High stakes tutorials

Most computer games start with some kind of tutorial, in which you as a novice player learn how to play the game. Game tutorials used to be somewhat bland: being afterthoughts, planned only once the rest of the game was largely complete, nothing of significance could happen in them. You were introduced to the controls and given the chance to find out what kind of moves you could make - and that was it.

But the two most recent games I've played have tutorials which both work as tutorials - technically simple and offering extra support to the player - AND advance the plot, indeed start it off with a bang.



"Cognition" starts with FBI agent Erica Reed racing to the cemetery where the serial killer whom she's been pursuing has taken her kid brother. Dialogue with her partner ramps up the tension and increases the urgency: she has to find Scott before the killer does something awful to him. Arriving at the cemetery, checking the gates and finding them locked teaches you how to examine and manipulate objects; having Erica draw her gun and shoot off the padlock teaches you how to use objects from your inventory - as well as increasing the tension still further. Inside the cemetery, the tutorial shows you how to use Erica's psychic powers - the "cognition" of the title - to find where Scott is and to enter the vault where he's been taken. Inside, you discover him strapped to a table beneath a machine which is clearly going to kill him if you tamper with it. This is your summative assessment: as a timer ticks down from ten minutes, you need to use everything you've learned in the tutorial to deactivate the machine; if you take too long, or cut the wrong wire, Scott will die. (He's going to die shortly anyway, but that's part of the story.)



The tutorial in "Ghost Trick" is similarly founded on jeopardy: you start by seeing a woman about to be shot by a hit man. Your character's ability to do anything about this is restricted by the fact that you're dead yourself; you are in fact a ghost. A disembodied voice (you find out whose it is later) instructs you how to use your "ghost tricks" to inhabit and move between objects and manipulate them to produce physical effects - which you then use to distract the hit man and make him miss his target. The woman is saved, but only briefly, because when she runs away the hit man catches up with her and this time he does not miss. The disembodied voice then introduces you to your most powerful ghost trick: to rewind time to four minutes before a death and prevent it from happening. Working against the clock, you need to figure out how to get around the junkyard in which the events are taking place and move objects into a position from which you can save the woman's life. When you release the wrecking ball above the head of the hit man just before he pulls the trigger, it's an enormously satisfying moment.

Educational courses too have traditionally been rather bland and boring in their opening sections. As with old-fashioned game tutorials, the thinking has been that you can't present too much of a challenge while your learners are still finding out how things work. This has been compounded by well-meaning pedagogical ideas about the proper way to start a course - for example, with an academic overview of the subject, or a discussion of its principles, or a reflective exercise to get the learner to find out what they know about it already - which tend to produce teaching which is general and abstract, and hence boring, or which relies on learners to supply the content, and hence is dull and bland unless they put in a lot of effort. I think this is a problem: we know how difficult it is for learners to keep finding the time to stay with a distance learning course, whether in print or online, which is why the biggest challenge for all learning designers is arousing and sustaining learner motivation.

Is it possible to design course openings which are not bland and boring? These two game tutorials suggest to me that it is. I've previously blogged about the principle of starting with your best and most exciting material, instead of saving it for later, in order to remind learners of why they're doing your course. To that, I'm now adding the principle of high stakes: giving them something to achieve which they can feel is really meaningful and important. Of course it still needs to be sufficiently simple for them to accomplish, no matter what their previous skill and knowledge. But that doesn't mean that it needs to be bland or boring.

When I say that course openings should be more like these two games tutorials, I don't mean that they need to have action and violence. Excitement, in an educational context, has different roots, but we still need to tap into it. What gives a learner the biggest buzz? It's finding they can do something they couldn't do before and which is really meaningful and important to them. Get that at the start of your course, and you'll have your learners as thoroughly hooked as they can be.

