Re-blog: active learning and teaching in online spaces

I know what a re-tweet is, but is there such a thing as a re-blog? Well, here's one anyway.

I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.

There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students.

Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ... 

Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ... 

Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....

(Read more)

Cuttings: August 2017

The Fear and the Freedom by Keith Lowe: the moral surprises of the second world war - review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "As a historian of the modern era, Lowe enjoys an enormous advantage over scholars who write about more distant epochs: he is able – for the moment at least – to draw into his writing the experiences of those who lived through the conflict. Perhaps no historian since Gitta Sereny, in The German Trauma, has grasped that opportunity as firmly as Lowe, or done so much with it. As every journalist knows, the art of the interview rests on two principles: asking the right questions and putting them to the right people. With journalistic nous, Lowe has assembled a remarkable chorus of voices and asks the most probing of questions. Their testimony, combined with the author’s pointed analysis, elevates a laudable volume into a very readable and startling book.... It has been said that the most impressive and worrying features of human behaviour is our capacity to adapt to the most terrible of circumstances.... Yet the testimony in these pages demonstrates that adaptation to the extremes and horrors of war was made possible only by the forging of myth. Both combatants and civilians came to define the war as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, or as a conflict that would save future generations from the abyss. This myth was an essential tool of survival. Now it is an obstacle to a proper understanding of how this most terrible of all wars continues to shape our lives."

Labour is right: social mobility is not a good goal for education - article by Selina Todd in The Guardian. "In the postwar years, opportunities in the professions and other well-paid, secure jobs expanded, benefiting huge numbers of people. But today, social mobility means a scramble for the few jobs that offer security.... social mobility reinforces social inequality. Policymakers inaccurately equate the two, but the social mobility agenda assumes we’re stuck with a hierarchical society. Its supporters uncritically accept that there are 'top' universities – the Russell Group – and 'leading professions', defined by Greening as law, medicine and banking (notably, education, meant to deliver so much, isn’t a sector that the talented are encouraged to enter)."

Rulers, Religion and Riches by Jared Rubin: why the west got rich - review by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian. "500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine... By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about. Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed 'backwardness' of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine... By getting 'religion out of politics', Europe made space at the political 'bargaining table' for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of 'pro-growth' policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them. The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by ... the printing press.... Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s 'search for alternative sources of legitimacy' after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for 'pro-commerce' interests."

Lone Echo - review in Adventure Gamers. "Virtual reality has forced developers to learn to walk all over again – often literally, as they rethink concepts as simple as basic movement. ... Lone Echo is set aboard a space station, letting players move freely, unbound by gravity. But instead of spinning around with thrusters (a mechanic that left many feeling dizzy and sick), Lone Echo lets you reach out and touch the world. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, you can grab walls, pull yourself along, and push off to float free though space. You can finesse your trajectory with wrist-mounted boosters, but even here, everything is in your hands. This simple mechanic manages to reconcile the biggest conflict facing VR design, providing both incredible freedom and a high degree of comfort.... Lone Echo casts you as 'Jack,' a service android aboard the Kronos II mining station orbiting Saturn, [and] de-facto companion to the station’s sole human, Captain Olivia Rhodes. ... After an unexplained anomaly knocks out several of the station’s systems, Jack and Olivia scramble to repair the damage and investigate the mysterious phenomenon.... You’ll interact with the world using a basic set of tools: a data scanner, a plasma cutter, and, of course, your hands. ... Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes is at the heart of this tale, and it’s clear that Ready At Dawn has put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure players bond with her. ... Immersive mechanics; an intimate, character-driven story; and a detailed, believable world all come together to create an experience I could genuinely lose myself in. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for a sequel before another game gets VR this right.

‘When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life’ says my dad - article by Richard Macer in The Guardian. "The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to. One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town.... Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London. The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names. ... When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken."

Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard - article by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian's 'Reformation 2017' series. "Historical research and analysis is a seditious rejection of those who seek to control the past in order to shape the future, and a vital antidote to a world without a perspective to match its challenges. History is too important to be antiquarian window-dressing, nationalist mythology or populist propaganda. We need a reformation of our relationship with the past, a radical shift to place understanding history at the heart of how we think about our world."

Cuttings: July 2017

Do not adjust your set: 50 years of colour TV: from tennis and ties to petals and plumage - article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "What’s distinctive about the history of British colour TV is that the switchover was directly responsible for the creation of certain genres that dominate the medium to this day. As the technology was experimental, the corporation decided to trial it on the newcomer, BBC2, which in 1967 was run by David Attenborough. He embraced the new palette, not least because he understood at once its possibilities for his type of broadcasting. Life on Earth, Paradise Birds and The Private Life of Plants would hardly have been worth making if viewers were unable to see the glories of plumage, pelts and petals. It is no coincidence that Gardeners’ World will celebrate its 50th birthday in January next year either... But Attenborough, one of the true visionaries of early TV, was not just looking out for his own genre. He saw at once that two types of content – arts and sport – could now be fully born through the coming of colour.... green seems to have been the primary colour of Britain’s early efforts in the new technology: the grass of Centre Court and Percy Thrower’s garden, the baize of snooker tables, lush French nature in the paintings of Monet, Cézanne and Renoir."

