world at the start of 2016 it seems as if we have been learning the wrong lessons. The world is awash with hatred. And since around a quarter of its inhabitants have mobile social media accounts we are leaving a very detailed evidential trail about its spread.... It is impossible to view this global rise of rage, ethnic conflict, victimisation and the curtailment of democratic norms with anything other than alarm. In particular, because it is happening on the cusp of a second global economic downturn. The collapse of growth in those middle-income countries dependent on commodities, combined with mass unemployment in southern Europe and the stagnation of China, may not produce another catastrophic financial event. But it does not need to. The route to a different kind of catastrophe is all too clear, as countries resort to trade embargoes, currency war and overt manipulation of the oil supply as geopolitical tools. The result is likely to be the deglobalisation of the world; the political destabilisation of the emerging economies; more floods of refugees from conflict zones the west cannot be bothered to engage with. Amid all this, the danger is not just another demagogue toting a modern Mein Kampf; there are thousands of little Mein Kampfs being written on social media by people who feel victimised and betrayed and have come to the conclusion that someone else’s death, starvation, expulsion or torture would solve their problems."
Ruqia Hassan: the woman who was killed for telling the truth about Isis - article by Homa Khaleeli, Aisha Gani and Mais al-Bayaa in The Guardian. "Family members say that, in person, the 30-year-old was shy and quiet. Yet on social media she showed no fear, documenting with brutal honesty life [in Raqqa] under Isis, and never attempting to hide her disgust for it.... 'The only thing the secular man remembers from the Qur’an is that God is the most merciful, and everything comes from that,” she wrote. “The only thing the extreme Islamists memorise is one verse – to be tough with infidels and merciful to believers – but to the extreme Islamists, everyone is an infidel, whether Muslim or not.'... [Her cousin says] 'She taught many people a lesson they would never forget. She taught us not to fear the tyrant ... I’m sure we will have many other Ruqias from now.' "
Last Futures by Douglas Murphy: utopian architecture, from space colonies to ziggurats - review by Andy Beckett in The Guardian. "During the anxious early 1970s, when the west was spooked by the oil crisis and economic stagnation, by the first widespread fears for the environment and predictions of global overpopulation, a giddy alternative to it all began to seize the imaginations of some Americans: space colonies.... During the 80s, most of the utopian architectural schemes of the previous two decades were so quickly forgotten or derided ... that it was almost as if they had never existed. Murphy tells the story of this counter-revolution pithily and well. This is not a long book, but it is really about much more than buildings; it is a fresh and haunting way of explaining what happened to the radical 60s and 70s as a whole, in Murphy’s view quite possibly the last chance the west had of creating a decent and environmentally sustainable society. Like all good revisionist history, the book concludes unexpectedly. The flexible, socially responsive sort of building first conceived by progressive postwar architects lives on, he writes, but it has mutated into the supermarket, the open-plan office, the distribution warehouse – not usually spaces of liberation but of control. In Britain and beyond, the 60s and 70s did contain the seeds of a new world, just not quite the one Murphy’s heroes imagined."
JustCloud.com: the no-backup backup service I trusted to store my valuable files - consumer rights column in The Guardian. "I subscribed to the cloud backup service operated by JustCloud.com in 2014, then backed up daily. Its website promises: 'Your files are constantly backed up and you can access them at any time from any device in the world'. In particular, the 'restore' feature allows 'disaster recovery' to restore lost files in the event of a computer crash. Last November I had a PC problem which meant I had to reinstall Windows. I then tried in vain to restore my files from the cloud. After some days of dealing with the JustCloud tech team it admitted all my files had been 'deleted in error'. It offered me a refund and to cancel my subscription. I was appalled to discover they were not operating any backup of the data they are holding for others. The 'service' was clearly worthless.... I have written to the managing director but received no response."
