Tuesday 18 November 2014

Simulations and games, feedback and scores

Talking about simulations with some academic colleagues recently, I showed them two examples publicly available on OpenLearn: "A Day in the Life of a Social Worker", in which you play a junior social worker in a busy department, and "Saving Setrus", in which you play the President of an imaginary African country. Both have high production values, with rich graphical interfaces to immerse you in the setting, but there are big differences in the feedback you receive on your actions - which as I've written elsewhere is the critical component of any simulation intended for learning and not simply for entertainment. Does giving a numerical score for your actions as President mean that, as one of my colleagues thought, "Saving Setrus" is really a game and not a simulation?

"A Day in the Life of a Social Worker" consists of three sections: an in-tray exercise, in which you have limited time to deal with incoming tasks; a case conference, in which you have to choose appropriate dialogue responses to the various participants; and a home visit, in which you have to choose appropriate actions and responses to achieve the visit's objectives, despite the uncooperative attitude of your interlocutor. The feedback to the in-tray exercise is clear and plausible: your simulated line manager calls you in for a chat and discusses the tasks you selected and the tasks you didn't, commenting in each case on the wisdom or otherwise of your choices, and throughout the rest of the day you may get messages from colleagues giving you indirect feedback; for example, you may get an angry text from a senior colleague if you fail to rearrange an appointment because you didn't check your diary and so didn't see the conflict. The feedback to the other two sections is less striking because the possible actions for the learner are more constrained - especially since some of the options are patently silly - but still it is delivered within the game setting, without breaking the immersion.

In "Saving Setrus", the military dictator of your neighbouring country Laurania is stepping up his brutal crackdown on the political opposition, which is supported by many of your nationals in the second city Setrus. Over four simulated days, you engage in conversations with the other country's ambassador, the President of another neighbouring country, your attorney general (for advice on the legal position), an NGO working in the region, and the leaders of your armed forces. You also remotely address the UN Security Council respond to a speach by the Lauranian President. In each case, you choice is limited to dialogue options, adjusting your position with respect to each of them and with respect to international law. You cannot avoid deploying your armed forces at the end of the four days, although you do have some choice over what their orders are. The feedback which you receive at the end of each day is basically a set of three scores, rating your choices on humanitarian, legal and political scales. At the end of the simulation, there is also a brief discussion on the issues involved, but you don't get much sense of how your actions affected the outcome or even your scores.

The in-tray exercise is plausibly an introduction to being a social worker, whereas "Saving Setrus" is not plausibly an introduction to being a president. I think my colleague is right: the presentation of feedback as scores, and the invisibility of how these scores are obtained, contribute to the sense that "Saving Setrus" is really a game. This does not mean that it had no educational value; at very least, it gives a player exposure to the international law concerning military intervention and an awareness of the issues involved. But it is not really a simulation and I now think I was wrong to describe it as such.

Wednesday 5 November 2014

The Waggler, the Knocker, and the sponge on a stick: science and craft at the Wedgwood Museum

I was surprised recently to hear several people in my university say that they wanted learning design to be more professional and less of a craft. I've always been proud to count myself an expert craftsman in it, so this was a bit of a blow and I wondered what they actually meant. I think they meant that they want learning design to have a better evidence base and a better grounding in theories of learning - which is fair enough, but if they're hoping to achieve the scientific certainty of being able to say "this works better than that" I believe they're going to be disappointed, because such certainties aren't available in the educational world. However good your evidence, however well-grounded in theory your learning design is, I believe when you've actually trying to make something you still have to resort to craft.

A visit to the Wedgwood Museum put the relationship between science and craft into perspective for me. One of the things for which Josiah Wedgwood is famous is the experimental quantitative rigour with which he perfected the materials for mass-producing his fabulous decorative tableware. One of the museum's iconic exhibits is a tray of ceramic slips, each having been fired with a slightly different glaze, which he used in the research for what became known as Jasperware. So that is a kind of exemplar for a scientifically based production process: the glaze needs to be mixed like this, and not like that, for the best results; the research says so.

