Why kids learn to use technology quickly

Here's an interesting take on the well-known phenomenon of small children using complex pieces of technology with ease. And it's so obvious that I'm surprised it never occurred to me before, nor have I seen it in any other writing about young people and technology.

I saw it in a passing comment by technology journalist Alex Wiltshire. He was talking about Minecraft, which in case you don't know is a hugely popular game, played either solo or co-operatively online by children as well as adults, though the game was not specifically designed for them. As he observes: "When it first came out everyone was confused as the developer gave little or no guidance. It didn't specifically say you had to cut down a tree to get some wood, whereas games that are produced by big companies give instructions – the last thing they want is for people not to understand how to play. With Minecraft, which had an indie developer, the player had to work things out for themselves."

And here's the key bit. "Because you learn so much when you're young, kids are used to the idea of a world they don't fully understand, so they're comfortable with having to find things out for themselves."

Now this is quite an unexpected way of looking at the phenomenon. We tend to think of kids as having some sort of special technical ability, ascribing it an essentialist explanation such as them being "digital natives" or their brains being wired differently. But of course, as he says, for children >everything< is strange and unknown, and given that kids are able to figure out adults and the rules by which they operate - far more complex than any technology, and far more critical to a child's survival - it should not be surprising that they can cope with a multi-channel television service or an iPad.

This perspective also reminds us that, though we adults may envy kids' facility with technology, it comes at a price: that of living in a world which they don't fully understand and which many things are strange and potentially threatening.

References

Marc Prensky, (2001) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon, 9 (5), pp 1-6.

Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger (eds), Educating the Net Generation (Educause, 2005)

David White (2009), "Not ‘Natives’ & ‘Immigrants’ but ‘Visitors’ & ‘Residents’", TALL blog

David S. White and Alison Le Cornu (2011), "Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement" First Monday, 16 (9).

Which to Teach, Procedure or Understanding?

When I’m showing a colleague how to do something on their computer and I try to explain why it works that way, often they’ll say: “Don’t tell me how it works, just tell me what I need to do.”

The reason I try to explain how it works is that referring back to the underlying system is how I myself remember things. It is, I think usually a better strategy overall: it equips one better to cope with unexpected situations, such as a software upgrade which moves the buttons or changes their names. But what I have to remind myself is that many people really don’t want to know all that; they just want to know what to do.

The trouble is that it’s sometimes very hard to devise a procedure – what the mathematicians call an algorithm, or sequence of instructions – which is really robust so that someone without any understanding at all can follow it and get the desired result every time. For example, what instructions would you give someone to enable them to get across a city by bus, if they don’t really understand what a bus route is or what governs a bus’s starting and stopping?

In the magnificent from-the-inside book about autism Send in the Idiots, that was the problem which confronted Henry and Sheila, who wanted to teach their autistic daughter Elizabeth (age 23) to get from their house to the public library, which she loved, by bus on her own. They’d shown her the way to the bus stop and explained the bus numbers and how the motions made by people at the bus stop attract the driver’s attention and make the bus pull over. “She might not have realized [that there was a correlation between people sticking out their hands and the bus pulling in], not because she lacked deductive reasoning but because she might have noticed the green stain on the person’s sneakers instead, the misplaced apostrophe in the advertisement on the side of the bus.”

Next they had to teach her when to get off the bus. They started with a street map and a bus route map, and she understood the differences between them. But when they tried the trip together, with a portable copy of the bus map, she couldn’t follow their route. “Each time the bus stopped, Elizabeth thought that she was to count off a dot, except that the bus stopped for traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, as well as to pick up or let off passengers. And, to make things worse, it also didn’t stop every time that it was supposed to. There weren’t passengers to let off or pick up at every point designated on the map.” Trying to follow the bus map, she became increasingly confused and distressed, to the point where Sheila had to take her off the bus.

The next strategy was to teach her to count streets, to use just the street map and to count the streets to her [destination]. However, when they tried this, she disputed their interpretation of a street. She wanted to count everything that was paved as a street. Again the map didn’t match what she was seeing. Elizabeth’s parents tried to wean her off this by telling her to count only those paved routes that had street signs. This had the potential for excluding entrances to parking garages and walkways. She was good at noticing details, so it seemed safe to assume that she would notice every street sign and cross-reference it with the map. However, not every street on the map had a sign – far from it, especially when they got downtown. They also tried by counting only streets that had white lines drawn on them. But some of the wider streets had several lanes – so several white lines – and some of the narrower streets had no lines. This didn’t work either.