These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real - article by Tom Vanderbilt in Nautilus. "[Ken Perlin, Director of the Media Research Lab at New York University] suddenly slips on his own head-mounted display, and he - or, rather, a large bright, animated figure that looks like some failed entry for an Olympic mascot competition - appears across the clearing from me. He waves his hand, tracing a line that seems to hang in the air. And then, with eyes no more lifelike than a snowman's two pieces of coal, he looks at me. This is a curiously powerful moment. Locking eyes with the simple avatar unleashes that warm, almost familiar prickling of human connection. What do you want from me? What can I do for you? Just the fact that someone else is in the virtual environment underscores the sense of 'social presence,' as media scholar Carrie Heeter has called it. 'If other people are in the virtual world, that is more evidence that the world exists.' The act of recognition inside a shared space validates both your existence and the existence of the space. A lack of recognition denies those things, not unlike the Hollywood trope in which a person, who has not yet learned he is a ghost, tries in vain to get other people’s attention. We are social mimickers. When we see our peers accepting the reality of an environment, we are encouraged to accept it too. Our behavior in virtual space is no different. While much of the current energy in virtual reality research is channeled into getting things to look real as possible, Perlin suggests that even with heightened visual verisimilitude, virtual reality will still feel solitary unless a compelling social presence is achieved. 'The holodeck,' says Perlin, 'is other people.' "
The bridge from education to experience - blog post by Harold Jarche. "When looking at the 70:20:10 model (Experience, Exposure, Education) the 10% formal education component is easy to understand, as is the 70% experience component. Less obvious is what makes up the 20% exposure component. Given the dominance of knowledge work in the modern workplace, the cognitive apprenticeship model may provide some insight. It includes six methods: (1) Modeling, (2) Coaching, (3) Scaffolding, (4) Articulation, (5) Reflection, (6) Exploration. While cognitive apprenticeship was originally designed for teachers working with students in a formal setting, it can be used in the workplace as well. In organizations where experts may be significantly more advanced in their skills than novices, there is a role for a knowledge journeyman. This person’s role would be to provide the six components of cognitive apprenticeship, and be a bridge between the experts and novices. Too often experts forget how they learned the basics and find it difficult to coach novices. Novices need the support of sense-makers as companions on their journey to mastery."
Connecting cooperation and collaboration - blog post by Harold Jarche. "According to The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often Yields Weaker Results, some of the reasons that workplace collaboration fails is due to: overconfidence in our collective thinking; peer pressure to conform; and reliance on others to do the work. The article goes on to show that collaboration works when: we work with people with different skills; we do what each person does best; and we all contribute our own work. This shows the underlying problem with collaboration. To be effective, collaborative work needs to be done by cooperative people."
Free love or genocide? The trouble with Utopias - article by Tobias Jones in The Guardian, based on his book A Place of Refuge." In 1999, John Carey published a great compendium of excerpts on the theme of utopias and dystopias. They grow, he wrote, 'from desire and fear … cry out for our sympathy and attention, however impractical or unlikely they appear'. To live without that alternative to contemporary society was to remove from record the dreams and nightmares of the human subconscious. To live without such a record was to live in a bland, thin world.... On 25 January, London’s Somerset House begins 12 months of exhibitions, installations and commissions to investigate the renewed allure of utopianism. One of the most eye-catching events is the opportunity to see the view from Anarres, the anarchic planet in one of the last century’s greatest novels, Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. In that interplanetary book, the arch-anarchist Shevek travels to a new planet, and struggles to understand the 'propertarian' anxieties: 'Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they died poor?' "
New Year, New You? Forget It - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "Behind the seductive lure of 'New Year, New You' lies another kind of mistake, too: the idea that what we require, in order finally to change, is one last push of willpower.... But the real reason that transformation is hard ... is that people (and organisations) have powerful 'competing commitments', or reasons not to change. To use weakness of will to explain why you take on too much, or overeat, or date disastrous people, is to neglect the fact that those habits make you feel indispensable, or assuage feelings of loneliness, or distract you from inner conflicts you’d rather not address.... One useful way to shift perspective is to hand both Old You and New You their marching orders, and narrow your focus to Present You. Don’t resolve to become 'the kind of person' who runs, meditates, or listens to your spouse. Instead, just do that thing, once, today. Preferably now."
Why a simple spreadsheet spread like wildfire - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Years ago, I began to wonder if the popularity of spreadsheets might be due to the fact that humans are genetically programmed to understand them. At the time, I was teaching mathematics to complete beginners, and finding that while they were fine with arithmetic, algebra completely eluded them. The moment one said 'let x be the number of apples', their eyes would glaze and one knew they were lost. But the same people had no problem entering a number into a spreadsheet cell labelled 'Number of apples', happily changing it at will and observing the ensuing results. In other words, they intuitively understood the concept of a variable."
