The Reader

As teachers, we sometimes assume that students will just absorb whatever we write for them and that reading is "essentially passive in nature" (Conole  2007, p 84). IT unfortunately encourages us in this assumption, by turning everything into a problem of information transfer, so that the reader of a text is just a recipient of information.

I've already written about assimilative learning being an active process, and here - in a painting of c1665 - is a picture of it. The painter is the Dutch artist Eglon van der Neer, a contemporary of Vermeer, and it comes from that genre of domestic interior scenes showing people intensely absorbed in some private activity. In the Protestant Low Countries , the devotional intensity which might elsewhere have been expressed in overtly religious art was being brought into the sphere of the personal and the internal.

The reader is clearly a well-educated woman: the writing set on the table shows that she lives through her literacy. The book she's reading is probably what was called an "emblem book": the picture visible on the left-hand page would have been an allegorical image, accompanied by a short and memorable motto, with a longer explanation and exegesis in the supporting text.

But the most remarkable thing about the painting is that she's not looking at the book. Her gaze is straight ahead of her, into empty space: she is looking inwards. It "suggests a life of the mind that remains impenetrable, inaccessible to even the most persistent viewer" (Wieseman, 2011, p 194).

Of course she is. For reading - meaningful reading, not just sounding out the words on the page, aloud or silently - involves thinking. And reading which is challenging - which is presenting something not only new but different, as is inevitably the case in education - involves a lot of thinking. So she is re-making her understanding, re-making her thought processes, perhaps re-making her very soul and identity; and for all this the words on the page are merely the start.

References:

Conole, G. (2007), “Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice”, and Appendix 7 “Taxonomy of learning activities”, in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.

Marjorie E. Wieseman (Curator of Dutch Paintings a the National Gallery), Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 2011).

The van der Neer painting was included in a Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition of that name between October 2011 and January 2012. It is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Emblem books could be both sacred and secular. For an interesting tour of some 17th century Dutch love emblem books, see http://emblems.let.uu.nl/emblems/educational/home.html on the Emblem Project Utrecht website.

Seen and heard: January 2012

New Year's Day concert from the Vienna Musikverein, live transmission on TV.
Sherlock, series 2.
Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope), new film, funny and moving, with Michel Piccoli as the reluctant Pontiff.
The Artist; they don't make films like this anymore, oh wait a minute they just did.
Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence, exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (and podcast by the curator).
Boundaries and boundlessness, Day Conference of Re-Vision (Centre for Integrative Psychosynthesis), with Nick Tonnon.
Galaxy Quest, film on TV, even after many viewings still makes me laugh and cry.
The Ghost, film on TV, still gripping but not as oppressively menacing as in the cinema.

Seen and heard: December 2011

Henry V, production by Propellor Theatre Company at Milton Keynes Theatre
The Ides of March, new film about US election politics, with George Clooney
"Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook", BBC TV documentary, in The Money Programme series
Rev, BBC TV comedy series, with Tom Hollander
Accidental Empires, book about the early history of the personal computer industry, by Robert X Cringely (1992 revised 1996)
The Colours of Christmas,  new CD with cracking performances of Christmas music, by John Rutter
Midnight Mass at Turvey Abbey, actually held at 7:30 in deference to the stamina of older members of the order
Meet Your Brain, The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, by Bruce Hood
The Book of Unwritten Tales, wonderful new point-and-click adventure game

Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?

To take in something external and make it part of oneself: assimilation or digestion is a powerful metaphor for learning. It's a long-established one too; the Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer famously asks that believers should "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the holy scriptures.  Today, "assimilative tasks" are one of the categories of learning activities in the classification system used by learning designers at the Open University. According to this system, the characteristic "assimilative tasks" are reading, viewing and listening, which even in the digital world remain the core activities of a university student.

But there's something slightly pejorative about the label "assimilative" in that classification, especially when set alongside the other categories: experiential, information-handling, communicative, productive and adaptive (simulations to you and me). Grainné Conole puts her finger on it when she describes assimilative tasks as "essentially passive in nature" (Conole 2007, p 84). Taking it for granted that we're all aiming to get students to be active in their learning, the implication is that reading text, watching video or listening to audio is somehow less active than, say, communicating, handling information or getting new experiences.

Now it's certainly possible to listen passively to a lecture or a podcast, or to read through written words passively without thinking about their meaning. But that's not assimilation: that's swallowing. To take in food takes minutes, or seconds; to digest it takes hours, and that digestion is a very active process, involving peristaltic movement, gastric acids, enzymes and so on. If we're to take assimilation as a model of learning, then the important part isn't putting the stuff in the mouth, or eyes or ears, but working on it to break it down and make it part of oneself. And that's the part on which a good teacher will focus.

This is something in which the Open University has excelled for the past forty years. The reasons its course materials are so good is not that the information is well-organised or that the explanations are clear - although they are - but that they're always accompanied by learning activities to help students build their own understanding of the subject. It's these activities, rather than the reading, viewing and listening, which are the real assimilative tasks. Here are some of the most common types, divided for convenience into three levels:

Basic

• summarising - for example: "List the three most important characteristics of theory X." "Write a single sentence explanation of concept Y."
• representing diagrammatically - for example: "Draw a mind map to show the relationship between the concepts of theory X., including examples from case study Y."
• organising - for example: "List the different aspects of this topic, and create a system for arranging them."
• classifying - for example: "Sort the instances A., B., C.… into the categories / concepts X., Y., Z.."
• comparing and contrasting - for example: "List points of similarity and difference between X. and Y."
• identifying - for example: "Identify the features of concept X. which make it an instance of concept Y."
• exemplifying - for example: "Find an example of concept X. in material Y., or in your own experience."

Intermediate

• interpreting - for example: "Describe the most important features of case X., according to theory Y."
• analysing - for example: "Outline the structure of case X., according to theory Y."
• applying - for example: "Describe what you would do in case X., according to principles / procedure Y." "Identify the salient features of case A., according to theory B."
• reflecting - for example: "Interpret your experience of X. according to theory / framework / protocol Y."

Advanced

• contextualising - for example:  "Relate case X. to its theoretical / social / historical / political / environmental etc. context."
• evaluating - for example: "Say how far case X. meets standards Y., and give reasons for your judgements."
• discussing critically (in the academic sense) - for example: "Argue for an interpretation of case X., and give reasons for preferring this over other possible interpretations."

A better name for this category of tasks might be "comprehension and application", rather than "assimilative", if assimilation is going to be mistaken for simple reception of material. But whatever we call it, properly conceiving the acquisition of knowledge and understanding as an active process is vital to higher education, since every academic discipline requires it to a greater or lesser extent. In the face of subject matter experts' tendency to teach a subject just by expounding it, the reminder which we need is that good teaching requires not only clear exposition but a process for learners to assimilate it.

References

Book of Common Prayer (1662), Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent.

Conole, G. (2007), “Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice”, and Appendix 7 “Taxonomy of learning activities”, in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.

Talking teaching or technology? A lesson from Pixar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Seen and heard - November 2011

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

24 words on how to write a restaurant review

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

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

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

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