Leonard by William Shatner: the secrets of Kirk’s 50-year friendship with Spock - review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "It wasn’t simply the two men’s contrasting appearance that defined their early career options ('choices' would imply far too much autonomy – they took everything they were offered). Shatner is excellent on the way that he and Nimoy’s story also turns on the distinction between their acting styles. Shatner, who had trained under Tyrone Guthrie at the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario, was always an outside-in player, fluent in the kind of stagey gestural acting that you associate with prewar Olivier. By the time he got to perform Kirk as an essentially Shakespearean hero, brave but given to soul-wrenching soliloquies, Shatner had yanked the English language out of any natural rhythm into a wilfully bumpy pattern of pauses, bunching and sudden rills. Nimoy, by contrast, was 'method' through and through. He started from the inside and worked outwards, and the result was a kind of mannered naturalism. Fine if you were doing Clifford Odets on Broadway, but slightly laborious if you were playing a character who could best be summed up by a pair of latex rabbit ears and a slathering of Max Factor 'Chinese Yellow'. Still, it worked. Shatner’s scenery-chewing allowed Nimoy to retreat into the internalised drama of Spock, a creature caught between his rational Vulcan brain and his messy human heart."
Performing King Lear by Jonathan Croall: ‘you have to rip your heart out’ - review by Simon Callow in The Guardian. "Every one of the actors interviewed in the book is exercised and sometimes defeated by the question of what to make of the astounding scene of the king’s arrival and his abrupt call to business... Is he a benevolent dictator? A capricious tyrant? A foolish old man? Is the division of the kingdom a good idea, or a deranged one? How mad, in fact, is he? How powerful? How old? Almost immediately, he embarks on an interrogation of the daughters to whom he is bequeathing the segments of his kingdom: how much do they love him? Are these questions an impulse of the moment? Or do they stem from insecurity, vanity, profound calculation? Two sisters vie with each other in protestations of love, one refuses to answer. Are Goneril and Regan wickedly manipulative? Or are they doing their best with a barmy old dad? Is Cordelia principled, or a prig? Or are all these questions irrelevant?"
The Life Project: what makes some people happy, healthy and successful and others not? - article by Helen Pearson in The Guardian. "In March 1946, scientists recorded the birth of almost every British baby born in one, cold week. They have been following thousands of them ever since, in what has become the longest running major study of human development in the world. These people – who turn 70 over the next two weeks − are some of the best studied people on the planet.... Often, the observations that scientists have made through these studies have not made for comfortable reading: they have revealed the persistent inequalities in society, and how the obesity epidemic has hit us hard. As one scientist told me, the birth cohorts hold a mirror up to Britain, and sometimes we don’t like what we see."
The death of the digital native: four provocations - article by Donna Lanclos from her talk at Digifest. ("In these four provocations, anthropologist Donna Lanclos argues that the notion of the 'digital native' is bogus and disempowering, that pandering to student expectations can backfire, universities should be open by default, and our attitude to educational technology needs a rethink.") "The 'digital native' is a generational metaphor. It's a linguistic metaphor. It's a ridiculous metaphor. It's the notion that there is a particular generation of people who are fundamentally unknowable and incomprehensible.... The workshops we're developing with Jisc are around helping people to visualise their practices so that if they do want to change, at least they know where they're starting from. It's so much more empowering a metaphor than native/immigrant. It's about what you do and why you do it, not about who you are as a person. It takes some of the value judgements out of descriptions of modes of behaviour."
The Game of Fibble - blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin. "I present the rules of Fibble, as invented and developed by E. and C. Le Guin and L. Howell, and named by U. Le Guin.... [1] Two to four players, the more the merrier. [2] The only words allowed are words that (so far as anybody there knows) do not exist. [3] If another player recognizes that a word you made is a real English word, you have to take it apart and make one that isn’t. [4] After you have placed this word on the [standard Scrabble] board, you must pronounce and define it to the other players.... [A few examples of words and definitions:] ESWOX: a kind of footgear worn by the ZOMOI, a warlike people of the Albanian hinterland. TORG: a piece of leg armor worn with eswox. PURPODED: past tense of the verb purpode, to intend to do something which blows up in your face. FLOTT: a wet fart. LORPINE, adj.: lying around on your face not doing anything The KOUDHIAD: the great epic of the grasslands, recounting the deeds of the hero Koudh. NAGNEET, beloved of the hero Koudh, a beautiful maiden but ill-natured. ANAGNEET, sister of Nagneet, less beautiful but much nicer."
Beyond email: could startup Slack change the way you work? - article by Jemima Kiss in The Guardian. "Slack is part of a wave of technologies trying to change the way we communicate, enabling continuous, fluid, more natural conversations to replace restrictive and time-consuming emails. Already, more than 2.3 million people use it every day, sending 1.5bn messages every month. ... Despite being founded by four white men, Slack has defied Silicon Valley’s self-reinforcing recruitment patterns to create probably the most diverse company in tech’s top tier. It feels like a company run by grownups; there is no ping pong at its San Francisco HQ, and its brand of conscientious, thoughtful culture has attracted staff such as [black female ex-Google employee] Erica Baker."
What do Islamist extremists believe? Salafi-Jihadism by Shiraz Maher – review by Patrick French in The Guardian. "During the 1990s, fighters and revolutionaries from diverse theatres – the Algerian civil war, Bosnia, Chechnya, Tunisia, the Afghan victory over the Soviets, the crushed Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – were looking for a new ideological direction. 'The violence of groups like al-Qaida and associated movements is neither irrational nor whimsical,' Maher states. 'For every act of violence they will offer some form of reference to scriptural sources.' ... In every sphere of life, the Islamist worldview was transmuting and the quietists were eclipsed. As the French academic Olivier Roy has written, this was as much about the Islamisation of radicalism as it was about the radicalisation of Islam. Militant Sunni groups reinterpreted rules on warfare to develop what Maher calls a 'novel doctrine of vicarious liability,' enabling them to target individual citizens of democracies, since these citizens had chosen their governments and were therefore responsible for their decisions. Muslims were told they must, in an existentialist way, take action if they were not to break their covenant with God. Democracy was presented not as a system to safeguard the rights of individuals, but as a damaging creed that separated religion from public life: divine sovereignty must be secured within an earthly political system. The idea of Muslim exclusivity expanded in new ways, and militants were instructed not to accept the support of unbelievers. Since the US was 'the central base of corruption and moral decay', those who excused its actions were apostates."