They’d been trying for three weeks, when Elizabeth’s distress during another unsuccessful attempt Elizabeth’s distress forced them to get off the bus early yet again. They were feeling a deep sense of failure. Blind people travelled on buses. So did children. But their grown-up daughter couldn’t.

‘Where are we, anyway?’ exclaimed Sheila.

‘Twelve,’ replied Elizabeth….

‘What?’ asked Henry. ‘Why twelve?’

Elizabeth pointed to the bus stop.

She had worked out that the bus map wasn’t at all abstract. It was only abstract if you were comparing it to the street map, or if you assumed that the bus had to stop at every dot. Instead, the bus map was a map of all the bus stop signs with the same logo as was in the bottom righthand corner of the map. In fact, you didn’t even need the map. You just needed to know the number of signs from the point of embarkation to the point of disembarkation. They were at twelve. They needed to get to fifteen.

So a triumph of sorts. But what a distance there is between Elizabeth’s algorithm for working out when to get off the bus and anything like a systemic understanding of the situation, in which the counting of bus stops relates to her progress across the city. And how good is her algorithm really? Would she know how to adjust it, if say a bus stop was suspended due to road works, or the bus route was diverted? Nevertheless, this story was a reminder to me that, if what you’re most concerned about is a practical outcome, it may be a good idea to abandon the goal of teaching understanding: even with non-autistic people, the effort may simply not be worth the benefit, for everyone concerned

Reference

Kamran Nazeer, Send in the Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism (Bloomsbury, 2006), pp 147-150.

Are MOOCs progressive or regressive?

At the ELESIG's recent symposium on students' experience of MOOCs, one of the interesting questions posed by George Roberts of Oxford Brookes University was whether Open Online Courses (massive or not) would address the digital literacy deficit.

Since we had already agreed amongst ourselves that MOOCs weren't really suited to learners without significant pre-existing digital skills, as well as considerable self-confidence and the ability to drive and organise their own learning, I mischievously proposed that MOOCs would actually widen the digital divide rather than narrowing it: those who had good education already would be able to get more from MOOCs, but those unfortunate enough to have been poorly taught and given no models for self-directed learning would be left even further behind.

It's a feature of open and free systems - such as free markets - that they favour those with the power and resources - the capital - to dominate them. This connection between digital liberalism and political liberalism (that's to say, conservatism) was also made interestingly last week by a commentator on The Guardian's website, following a review of Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything , Click Here. "RO42" wrote:

This sounds a very valuable book, and one that need to be more widely read.

The thing I'm increasingly coming to notice is that technophiles are very, very conservative politically but think they're liberal. They believe in deregulation and hands-off governance because it is "freer", market self-regulation rather than legal frameworks for business operation because it "promotes entrepreneurism" (shades, of course, of "wealth creators") and a strange kind of philanthropic Big Society obsession where everything is "democratically" chosen and the enthusiastic amateur rather than expertise listened to.

There is a massive fear of expertise and knowledge in this new technological culture; anyone who claims to know things is lumped in with the charlatans, or even worse deemed elitist and irrelevant. There is a place for crowd-sourcing and co-operation but it should not come with the devaluing of education.

If free and open education is not just to favour the already-privileged, there need to be educational structures to protect the vulnerable and disadvantaged - which is why I hope there will always be a place for institutions such as my own, The Open University, which have a mission to do precisely that, and why even as we ourselves move into MOOCs I think ours will be rather different from those envisaged by techno-utopians.

Reference

The sessions led by Alison Littlejohn and George Roberts at the ELESIG symposium "Researching Learners' Experiences of MOOCs and other New Pedagogies" can be seen at http://elesig.ning.com/video (you need to register, free, for access to the site).

The instructions for playing Pong

Pong - the first massively successful video game - has just turned 40 years old. The original Pong machines were placed in bars and pubs, like pinball machines or fruit machines, but they attracted whole new groups of users who were not already players of slot machine games. Which raises the question: given that the technology and the type of game were wholly new to most of those who played it and loved it, how did they learn to play Pong?

From the kind of guidance we produce for students learning to use our online learning systems, you might think that there would have had to be some pretty long and detailed instructions. A lot of things would have been unfamiliar and would have needed to be explained: the rules of the game, how to use the control knobs to move your bat up and down the screen, what happens when the ball hits your bat, what happens when the ball goes out of play, how score is kept, and so on.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.  The instructions for playing Pong, printed on the machine cabinets, read as follows:

Avoid missing ball for high score.