‘Fear of Looking Stupid’: Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods - article by David Matthews for Times Higher Education. "Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.... Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews....One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that 'a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.' But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their 'personal identity affirmation' -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ 'No. 1 challenge' was to make sure that they were 'not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.' Herckis also found that many academics clung to a 'very strong' idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975." (Search for Global Learning Council Summit 2017 "lauren herckis" for more.)

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal – review by Matthew Cobb in The Guardian. "Virtually every characteristic that has been claimed to be uniquely human has eventually turned out to have some kind of a precursor in a close relative. As De Waal explains in a series of engaging accounts, language, self-recognition, tool making, empathy, co-operative behaviour, mental time-travel, culture and many other traits and abilities have turned out not to be exclusively human. This is hardly surprising, given that we evolved from an ape ancestor not so long ago: we share behaviour with our relatives, just as we share anatomy.... De Waal does not explore the underlying processes producing the complex and intriguing behaviours described here: we know very little about them. Instead, he focuses on observations and behavioural experiments from the growing field of evolutionary cognition. These allow us to peer into the minds of non-human animals – mainly social animals such as primates and corvids (crows and their relatives), but also dolphins, elephants and one invertebrate, which differs from the others not only in its anatomy but also in its solitary behaviour: the octopus."

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: trouble with algorithms - review by P D Smith in The Guardian. "Her main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives."

Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance? - article by Jonathon W. Penney, on Slate. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "My findings suggested that once people were made aware of different online threats, they were less willing to engage in a range of activities online. For example, when made aware of online surveillance by the government, noteworthy percentages of respondents were less likely to speak or write about certain things online, less likely to share personally created content, less likely to engage with social media, and more cautious in their internet speech or search. In other words, there was a clear chilling effect.... My statistical findings also suggest a greater chilling effect on women and younger internet users. In every scenario examined, I found a statistically significant age effect: The younger the participant, the greater the chilling effect. This association was strongest in the scenario involving government surveillance.... I also found female internet users in the study were more likely to be chilled in scenarios involving surveillance and personal legal threats for content posted online, with the statistical association strongest in the latter scenario. Besides being more often the victims of online harassment, my findings suggest women may also be more negatively affected when targeted with legal and regulatory threats."

Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism - article by Anne Quito and David Yanofsky in Quartz, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "With a two-word tweet, French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled his official portrait yesterday. Taken in his office at the Élysée Palace 46 days after being sworn into office, the 39-year-old centrist’s striking portrait is a masterclass in soft-power symbolism.... Working with his official photographer, Soazig De La Moissonnière, Macron carefully planned the location, pose, props, and publicity for the portrait, which will decorate the walls some 50,000 French government outposts around the world. In the tradition of power portraiture in art history, the so-called 'Jupiterian president' carefully chose props that hint at his personality and underscore his centrist politics. Every detail matters."

The party’s over: how tuition fees ruined university life - article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. "It seems very strange that students should be seen as both demanding consumers and timid thinkers. But perhaps one leads to the other. Certainly [one] English literature tutor believes that 'there is a customer entitlement that erodes students’ sense of personal entitlement'. So even as they demand more of the service, they are 'more submissive to the institution'. There is 'an alliance of subjugation', he says, in which 'they feel they have got to do what’s asked of them, and we feel we have to help them achieve what’s asked of them. It makes me quite sad. I want a student who says: ‘Are you sure about that? Why do you think that?’ But those are fewer and further apart.' "

Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield: luxury communism, anyone? - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, 'time has been diced into the segments between notifications') with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. It’s about what Greenfield calls 'the colonisation of everyday life by information processing', and this new colonialism, in the author’s view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokémon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhone’s operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or the world of increasingly networked objects... What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures – just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk.... Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warn progressives against technological utopianism. 'Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hype is couched in superficially appealing language.' "