Blood, Met and tears: the homeless singers who discovered a Passion - article based on diary entries by Penny Woolcock in The Guardian. "January 2014. Streetwise Opera’s weekly workshops are open to anybody who is homeless or has experienced homelessness, as well as members of the wider community. They are run like any amateur choir, with professional workshop leaders, small public events and a big show every couple of years. Performers turn up to sing and not to discuss their problems – a revolutionary concept that I have grown to love and respect. It was Matt Peacock, founder and CEO, who asked whether I would like to direct Bach’s St Matthew Passion with Streetwise in collaboration with The Sixteen, one of the world’s greatest early music ensembles...." [See recording of the Easter 2016 production at http://streetwiseopera.org/films/streetwise-opera-and-sixteens-passion.]
Sunday, 3 April 2016
Seen and heard: March 2016
The Mass on the World – meditation day led by our friend Lynne Scholefield on Teillhard de Chardin’s extraordinary work, conceived and first drafted when he was a stretcher bearer in the Great War: on my reconstruction, his spiritual response to the suffering and devastation but also the humanity and compassion which he witnessed. As a Jesuit priest, the strongest thing he could conceive to hold these extreme contradictions was the altar of the Mass; and so, at sunrise with no table, paten or chalice, he celebrates the Mass, offering instead the visualised presence of all the suffering and all the hope in the world. A very personal response, but one which has resonance now, as the world seems to be being torn apart once again.
The Art of Scandinavia – BBC TV series, with Andrew Graham-Dixon as our amiable guide around the history and art of Norway (lots of angst), Denmark (lots of bricks) and Sweden (lots of minimalist furniture).
Bridge of Spies – gripping and heart-warming Cold War spy film from Steven Spielberg, with great performances from Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance and an agreeably slow and measured pace not much seen in mainstream films these days.
The Passion – very moving staged performance of a skilfully-filleted version of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion by Streetwise Opera, whose players are all homeless or formerly homeless people, and The Sixteen’s professional singers and instrumentalists. The amateur performers and market-place venue gave it the immediacy and groundedness of a medieval mystery play, with the the homeless people sharing amongst them the role of Jesus (Christ as Everyman?) – the rough-and-ready quality of their singing being more than out-weighed by the power and presence of their dramatic performances. The whole was held within the matrix of The Sixteen’s professional musicians, who performed whilst walking amongst the actors and audience as the story demanded, and the really fabulous dramatic narration from Joshua Ellicott as The Evangelist. A tremendous project, which I’m so glad has been documented and recorded.
Lines of thought – exhibition celebrating 600 years of the Cambridge University Library, with choice exhibits arranged in six historical lines: communication, scripture, gravity, genetics, history and anatomy. A chance to see a Newton manuscript, a Gutenberg bible, a Darwin notebook, and so on; but interesting rather than illuminating. Nice website and digital resources, though.
The Art of Scandinavia – BBC TV series, with Andrew Graham-Dixon as our amiable guide around the history and art of Norway (lots of angst), Denmark (lots of bricks) and Sweden (lots of minimalist furniture).
Bridge of Spies – gripping and heart-warming Cold War spy film from Steven Spielberg, with great performances from Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance and an agreeably slow and measured pace not much seen in mainstream films these days.
The Passion – very moving staged performance of a skilfully-filleted version of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion by Streetwise Opera, whose players are all homeless or formerly homeless people, and The Sixteen’s professional singers and instrumentalists. The amateur performers and market-place venue gave it the immediacy and groundedness of a medieval mystery play, with the the homeless people sharing amongst them the role of Jesus (Christ as Everyman?) – the rough-and-ready quality of their singing being more than out-weighed by the power and presence of their dramatic performances. The whole was held within the matrix of The Sixteen’s professional musicians, who performed whilst walking amongst the actors and audience as the story demanded, and the really fabulous dramatic narration from Joshua Ellicott as The Evangelist. A tremendous project, which I’m so glad has been documented and recorded.
Lines of thought – exhibition celebrating 600 years of the Cambridge University Library, with choice exhibits arranged in six historical lines: communication, scripture, gravity, genetics, history and anatomy. A chance to see a Newton manuscript, a Gutenberg bible, a Darwin notebook, and so on; but interesting rather than illuminating. Nice website and digital resources, though.
Sunday, 6 March 2016
Seen and heard: February 2016
The Lady in the Van – film of Alan Bennett’s stage play, based on his diaries, themselves deriving from real events. Several whole new dimensions are added by the film treatment, first among which is the uncomfortable and frequently disgusting realism of Mary Shepherd’s presence in first a smart North London street and then in Alan Bennett’s driveway, and second is the sharp dialogue and interplay between Bennett the writer and Bennett the person living out the events, which on screen can be actually played by the same actor – tremendous performance by Alex Jennings – with the added impact of close reaction shots. The excellence of Maggie Smith’s performance goes without saying. Fun also to re-read Alan Bennett’s diary of the filming.
Game Design Workshop: A Play Centric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, by Tracy Fullerton – best book on game design I’ve read for ages. Each chapter works through one aspect of game design, with exercises inviting the reader to apply the concepts to games familiar to them – the activity which would be workshopped in a face-to-face course, such as the one Fullerton teacher. I thought I was pretty familiar with game design, but every chapter has an insight for me. (See quote in my Cuttings for this month, on the importance of fixing on the player experience – for which read learner experience if you follow the analogy, as I’ve done frequently, between game design and learning design.)
