When signs get personal

(Copied from my original post 4.3.2020 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)

What do you think of signs like this? Do you find them cute and amusing, or do you find them annoying? Above all, do you find them effective for what they’re trying to do?

I must admit I rather like this sign, which I spotted on the luggage trolleys at Milton Keynes railway station. In one sense, the sign is redundant: if you’re looking for a luggage trolley, you don’t need a sign to tell you that you’ve found one. But I think the purpose of the sign is other than that. For one thing, it prompts someone with luggage to think of using a trolley, even if they weren’t looking for one. (We’ve all seen people struggling with wheelie suitcases who should really be using a trolley, for the benefit of other passengers if not themselves.) More important than that, though, the real purpose of the sign I think is to give a voice and identity to the station and the railway company: what discourse analysts call “subject positioning” [1]. The words on the sign are the sort of thing which might be said by someone who was considerate and helpful and attentive to your needs. The implication is that the station staff and the railway company collectively have the kind of personality which means they talk to you like that: polite, kind and helpful in a personal way. Contrast that with the sort of sign which you’re more likely to see on a luggage trolley:

Warning: trolleys MUST be returned to a designated point. Penalty for abandoned trolleys £500.

What kind of person says that? Someone who is bureaucratic and officious, and that’s the kind of personality such a sign attributes to an organisation which puts it up.

Such personal-sounding offers of help need to be carefully judged, of course. Those of my generation who used Microsoft Word 97 will remember the Office Assistant, which by default took the form of a cheery, cheeky animated paper clip, popping up unbidden at the least appropriate moments. I’m afraid the paper clip’s conversations with me generally did not go well.

Office Assistant: It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?

Me: No! Sod off!

I think the reason the Office Assistant’s appearance was so annoying is that it was intrusive: it actually interrupted what you were doing (such as writing a letter) and demanded that you respond to it before you could continue. Although the notice on the trolley hails you as a carrier of luggage – subject positioning again – this is not annoying in the same way; if you’re not part of the target audience, you simply disregard the hail and walk on, though perhaps with a pleasant lingering appreciation for the fact that HAD you needed help with your luggage it would have been available.

The relevance of this for education, specifically for learning materials, is that often you want to address the learner personally and directly. This is an illusion of course, just as a TV presenter talking to you directly is an illusion because what they’re actually talking to is a television camera. [2] Nevertheless, when it’s done right, it feels natural and unremarkable, even though the writer or presenter cannot see you and knows nothing about you and what you are thinking and feeling; you only notice it when it goes wrong and the illusion is broken.

The reason authors of learning materials, like TV presenters, try to address the members of their audience individually and directly, is that it sets up a personal relationship and introduces emotional warmth into the communication. The standard for learning materials is to use the second person (“you”) and contractions (“as you’ve seen”), resembling spoken language more than written language. A common stylistic model is what Derek Rowntree many years ago called “a tutorial in print” [3]: you talk to the learner as though they were there with you, and invite responses from them. (“What would you do next in this situation?” “What do you make of this argument?”) This kind of writing has been fundamental to the learning materials of The Open University, both printed and online, since its inception in the 1970s.

This too can go wrong, of course. As with the Microsoft Office Assistant, eagerness to help can come across as patronising, if the reader or learner is fully capable of managing by themselves; there’s an OU legend of the course materials which at one point suggested to the learner that they should take a coffee break if it was all getting too much. But there are many OU students who are grateful for a supportive tone; I remember one telling me how she’d been finding a particular section of her course hard going when she was delighted to read the materials’ reassurance that this topic was difficult and probably wouldn’t make sense until later. The perfect anticipation of what she was thinking and feeling not only encouraged her but reinforced her relationship with the course, communicating to her that the personality behind it was concerned for her and her success.

The OU was set up to bring higher education to people who had missed out on it earlier in life. Such people, frequently with a poor educational background, could not be expected to be familiar with formal study and the experience of a new subject being initially difficult but becoming easier with practice. They would therefore very likely be in need of assurance that the experience of difficulty is not a reason for thinking yourself incapable or for giving up. Postgraduate students, at the OU and elsewhere, can be expected to be better able to manage their own study, and can be safely left to self-regulate and negotiate normal difficulties for themselves, to say nothing of deciding when to have their own coffee breaks.

But I would argue that, even for experienced and sophisticated learners, learning materials should still embody that personal relationship implied by direct address. It’s what distinguishes education or training from an information dump. The illusion of the materials being a personal tutor – an illusion in which the learner acquiesces, just as we acquiesce in the illusion that a TV or radio presenter is talking to us – allows learning materials to do two very important things. The first is to support motivation – the great challenge in all distance learning – by giving comfort and encouragement. The second is to support self-management, by modelling how to mentally step back from the subject, the information, to reflect on the learner’s experience of its study; by internalising this supervisory voice, the learner eventually becomes better able to evaluate and regulate their learning for themselves.

The temptation when writing learning materials is to be factual and presentational. Getting personal, addressing the reader directly – and thinking about how they would like to be addressed – is something to which writers need to give deliberate attention .