Drama queens: why it’s all about women and power on screen right now - "Superhero movies are conspicuously fables about power: they are preoccupied with its sources, how to control it, how to justify it. They are the fantasies of superpowers. What made Wonder Woman seem so different, and such a pleasure to so many viewers, was that its story remained focused throughout on the question of women’s relationship to power. Made by and starring women, the film has been a global blockbuster, giving the franchise commercial power, which is the only kind Hollywood pays attention to; but the film itself has provoked a debate over what this allegory of female power is actually saying. Meanwhile, one of the year’s most-discussed television series was also about women and power, albeit in a far less celebratory mode. The Handmaid’s Tale asks explicit questions about what happens in a totalitarian patriarchal society that denies women access to all economic, legal and political rights. And now Game of Thrones, which is equally interested in women and power, has finally premiered its seventh series to its tenterhooked fans.... Countless words of journalism have debated whether Game of Thrones is feminist or misogynist; that either supposedly mutually exclusive position can be persuasively argued should suggest something of the show’s complexity. ... Watching Game of Thrones play out the storylines of all its varied, fascinating women, in other words, is like watching the culture do battle with its own ideas about women: overt misogyny, internalised misogyny, at least three waves of feminism and post-feminism are all fighting it out before our eyes. It is by no means clear who, or what, will win. What we see is what the struggle over women and power looks like.... While there is a tiny bit of hocus-pocus, most of the supernatural power in Game of Thrones is prosthetic, rather than symbolic. Women don’t have internal magical power, because they operate in a recognisably realistic political world – but they can acquire power externally (from dragons, potions, weapons or gods). And any power will do. In one of the best moments of the entire six series so far, Cersei is informed by an enemy that knowledge is power. With a signal, she has her guards put a sword to his throat before correcting him: 'Power is power.' Game of Thrones is not a story about dragons. It is a story about power."

Cast adrift - article by Ellen E. Jones in The Guardian Guide (29.7.17, pp 14-17). "The Handmaid's Tale, a bracingly up-to-date screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, has been praised for its cinematic visuals and compelling central performance from Elisabth Moss as handmaid Offred, but one element remains controversial: the inclusion of race without the depiction of racism. It's this that New York Magazine has described as the show's 'greatest failing'. ... 'The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies,' wrote actor and rapper Riz Ahmed in the Guardian last year. 'Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.'"

Seen and heard: April to June 2017

The Sense of an Ending – lovely, compassionate (but not cosy) film, from a Julian Barnes novel, played with down-to-earth style by Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, and excellently suitable for anyone of advancing years given to looking back at their life.

How To Be Both – novel by Ali Smith, notable for its two halves being readable in either order. My order seemed perfectly natural, and I can’t imagine it working so well in reverse – but I gather than people who read them the other way round feel like that too. There’s supposed to be a point here about apparently distinct times, for example 'before' and 'after', being more entangled and simultaneous than we usually credit. I’m not sure I came away more aware of that than I was already, but it was certainly an enjoyable excursion.

Madonnas and miracles – exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, cleverly dressing a gallery to evoke rooms in a renaissance house, so that the artworks could be displayed in a setting at least suggestive of their original context. Unfortunately – as I heard a Benedictine monk comment – what was missing was the faith context, which was only described in objective terms, and how meaningful can that be unless you at least temporarily and imaginatively enter into the relevant spiritual world in which a rosary, say, has actual and living power?

Patience – Gilbert and Sullivan performed by English Touring Opera. Good clean fun for all the family. I’d forgotten the bit where the male chorus of soldiers have to get themselves up like artistic ponces to woo their girlfriends, who’ve entirely gone over to the aesthetic movement. Troubled by the female grotesque character, though, who I realise is a sexist recurrence in the G&S operas.

Rogue One – entertaining Star Wars prequel. I particularly liked the way (spoiler) everyone gets killed at the end, like in Blackadder. Except for Darth Vader, of course, he just carries on and on and on.

Their Finest – amusing, touching and understated very British film, rather like the WW2 morale-boosting film whose making it depicts. Class acts from Bill Nighy and Gemma Aterton.

Pina – beautiful film by Wim Wenders, watched on video, featuring the stunning and imaginative choreography of Pina Bausch.

Naturally 7, ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ - performing on Later with Jools Holland. Amazing a capella.

The Journey – bold imagining of the conversations through which Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley went from being mortal enemies to the best of buddies, here compressed into a single long car journey together. Very convincing performances from Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall, and agreeable comic relief from Toby Stephens who plays Tony Blair like Hugh Grant.

The Conversations – transcripts of four long conversations between master film editor Walter Murch and novelist, Michael Ondaatje. Illuminating and inspirational on all kinds of issues to do with film editing and sound design, with stories from The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient.

Broken – TV drama by Jimmy McGovern. Misery television at its finest: completely depressing subject matter, poverty and social conflict in a northern town, made into totally compelling viewing because of the vivid and compassionate portrayal of the characters, all anchored by Sean Bean’s humane and decent Catholic priest.

Old Man’s Journey – beautiful, meditative top-rated iPad game, in which you lead the titular old man across a sequence of landscapes towards a destination which is initially unknown, though the reminiscences which appear every time he sits down to rest gradually build up a picture of his life story.

The Art of Japanese Life –BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, as beautiful and ennobling as you’d expect, but so meditative that I don’t think I got through a single episode without falling asleep.