The Night Manager - blisteringly good and powerful TV adaptation updating John Le Carre’s novel to the present, with Tom Hiddleston somehow both effacing and attention-grabbing as the hotel night manager of the title, Olivia Coleman gripping and empathetic as the spymaster, Tom Hollander a million miles away from his goofy dramatic roles (Mr Collins in Price and Prejudice, Rev) as the international arms dealer’’s sinister chief of operations, and Hugh Laurie both affably relaxed and scarily sharp as the arms dealer Richard Roper himself. The moments of sickening violence are a reminder of the death and mass destruction lurking behind the glamorous locations.
The Philadelphia Story – watched on TV. Because like most people I'm more familiar with the musical updated version High Society, I was struck by the quality of the writing (it should be good, since it derives from a stage play) and by the quite specific satirical target of the old Quaker families which seemingly then still in 1940 dominated Philadelphia like an aristocracy (the surname of Katherine Hepburn’s character, significantly, is Lord)
Game Design Workshop: A Play Centric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, by Tracy Fullerton – best book on game design I’ve read for ages. Each chapter works through one aspect of game design, with exercises inviting the reader to apply the concepts to games familiar to them – the activity which would be workshopped in a face-to-face course, such as the one Fullerton teacher. I thought I was pretty familiar with game design, but every chapter has an insight for me. (See quote in my Cuttings for this month, on the importance of fixing on the player experience – for which read learner experience if you follow the analogy, as I’ve done frequently, between game design and learning design.)
The Night Manager - blisteringly good and powerful TV adaptation updating John Le Carre’s novel to the present, with Tom Hiddleston somehow both effacing and attention-grabbing as the hotel night manager of the title, Olivia Coleman gripping and empathetic as the spymaster, Tom Hollander a million miles away from his goofy dramatic roles (Mr Collins in Price and Prejudice, Rev) as the international arms dealer’’s sinister chief of operations, and Hugh Laurie both affably relaxed and scarily sharp as the arms dealer Richard Roper himself. The moments of sickening violence are a reminder of the death and mass destruction lurking behind the glamorous locations.
The Philadelphia Story – watched on TV. Because like most people I'm more familiar with the musical updated version High Society, I was struck by the quality of the writing (it should be good, since it derives from a stage play) and by the quite specific satirical target of the old Quaker families which seemingly then still in 1940 dominated Philadelphia like an aristocracy (the surname of Katherine Hepburn’s character, significantly, is Lord)
Cuttings: February 2016
This Is London by Ben Judah: the truth about a capital city utterly transformed - review by Blake Morrison in The Guardian. " Ben Judah’s epic account of contemporary London is ... motivated by a desire to show our capital in its true (new) colours: as a megacity of global migrants, some of them rich, most of them poor, few of them happy with their lot. Knightsbridge gets a chapter and so does Mayfair’s Berkeley Square, but it’s the people and places further out that really interest him – the Poles, Somalis, Afghans and Ghanaians in areas such as Beckton, Ilford, Edmonton, Catford and Harlesden. The ethnic majority, in other words: the 55% of London’s population that isn’t white British.... It’s when Judah sits down with someone and listens that the book really takes off. He is brilliant at getting people to speak: the London Underground cleaner; the Polish builder; the Egyptian heiress; the Filipina housemaid; the imam who washes the bodies of the dead; the teacher; the carer; the gang leader. Among the mass of migrant stories are recurring tales of the glamour of London as seen from afar, and the grime, fear, poverty and violence seen close up. We learn a lot about the work that migrants do and how they see the British. Mean, ugly, lazy, cruel, secretive and snobbish are among the words used about us, though there is respect for our constitution and amusement at how we’re always saying sorry."
Exhibition at the pictures: Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence on screen - article by Orhan Pamuk in The Guardian. "I conceived the novel and the museum simultaneously, and explained the complex link between them in the novel: a young man from a wealthy, westernised Istanbul family falls in love with a poor distant relation, and when his love goes unrequited, he finds solace in collecting everything his beloved has ever touched. Finally, as we learn at the end of the book, he takes all of these objects from daily life – postcards, photographs, matchsticks, saltshakers, keys, dresses, film clips, and toys, mementoes of his doomed love affair and of the Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s whose streets he wandered with his lover – and displays them in the Museum of Innocence.... Innocence of Memories is based as much on the novel as it is on the objects that inspired it (clocks, coffee cups, photographs, clips from old movies set in Istanbul), on daydreams layered in poetic sequence, and on the actual landscape of the city. The camera’s exploration of the places where I found the objects for my collection befits my vision of what museums should be: the key to the future of museums is in our homes, in our daily lives, and on the streets.... Once I started wandering the streets of Istanbul in preparation for the novel and the museum, raiding flea markets, secondhand bookstores, and the homes of friends and family for old pillboxes, ashtrays, framed pictures of mosques, identity cards and passport photos, I realised that collecting artefacts for a museum is not very different from collecting stories and facts for a novel."
It’s not Cyberspace anymore - article by Danah Boyd in online magazine Points, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "It’s been 20 years — 20 years!? — since John Perry Barlow wrote 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' — a rant in response to the government and corporate leaders who descend on a certain snowy resort town each year as part of the World Economic Forum (WEF).... 'Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.'... When Barlow penned his declaration, he was speaking on behalf of cyberspace, as though we were all part of one homogeneous community. And, in some sense, we were. We were geeks and freaks and queers. But over the last twenty years, tech has become the underpinning of so many sectors, of so much interaction. Those of us who wanted cyberspace to be universal couldn’t imagine a world in which our dreams got devoured by Silicon Valley. Tech is truly mainstream — and politically powerful — and yet many in tech still want to see themselves as outsiders.... There is a power shift underway and much of the tech sector is ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful. Worse, a collection of unicorns who see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility. They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings."