Seen and heard: December 2013

Posts and articles

• Why do children believe in Santa but not Harry Potter? (from Headquarters blog). Children's understanding of the difference between pretend and real comes earlier and is more sophisticated than we usually think. 
• Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s A Robot (from MindHacks blog, and on iO9, located through Memex 1.1 blog). A real-life Stepford Wives experience, when Michael Scherer, Washington Bureau Chief of TIME magazine, was phoned by what sounded like a brightly-voiced woman offering a deal on health insurance. Something made him suspicious. "When Scherer asked point blank if she was a real person, or a computer-operated robot voice, she replied enthusiastically that she was real, with a charming laugh. But then she failed several other tests. When asked “What vegetable is found in tomato soup?” she said she did not understand the question. When asked multiple times what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained repeatedly of a bad connection." The article includes audio extracts from the call. 
• Review of Anita Elberse, So Much for the Long Tail, by Steven Poole. "In 2006, the then editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, [claimed in 'The Long Tail' that] thanks to new digital distribution methods ... the blockbuster was on the way out, and most profits would henceforth come from niche products. It didn't work out that way, as Elberse now demonstrates.... A remarkable statistic: 74% of all individual MP3s purchased online in 2011 sold fewer than 10 copies each, while 0.00001% of songs made up 15% of total revenues."
• Here's how data thieves have captured our lives on the internet, John Naughton article in The Observer 29.12.13 The historian of the internet reflects on the implications of Snowdon's revelations of the extent to which "the most liberating communications technology since printing has been captured" by the security services, with the complicity of the major technology companies.

Shows and events, books and games

The Secret Life of Mary Poppins - Culture Show documentary about P.L Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, intelligently presented by Victoria Coren. Her point was that Hollywood films require tidy stories and happy endings - in Saving Mister Banks no less than Mary Poppins - and that one can find these films powerful and enjoyable on their own terms, even if one also simultaneously loves the darker and very different original books or appreciates the complexity of the real life story of Travers and Disney.

Last Tango in Halifax, second series - still more beautiful writing and great performances, swinging from comedy to tragedy and back again. (Fun also to compare Derek Jacobi's solid Yorkshireman here with his camp actor in Vicious.) A lovely touch to build up to the wedding on Christmas Eve - in both story time and real time. Plenty of potential remaining for a third series, I think.

A Bridge Over You - Christmas single by Lewisham and Greenwich Hospital choir, mashing up Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and Coldplay's "Fix You", with a video produced by my sister. (See earlier post.) The singing is pretty good, but it's not just family pride for me to say that I think it's the video which makes this single: by linking the songs to the singers' working lives, it gives them added poignancy - no surprise that many of the online comments talk about how moving it is. The release didn't displace the X Factor winner as the official Christmas Number 1, but I'm told it did get to Number 15 in the indie charts and Number 8 in Amazon downloads, which is pretty good and some kind of vindication of compassion and good taste.

The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination - exhibition at SOAS, London. Beautifully curated and arranged, starting with two chambers showcasing geographically-located artefacts and extracts from key texts and finishing with a reconstructed fire temple. Good to see some prominence given to this lesser-known faith: the precursor to the great monotheistic religions and the religion of the Christmas magi.

Cunninghamfest - day-conference celebrating the career of my old friend and colleague Andrew Cunningham on the occasion of his retirement. Having left the History of Science / Medicine field in 1993, it was very pleasing to see how the marginal views for which he and I contended have now become orthodoxy, so that Jim Secord called our "Big Picture" paper a citation classic and an analytical classic. (A summary of our paper by David Gilad is here.) That wasn't what people said at the conference where we first presented it; I remember the comments being equally divided into "This is obviously untrue" and "We know this already" - which as I said to Andrew at the time is a sign of a transformation in thinking about to occur and an inevitable consequence of working at a discipline's cutting edge. His main worry was that these things would go from "obviously untrue" to "known already" without there ever having been a time at which they were said by us. The Cunninghamfest was proof that that had not happened, and that all the work which he and I put in had not gone to waste. Cheers, Andrew; they were great years.