Cuttings: June 2017

Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins: ‘People really thought that only men loved action movies’ -
interview by Hermione Hoby in The Guardian. "In one scene, Diana annihilates an enemy sniper, and takes out the better part of an ancient church. After a suitably suspenseful pause, our heroine emerges, straddles the wreckage, and patiently grants the camera some adoring seconds on her immaculate face. Watching this, I was overcome with the perfection of her liquid eyeliner. I tell Jenkins as much and she laughs uproariously. Was it important to her that Diana look gorgeous at all times? 'Absolutely. As I always say, it would be more practical if Batman were built like a very small rock climber, it would be much easier to get into spaces, to do all kinds of things. Well, that’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is he’s unreasonably big and built. Good. My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully but that everybody would love me too. I think that’s intrinsic to fantasy – fantasy is fantasy.'"

Jeremy Corbyn​ has won the first battle in a long ​war​ against the ruling elite - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "The British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers.... When most socialists treated the working class as a kind of bee colony – pre-programmed to perform its historical role – Gramsci said: everyone is an intellectual. Even if a man is treated as 'trained gorilla' at work, outside work 'he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line of moral conduct'. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks] On this premise, Gramsci told the socialists of the 1930s to stop obsessing about the state – and to conduct a long, patient trench warfare against the ideology of the ruling elite."

Baileys prize winner Naomi Alderman on fame, Trump and Wonder Woman - interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Naomi Alderman writes novels and video games, teaches, makes radio programmes about science, art, fantasy and culture for the BBC.... The Power is 42-year-old Alderman’s fourth novel... A work of science fiction featuring four protagonists, it imagines a world in which women have physical dominance over men via their ability to electrocute them at will, and where institutional, social, political and personal power reverses. ... In her Baileys acceptance speech, Alderman declared that 'my life would be more possible with the women’s movement existing and no running water than the other way around … And I suppose one of the things the book is about is that the support and the power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity.' She also implored the audience to go and see Wonder Woman, throughout which, she says, she wept."

Being Wagner by Simon Callow: what makes Wagner so controversial? - review by Thomas Laqueur in The Guardian. "This book grew out of the research Simon Callow did for a play, Inside Wagner’s Head, which he wrote for the composer’s bicentenary in 2012. What was it about this man, he asked himself, that made him so controversial – in his day and since? It is an actor’s book and he came up with an actor’s answer: his subject’s 'demiurgic personality'.... In this book, as in the 2012 play, Callow is still engaged with what was going on inside Wagner’s head – 'What was it like to be Richard Wagner?' But he expands on that question here: 'What was it like to be with Richard Wagner?' And, more revealing, 'What was it like to become Richard Wagner?' It is a book about the production of a man for whom 'self-dramatisation was his essential mode' and who, in his autobiography My Life, set the standard."

Tiananmen Square: the silences left by the massacre - article by Madeleine Thien in The Guardian. "Each year around the anniversary of 4 June 1989, the Beijing massacre, words vanish from the Chinese internet. A comprehensive list of blocked words is published by China Digital Times, which keeps an extensive database. Digital censorship has pushed Chinese citizens to create an irreverent, ingenious and hilarious counter-language of puns, gifs, memes, nicknames and more, to fill in the spaces otherwise left blank. I turned to those missing words to record the events of 1989 and the aftermath.... The poet Bei Dao wrote: 'Life’s only a promise / Don’t grieve for it / We knocked down midnight’s door / alone like a match polished into light.' Today, 27 years later, even the words yesterday and tomorrow are so politically charged, they disappear." (Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien was shortlisted for the Baileys prize.)

Blooming marvellous: the world's first female photographer and her botanical beauties - "Anna Atkins is considered to have been the first female photographer. She was born in Kent in 1799, and she made her most significant contribution across 10 years in the mid-19th century in which she created at least 10,000 images by hand. But it was what she did with those pictures that gave her a place in art history. Atkins realised what millions of social media users know today: that images are for sharing. She created the first book to contain photographs, and she paved the way for photography’s power to connect people.... It was Atkins’s interest in the study of algae that prompted her book. She was so disappointed by the lack of illustrations in a guide to British algae published in 1841 that she decided to do something about it. In the autumn of 1843 she began work on creating images of hundreds of different types, using Herschel’s cyanotype method. It was a meticulous task whose skill rested in working quickly to assemble the dried algae arrangement, before leaving the paper exposed to sunlight for precisely the right amount of time."

Essayism by Brian Dillon: pure creativity on the page - "Dillon himself is a superbly varied essayist; the author of a range of books about photography, hypochondriacs, the great explosion at a munitions factory in Faversham, Kent, in 1916, and another written in 24 hours called I Am Sitting in a Room, his lines of inquiry are the body and its afflictions, contemporary art and literature, the history of place and ruins. He has a natural affinity for the essay 'as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things'. Lists are a wonderful tactic of essayism – consider Georges Perec’s astonishing lists in Species of Spaces, from the food and drink he consumed in 1974 to the objects on his desk. Dillon helps us see, via Joan Didion in The White Album, the list as incomplete, the very act of making a list a gesture at what cannot be listed or will always be left out: 'the list, if it’s doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making'."