Practice and the Development of Expertise - article by Tom Gram in his blog Performance x Design. "It seems ... signatures of expertise are the result of years of effortful, progressive practice on authentic tasks accompanied by relevant feedback and support, with self-reflection and correction. The research team have labeled this activity 'Deliberate Practice'. Others have called it deep practice and intentional practice. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or at all. Six elements for are necessary for practice (or on the job experience) to be 'deliberate' practice: (1) It must be designed to improve performance. ... . Years of everyday experience does not necessarily create an expert. Years of deliberate practice does.... (2) It must be based on authentic tasks.... (3) The practice must be challenging.... (4) Immediate feedback on resuls.... (5) Reflection and adjustment.... (6) 10,000 hours... Fortunately we have a number of approaches available to us that align well to the conditions of deliberate practice... (a) Action learning... (b) Cognitive apprenticeship... (c) Communities of practice... (d) Simulation and games... (e) Feedback in the workflow... (f) Stretch assignments with coaching... (g) Open practice centres."
Can you make your own happiness? - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "There might be a ... general rule here: that whatever self-improvement schemes you’re most attracted to, they’re the ones you should avoid, because your attraction could be rooted in fear of the alternatives. Applied rationality holds out the promise that self-mastery is possible, and that you can control how life unfolds. It assumes we know, roughly, what happiness would look like, and just need help making it happen. But if you’re already strongly invested in that viewpoint, there’s probably more to be gained from exploring the ways in which life isn't controllable, or the possibility that you don’t know what’s best, that reason isn’t always the answer. Put down that rationalist handbook and take up yoga, or magic mushrooms, or gardening, or dance, or prayer. Yet consistency requires I ask the same thing of myself. Why am I so keen to believe reason and data can’t be the path to fulfilment? Am I looking for excuses not to change, by painting my failings as too mysterious and complex for mere rationality to address?"
Mein Kampf: Eine Kritische Edition: taking the sting out of Hitler’s hateful book - review by Neil Gregor in The Guardian. "What impact will the republication have? There have been no shortage of lazy attempts to juxtapose the republication of Mein Kampf with the rising political tensions that have attended the massive influx of refugees into Germany. Such arguments stand within a long, undistinguished tradition of casting every act of everyday racism in Germany as evidence that the country stands permanently on the brink of the Fourth Reich. But if we are looking for the drift towards nationalist authoritarianism we should be looking at Poland; if we are concerned about populist nationalism the more obvious danger lies in France. Even the phenomenon of Pegida is too easily interpreted against the background of Germany’s Nazi past, whereas in reality its ugly blend of nationalism, Islamophobia and hostility to multiculturalism makes more sense when examined alongside Ukip. The point is not to suggest that Germany is now an oasis of decency in a desert of xenophobia. Rather, it is to underline that manifestations of far-right politics now draw on quite different sources to those that Hitler once did. Mein Kampf can now only really be read as history."
#Twitter crisis? Not if it decides that it can be a smaller, smarter platform - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "Whereas it is easy to give an answer to the question 'What is Facebook?', the answers for Twitter depend on who you ask. Technically, it’s a platform-independent micro-blogging service with a limit per post of 140 characters. For geeks, it’s a human-mediated RSS feed – that is to say, a way of plugging into the thought streams of people you choose to 'follow'. For celebrities, it’s a way to broadcast to fans. For journalists, it’s an efficient way of conveying breaking news from anywhere. For some people, it’s a combination of a giant phone book, a personal radio station and what used to be called a “party line” in the old days of telephony. For others, such as blogger Jeff Goins, it’s 'the cheapest way to send an instant message to someone interested in you ... the easiest mode of finding breaking news that’s relevant to you ... the most effortless way to meet a celebrity. Twitter is not the main stage; it’s the backstage. What happens over coffee and face-to-face, while others are schmoozing and dropping business cards on tables.' And so on, ad infinitum."
I love you, I love you, I love you … why we can’t stop using those three little words - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The most recent modern rendering of this very British difficulty with getting the words out is probably Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which Charles (Hugh Grant) can only manage it by running after Carrie (Andie McDowell) on London’s South Bank and saying, 'Er, in the words of David Cassidy … while he was still with the Partridge Family … er, I think I love you.' Charles’s inability to say 'I love you' without scare quotes is just the most debilitating symptom of his general problem with words, which he tends to deploy in the service of embarrassing faux pas or creative reworkings of 'Fuck'. His deaf brother David has to intervene on his behalf at his wedding to the wrong woman, allowing him to finally speak of his love for Carrie through sign language."
Sonnet (inspired by Sonnet 22) - revisiting of Shakespeare sonnet by Wendy Cope in The Guardian. "My glass can’t quite persuade me I am old – In that respect my ageing eyes are kind – But when I see a photograph, I’m told The dismal truth: I’ve left my youth behind...."
Terry Pratchett statue to bring Discworld author home to Salisbury - news piece by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Almost 9,000 people have signed a petition calling for a permanent statue of the Discworld author, who died last year, to be installed in a prominent position in his hometown.... The statue is set to be designed by Paul Kidby, the artist whose iconic illustrations adorn Pratchett’s Discworld books.... His drawing suggests a life-sized statue of Pratchett in bronze, in which the author is, he says, 'standing in a relaxed pose, wearing his iconic hat and carrying a book under his arm.... There is the possibility to add some Nac Mac Feegles (Scottish-style pixies from Pratchett’s writing) to the sculpture, which would add an element of humour and surprise to the piece. I think these Feegles would be best placed behind Terry’s feet so they only visible when walking to the back of the sculpture. I think they should be doing something mischievous such as prising the letters off the base and carrying them off – or similar. These small characters would bring an aspect of his Discworld creation directly into the overall piece.' ”
You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]: a killer’s testimony - review by Gavin Knight in The Guardian. "The Northumbria Police won’t ever forget Raoul Moat. The week of July 2010 when Moat went on the rampage was unprecedented. Moat, a 37-year-old Geordie bodybuilder, was serving a short sentence for assault in Durham prison when his 22-year-old girlfriend Sam dumped him for a younger man. Two days after his release, Moat shot and killed the new boyfriend with a sawn-off shotgun, then turned it on Sam, hospitalising her. He declared war on the Northumbria police and blinded one of their officers, who was sitting unarmed in his car. On the run for seven days, Moat camped out in the woods of Northumberland.... Surrounded by armed police, Moat shot and killed himself.... Now Andrew Hankinson, a journalist from Newcastle, has constructed a narrative from Moat’s own written and recorded source material. Why devote a book to him? His purpose is to show Moat as a product of our culture and society. The author takes us inside the killer’s head without giving the reader the privilege of distance in which to judge and dismiss him. The result is an uncomfortable, claustrophobic read.... He deploys the urgent present tense and the second person. 'They release you from prison at 10.55am.' This gives the narrative the feel of an unfolding video game. It also has the familiarity of advertising copy, the 'you' of opportunity, which is compounded by the ironic title and cover in the style of a 50s advert."