Do we really need more guides to mindfulness? - article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "You’d be forgiven, amid this deluge [of mindfulness-mania and mindfulness-debunking], for having forgotten – or maybe never having quite grasped in the first place – what mindfulness actually is. Often, the word just functions as a non-religious, de-hippified synonym for formal meditation practice, which most commonly involves sitting quietly and following the breath. But it’s perhaps most usefully understood not as a practice but a state: a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience, conducted in a non-judgmental spirit, and without undue focus on the achievement of any particular goal.... Contrary to the debunkers, the point certainly isn’t that mindfulness is rubbish. It’s that it’s so non-rubbish – so much a crucial foundation of a fulfilling life – that you shouldn’t relegate it to the status of a minor hobby, something to be done with your downtime. And that you might already be doing it."
Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche: why mainstream culture, not the universities, is doing our best thinking - review by John Gray in The Guardian. "Nietzsche argues that education (he uses the German word Bildung, a term with multiple senses but that broadly means the formation of culture and individual character) has been degraded by being subordinated to other goals. Both the German gymnasium – the secondary school that prepared students for university – and universities themselves had forfeited their true vocation, which was to 'inculcate serious and unrelenting critical habits and opinions'. Instruction in independent thinking had been renounced in favour of 'the ubiquitous encouragement of everyone’s so-called "individual personality"' – a trend Nietzsche viewed as 'a mark of barbarity'. As a result, education was dominated by two tendencies, 'apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education.' The first extends education too widely and imposes it on a population that may not want or need it, while the second expects education to surrender any claim to autonomy and submit to the imperatives of the state....Anti-academic Nietzsche may have been, but his mistake was in pinning his hopes on 'high culture'. If you look beyond the walls of the academy, you will find a scene that is remarkably vital."
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli: quantum theory made charming - review by David Kaiser in The Guardian. "In the early 1960s, famed physicist Richard Feynman developed a new lecture course for new undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology. Feynman aimed to turn the standard physics curriculum on its head, introducing young students to some of the most exciting questions in the field right away, rather than slogging through the usual staid topics en route to the research frontier. By most accounts (including Feynman’s own), the classroom experiment was a flop. Even in the hands of such an acclaimed teacher, the leap was just too far for most incoming students to handle. Yet all was not lost. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, first published in 1964, have become some of the most admired – even, cherished – lectures in modern science. Sales of the English-language edition have topped 1.5m copies, and counting."
Together in electric dreams: how the art world embraced modern technology first - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "The first use of 'electronic superhighway' is credited not to a media theorist but to the Korean American visual artist Nam June Paik, who foresaw developments that we would now recognise as YouTube and Skype. In his 1974 essay 'Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society', Paik announced the coming 'electronic superhighways' of optical cable that would encircle the globe. He was a pioneer of video art and used bulky old analogue TV sets as modular components for sculpture.... As this exhibition shows, a lot of what we consider internet-age worries about gorging on electronic stimuli were developed first, not as a response to the internet, but in the age of television. "
Revolts, race, Russia: 60 years on, 1956 is disconcertingly similar to 2016 - article by Simon Hall in The Guardian, based on his book 1956: The World in Revolt. "Headlines filled with turmoil in the Middle East, racial violence in the United States and arguments about Britain’s place in the world. Not from 2016, but 60 years ago. Towards the end of 1956 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr – the charismatic 27-year-old leader of the Montgomery bus boycott – delivered a rousing speech before an overflow crowd at the city’s Holt Street Baptist church. In a tumultuous year that had witnessed the Suez crisis, a popular uprising in Hungary and an upsurge in anti-colonial nationalism across Africa and the Middle East, King told the supporters of the boycott – whose own year-long struggle against segregated buses was on the brink of a historic triumph – that they were 'living in one of the most momentous periods in human history'. 'We stand today,' he declared, 'between two worlds – the dying old, and the emerging new.'... This battle, between the champions of freedom and the guardians of the old order, lay at the very heart of 1956 – one of the most dramatic years of the 20th century."