But if you go to the demonstration area, where staff will show you how pots and vases are actually made, you get a different picture. Yes, everything which they do depends on the precisely controlled composition of their materials; the maker of slipware vases needs a plaster mould which absorbs water out of the slip at a predictable speed, they know and allow for the precise percentage shrinkage on firing (it's 12% by the way), and they can count on their glazes and pigments working properly even though their original toxic ingredients such as lead and arsenic have been replaced with less harmful substances tested and selected to still behave just as Josiah Wedgwood intended. And yet, when it comes to hands-on working, what counts is craft skill, with craft or folk terminology.

Jasperware vases usually have a decorative design in a contrasting colour. To get the decorative application out of its mould, they use a tool called a Waggler. It's rather like a handle of a spoon, precisely shaped for its job of easing out a delicate and fine-detailed sliver of clay, And they really do call it a Waggler; the demonstrator told me that there was a scientific name for it, but he couldn't remember what it was. It gets better: to firm up the clay in the moulds, they use a wooden mallet with its head covered with enough cloth to give it just the right amount of bounce, which they call a Knocker. And when they throw a pot or a vase on a wheel, to reach in and remove the excess water from the bottom after they've finished, they use a piece of bathroom sponge taped to the end of a bit of stick, which they call "the sponge on a stick".

The custom-made tools, or tools put together from things lying around, and the folksy names for them, are characteristic of craft and its culture. You couldn't ask for a clearer demonstration that no matter how scientific you get, you still need a Waggler, a Knocker, and a sponge on a stick.

The Waggler
The Knocker
The sponge on a stick



Cuttings: October 2014

The Marshmallow Test review – if you can resist, you will go far - review of Walter Mischel The Marshmallow Test: Understanding Self-Control and How to Master It, by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “Walter Mischel's study into impulse control began in the 1960s…. He tested pre-school kids on their self-control. It was simple: they could have one marshmallow immediately, or wait, alone in a room, for a given number of minutes, ring a bell and the researcher would give them two. The results were astonishing to the team: good impulse control turned out to be a predictor of success in disparate areas, from academic results to health in later life…. [Mischel's concern in this book] is with the lived experience of impulse control, the moment of failure, the moment of success, what can be learned and what unlearned…. Children who can be persuaded to think of marshmallows as puffs of cloud are more likely to overcome their temptation than children encouraged to think of the squidge and the sweetness…. Children who were able to imagine the marshmallow with a frame around it, as an image rather than the thing itself, found it easier to defer gratification, too. Children who distracted themselves performed better. Hot and cool perception interlace with abstraction and diversion to create the person who, down the line, when you've seen their Sats scores and healthy internal organs, you'd call more ‘rounded’.”

We need a bold scandalous feminism – article by Jacqueline Rose in The Guardian. “It is time to return to what feminism has to tell us. It is time to make the case for what women have to say about the perils of our modern world. But the case cannot be made along the lines that have become most familiar. We cannot make it only by asserting women's right to equality or by arguing that women are qualified to enter the courts of judgment and the corridors of power. Those claims are important but they tend to be made – loudly, as they must be – to the detriment of another type of understanding, less obvious but no less vital, that makes its way into the darker spaces of the world, ripping the cover from the illusions through which the most deadly forms of power sustain and congratulate themselves. This we might call the knowledge of women. In its best forms, it is what allows women to struggle for freedom without being co-opted by false pretension or by the brute exertion of power for its own sake.”

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris by Colin Jones – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this compelling Cheshire cat of a book, Colin Jones charts the moment in the mid-18th century when Paris learned to smile. Until that point, the court, tucked away at Versailles, had insisted that everyone kept a straight face. This was partly because France's most privileged mouths had been spoiled by too much sugar, and no one wanted their black stumps flashed to infinity in the Hall of Mirrors. But it was also because smiling in general risked making you look either plebeian or insane. To understand why you have to go to the roots. Sourire, a smile, comes from sous-rire, a little laugh, and laughing was something that definitely belonged to the lower orders. Just like a yawn or a fart, a side-splitting guffaw breached the boundary between the body and the rest of the world. This inside-outsideness was fine if you were of a Rabelaisian turn of mind, but disturbing if you weren't. For in the bellylaugh's uninhibited rumble, it was possible to hear the stirrings of serious social and political dissent. No wonder the toffs at Versailles kept their mouths clamped shut, refusing to mobilise their features beyond the occasional sneer.”