That's it; there was nothing else. Or rather there was a whole lot else: the physical features of the machine and the experience of experimenting with the game. The coin slot was a familiar affordance for the insertion of a coin, which started the game. The knobs were obvious controls, and nudging them visibly moved the paddles on the screen. The contact between the ball and a paddle was marked as a significant event by the distinctive "pong" sound, and one or the other of the numbers at the top of the screen could be seen to increase whenever the ball went off a left or right edge, which was also accompanied by a negative sound. The one thing which the games designers judged needed explaining was the object of the game: to get a high score by avoiding missing (not, interestingly, "hitting") the ball. The single instruction also, as a bonus, identified the dot on the screen as a representation of a ball, which together with the game's name printed on the machine casing ("pong" does not carry its unfortunate British meaning in the USA, and to its first American users would have suggested only "ping pong"), provided further clues to interpretation from the real-world.

I'm not suggesting that instructions for students using online learning systems should be as brief as the original instructions for Pong, but I do challenge our tendency to strive for thoroughness and explicitness. Consider the advantages of brevity: first, students are more likely to read it; and second, by actually requiring students to fill in the gaps for themselves, they have to think about what they're reading and activate their previous knowledge in order to interpret it - in other words, the learning is deeper and more likely to be retained. Of course, not every single student will be able to manage with brief instructions - there may be some key piece of background knowledge which they lack, or  some distraction may lead them to a wrong interpretation; but most will, and will benefit from the brevity, and for those who need it we can also provide longer, more detailed guidance which holds their hand while walking them through stage by stage. (And those who need to refer to the detailed guidance will probably not need all of it.)

I adopted this approach a couple of years ago, when revising the guidance for new users of the Elluminate Live! audiographic conferencing system. The full Walkthrough ran for 15 pages, and included screenshots to show what should be happening at every stage of installation and setup, but I also produced a 2 page Short Guide, without screenshots, for those users who were used to installing new software and adjusting settings, and needed only a few essential details. Earlier this year, I was pleased to see the new edition of the Open University Computing Guide adopting the same strategy: prefacing its information on each feature of the Virtual Learning Environment with a Quickstart  page for those who neither want nor need the full detail.

Not always, but most of the time, less is more.

Reference

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), p. xiii

Why don't students with IT problems phone the Helpdesk?

An advisor on the Open University's Computing Helpdesk told me the other day that a major reason why students don't phone the Helpdesk when they have computer problems is that they're afraid they'll be asked questions they don't understand and can't answer.

It's obvious when you think about it. But it needs statng, for those of us fortunate enough to feel relatively comfortable with technology. We need to understand that the fear which paralyses many people isn't just fear of technology itself, but fear of the humiliation which comes from being reduced to a state of ignorance and incompetence.

There's a great Not-the-Nine-o'-Clock-News sketch all about that fear. It was made around 1980, when personal computers and mobile phones were still in the future, and it was hi-fi audio systems that were the geek's favourite cutting-edge technology. The premise is simple: Mel Smith walks into a hi-fi showroom and asks to buy a gramophone. The shop assistants laugh at him.



Just after that conversation with the Helpdesk advisor, I read about some interesting work by Clare Lee and Sue Johnston-Wilder on fear of maths: a close cousin surely of the fear of technology. Their aim is to find ways to develop "mathematical resilience" in children and adults - so this isn't so much about people not having problems as having confidence that problems can be solved. Their approach is based on collaborative working, mutual support, and a lot of talking. "Articulation of ideas improves learners' confidence in both their learning and their competence to use mathematical concepts. In other words, when learners have the opportunity to 'talk like a mathematician' they can become someone who 'knows and can do mathematics' - they begin to see themselves as capable." (OpenMinds, June 2012, p 47, www.open.ac.uk/openminds)

What this suggests to me is a language-learning approach to IT: helping people develop confidence with the technology by developing their capability to talk about it. This would be rather like the language-learning approach to academic skills, currently being pursued by colleagues in the OpenELT secton of my faculty. I wonder if anybody's tried this before?

iTunes University: better than the real thing?

Reviewing some draft course materials about the evaluation of e-learning innovations, I was reminded of a rather nice piece of evaluation research which caused quite a stir when it was published in 2009. The nice thing about it is that it's very simple, yet perfectly illustrates the importance of not taking evaluation data at face value and looking at what's going on beneath the surface.