The science of resilience: how to teach students to persevere - article by Judy Wallis on The Guardian's Teacher Network. "In schools today, the focus is not only on helping students pass exams, but also on improving their character by making them more resilient. Resilience in learning, as in life, is about being able to persevere through setbacks, take on challenges and risk making mistakes to reach a goal.... It’s not always clear, however, how to develop more resilient students. I believe there are three main areas to focus on: a child’s competence, their tolerance to mistakes, and their ability to set goals. These components help young people to sustain effort even when a challenge seems too great.... When students make mistakes, explain that these are not failures: they are opportunities for the brain to build a bridge that will bring them success in future."
How to formulate a good resolution - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "What we want isn’t straightforward. At bedtime you might want to get up early and go for a run, but when your alarm goes off you find you actually want a lie-in. When exam day comes around you might want to be the kind of person who spent the afternoons studying, but on each of those afternoons you instead wanted to hang out with your friends. You could see these contradictions as failures of our self-control: impulses for temporary pleasures manage to somehow override our longer-term interests. One fashionable theory of self-control ... is the ‘ego-depletion’ account. This theory states that self-control is like a muscle. This means you can exhaust it in the short-term... My issue with it is that it reduces our willpower to something akin to oil in a tank. Not only does this seem too simplistic, but it sidesteps the core problem of self-control: who or what is controlling who or what? Why is it even the case that we can want both to yield to a temptation, and want to resist it at the same time? ... [George] Ainslie’s account begins with the idea that we have, within us, a myriad of competing impulses. ... Willpower is a bargaining game played by the forces within ourselves, and like any conflict of interest, if the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable isn’t clearly defined then small infractions can quickly escalate. For this reason, Ainslie says, resolutions cluster around ‘clean lines’, sharp distinctions around which no quibble is brooked.... This is why advice on good habits is often of the form 'Do X every day'... We know that if we leave the interpretation open to doubt, although our intentions are good, we’ll undermine our resolutions when we’re under the influence of our more immediate impulses."
Spotlight: the reporters who uncovered Boston's Catholic child abuse scandal - article by Henry Barnes in The Guardian. "The Spotlight team had identified 12 priests who they knew had been implicated in child sex abuse. They wanted to get the names out there, but Baron told them to hold their fire and aim for the bigger target: the Catholic church itself. 'Would an editor have that sort of restraint now?' asks [Josh Singer, co-writer of the film Spotlight]. 'As opposed to just throwing what you have up on the web? If you’d just run those names it would have been a he-said-she-said with every single one. Instead of talking about the bigger story, which is the system.' 'The internet has forced us to think in short bursts,' says [journalist Walter "Robby"] Robinson. 'We seldom have time to get a really strong grasp on what the full story is. Everybody’s trying to get morsels out there, instead of the full meal.' "
As Mein Kampf returns to Germany, the world is again awash with hatred - column by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Since 1945, every generation in the educated world has been taught “the lessons” of the rise of Nazism. But surveying the world at the start of 2016 it seems as if we have been learning the wrong lessons. The world is awash with hatred. And since around a quarter of its inhabitants have mobile social media accounts we are leaving a very detailed evidential trail about its spread.... It is impossible to view this global rise of rage, ethnic conflict, victimisation and the curtailment of democratic norms with anything other than alarm. In particular, because it is happening on the cusp of a second global economic downturn. The collapse of growth in those middle-income countries dependent on commodities, combined with mass unemployment in southern Europe and the stagnation of China, may not produce another catastrophic financial event. But it does not need to. The route to a different kind of catastrophe is all too clear, as countries resort to trade embargoes, currency war and overt manipulation of the oil supply as geopolitical tools. The result is likely to be the deglobalisation of the world; the political destabilisation of the emerging economies; more floods of refugees from conflict zones the west cannot be bothered to engage with. Amid all this, the danger is not just another demagogue toting a modern Mein Kampf; there are thousands of little Mein Kampfs being written on social media by people who feel victimised and betrayed and have come to the conclusion that someone else’s death, starvation, expulsion or torture would solve their problems."