Preston Sturges: how a master of daftness conquered Hollywood - article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. "It was a sprint worthy of his greatest farces: between 1937 and 1944, Preston Sturges made some of the funniest films Hollywood ever produced, including The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. Then suddenly, as if his frantic, frenzied comedies had exhausted not only himself but his form, Sturges ran out of steam. Blending the comical and serious, farcical and cerebral, high and low, Sturges found catalytic energy in mixing formulas like a madcap scientist; as if he had released actual kinetic energy, he went ricocheting through Hollywood cinema, until he fell to earth with a thud."
All the attention came from women telling me how stupid my book was - article by Polly Vernon in The Guardian. "I knew Hot Feminist would prove contentious when I wrote it.... While the reviewers were at odds about Hot Feminist, Twitter was united. My book and I instantly became the target of unbridled internet scorn.... I tried fronting it out, but I couldn’t sustain the defence. I was promoting the book on TV and at festivals, wired on caffeine and adrenaline, not really eating, not really sleeping; checking Twitter compulsively. Four days after publication, I developed a facial twitch. ... I got over it. It took time, friends, therapy, a couple more good reviews, quitting Twitter. Now? I’m fine. Almost completely restored. Almost. Because I do wonder if I’ll ever take such risks – publish anything as heartfelt, as exposing – again. Probably not. And I wonder who else is choosing not to say things they really mean, for fear of how Twitter will react."
Play nice! How the internet is trying to design out toxic behaviour - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "A software engineer who built and moderated online comment platforms, [Aja] Bogdanoff spent her days wading through insults, and her spare time firefighting more urgent incidents. She could see platforms being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of antisocial users, but couldn’t figure out how to get one jump ahead of them.... '[Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature] says people always believe that their actions are justified. No matter what they’re doing, they think there’s a valid reason,' she recalls... 'So, I realised we had to get in there and interrupt that process; make people think about it, that these are real people.' Instead of constantly running to catch up with 'bad' posters, could she design better behaviour in from the start?... This is where Civil Comments, the startup Bogdanoff founded with Christa Mrgan, comes in. The idea is simple (although the software is so complex it took a year to build): before posting a comment in a forum or below an article, users must rate two randomly selected comments from others for quality of argument and civility (defined as an absence of personal attacks or abuse). Ratings are crunched to build up a picture of what users of any given site will tolerate, which is then useful for flagging potentially offensive material. Crucially, users must then rate their own comment for civility, and can rewrite it if they want (in testing, about 5% did)."
How we made Angry Birds - feature by Jaakko Ilsalo and Tuomo Lehtinen in The Guardian. "I was working on something that let you sling balls around, then I added some blocks for them to collide into. When we got the birds from Jaakko, things all started to come together. But the aiming mechanism wasn’t working: the birds didn’t fly where you expected them to, which wasn’t fun – players had to be able to figure out where they had failed. Jaakko spent a lot of time tweaking the blocks, too, so that when there was a hit, things broke in a way that was satisfying: they couldn’t collapse too easily, couldn’t wobble too much. We initially had a castle much closer to the slingshot – you could see both on screen – but when we moved it further away, the extra flight time meant the anticipation and excitement grew."
England’s schools make us the extremists of Europe - article by Danny Dorling in The Guardian, based on his book A Better Poltics: How Government Can Make Us Happier. "In terms of education, instead of looking at ways to increase wellbeing, England has turned itself into the extremist of Europe and the effects are not going to make anyone happier. Education in England is expanding into new extremes of elitism. The covert message is that a small elite, made up of superior individuals, should lead us. The mechanism to select such individuals is being constantly honed.... Universities say they want to attract the most academically able individuals – without justifying how they define 'most able'.... Like the clergy and conjurors of old, their academic judgments can never be questioned. In schools, we rank institutions by the performance of the children – and the result is that schools are encouraged to exclude those least likely to do well in exams.... Our government encourages it and apparently has no idea that in this England is highly unusual in Europe."
Four neuromyths that are still prevalent in schools: debunked - article by Bradley Busch in The Guardian Teacher Network. "Many 'neuromyths' are rampant in our classrooms, and research suggests that people are often seduced by neuroscientific explanations, even if these are not accurate or even relevant.... Such myths are a drain on time and money, and it is important to explore and expose them. So which popular neuromyths exist in schools and how did they catch on? (1) Learning styles... (2) You only use 10% of your brain... (3) Right brain v. left brain.... (4) Playing brain games makes you smarter."