Death Comes to Pemberley - BBC dramatisation of P.D. James' homage to Jane Austen. So many beautiful things: Matthew Rhys as Darcy, played mercurially nice and nasty like his character in The Americans; Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, a skilled manager of a large household and a true match for him; Rebecca Front as Mrs Bennett, played not melodramatically (as Alison Steadman did in the BBC Pride and Prejudice), just saying absolutely the wrong thing at the wrong time; and a cameo from (Dame) Penelope Keith as Lady Catherine de Burgh.

The Book of Pages - unusual graphic novel by David Whitehead, essentially a Buddhist meditation on technology as the story follows a monk in his journey through a modern metropolis. The book is now out of print, but the website reproduces some of its sections, my favourites of these being: Flight, Mind Dragons, Button.

ColAR - iPad app demonstrating a new level of "augmented reality" (which is presumably what "AR" stands for). You print out a line drawing, colour it in, and the app, viewing the picture through the iPad's camera, animates it in 3D, as in this video. Jaw-droppingly amazing; my six-year-old grand-daughter was quite blown away by it, and she's not easily impressed.

Toca Hair Salon Me - another great app for kids. Take a photo of yourself, or one of your friends, then cut, grow and restyle their hair using the wide range of tools available. You can even save a picture of your finished results. Great fun - an important part of which comes from the way the photo is animated in the hair salon. (See this video.)

The Beiderbecke Affair - box set of the 1984 Alan Plater series, with James Bolam and Barbara Flynn, a Christmas present from my wife (thank you, dearest). Wonderful to watch again, and amazingly topical given its theme of social misfits being under surveillance on the outside chance that some of them might one day break a law. Unfortunately today's real life spooks aren't as humorously bumbling as D.S. Hobson, any more than you and I speak wittily laconic lines of Alan Plater dialogue.

Boring messages: how to make them interesting?

If you've ever fantasised about making a boring message more interesting by setting it to music, then you should see what Virgin America have done with their in-flight safety video.

It's great fun, of course, but this just confirms my doubts how much of a solution this is to the problem of a boring message. How much attention would you pay this video on the second or third in-flight viewing, let alone the tenth or the fiftieth?

But there are some nice touches. I particularly like how they deal with the problem of soundng like a prat when compelled by legislation to say things which pretty much everyone knows. Their approach is to acknowledge the problem and become arch. ("For the 0.001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before - really?....") It's one way of retaining dignity and credibility under impossible requirements.

Seen and heard: November 2013

Articles and postings

Review of Writing on the Wall: Social Media: The First 2000 Years by Tom Standage. "Standage's central argument [is] that mass media, the means of distributing information that we have become so used to, are an aberration, closely linked to the industrial phase of history. Now centralised industrial processes have given way to distributed, technological ones, with individuals at the controls, we are settling back into old ways of doing things." (David Shariatmadari in The Guardian)

The Dunning-Kruger effect - in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average . So for example about 80-90% of drivers think they have above-average ability. (Guardian Headquarters blog and Mind Hacks blog)

Top nine things you need to know about 'listicles' - a listicle being an article in the form of a list: an increasingly popular form because they're easy both to write and to read. (Steven Poole in The Guardian)

How’s your creativity coming along? (Dilbert cartoon)

Shows and events, books and games

Heavenly Spaces - concert by Polymnia (in which I sing) in the beautiful resonant space of the Milton Keynes City Church of Christ the Cornerstone. Highlight for some of the audience was our rendition of Monteverdi madrigals; highlight for me was the solo cello playing of the stupendously talented Gemma Rosefield.

Philomena - film of the true story of the journalist Martin Sixsmith helping an elderly Irish woman trace the infant son she was forced to give up for adoption when she was a girl. Judi Dench as excellent as one would expect as Philomena, but Steve Coogan as Sixsmith was a revelation: he can do serious, and do it very well. A tremendous film; you may start thinking that it's going to be a gently sentimental story - what Sixsmith calls disparagingly a "human interest story", the kind of journalism he doesn't do - but gradually and insidiously the film gets you in its grip, so that when the story proceeds to its final shocking revelations, the impact is colossal.