Cuttings: May 2017

Francois-René de Chateaubriand, 1841, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “When steam power will be perfected, when, together with telegraphy and railways, it will have made distances disappear, it will not only be commodities which travel, but also ideas which will have wings. When fiscal and commercial barriers have been abolished between different states, as they have already been between the provinces of the same state; when different countries, in daily relations, tend toward the unity of peoples, how will you be able to revive the old mode of separation?”

Big stories are complex: here's how we're trying to explain them better - article by Vicky Frost, Nick Haley and Natalie Hanman in The Guardian. "You may have noticed some small blue boxes sitting within articles on the Guardian’s site and app. These are what we have called 'explainer atoms' – ... a user-, digital- and mobile-friendly way to explain and contextualise news events. These distinctive explainers answer questions such as 'Why do migrants and refugees head for the north coast of France?' inside an article about the refugee crisis, or 'Who is Emmanuel Macron?' for people reading about his victory in the first round of the French elections. By answering questions such as these inside an article, we aim to provide a richer, clearer reading experience for those who haven’t followed every cough and spit of a story (or even for those who have, but never quite caught the initial explanations), and to do it in such a way that it isn’t intrusive for readers with more knowledge. That means communicating the maximum amount of information in the minimum number of words. We trialled this approach over the EU referendum last summer, with 100-word explainer atoms considering 'What is article 50?' (the question everyone was asking the morning after the night before), 'How might Brexit affect Ireland?', or 'Why is the referendum happening now?'. The idea was that, whenever you joined in the debate, you could catch up with the important elements of it."

Part-time student numbers collapse by 56% in five years - article by Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian. "The latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that part-time student numbers in England have fallen 56% since 2010.... The Open University, which solely delivers distance learning and relies on older, employed learners, ... as its bread and butter, has been hit especially hard, with its numbers falling by 30% between 2010-11 and 2015-16.... Part-time enrolments in England hit the floor in 2012 when the government raised the cap on part-time fees, doubling or even tripling the cost of many courses. To counter this, the government extended loans for tuition fees to part-timers, who previously hadn’t been eligible to apply. But ... research shows that about two-thirds of would-be part-time students were not eligible for this support, often because they were studying a more bite-size course, or already had a degree."

Raymond Tallis: [My working day] ‘In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’ - article by Raymond Tallis in the series 'My working day' in The Guardian. "My books ...begin in notebooks, emerging by a process akin to crystallisation. Eventually a provisional title announces itself, signalling and reinforcing commitment to a topic, to a line of inquiry. The lineaments of a structure loom through the fog in the form of chapter headings that both provoke ideas and give them a home. Thus the journey from initial tingles – the whoosh of a connection, the micro-illumination of a phrase, the sudden sense of an expanding cognitive space – to a completed work. With successive drafts, writing becomes an increasingly clerical activity – synopses, cross-referencing, footnotes. Paul Valéry spoke of the conflict between the process of thinking and the products of thought. Teasing out an idea is fundamentally different from seeing where it might fit into a publishable book."

Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin: the damage done by Silicon Valley - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The argument of Taplin’s new book: the titans of the digital age frequently behave like spoiled and ignorant brats with far, far more money than sense; and their victims include many of the artists who create things of real value and who can no longer earn a living from doing so. Taplin’s sense of outrage is palpable and his case is often compelling. Unfortunately, the two parts of the argument don’t really hang together. The first claim is hard to dispute – Silicon Valley does increasingly resemble some kind of nightmarish children’s playground, populated by overgrown babies with no idea of the consequences of their actions – but the evidence he marshals is mainly second hand, drawn from newspaper commentary and some well-known histories of the digital revolution. As a result, it feels a little overfamiliar.... He leans too heavily on the assumption that the 1960s and 70s represented an artistic golden age whose like we will never see again. Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde aren’t quite enough to build a case like that. Any era will value its own products, and that will be especially true of the people who helped make them. Imagine a period 30 or 40 years from now when podcasting has been destroyed by some new economic model (though it will probably happen far sooner than that)."

Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things - interview by B.R. Cohen on Public Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "At the moment, I am trying to write a history of the United States from 1492 to the present... I’ve been trying to weave a history of technology into an account of the origins of American political ideas and institutions, which is A) not easy, and B) alarming. ... I do think about things like the Constitution as having a vital relationship with the technologies of writing and printing.... It’s difficult not to be susceptible to technological determinism. We measure the very moments of our lives by computer-driven clocks and calendars that we keep in our pockets. I get why people think this way. Still, it’s a pernicious fallacy. To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible.... I once wrote a piece about the history of the breast pump. I was using a breast pump at the time and every time I hooked myself up to that monstrosity I felt like I was in a Mary Shelley story... So I looked into it. And do you know why we have breast pumps in the United States? Because we don’t have maternity leave. Pumps are a very cheap and crappy substitute." See her website https://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/home.