The experiment was very simple. A university psychology class was divided into two; half went to a regular lecture, and half were given an audio podcast of the same lecture. A week later they took a test on the lecture content - and guess what happened? The students who'd had the podcast scored significantly higher.

Cue headlines in the educational press and blogosphere, along the lines of "iTunesU better than the real thing!", and delight for the proponents of new technology (such as here, here, and here). But there was something puzzling about the result. As any lecturer who has tried producing audio teaching materials knows all too well, the average lecture  makes a pretty poor podcast: stripped of the motivation and engagement factors which come from physical presence at a live lecture, the soundtrack on its own tends to be dull and slow - unless the lecturer is a truly stellar performer, which most are not. So how was it that the students who had the lecture podcast did better in the test?

The answer of course lies in the use which students made of the podcast (which was only reported by some of the commentators, such as here and here). Most of these students took notes, and took really good notes, some of them listening to the podcast several times to make sure they'd understood everything. That they scored highly is not surprising! Those students who DIDN'T take notes from the podcast  - one listened to it while working out at the gym - got rubbish scores. So the real finding turns out to be, not that a podcast is better than a live lecture, but that taking notes is better than not taking notes - and a podcast can be one way of helping students take good notes.

There are two lessons I see I this in story. The first is that evaluation of learning technology needs to get down to the level of student activity, because it's there, in what students do or don't do, that changes need to occur for there to be benefit. The second is that when we introduce new learning technologies, we need also to work on students' understanding of how to use them. There's a cultural norm that you take notes in university lectures, but there's no such common understanding in the case of podcasts. In fact, the cultural norm is rather then other way, a podcast being something you listen to while doing something else, such as working out at the gym. The associations of the technology encourage students to assume that they will learn the information simply by listening to it.

The malignant way in which information technology supports a view of education as the transmission of information is something on which I'm intending to blog in a future post.

References
Dan McKinney, Jennifer L. Dyck and Elise S. Luber, "iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?", Computers and Education, 52 (2009), 617-623
Hannah Fearn, "Coming to a screen near you", Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 June 2009, p 38

Digital literacies (2): Why academic literacy is about texts

This arises from a long blog by Robin Goodfellow for the Literacy in the Digital University project, following up a presentation in which he started from the position that "literacy" is not just about reading and writing and the comparable digital activities ("new literacies"), or about communication skills (presenting, reviewing, discussing) but about social practices: that is to say, literacy is purposeful and relational, drawing on "a complex and distributed understanding of the network of personal and occupational relationships that give the text its purpose".

All fairly uncontroversial, one might think. But there was one question which was posed in discussion, and which stayed with him and which is the subject of his blog: "If Literacy is 'social practice' why talk about Texts? Why not just talk about social practice?"

His immediate response had been that "we are focusing on practices in the university, which are uniquely defined in terms of texts" - while explaining that he meant the word "text" in an extended sense, referring to any kind of communicative artefact, not just printed words and not just words at all (so including pictures and recorded music).

But in his blog he poses the question: "it is always going to be the case that what we currently call texts are what define practice in higher education? As HE gets more intermingled with other social fields (industry, commerce, the professions, popular culture - see Mandelson's 'Higher Ambitions' framework) and as practice-oriented communication becomes more mutimodal and time-shifted and otherwise dispersed won't the notion of text as a defining characteristic of university practice become less and less relevant?"

I think the answer is No - or at least, it shouldn't. I follow Diana Laurillard (Re-thinking University Teaching, 2nd edn, p. 21-2) in taking the defining feature of university practice to be its second-order character: "the point about academic knowledge is that, being articulated, it is known through exposition, argument, interpretation ... through reflection on experience and represents therefore a second-order experience of the world." Academic discourse is characteristically not only about knowledge, but about knowledge-about-knowledge: epistemology, or how-we-come-to-know. It is not only what we believe to be the case, but why we believe it to be the case, or why my view of what is the case is better than yours. It is about theories and models, interpretations and frameworks, inferences and arguments.

Here perhaps is the practical meaning of Helen Beetham's summary of the key difference between academic knowledge and internet knowledge (referenced by Robin Goodfellow): that academic knowledge practice is about truth value while internet knowledge practice is about use value. If you value knowledge only for how it can be used, you will not be interested in how the knowledge is derived; you only care about whether it is reliable: Yes, or No. But if you care about the process by which knowledge is made and justified, challenged and revised, then you will need to get into second-order discourse.