Ruqia Hassan: the woman who was killed for telling the truth about Isis - article by Homa Khaleeli, Aisha Gani and Mais al-Bayaa in The Guardian. "Family members say that, in person, the 30-year-old was shy and quiet. Yet on social media she showed no fear, documenting with brutal honesty life [in Raqqa] under Isis, and never attempting to hide her disgust for it.... 'The only thing the secular man remembers from the Qur’an is that God is the most merciful, and everything comes from that,” she wrote. “The only thing the extreme Islamists memorise is one verse – to be tough with infidels and merciful to believers – but to the extreme Islamists, everyone is an infidel, whether Muslim or not.'... [Her cousin says] 'She taught many people a lesson they would never forget. She taught us not to fear the tyrant ... I’m sure we will have many other Ruqias from now.' "
Last Futures by Douglas Murphy: utopian architecture, from space colonies to ziggurats - review by Andy Beckett in The Guardian. "During the anxious early 1970s, when the west was spooked by the oil crisis and economic stagnation, by the first widespread fears for the environment and predictions of global overpopulation, a giddy alternative to it all began to seize the imaginations of some Americans: space colonies.... During the 80s, most of the utopian architectural schemes of the previous two decades were so quickly forgotten or derided ... that it was almost as if they had never existed. Murphy tells the story of this counter-revolution pithily and well. This is not a long book, but it is really about much more than buildings; it is a fresh and haunting way of explaining what happened to the radical 60s and 70s as a whole, in Murphy’s view quite possibly the last chance the west had of creating a decent and environmentally sustainable society. Like all good revisionist history, the book concludes unexpectedly. The flexible, socially responsive sort of building first conceived by progressive postwar architects lives on, he writes, but it has mutated into the supermarket, the open-plan office, the distribution warehouse – not usually spaces of liberation but of control. In Britain and beyond, the 60s and 70s did contain the seeds of a new world, just not quite the one Murphy’s heroes imagined."
JustCloud.com: the no-backup backup service I trusted to store my valuable files - consumer rights column in The Guardian. "I subscribed to the cloud backup service operated by JustCloud.com in 2014, then backed up daily. Its website promises: 'Your files are constantly backed up and you can access them at any time from any device in the world'. In particular, the 'restore' feature allows 'disaster recovery' to restore lost files in the event of a computer crash. Last November I had a PC problem which meant I had to reinstall Windows. I then tried in vain to restore my files from the cloud. After some days of dealing with the JustCloud tech team it admitted all my files had been 'deleted in error'. It offered me a refund and to cancel my subscription. I was appalled to discover they were not operating any backup of the data they are holding for others. The 'service' was clearly worthless.... I have written to the managing director but received no response."
These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real - article by Tom Vanderbilt in Nautilus. "[Ken Perlin, Director of the Media Research Lab at New York University] suddenly slips on his own head-mounted display, and he - or, rather, a large bright, animated figure that looks like some failed entry for an Olympic mascot competition - appears across the clearing from me. He waves his hand, tracing a line that seems to hang in the air. And then, with eyes no more lifelike than a snowman's two pieces of coal, he looks at me. This is a curiously powerful moment. Locking eyes with the simple avatar unleashes that warm, almost familiar prickling of human connection. What do you want from me? What can I do for you? Just the fact that someone else is in the virtual environment underscores the sense of 'social presence,' as media scholar Carrie Heeter has called it. 'If other people are in the virtual world, that is more evidence that the world exists.' The act of recognition inside a shared space validates both your existence and the existence of the space. A lack of recognition denies those things, not unlike the Hollywood trope in which a person, who has not yet learned he is a ghost, tries in vain to get other people’s attention. We are social mimickers. When we see our peers accepting the reality of an environment, we are encouraged to accept it too. Our behavior in virtual space is no different. While much of the current energy in virtual reality research is channeled into getting things to look real as possible, Perlin suggests that even with heightened visual verisimilitude, virtual reality will still feel solitary unless a compelling social presence is achieved. 'The holodeck,' says Perlin, 'is other people.' "
The bridge from education to experience - blog post by Harold Jarche. "When looking at the 70:20:10 model (Experience, Exposure, Education) the 10% formal education component is easy to understand, as is the 70% experience component. Less obvious is what makes up the 20% exposure component. Given the dominance of knowledge work in the modern workplace, the cognitive apprenticeship model may provide some insight. It includes six methods: (1) Modeling, (2) Coaching, (3) Scaffolding, (4) Articulation, (5) Reflection, (6) Exploration. While cognitive apprenticeship was originally designed for teachers working with students in a formal setting, it can be used in the workplace as well. In organizations where experts may be significantly more advanced in their skills than novices, there is a role for a knowledge journeyman. This person’s role would be to provide the six components of cognitive apprenticeship, and be a bridge between the experts and novices. Too often experts forget how they learned the basics and find it difficult to coach novices. Novices need the support of sense-makers as companions on their journey to mastery."