Sandy Hook father Leonard Pozner on death threats: ‘I never imagined I’d have to fight for my child’s legacy’ - article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "Even in a country all too used to mass shootings, the merciless killing in Newtown, Connecticut of 20 six- and seven-year-olds, along with six of the school’s employees, retains a terrible hold on the US’s imagination, gripping the memory after too many other shootings have faded away. For most, it is too horrible to mention without a shudder. But for a tenacious few, it is too horrible to believe, and soon after Noah was killed, when Pozner thought he had already seen the worst of humanity, he came into contact with the latter group. Just days after the massacre, when the US was still reeling from the tragedy, and Pozner himself was, he says, 'pretty much in a catatonic state', the theories started spreading: Sandy Hook had never happened, it was staged by actors, the children had never existed, it was a ruse by President Obama/the anti-gun movement/the 'New World Order global elitists'. So-called Sandy Hook truthers – Pozner prefers the term hoaxer – pored over photos of the families and children on social media, triumphantly pointing to any visual similarities they could find between the dead children and living ones. The families were harassed by hoaxers, online and off, insisting that they stop their fake grieving. When Pozner roused himself from his catatonic grief to post photos of Noah online, hoaxers would leave comments: 'Fake kid', 'Didn’t die', 'F***ing liar'. "

Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis: one of the greatest political memoirs ever? - review by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice. In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis."

'Strong and stable leadership!' Could Theresa May's rhetorical carpet-bombing backfire? - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "'In general, there is evidence that repetition of political frames tends to be effective,' [says political psychologist Aleksandra Cichocka] 'especially when the aim is to reach an audience that is not highly knowledgable about politics.' Repetition, of course, has been a key device in the art of rhetoric for millennia. And there is a view that brute repetition itself can smuggle an idea past the critical faculties to nest in the subconscious. This is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, according to Victor Klemperer, who lived through the era and analysed its rhetoric in his classic book The Language of the Third Reich. Nazism didn’t prevail in Germany because of the individual speeches of Hitler or Goebbels, Klemperer explains. 'Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.' It is instructive to compare this with what Tony Blair’s former director of communications, Lance Price, told the BBC: 'You have to do it over and over again. It doesn’t matter that journalists are sick and tired of hearing it; the point is that voters have to hear it a lot before it sinks into their subconscious and starts to have some resonance.' "

Constructing the Golem - blog post 123 by Ursula K. Le Guin, 21 February 2017. "The legend of the golem varies according to the teller, but I will follow the version that tells how in a time of persecution a rabbi made a mighty giant out of mud, a golem, and wrote a sacred word on its forehead — 'Truth' — that gave it life. With its frightening size and enormous strength, the golem was to defend and safeguard the Jews. But the golem was not rational, not controllable. It was a danger in itself. So the rabbi removed a single letter from the word on its forehead, which then read 'Death,' and the life went out of the giant, leaving only mud.... Looking at the New World from the ancient one I inhabit, I am appalled at the constant, obsessive attention paid to Trump. ... Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. ... Every witty parody, hateful gibe, clever takeoff, etc., merely plays his game, and therefore plays into his hands.... I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way. He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud."

Post Truth by Matthew D’Ancona and Post-Truth by Evan Davis: is this really a new era of politics? - review by John Gray in The Guardian. "Blair’s assertion that the world is fashioned from our beliefs was echoed by an anonymous aide of George W Bush (widely thought to be Karl Rove) when in an interview reported in October 2004 he dismissed the 'reality-based community' – 'people who believe solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality' – as no longer important in politics. 'That’s not the way the world really works any more … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.' If the post-truth era is defined by the conviction that reality is constructed through the exercise of power, this is when it began to shape democratic politics.... While the notion that we entered a new age 12 months ago is far-fetched, D’Ancona’s punchy polemic asks questions that are urgently topical and undeniably important. He is right that the internet and social media have transformed communication, giving disinformation and deception in markets and politics added potency. Davis considers how this has happened, and in a rich and probing analysis of the use and misuse of the media suggests the answer can be found in the economics of information. What seems like an irrational message may contain information of a subtle and tacit kind to which people respond. Even when what is being communicated has little or no cognitive content, there are rational explanations as to why such messages can be so effective. Distinguishing between post-truth, post-fact, nonsense and gibberish, Evans’s ambition seems to be to develop a general theory of bullshit."