'The Role of the Game Designer' - Chapter 1 of Game Design Workshop: A Play Centric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, by Tracy Fullerton, 3rd edition, CRC Press (Boca Raton, FL), 2014. "As a game designer, a large part of your role is to keep your concentration focused on the player experience and not allow yourself to be distracted by the other concerns of production. Let the art director worry about the imagery, the producer stress over the budget, and the technical director focus on the engine. Your main job is to make sure that when the game is delivered, it provides superior gameplay.... In some ways, designing a game is like being the host of a party. As the host, it's your job to get everything ready - food, drinks, decorations, music to set the mood - and then you open the doors to your guests and see what happens. The results are not always predictable or what you envisioned. A game, like a party, is an interactive experience that is only fully realized after your guests arrive. What type of party will your game be like? Will your players sit like wallflowers in your living room? Will they stumble around trying to find the coatroom closet? Or will they laugh and talk and meet new people, hoping the night will never end?" (pp 3-4)
Exhibition at the pictures: Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence on screen - article by Orhan Pamuk in The Guardian. "I conceived the novel and the museum simultaneously, and explained the complex link between them in the novel: a young man from a wealthy, westernised Istanbul family falls in love with a poor distant relation, and when his love goes unrequited, he finds solace in collecting everything his beloved has ever touched. Finally, as we learn at the end of the book, he takes all of these objects from daily life – postcards, photographs, matchsticks, saltshakers, keys, dresses, film clips, and toys, mementoes of his doomed love affair and of the Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s whose streets he wandered with his lover – and displays them in the Museum of Innocence.... Innocence of Memories is based as much on the novel as it is on the objects that inspired it (clocks, coffee cups, photographs, clips from old movies set in Istanbul), on daydreams layered in poetic sequence, and on the actual landscape of the city. The camera’s exploration of the places where I found the objects for my collection befits my vision of what museums should be: the key to the future of museums is in our homes, in our daily lives, and on the streets.... Once I started wandering the streets of Istanbul in preparation for the novel and the museum, raiding flea markets, secondhand bookstores, and the homes of friends and family for old pillboxes, ashtrays, framed pictures of mosques, identity cards and passport photos, I realised that collecting artefacts for a museum is not very different from collecting stories and facts for a novel."
It’s not Cyberspace anymore - article by Danah Boyd in online magazine Points, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "It’s been 20 years — 20 years!? — since John Perry Barlow wrote 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' — a rant in response to the government and corporate leaders who descend on a certain snowy resort town each year as part of the World Economic Forum (WEF).... 'Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.'... When Barlow penned his declaration, he was speaking on behalf of cyberspace, as though we were all part of one homogeneous community. And, in some sense, we were. We were geeks and freaks and queers. But over the last twenty years, tech has become the underpinning of so many sectors, of so much interaction. Those of us who wanted cyberspace to be universal couldn’t imagine a world in which our dreams got devoured by Silicon Valley. Tech is truly mainstream — and politically powerful — and yet many in tech still want to see themselves as outsiders.... There is a power shift underway and much of the tech sector is ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful. Worse, a collection of unicorns who see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility. They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings."
Practice and the Development of Expertise - article by Tom Gram in his blog Performance x Design. "It seems ... signatures of expertise are the result of years of effortful, progressive practice on authentic tasks accompanied by relevant feedback and support, with self-reflection and correction. The research team have labeled this activity 'Deliberate Practice'. Others have called it deep practice and intentional practice. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or at all. Six elements for are necessary for practice (or on the job experience) to be 'deliberate' practice: (1) It must be designed to improve performance. ... . Years of everyday experience does not necessarily create an expert. Years of deliberate practice does.... (2) It must be based on authentic tasks.... (3) The practice must be challenging.... (4) Immediate feedback on resuls.... (5) Reflection and adjustment.... (6) 10,000 hours... Fortunately we have a number of approaches available to us that align well to the conditions of deliberate practice... (a) Action learning... (b) Cognitive apprenticeship... (c) Communities of practice... (d) Simulation and games... (e) Feedback in the workflow... (f) Stretch assignments with coaching... (g) Open practice centres."
Can you make your own happiness? - column by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "There might be a ... general rule here: that whatever self-improvement schemes you’re most attracted to, they’re the ones you should avoid, because your attraction could be rooted in fear of the alternatives. Applied rationality holds out the promise that self-mastery is possible, and that you can control how life unfolds. It assumes we know, roughly, what happiness would look like, and just need help making it happen. But if you’re already strongly invested in that viewpoint, there’s probably more to be gained from exploring the ways in which life isn't controllable, or the possibility that you don’t know what’s best, that reason isn’t always the answer. Put down that rationalist handbook and take up yoga, or magic mushrooms, or gardening, or dance, or prayer. Yet consistency requires I ask the same thing of myself. Why am I so keen to believe reason and data can’t be the path to fulfilment? Am I looking for excuses not to change, by painting my failings as too mysterious and complex for mere rationality to address?"
Mein Kampf: Eine Kritische Edition: taking the sting out of Hitler’s hateful book - review by Neil Gregor in The Guardian. "What impact will the republication have? There have been no shortage of lazy attempts to juxtapose the republication of Mein Kampf with the rising political tensions that have attended the massive influx of refugees into Germany. Such arguments stand within a long, undistinguished tradition of casting every act of everyday racism in Germany as evidence that the country stands permanently on the brink of the Fourth Reich. But if we are looking for the drift towards nationalist authoritarianism we should be looking at Poland; if we are concerned about populist nationalism the more obvious danger lies in France. Even the phenomenon of Pegida is too easily interpreted against the background of Germany’s Nazi past, whereas in reality its ugly blend of nationalism, Islamophobia and hostility to multiculturalism makes more sense when examined alongside Ukip. The point is not to suggest that Germany is now an oasis of decency in a desert of xenophobia. Rather, it is to underline that manifestations of far-right politics now draw on quite different sources to those that Hitler once did. Mein Kampf can now only really be read as history."
#Twitter crisis? Not if it decides that it can be a smaller, smarter platform - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "Whereas it is easy to give an answer to the question 'What is Facebook?', the answers for Twitter depend on who you ask. Technically, it’s a platform-independent micro-blogging service with a limit per post of 140 characters. For geeks, it’s a human-mediated RSS feed – that is to say, a way of plugging into the thought streams of people you choose to 'follow'. For celebrities, it’s a way to broadcast to fans. For journalists, it’s an efficient way of conveying breaking news from anywhere. For some people, it’s a combination of a giant phone book, a personal radio station and what used to be called a “party line” in the old days of telephony. For others, such as blogger Jeff Goins, it’s 'the cheapest way to send an instant message to someone interested in you ... the easiest mode of finding breaking news that’s relevant to you ... the most effortless way to meet a celebrity. Twitter is not the main stage; it’s the backstage. What happens over coffee and face-to-face, while others are schmoozing and dropping business cards on tables.' And so on, ad infinitum."