Connecting cooperation and collaboration - blog post by Harold Jarche. "According to The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often Yields Weaker Results, some of the reasons that workplace collaboration fails is due to: overconfidence in our collective thinking; peer pressure to conform; and reliance on others to do the work. The article goes on to show that collaboration works when: we work with people with different skills; we do what each person does best; and we all contribute our own work. This shows the underlying problem with collaboration. To be effective, collaborative work needs to be done by cooperative people."
Free love or genocide? The trouble with Utopias - article by Tobias Jones in The Guardian, based on his book A Place of Refuge." In 1999, John Carey published a great compendium of excerpts on the theme of utopias and dystopias. They grow, he wrote, 'from desire and fear … cry out for our sympathy and attention, however impractical or unlikely they appear'. To live without that alternative to contemporary society was to remove from record the dreams and nightmares of the human subconscious. To live without such a record was to live in a bland, thin world.... On 25 January, London’s Somerset House begins 12 months of exhibitions, installations and commissions to investigate the renewed allure of utopianism. One of the most eye-catching events is the opportunity to see the view from Anarres, the anarchic planet in one of the last century’s greatest novels, Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. In that interplanetary book, the arch-anarchist Shevek travels to a new planet, and struggles to understand the 'propertarian' anxieties: 'Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they died poor?' "
Tuesday, 26 January 2016
Engineering an online community: lessons from a student-centred hack day
A chance to spend a whole day with twenty of our students, selected from over 140 volunteers, for a workshop to find ways of teaching them better: too good to miss. The workshop was run like a coding “hack day”: each team identifying a problem, then developing a solution, prototyping it, and pitching it to the whole group with votes and a prize for the best conception. It was intense and fun (as hopefully comes across from the Twitter posts during the day), but for me the strongest sign of something important happening was that the problem my team chose to work on was not something I’d have guessed at all, despite my many years working in the field: testimony to the power and importance of bringing students into the process.
What’s the biggest problem you face in your studying? we asked the two students in my team. Both of them in different ways pointed to the problem of isolation and the difficulty of contact with other students. The first wanted to be able to share impressions with others, to see how they were responding to the same questions; online forums should have helped her, but she found that other students didn’t reply to her posts, and that in general people tended just to post their own ideas, at length, without responding to others. Long travelling distances were an obstacle to her attending face-to-face tutorials. The second student, on a foreign language course, wanted to find other students with whom to practice speaking; online tutorials enabled this, but low attendance put extra pressure on those who did attend, with added stress when the technology was unreliable. Hearing them talk, I remembered that the problem of student isolation is THE fundamental problem of distance education. I’d forgotten it because the problem has been around for so long, and because we’ve made so many efforts to solve it; what I realised was that despite forty years and more of trying, with all the latest technology at our disposal, we still haven’t really cracked it.
In trying to address the problem of student isolation, I think we’ve been ill-served by academic talk about “community” and in particular “learning community”. In health and social care, “community” has become notorious as a fantasy concept: that thing for which we all long to alleviate our sense of alienation in an individualised and fragmented society – ignoring the fact that communities are not necessarily benign or supportive. In education too, there has been something of the same hippy-like dream of creating “learning communities”, as networks of cooperative sharing and the collaborative construction of knowledge. Efforts to document actual learning communities has not been accompanied by comparable analysis of how they can be deliberately created, sustained and developed, and instead there has been an unhealthy fixation on collaboration as the highest form of participation in a learning community, with less intense forms – such as mere cooperation, or sharing, or (worst of all) “lurking” - relegated to lower rungs on the hierarchy of community engagement.