Negativity bias: why conservatives are more swayed by threats than liberals - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian Headquarters blog. "There is a widespread psychological bias to attend more to negative messages than positive ones. They capture more attention, elicit stronger emotions and are more memorable. Some individuals are more sensitive to this ‘negativity bias’ than others and pay higher precautionary costs. They may spend more time worrying or more money on security. Other people are less sensitive to possible threats and pay higher costs when hazards occur.... I have written before about the research showing that while conservatives and liberals hold the same moral ideals, they prioritise them differently. Liberals tend to value fairness while conservatives prioritise tradition and authority.... In this month’s Psychological Science, Daniel Fessler and colleagues at the University of California examine whether individual differences in negativity bias might be associated with voting behaviour."

Grayson Perry: ‘I am nostalgic for a time when art galleries were empty’ - article in The Guardian. "As an artist I have long been interested in the decreasing value of the rebellious stance. The counterculture has always been the perfect R&D lab for capitalism. What starts as a creative revolt soon becomes co-opted as the latest way to make money. As we have seen over the past few years, the hippie free-for-all face of the internet was a mask that soon fell away to reveal a predatory capitalist robot. I would characterise the art establishment’s reaction to challenge as 'Oh! Jolly good! Rebellion! Welcome!' Part of the historic recipe of modern art has been revolution, the overthrow of the old order. But what if the ethos of that rebellion is now mainstream? Punks are now pensioners, tattoos are as dangerous as reading Harry Potter, a Damien Hirst show is a nice day out with the kiddies. The mutinous subcultural pose is now the norm. The only people who call art shocking these days are lazy journalists. One of the most unsettling gestures in recent British art history was [Tracey] Emin saying she voted Tory. The Tories seem very popular these days."

Cuttings: April 2017

I’m a bit brown. But in America I’m white. Not for much longer - article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "Why are people from the Middle East counted as white by the US government but considered definitely-not-white by many Americans? How can you count somebody as white one year and then decide they’re not white the next year? Indeed it raises the question, what actually is 'whiteness' and who qualifies as white?... When the Irish first came to the US in large numbers nobody was holding parades in their honour; rather they were vilified in the same way that Mexicans and Muslims in the US are vilified today. In How the Irish Became White (1995), Noel Ignatiev writes that 'While the white skin made the Irish eligible for membership in the white race, it did not guarantee their admission; they had to earn it.' Ignatiev, along with others, argues that the Irish earned their admission by embracing racism against African-Americans; reinforcing their whiteness by emphasising other people’s blackness.... It’s not just the Irish who have worked their way into whiteness over the years. Italian-Americans have been similarly whitewashed. And in How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (1998), Karen Brodkin argues that Jewish intellectuals helped to 'whiten' US Jews during the 1950s and 1960s. Jews, she says, are now considered white – but perhaps not for ever. Whiteness doesn’t just expand to let people in, it can also contract and spit people out. In an essay last year, Brodkin wonders whether Trump will 'unwhiten' Jews."

Dystopian dreams: how feminist science fiction predicted the future - article by Naomi Alderman in The Guardian. "What interests me, and what links these stories [about the upbringing of Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr)]... is the sense of young people having been exposed early on to the idea that there are other ways of living... That however you’ve grown up, it would always be possible to do things differently.... My latest novel, The Power, has been described as a dystopian thriller. In it, almost all the women in the world suddenly develop the power to electrocute people at will (they can electrocute women as well as men; also animals and inanimate objects – I based it on what electric eels do). And they use their power, slowly but surely, just as men do in our world today. Some of them are kind and some cruel. Some rape and some just have a jolly good time in bed with willing participants. Nothing happens to men in the novel – I explain carefully to interviewers – that is not happening to a woman in our world today. So is it dystopian? Well. Only if you’re a man.... Le Guin has a beautiful long short story that I’d encourage anyone to read. It’s called 'The Matter of Seggri' and it draws – as so much of her work does – on her deep sympathy with the position of the anthropologist, there to observe and understand, not judge and solve.... What I love about this story is how clear-eyed it is that all societies – at least all thus far constructed – leave something out. At a certain point in the story, one woman grieves over the curious behaviour of a [brothel] boy who had fallen in love with her and wanted to be free to live only with her. 'She thought, "My life is wrong." But she did not know how to make it right.' It’s a heartbreaking moment. So often when one’s life seems wrong, it’s the world that is wrong. But we do not know how to make it right."