I love you, I love you, I love you … why we can’t stop using those three little words - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The most recent modern rendering of this very British difficulty with getting the words out is probably Four Weddings and a Funeral, in which Charles (Hugh Grant) can only manage it by running after Carrie (Andie McDowell) on London’s South Bank and saying, 'Er, in the words of David Cassidy … while he was still with the Partridge Family … er, I think I love you.' Charles’s inability to say 'I love you' without scare quotes is just the most debilitating symptom of his general problem with words, which he tends to deploy in the service of embarrassing faux pas or creative reworkings of 'Fuck'. His deaf brother David has to intervene on his behalf at his wedding to the wrong woman, allowing him to finally speak of his love for Carrie through sign language."
Sonnet (inspired by Sonnet 22) - revisiting of Shakespeare sonnet by Wendy Cope in The Guardian. "My glass can’t quite persuade me I am old – In that respect my ageing eyes are kind – But when I see a photograph, I’m told The dismal truth: I’ve left my youth behind...."
Terry Pratchett statue to bring Discworld author home to Salisbury - news piece by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Almost 9,000 people have signed a petition calling for a permanent statue of the Discworld author, who died last year, to be installed in a prominent position in his hometown.... The statue is set to be designed by Paul Kidby, the artist whose iconic illustrations adorn Pratchett’s Discworld books.... His drawing suggests a life-sized statue of Pratchett in bronze, in which the author is, he says, 'standing in a relaxed pose, wearing his iconic hat and carrying a book under his arm.... There is the possibility to add some Nac Mac Feegles (Scottish-style pixies from Pratchett’s writing) to the sculpture, which would add an element of humour and surprise to the piece. I think these Feegles would be best placed behind Terry’s feet so they only visible when walking to the back of the sculpture. I think they should be doing something mischievous such as prising the letters off the base and carrying them off – or similar. These small characters would bring an aspect of his Discworld creation directly into the overall piece.' ”
You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]: a killer’s testimony - review by Gavin Knight in The Guardian. "The Northumbria Police won’t ever forget Raoul Moat. The week of July 2010 when Moat went on the rampage was unprecedented. Moat, a 37-year-old Geordie bodybuilder, was serving a short sentence for assault in Durham prison when his 22-year-old girlfriend Sam dumped him for a younger man. Two days after his release, Moat shot and killed the new boyfriend with a sawn-off shotgun, then turned it on Sam, hospitalising her. He declared war on the Northumbria police and blinded one of their officers, who was sitting unarmed in his car. On the run for seven days, Moat camped out in the woods of Northumberland.... Surrounded by armed police, Moat shot and killed himself.... Now Andrew Hankinson, a journalist from Newcastle, has constructed a narrative from Moat’s own written and recorded source material. Why devote a book to him? His purpose is to show Moat as a product of our culture and society. The author takes us inside the killer’s head without giving the reader the privilege of distance in which to judge and dismiss him. The result is an uncomfortable, claustrophobic read.... He deploys the urgent present tense and the second person. 'They release you from prison at 10.55am.' This gives the narrative the feel of an unfolding video game. It also has the familiarity of advertising copy, the 'you' of opportunity, which is compounded by the ironic title and cover in the style of a 50s advert."
Preston Sturges: how a master of daftness conquered Hollywood - article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. "It was a sprint worthy of his greatest farces: between 1937 and 1944, Preston Sturges made some of the funniest films Hollywood ever produced, including The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero. Then suddenly, as if his frantic, frenzied comedies had exhausted not only himself but his form, Sturges ran out of steam. Blending the comical and serious, farcical and cerebral, high and low, Sturges found catalytic energy in mixing formulas like a madcap scientist; as if he had released actual kinetic energy, he went ricocheting through Hollywood cinema, until he fell to earth with a thud."
All the attention came from women telling me how stupid my book was - article by Polly Vernon in The Guardian. "I knew Hot Feminist would prove contentious when I wrote it.... While the reviewers were at odds about Hot Feminist, Twitter was united. My book and I instantly became the target of unbridled internet scorn.... I tried fronting it out, but I couldn’t sustain the defence. I was promoting the book on TV and at festivals, wired on caffeine and adrenaline, not really eating, not really sleeping; checking Twitter compulsively. Four days after publication, I developed a facial twitch. ... I got over it. It took time, friends, therapy, a couple more good reviews, quitting Twitter. Now? I’m fine. Almost completely restored. Almost. Because I do wonder if I’ll ever take such risks – publish anything as heartfelt, as exposing – again. Probably not. And I wonder who else is choosing not to say things they really mean, for fear of how Twitter will react."
Play nice! How the internet is trying to design out toxic behaviour - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "A software engineer who built and moderated online comment platforms, [Aja] Bogdanoff spent her days wading through insults, and her spare time firefighting more urgent incidents. She could see platforms being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of antisocial users, but couldn’t figure out how to get one jump ahead of them.... '[Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature] says people always believe that their actions are justified. No matter what they’re doing, they think there’s a valid reason,' she recalls... 'So, I realised we had to get in there and interrupt that process; make people think about it, that these are real people.' Instead of constantly running to catch up with 'bad' posters, could she design better behaviour in from the start?... This is where Civil Comments, the startup Bogdanoff founded with Christa Mrgan, comes in. The idea is simple (although the software is so complex it took a year to build): before posting a comment in a forum or below an article, users must rate two randomly selected comments from others for quality of argument and civility (defined as an absence of personal attacks or abuse). Ratings are crunched to build up a picture of what users of any given site will tolerate, which is then useful for flagging potentially offensive material. Crucially, users must then rate their own comment for civility, and can rewrite it if they want (in testing, about 5% did)."