Does second-order discourse require the use of texts? No, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. By making the knowledge (the theory, the data, the model, the interpretation) an artefact, it becomes easier for us to stand back from it and view it as an object and conduct the second-order discourse. The text does not need to be a physical thing, or even a digital thing: it can be a spoken object, as for example the thesis or the various points of argument in the formal disputations at pre-modern universities. The technology to accomplish a second-order discourse can be rhetorical and procedural, as well as physical and material.

But do we need this second-order discourse? Do we actually need academics and universities to conduct it, to look at the foundations of knowledge, instead of just using it?

As the historian Susan Faye Canon observed a long time ago (Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, 1978), the best justification for the existence of historians is that, unless you have people whose professional responsibility is the reconstruction of the past in all its complexity and subtlety, then the only accounts of the past which are available will be the simplified and interested accounts of politicians and those with a political axe to grind.

I think we need academics and academies for essentially the same reason: that unless we have people whose professional responsibility is in defining and challenging the basis of knowledge, then all we will have is the claim and counter-claim of parties who value knowledge only for its usefulness to them and its service of their interests.

Digital literacies (1): They've read the research so we don't have to

One of the sessions which excited me at Alt-C was the workshop by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe on "Frameworks for developing digital literacies". But why it was exciting isn't very evident from the PowerPoint - hence this further blog.

What was exciting was that they drew on two enormous pieces of summarising work - one on conceptions of digital literacy, and one on learners' experience - and brought them together.

Conceptions of digital literacy

The summarising work here was done as part of the Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA) project. From nine major frameworks attempting to define the components of digital lteracy, or learning literacy in a digital environment, they constructed a "framework of frameworks" (see the project report, pp 35-38). The resulting set of "top-level terms, framing ideas" is not so exceptional: learning to learn, metacognition; academic practice / study skills; information literacy; communication and collaboration skills; media literacy ; computer literacy; employability; citizenship. What is more interesting is the way they break these top-level framing ideas down into practices, both non-digital ("what competent learners do") and digital ("what competent digitally enabled learners do"). For example, "learning to learn, metacognition" is broken down into the following non-digital and digital practices:

• manage time and study commitments / use digital tools to manage time and study commitments
• balance learning and life / use digital networks and online resources to fit learning into life
• know where and how to access support / access support online including learning communities
• construct strategies for learning, articulate goals / diagnose learning needs [and] choose appropriate learning tools
• reflect on own learning and progression / use digital tools to record and reflect on progress.

What this presents very clearly is the position that digital learning literacy is just a matter of doing learning literacy practices, only with digital tools and in a digital environment. Or, to put it another way, there's no such thing as e-learning: only learning done with e-tools.
The "framework of frameworks" seems like a good starting place for planning progression in digital learning literacy across course pathways.
(See also comment on the LLiDA report by Robin Goodfellow, for the Literacy in a Digital University project.)
Learners' experience
The summarising work here was done by the Support and Synthesis Project at Oxford Brookes University, synthesising outputs from the many projects in the JISC "Learners' experiences of e-learning" programme.
The "Dissemination" section of the project website includes workshop materials, of which the ones used at Alt-C are:

1. a document "Developing effective e-learners", presenting a pyramid model of development, listing both technical and learning competences at the ascending levels of Access, Skills, Practices and behaviours, and Attributes and identities (under "Session 5: Learners are different")
2. a set of one-paragraph summaries of students' strategies for learning with technology (not all of them necessarily desirable), suitable for printing on card for use as a workshop activity (also under "Session 5: Learners are different")
3. a set of "Key messages" cards, as a nutshell summary of the results of the JISC projects (under "Session 3: Themes and issues" - although a nicer designed-up and slightly different version is on the JISC website)

These "Key messages" are worth reproducing here, for the benefit of all those of us who are never going to read through all the reports of all the JISC learners' experience of e-learning projects (the originals include illustrative quotes also:

• Expectations of technology - Learners have high expectations of technology with respect to access, choice and reliability.
• Expectations of VLEs - Learners expect consistency across modules in use of the VLE: most see it as an essential aspect of course admin and communication.
• Expectations of tutors' skills - Learners have high expectations of their tutors’ use of technology. They expect use of technology for learning to be appropriate and skillful.
• Keeping the balance - Students stress that learning with ICT should be balanced with face to face and paper-based learning. A minority positively dislike the distractions from study that computers entail.
• Tutors as mentors - The way in which learners use technology is still led by their tutors and the design of their courses. Even ‘google generation’ students are often introduced to educationally important technologies by their tutors.
• Playing the game - As the use of technology makes more learning happen in ‘public’, learners are being socialized to play the academic game in new ways.
• Personalisation - Learners expect to be able to personalise institutional technologies and to use personal technologies in the institutional environment. Disabled learners may be excluded if they cannot do so.
• Meaningful choices - Learners want meaningful choices from technology. This is not about the look and feel of online services, but about key issues in how they learn.
• Google generation - The Internet is the first port of call for information: sites such as google and wikipedia are referred to before academically approved resources.
• Academic digital content - Access to academic digital content is regarded by learners as a unique benefit of attending HE and FE institutions.
• Underworld - Communication technologies most used by learners are also often outside institutional control (mobile phones, skype, chat): there is an ‘underworld’ of social networking in support of learning.
• Digital divide - There is evidence that the ‘digital divide’ is becoming deeper but narrower: a minority of students lack basic access and ICT skills, while an increasingly large majority have a wide range of devices and competences, especially with laptops
• Skills gap - Despite their facility with personal technologies, learners often lack skills in using technology to support learning. This can be true even after considerable time at college.
• Maturing - Students report an increased use of technology as they mature in their studies
• Different strokes - Learners display enormous differences in past educational experiences, needs, and motivations. These have a profound influence over their preferred strategies for using technologies.
• Attachment - Learners attach emotional significance to technologies, particularly ‘their own’ technologies, which many perceive as extensions of themselves.
• Social software - Many students make extensive use of social software such as Facebook, including for informal discussions about their learning, but rarely for formal collaboration.
• Public / private spaces - There are divergent opinions among learners about the use of social networks such as Facebook to support learning, and about how they manage their online identities.
• Digital conservatism - Only a small minority of students actively investigate the potential of new software or technologies beyond those in general use. Disabled students can be among the most pioneering.
• Technology hurdle - Where technologies require learners to adjust their usual study practices, they can become a barrier. Such technologies require careful introduction and clear communication about the benefits of use.
• 1000 words - Very many learners, particularly younger learners, are used to accessing knowledge via images and video. They can struggle with an academic practice which only values text as a medium for communicating ideas.
• Collaboration - Technology-mediated collaboration is increasingly common. Student experiences range from pride in their collaborative work to fear of ‘free riders’ and frustration at the available technologies.
  

Learning as doing two things at once

I'm having a problem with the screen layout of some online course materials. The student is being taught how to write definitions, and in one section they're presented with six different definitions of globalisation and have to fill in a table to analyse, for each of them, the different components of the definition. It's a common sort of distance learning activity, and the screen layout problem is a common one too: the student really needs to be able to see the definition they're working on and the table into which they're writing their analysis at the same time. I don't know how we're going to achieve this on our VLE - unless we put each of the definitions on a separate screen and repeat the table six times!

I find it astonishing that with all the effort and design talent which has gone into developing online learning platforms it is still the exception rather than the rule to find an easy way of enabling a learner to hold two things in view simultaneously. (For OU staff only: here is a rare exemple from D821.)

But this doing two things at once, or switching rapidly between them, is the essence of learning, is it not?

If we think we're simply transmitting information (as tends to be the assumption with people from the IT industry, which is based on information theory's conceptualisation of complex problems as the transmission, modification and reception of information), then a single view, single activity interface is not a problem. The student is just reading text, or looking at a picture, or watching a video, etc.

But if we're thinking about learning, then the student needs to be not only in the text, the picture or the video, but standing back from it and doing something else: relating it to their existing knowledge, forming new knowledge structures to accommodate it, thinking how to apply it to other circumstances. (It's the back end of the Kolb learning cycle.)

Good students, of course, do this whether we make it easy for them to do it or not. They take notes, they think about what we've shown them, they talk about it with their mates, they try it out.

But given how fundamental to learning is this doing-two-things-at-once (or, more accurately, switching between them quickly), and given that the distinctive capability of the contemporary digital computer is the integration of different functions on the same screen, isn't it extraordinary how little our VLEs and teaching platforms help our learners with this second function, being still designed on the assumption that they will be doing only one thing at a time?