Cheek by Jowl - beautiful collection of articles and talks by Ursula Le Guin on the theme of the human-animal relationship in fiction, though actually the piece which resonated me most was one in which she talked about the origins and development of her Earthsea cycle.

The Choir: Sing while you Work - second TV series, in which Gareth Malone forms and trains workplace choirs in organisations such as a city council, a fire service, and a city bank. There are probably many other choirmasters who could do what he does in terms of getting a choir going; but what he has uniquely is the ability to make this work on television: to let us get to know the people and their jobs and to make us care about them and what the singing means to them. (As I've blogged elsewhere, "it's not so much the song or the singing which makes its impact on us: it's who the singers are.")

The Coronation of Poppea, performed by English Touring Opera - I could have done without the Russian Revolutionary staging, with Poppea dressed like Grayson Perry in his transvestite persona, but most of the singing was really great, especially Helen Sherman singing Nero.

Richard II - the Royal Shakespeare Company production, broadcast to cinemas, with David Tennant in the title role. A good production (though not a great one, says my wife, who's favourite Shakespeare play it is), and wholly immersive, with excellent camera work, moving between close-up and whole-stage view largely seamlessly. David Tennant was excellent as Richard, of course, but Bollingbrooke felt shallow by comparison; as Richard says, they're like twin buckets in a well: when one rises the other goes down, so it should be possible to see them as counterparts or equals.

An Adventure in Space and Time - nostalgic (for me) TV drama about the creation of Dr Who, focusing on the roles of Sydney Newman, the head of drama whose idea it was; Verity Lambert, the producer who made it happen; and Bill Hartnell, the fading actor who was chosen to play the first doctor.

Gravity - astonishing new space film, largely carried by Sandra Bullock (George Clooney being in a support role), with echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and (how embarrassing to admit knowledge of this) Barbarella. Unexpectedly intense; the tension never really lets up for all of the 90 mins, until she take her first shaky steps back on Earth. I'm still not sure what it was all about, though.

Setting boundaries: psychotherapy and spirituality workshop at Turvey Abbey. A day well-spent in the company of spiritual directors and therapists, provoking troubling reflections on what happens when boundaries break down - or are compulsively defended.

The Odyssey: a soldier's road home - article by Charlotte Higgins in Guardian Review. Penetrating interpretation of the return of Odysseus, bringing out aspects of the story which were wholly new to me - setting it alongside the contemporary experience of returning war veterans.

The singers and the song

One of the lovely things about Gareth Malone's TV series Sing While You Work is that he makes putting together a workplace choir not just about getting people to sing but about finding their voice. The bits of the programmes where he learns about the singers and their jobs, and what really moves them about their work, are the mose unique and usually the most moving parts. And one of the things he does is to find a song which sums up what they do and which they can really sing and mean it. As with The Zimmers performing My Generation, it's not so much the song or the singing which makes the impact: it's who the singers are.

So here's the Lewisham and Greenwich choir from Series 1, performing Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, mashed up with Coldplay's Fix You. Have a tissue ready; this one goes to the heart.



Even though not on sale until 9 December (£1.98 from the iTunes store), the bookies have this as joint fourth favourite to be Christmas Number 1 - which would be a welcome change!

Disclosure: the video was produced by my sister's company London Video Productions.

My Doctor Who memory: the Daleks in Trafalgar Square

5 December 1964. The Doctor was William Hartnell, and this was only the second ever Dalek story, the one in which the Daleks invade a near-future Earth. I was five, nearly six, and I was just discovering Doctor Who and experiencing that peculiar ambivalence familiar to subsequent generations of children: that of it's being terrifying, beyond anything else in our televisual experience - but also entirely compelling. The story is notable in the overall Who narrative, because it's the one in which his grand-daughter Susan stays behind to marry her nice resistance fighter and work for the post-war reconstruction of Earth. But for me it was memorable, in fact burned itself into my memory, because it showed the Daleks in a place which I knew intimately.