The Truth about Evil – article by John Gray in The Guardian. “Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly – to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved. Paradoxically, this belief in the evanescence of evil is what underlies the hysterical invocation of evil that has lately become so prominent. There are many bad and lamentable forces in the world today, but it is those that undermine the belief in human improvement that are demonised as “evil”…. It’s in the Middle East… that the prevailing liberal worldview has proved most consistently misguided. At bottom, it may be western leaders’ inability to think outside this melioristic creed that accounts for their failure to learn from experience….”

How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, by Margaret Meek. “Understanding authorship, audience, illustration and iconic interpretation are part of the ontogenesis of ‘literary competences’. To learn to read a book, as distinct from simply recognizing the words on the page, a young reader has to become both the teller (picking up the author’s view and voice) and the told (the recipient of the story, the interpreter). This symbolic interaction is learned early. It is rarely, if ever, taught, except in so far as an adult stands in for the author by giving the text a ‘voice’ when reading to the child. Wendy and Stephen [the dedicatees of Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins, the book under discussion] are replaced by other nameless children, in this case thousands of them, whose interpretations of the words and pictures may be as numerous, but are scarcely ever inquired into or understood for what they are.” (p 10) [See also discussion here.]

Humans, 150,000 years ago, wouldn’t figure on a list of the five most interesting species on Earth – interview with Jared Diamond by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. “Diamond has enjoyed huge success with several “big books” – most famously, 1997’s Guns, Germs and Steel – which ask the most sweeping questions it is possible to ask about human history. For instance: why did one species of primate, unremarkable until 70,000 years ago, come to develop language, art, music, nation states and space travel? Why do some civilisations prosper, while others collapse? Why did westerners conquer the Americas, Africa and Australia, instead of the other way round? Diamond, who describes himself as a biogeographer, answers them in translucent prose that has the effect of making the world seem to click into place, each fact assuming its place in an elegant arc of pan-historical reasoning. Our interview itself provides an example: one white man arriving to interview another, in English, on the imposing main campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a landscape bearing little trace of the Native Americans who once thrived here. Why? Because 8,000 years ago – to borrow from Guns, Germs and Steel – the geography of Europe and the Middle East made it easier to farm crops and animals there than elsewhere.”

Jacques Tati’s Playtime: Life-Affirming Comedy – article by Jonathan Romney in The Guardian. “In its quiet way, Playtime expresses a satiric outrage at the antiseptic nature of modern life, but its take on urban alienation is nothing if not joyous. Tati celebrates human character (and French character in particular) as indomitably resistant to imposed order, especially if that order smacks of transatlantic-style bureaucracy…. The sprawling cast fills the screen, especially in the increasingly manic second hour, which features the chaotic opening night of the pretentious Royal Garden restaurant. Hulot is present there, but often disappears into the throng, Where’s Wally?-style. Tati had already wearied of the character, and constantly subverts his audience’s desire to see him at centre stage. Playtime teems with confounding Hulot lookalikes, equipped with his trademark hat, pipe and raincoat. Tati also hides himself in the action, camouflaged; in one shot, he plays a policeman directing traffic in jerky semaphore, but stays in the background, just a living part of the overall scenery. The film’s mesmerising strangeness rises partly from a tension between the delicacy, even discretion, of the gags and the vastness of the conception. This is minimalist humour mounted on a maximalist scale. The timing disconcerts: jokes are barely signalled, and are often over before we’ve quite registered them. The most audacious sight gag, the spontaneous shattering of a glass door, is done with scant ceremony, and the joke then becomes the doorman’s attempts to carry on as if the door were intact. Other routines don’t gel as gags in the usual sense; two adjacent flats are shot to look like a single space, so that neighbours appear to inhabit the same room. But Tati works this set-up less for laughs than for an unsettling detached oddness.”

Seen and heard: October 2014

Margaret Meek, How Texts Teach What Readers Learn - a slim pamphlet (just 32 pages) but full of insight into the assumptions about reading which we take for granted (such as, that a book may be written for certain people but read by others, that the "voice" may or may not be that of the author let alone the person reading it aloud, that the book may refer to things which bear a closer or more distant relationship to the reader's lived experience) but which children learning to read have to figure out, because these things are usually not taught explicitly. (For an example of the discussion the pamphlet inspires see here.) Overall, it's a plea that school reading should not be limited to functional reading, but what it prompted in me was the realisation that reading of academic or historical texts is "difficult" in a similar way, and that this is something which students have to learn. At my university, the team devoted to English for academic purposes are working on interesting ways to teach academic reading as an explicit skill, in the recognition that this is something which many people, perhaps most, do not do naturally or spontaneously. I'm watching with interest....