Yet “community” can be a meaningful concept even if there is only identification and no interaction. I remember once commenting to a colleague that my wife and I were Trekkies, Star Trek fans. “Oh,” she said, “what do you do?” I think she imagined that we went to conventions dressed as Klingons or something, so she was rather disappointed by my answer: “Well, we watch the TV show, and we rather enjoy it.” When I told this story at the Hack Day, two other members of my team to my surprise enthusiastically self-identified as Trekkies, showing that even this minimal level of identification with a community can have social significance.
More importantly, there can be practical outcomes from even low levels of community engagement. When I’m working out at the gym, I don’t interact with other gym users, and I don’t particularly want to; yet I can see them doing what they’re doing, and the fact that they’re there and working out also gives a spur to my motivation and persistence. “Exactly,” said one of our students, when I made this comparison. He regularly went to his local university library to work, so as to be in the midst of other people at study – even if they were studying different things – which helped him work longer and harder than he would have done at home.
The critical point of insight for me came when I realised that he didn’t have this sense of working alongside others with the other students on his course. He had no perception of the other students in his geographical area, who would be potential partners for face-to-face language practice, for example. Ideas started to ping rapidly now: I had a vision of a Google maps display, showing the geographical location of other students on his course (for privacy reasons, probably limited to the first part of the postcode); a faculty colleague had a vision of a dating app, which matched students with similar “would like to meet” profiles in the same geographical area or with a willingness to meet online.
And so, with the assistance of a super-smart graphic designer, we mocked up a screenshot of our solution: a view of the student’s community as >the first< screen a student sees on entering the University’s online environment. It included:
- a map showing the locations (approximate for privacy reasons) of other students (either on the course, on the qualification, or in the OU), with roll-over pop-ups of their profiles (for those who have made their profile public), and the colour of the indicator showing when they are online
- a roster of designated “friends” or “buddies” with whom the student already has contact, with again a colour indicator showing when they are online
- an “Ask the community” message board, switchable between messaging students on the course, the qualification, and the OU as a whole (this was a more modest substitute for the “dating app”, though we still thought this was a good idea).
Our choice of student isolation as a problem was validated when we discovered that two other teams had also chosen to address it, though in very different ways: one conceived an app for instant messaging with other students or with a tutor, and the other aimed to improve the effectiveness of online forums. It was the app which won the popular vote at the end of the day, but we still thought our solution was a good one because it embodied three critical features, necessary for students to build their own community:
- mutual visibility of online presence (if you can’t see the community, you won’t interact with it)
- flexible levels of engagement (you can interact minimally or massively, or start small and build, or drop back if other pressures intervene)
- viable even with initial low participation (unlike an empty forum, the community is visible and invites interaction even before anyone has done anything).
And the best thing about our solution, we thought, is that it requires no new technology: just the common social media tools, already familiar to a good proportion of our students. It can be done right now. Now we just have the challenge of making it happen!
Wednesday, 20 January 2016
By Grabthar's hammer, what an actor!
RIP Alan Rickman, who died last Friday. He was romantically wonderful in Truly Madly Deeply and scarily psychopathic in Die Hard, but the role for which I remember him most fondly is Alexander Dane in the Star Trek spoof (or should that be homage) Galaxy Quest. Dane is an English actor, who to his chagrin owes his fame to having played an alien in a sci-fi TV show, long-cancelled but still beloved by its devoted fans. Like Alec Guiness, whose ambivalent relationship with his character in Star Wars is well-known, he resents the fans who try to prompt him into declaiming his character's catch-phrase and the cheesy supermaket opening appearances he is forced to attend to maintain his income. Only when the cast of the TV show are kidnapped by real aliens, who think that they are real space heroes, does he have to play his part for real and in it discovers new meaning.
The compilation here contains some of his best moments, thought not for me the best of all. The crew are in a shuttlecraft, descending to a planet to search for a way of repairing their damanged ship, when Guy Fleegman, who played a minor part in a single episode, starts to panic. His character was a "redshirt", someone who exists purely to be killed off early in the episode to show that the danger is serious, and he fears that will be his role in real life too. The rest of the cast (except Dane) try to reassure him; perhaps he will turn out to be the plucky comic relief? His whimpering is interrupted when Alan Rickman from the back of the shuttlecraft asks in acid tones: "Are we there yet?"
Sunday, 17 January 2016
Seen and heard: December 2015
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.
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.
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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)