The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart: a liberal’s rightwing turn on immigration - review by Johnathan Freedland in The Guardian. "[Goodhart] argues that the key faultline in Britain and elsewhere now separates those who come from Somewhere – rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated – and those who could come from Anywhere: footloose, often urban, socially liberal and university educated.... Goodhart deserves credit for confronting ... early and front on [the issue of cultural, not only economic, discontent voiced by his 'Somewheres']. But that does not mean either his diagnosis or his prescriptions are right. First, in his sympathy for Somewheres he caricatures Anywheres. Too easily does his category ... collapse into an upmarket version of the hated 'metropolitan liberal elite'.... A visit to even the much derided, ultra-remain districts of, say, north London would show areas that are still genuine communities.... Anywheres come from somewhere too. Second, Goodhart insists that the views of Somewheres have been overlooked for decades, over-ruled by the Anywheres who control the commanding heights of political and cultural power, from the civil service to the universities to the BBC.... He claims Somewhere views are marginalised in our collective life, yet the Mail, Sun, Express, Telegraph and the rest air little else. It is the liberal internationalism of Anywheres that is drowned out. Where Goodhart goes wrong above all is on Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities.... The very qualities Goodhart most admires among the Somewheres – including neighbourliness, trust and a sense of shared destiny – are to be found in Britain’s minorities. They have not caused the social fragmentation he laments: globalisation, automation and a thousand other shifts bear more blame than they do. If anything, and especially in the cities, they point to a remedy for those Anywheres Goodhart believes have become unmoored. Minorities might be more of a model than a threat, more to be emulated than to be feared."

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman: nice dramatic narratives, but where’s the nihilism? - review by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. "Gaiman plays down the extreme strangeness of some of the material and defuses its bleakness by a degree of self-satire. There is a good deal of humour in the stories, the kind most children like – seeing a braggart take a pratfall, watching the cunning little fellow outwit the big dumb bully. Gaiman handles this splendidly. Yet I wonder if he tries too hard to tame something intractably feral, to domesticate a troll.... The Norse myths were narrative expressions of a religion deeply strange to us. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are divine comedies: there may be punishment for the wicked, but the promise of salvation holds. What we have from the Norse is a fragment of a divine tragedy. Vague promises of a better world after the Fimbulwinter and the final apocalypse are unconvincing; that’s not where this story goes. It goes inexorably from nothingness into night. You just can’t make pals of these brutal giants and self-destructive gods. They are tragic to the bone."

In our Google era, indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "One of the things that’s commonly imagined is that indexing is, in the age of Google, something that can be outsourced to a computer algorithm. Dead wrong. A concordance – essentially, an alphabetical list of all the words in a book with page references – can be done by a computer. But an index, to be useful, needs to be done by a human. In a book about the Middle East, say, an entry that said: 'Syria 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 23, 25, 26, 27 … ' would be no use at all.... Bad indexes are legion. Absent indexes almost more so. One of my correspondents recently bewailed the index of a major and bestselling recent book.'“Entry for France – around 40 undifferentiated locators,' she complained. 'Entry for Europe, over 90 page refs.' She concluded: 'Looks like a concordance created by searching the PDF files.' "

Nadeem Aslam: My writing day - article in The Guardian. "Next to my writing desk is a blank sheet of A4 paper on to which I jot down things I need to look up – some to do with the book I am writing, others completely unrelated. Only when the sheet is full – on both sides – do I log on: it can take up to 10 days to fill the sheet. Then I go through the items one by one. A particular scene from a half-forgotten movie; the contemporary reviews of a classic novel … I stay logged on for as long as it takes to look everything up. Afterwards I pin a new sheet next to the desk."

School of hard knocks: the dark underside to boarding school books - article by Alex Renton in The Guardian, based on his book Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class. "Savage discipline, along with sexual confusion and formalised bullying, are so common in the schooldays memoirs of the British elite in the 19th and 20th centuries that you have to conclude that parents wanted and paid for their children to experience these things. To most of the class that used them, the private schools were factories that would reliably produce men and women who would run Britain, its politics, business and culture. Boarding school was a proven good investment. So thousands of men and women who had suffered awfully, by their own admission, sent their children off for just the same."

Beyond Videos: 4 Ways Instructional Designers Can Craft Immersive Educational Media - article by Amy Ahearn on EdSurge. "I’ve found that videos turn out best if I help the expert do four things: relate, narrate, demonstrate, and debate. These four actions represent a synthesis of the research on instructional media. 'Relate' videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. 'Narrate' videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. 'Demonstrate' videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. 'Debate' videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

How the media warp science: the case of the sensationalised satnav - article by Dean Burnett in The Guardian Brain-flapping column. "Earlier this week I saw how a science news story occurred, from experiment to media coverage.... A UCL study titled ' Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future' was published in Nature Communications.... The results suggest that ... the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex form a navigational system that allows us to work out how to get around a city, by remembering what’s where, where we’ve been, and where to go. An interesting study, with interesting and reasonable conclusions.... But it doesn’t end there. In these days of 'publish or perish' and obsessions with 'impact ', it’s not enough to produce a good study, people have to read it as well.... In this instance, the UCL media relations office sent out an undeniably thorough and well-written press release, but with the title 'Satnavs "switch off" parts of the brain'.... What was ... fascinating, as someone who had the full details of both the study and how it was pitched, was how the different papers reported it. They all had exactly the same info and material, but presented it in revealingly different ways."