The Educators - excellent series on BBC Radio 4, each episode being an interview with someone whose ideas are currently shaking up educational thinking: provocative and inspirational. So far I've heard the interviews with Ken Robinson (on making creativity as important as literacy in school education), John Harrie (whose verdict after a massive review of educational research literature is that what makes a difference in teaching isn't any particular method or approach but the extent of the teacher's experience), Daisy Christodoulou (who argues discovery learning doesn't help learners who lack the basic knowledge or social capital to make use of it), Tony Little (on priorities in school education) and Paul Howard-Jones (on how games in the classroom seem to be more effective, or more motivational, when there's an element of chance in them - flying in the face of rationalist educational theory). Still to come on my playlist are the interviews with Sugata Mitra, Jo Boaler and Salman Khan (of the Khan Academy).

The Sixteen, 'Voice of the Turtledove' tour - another great concert by the vocal wonder-group, returning to their musical heartland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Bought the album straight away.

Wedgwood Museum - now happily saved for the nation, though when we planned our visit we thought it might be a literal case of "last chance to see". So much gorgeousness, with room after room of the finest craft: stunning from both the technical and design point of view; too much to take in all at once, so we're going to come back after next April, when their new galleries and facilities are open.

The West Wing - watching again from the start on box set. The political setting has dated, of course, but it was only ever partly about that. I now see it as being mainly about the struggle to do the right thing in large, complex public organisations, and abo;ut how and why things do and don't happen in them. My wife and I both felt like seeing it again anyway, but I'm watching it now partly in preparation for a management development programme. It feels more relevant than most textbooks.

What We Did on Ou Holiday - beautiful, funny, startling and moving new film, with David Tennant and Rosamund Pike as the divorcing parents of three precociously-tongued children (after the manner of Outnumbered, being produced by the same team), and a splendid performance by Billy Connolly as the children's grandfather. Cunningly constructed so that you start off sympathising with the parents in dealing with the children's weirdness, but then - in the critical middle section where they go to the beach with their grandfather, who is old and dying and doesn't care about pretending any more - you come to assume the children's point of view, and you realise that it's the growns-ups who are behaving strangely.

St Albans Cathedral - the longest nave in Europe, apparently, but more impressive to me were the organ-tuning going on during our visit (long notes, sustained until adjustment is complete, proceeding slowly upwards across a period of hours) and the tomb of St Alban. He was the first English martyr, killed for refusing to renounce the Christianity to which he had just converted - and we couldn't help but think of the hundreds being similarly martyred in our own time. An Arab family (parents and three children) came to kneel at the tomb while we were there; relatives or at least compatriots of such? Medieval times have never seemed so close.

Verulamium Museum - very child-friendly, and definitely somewhere to take our granddaughter when she does the Romans at school. Museums in general, I've been glad to discover, are much better than in my own childhood on making visible the inference process by which you get from the grotty old fragments in front of you to the reconstructed splendour of the past life, which is actually what is interesting.

Private Lives of Print: The Use and Abuse of Books 1450-1550 - exhibition at Cambridge University Library. Definitely worth the visit; it's open to the public, free admission, Monday to Saturday till 11 April 2015. There were two big insights for me. First, while I knew that manuscript production continued for a long time (centuries, they said) after the invention of printing (there was a huge industry there which wasn't about to go away) I didn't realise what an influence it had on early book production. Customers wanted their printed books to look just as splendid as their manuscripts, which meant parchment pages and manual illuminations, drawn and coloured in spaces deliberately left blank during printing. (The printer just had to hope the illuminator knew what letter they were supposed to be illuminating; the exhibition includes one example where they got it wrong.) The second insight was that production design norms and conventions had to be established for printed pages, just as in our own time we've had to establish norms and conventions for web page production and design; in the case of printing, these were copied partly from manuscripts and partly from earlier printed books, which in many cases were the source from which the text was copied, the page breaks of the source printing being marked subtly in the text of the copied version. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a typo in a Guttenberg Bible.