How we made Angry Birds - feature by Jaakko Ilsalo and Tuomo Lehtinen in The Guardian. "I was working on something that let you sling balls around, then I added some blocks for them to collide into. When we got the birds from Jaakko, things all started to come together. But the aiming mechanism wasn’t working: the birds didn’t fly where you expected them to, which wasn’t fun – players had to be able to figure out where they had failed. Jaakko spent a lot of time tweaking the blocks, too, so that when there was a hit, things broke in a way that was satisfying: they couldn’t collapse too easily, couldn’t wobble too much. We initially had a castle much closer to the slingshot – you could see both on screen – but when we moved it further away, the extra flight time meant the anticipation and excitement grew."
England’s schools make us the extremists of Europe - article by Danny Dorling in The Guardian, based on his book A Better Poltics: How Government Can Make Us Happier. "In terms of education, instead of looking at ways to increase wellbeing, England has turned itself into the extremist of Europe and the effects are not going to make anyone happier. Education in England is expanding into new extremes of elitism. The covert message is that a small elite, made up of superior individuals, should lead us. The mechanism to select such individuals is being constantly honed.... Universities say they want to attract the most academically able individuals – without justifying how they define 'most able'.... Like the clergy and conjurors of old, their academic judgments can never be questioned. In schools, we rank institutions by the performance of the children – and the result is that schools are encouraged to exclude those least likely to do well in exams.... Our government encourages it and apparently has no idea that in this England is highly unusual in Europe."
Four neuromyths that are still prevalent in schools: debunked - article by Bradley Busch in The Guardian Teacher Network. "Many 'neuromyths' are rampant in our classrooms, and research suggests that people are often seduced by neuroscientific explanations, even if these are not accurate or even relevant.... Such myths are a drain on time and money, and it is important to explore and expose them. So which popular neuromyths exist in schools and how did they catch on? (1) Learning styles... (2) You only use 10% of your brain... (3) Right brain v. left brain.... (4) Playing brain games makes you smarter."
'The Role of the Game Designer' - Chapter 1 of Game Design Workshop: A Play Centric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, by Tracy Fullerton, 3rd edition, CRC Press (Boca Raton, FL), 2014. "As a game designer, a large part of your role is to keep your concentration focused on the player experience and not allow yourself to be distracted by the other concerns of production. Let the art director worry about the imagery, the producer stress over the budget, and the technical director focus on the engine. Your main job is to make sure that when the game is delivered, it provides superior gameplay.... In some ways, designing a game is like being the host of a party. As the host, it's your job to get everything ready - food, drinks, decorations, music to set the mood - and then you open the doors to your guests and see what happens. The results are not always predictable or what you envisioned. A game, like a party, is an interactive experience that is only fully realized after your guests arrive. What type of party will your game be like? Will your players sit like wallflowers in your living room? Will they stumble around trying to find the coatroom closet? Or will they laugh and talk and meet new people, hoping the night will never end?" (pp 3-4)
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
Technology: an enhancer or enabler of learning?
(An online discussion at the Open University recently posed the question: is technology an enhancer or an enabler of learning? Here is my answer.)
Technology, according to Danny Hills and Douglas Adams, is everything that doesn’t work yet: when it starts to work reliably, it becomes part of the background and we cease to see it as technology. So when we talk about technology-enhanced or technology-enabled learning, it’s to give people a reason why they should put up with something that doesn’t yet work properly: despite the problems, we’re saying, it’s worth persevering with the technology because it will allow us to do better or more efficiently something which we’re already doing (technology-enhanced) or to do something which we currently can’t do at all (technology-enabled).
I can only think of three things in learning and teaching which are genuinely enabled, rather than enhanced, by technology. Learning at a distance is not one of them, because you can (as the OU did for many years) operate through postal and courier services for the delivery of materials and messages. Remote co-presence, however, is really only achievable through audio or video conferencing, such as we regularly use in online tutorials. This is more than a simple matter of communication: the synchronous nature of the medium supports the constant and continuous engagement of participants, which allows a different kind of conversation, not merely a faster one. Even participants who are not actively communicating can have their motivation and relationship strengthened, simply by being present at the virtual event.
The second thing enabled by technology is automated rapid feedback, such as is provided by computerised tests. The promptness of feedback, we know, is massively important for learning, and it also increases motivation when it provides immediate sense of progress or achievement. Automation can also bring the testing more under the learner’s control, allowing them to take it at a time of their choosing, to repeat it if they wish until they are successful, and to interpret and act on the result as they wish. Students, we know, like on-screen tests for precisely these reasons, though unfortunately they are only really effective in areas of knowledge and skill which are capable of being broken into discrete elements and for which questions can have closed answers.
The third aspect of learning and teaching enabled by technology is encounter with authentic situations, which is critical for the learning of many practical situated skills, especially the interpretation of complex situations, such as those involving people. While audio and video can enhance learning of all kinds, by providing illustration or amusement, their richness is essential for allowing the development of holistic understanding, in which the presence of micro-cues allows learners not to be limited by what can be consciously articulated. Listening and speaking in a foreign language, for example, unlike reading and writing which can be taught through text alone, require actual aural models and authentic situations in which to practice, and one can trace the use of successive technologies for sound recording and reproduction as they were developed: gramophone records and language laboratories in the 1960s, cassette tapes in the 1970s, CDs in the 1980s, multimedia DVD-ROMs in the 1990s, internet delivery in the 2000s, and mobile apps in the 2010s. The distance learning of people skills, such as is relevant to many professional practice disciplines, has also been I would say enabled (rather than enhanced) by audio and video. It remains to be seen how far virtual reality technologies, hitherto too clumsy and low quality to compete seriously with remote audio and video or with face-to-face role play, may allow these possibilities to be expanded in the future.
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, 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?' "
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