We didn't live in London, but we often drove there, and my father taught me the names of the landmarks: Hammersmith Bridge, Piccadilly Circus with its neon lights and statue of Eros, and Trafalgar Square with its stone lions and Nelson's Column. Practising my geography, I used them to mark the stages of our journeys, counting them off and naming them as we passed. They were not only part of London, they were part of my life.

So I'm watching Doctor Who, and there's this bit where Barbara, who's fallen in with a group of resistance fighters, is helping this old and wheelchair-bound hero of the conflict escape, because the Daleks are closing in on their location. In a long filmed sequence, with another woman of the resistance, they race along the Victoria Embankment, and then have to hide as a Dalek convey passes over Westminster Bridge. When the coast is clear, they move on quickly to Trafalgar Square - but the Daleks have got there first. The camera view starts at the top of Nelson's Column, then pans down to the stone lions, revealing the Daleks gathering there. The effect was breath-taking and astonishing for me; the Daleks were no longer just on television: they had invaded my life.<1>


(The Victorian Embankment / Trafalgar Square sequence begins at timecode 5:03)

Many years later, watching the episode on DVD, I had a flash of association with an image which I only got to know as an adult: the famous newsreel footage of the Nazi army marching into Paris past the Arc de Triomphe. The sense of violation, of a deeply familiar landmark being desecrated by something which should absolutely not be there, was just the same. I was also aware of how many associations there must quite deliberately have been in that episode when originally shown, for grown-ups who remembered the Second World War and knew about Nazi-occupied Europe: the intimidation, the resistance, the labour camps, and the occupied people pressed into service as collaborators: the humans who had been turned into Robomen.<2> The Doctor himself most obviously resembled an Eastern European refugee: cultured yet poor, wandering far from his native land, the generation between himself and his grand-daughter conspicuous by its absence, presumably due to war or armed conflict.



But back in 1964, my dear mother indulged my obsession. She always decorated our (home-made) Christmas cake with style and imagination, and so that year our Christmas cake featured the Daleks in Trafalgar Square. Nelson's Column was a stick of rock, with the plastic lions from my Noah's Ark around its base and Noah himself standing in for Nelson. The Daleks themselves were made of round chocolate biscuits in layers, with smarties on their outsides. It was a good end to a fantastic story. The Daleks might have conquered the Earth, but we ate them for Christmas.

Notes

<1> This story was the first in Dr Who to use extensive location filming - to great effect. The image of the Daleks on Westminster Bridge is well-known because of a publicity still (not reflecting the shots used in the actual episode), which was later imitated on a Radio Times cover in 2005 (image 14) and the 50th anniversary programmes.
<2> The World War 2 and Nazi occupation references are discussed in the commentary on the BBC Dr Who website, and in the Wikipedia entry.

The secret of learning design - on a T-shirt

This excellent T-shirt is produced by the same designers who produced the much-circulated graphics on How to Care for Introverts / Extroverts.

As soon as I saw the design, I forwarded the link to a friend who finds some of her work colleagues need to have the same things explained to them repeatedly, or think that if they're sent on a training course they'll magically be able to do their job. She loved the design, as I knew she would.

But it later occurred to me that this T-shirt slogan also goes to the heart of learning design, along the same lines as my previous effort to summarise everything one needs to know about it in two principles. What it says is that you can explain as much as you like, and produce texts and videos and websites, and none of it guarantees anything. Or as I put it in my previous post: people learn because of what they do, not what you do.

Of course, if you're a teacher, this doesn't mean that you can just explain things and leave the rest up to the learner. If you're going to take your responsibility seriously, and if you have learners who you can't be sure will be able to take charge of their own learning, then you need to prompt them into doing things which will enable them to learn from your explanations. It's in that interaction that the magic happens, which is why learning design is a creative craft. As the T-shirt reminds us, the learning begins when the explanation ends: when the teacher stops talking and the learner becomes active.