References

[1] See for example Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990), ‘Positioning: the discursive production of selves’, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol 20, pp. 43-65.

[2] This point was powerfully illustrated by one of Michael Wesch’s anthropology students in the early years of YouTubeing, when she held up a mirror to her webcam to show us what she was actually talking to (in other words, not us) while making her video. (Wesch included the short video clip in his talk An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, timecode 21:38 to 22:03.)

[3] Rowntree, D. (1994), Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, London, Kogan Page, p. 14. Lockwood, F. (1992), Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, London, Kogan Page, p. 25. See also my blog post ‘Alternatives to telling: what are we forgetting when we put education online?’

Interactive narrative: Lessons from Telltale

Back in the 1990s, when the potential of interactive audio-visual media was first brought to the general population through affordable personal computers coupled with the extended storage capacity of CD-ROMs, technology commentators speculated wildly about the impact this would have on the creative arts. What would happen if you had a truly interactive novel, in which not just the reading experience but the actual storyline was shaped by the reader as well as the writer? Or a drama, in which you could, say, take on the role of Hamlet and choose to avenge your father’s death in the first Act instead of dithering around until Act III? Was the whole concept of a linear narrative with exposition and conclusion itself dead? Star Trek: The Next Generation provided a convenient cultural reference: the TV show's 1987 opening episode realised the concept of “virtual reality” through a room on the starship in which computer-generated holograms and force fields could simulate both a physical environment and people in it. The crew used this “holodeck” not only for training but for recreation; Captain Picard enjoyed role-playing Dixon Hill, a private eye from a 1940s-style crime thriller, and Captain Janeaway took on the role of the governess in a Jane Eyre-like gothic “holonovel”[1]. The optimism about digital technology’s potential for interactive narrative was summarised in Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1998) [2].

"Basically, I am assuming that this movement is analogous to the invention of the movie camera a hundred years ago, and asking: if the digital environment (multimedia, networked, desktop, VR, arcade, etc.) is the 'camera,' then what will be the equivalent of the 'movie'? The holodeck provides one provocative model."
(Interview with Michelle Ellen Green)

Ten years later, this confidence had largely collapsed, not merely because virtual reality was proving to be technically a more clunky affair then early enthusiasts had hoped, but because authors were finding it just too hard to write truly interactive narrative scenarios that anybody would actually want to play. They discovered what the writers of adventure games had known for some time: that you need to anticipate and provide for anything the player may decide to do – hard enough when dealing with physical objects, but mind-bogglingly complex when dealing with non-player characters and narrative storylines. If players are going to be able to take the story in any direction they want, then you can’t write something as dramatic as Hamlet, because if the player kills Claudius in Act I then the story either has to end there or else you need to have provided additional material to allow it to go somewhere else. Even if you limit the number of choices the player has at each stage, as long as each branch leads to further choices then the tree of potential storylines quickly grows to an impossibly large size. If you try to write discrete scenes which players can encounter in any order, then you never know what they’ve seen previously, which means that every scene needs to do its own exposition. limiting how far it can develop the story. Taken together, these problems meant that interactive narratives tended towards the bland and purposeless, with largely meaningless choices about which it was difficult for players to feel much investment.[3] The few interactive narratives which are generally reckoned to have succeeded (for example, Façade, Her Story [4]) operated within a very restricted setting; the remainder never got beyond the stage of experimental works and sunk into obscurity.

This is why it’s extraordinary that Telltale Games has become successful, both commercially and artistically, in producing interactive narratives. As Dan Connors the co- founder of Telltale has commented: “We just chose the four things that people had given up on: digital distribution, episodic gaming, licensed gaming, interactive narrative, and said: You know what, it CAN be done, and we're going to do it." (Documentary ‘Telltale Games: Story Mode’, quote at 0’32”.) Ignoring modernist ideas of non-linear narratives, they’ve focussed unapologetically on good old-fashioned story-telling. Their characters and settings are strong and dynamic, drawing on the proven dramatic possibilities of pre-existing media franchises: Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, The Walking Dead (their breakthrough title), Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us (based on a comic series), and Tales from the Borderlands (based on the Borderlands role-playing game). The storylines are exciting, with suspense and resolution and a dramatic ending to each episode – essential for motivating players to buy and download the next. And (it should go without saying) their writers, animators, voice artists and music composers are first-rate, all combining their efforts in the service of the story.

But what about the interactive element? How is playing a Telltale game different from watching an animated film? The first thing to be said is that their interactivity is quite limited.[4] Although as a player you have choices, some of which seem as though they have decisive significance, you cannot actually affect the overall storyline; even when it seems you have freedom of movement, you are in fact travelling on rails. But the second thing to be said is that the interactivity which the games do afford is precisely that which enriches and deepens your involvement with the story. In other words, rather than trying to provide for whatever the player might try to do – which would be impossible – Telltale have focused on providing what is most important in terms of its impact for the player.

Here’s how it works in Tales from the Borderlands. You alternate between two characters: Rhys, a middle-ranking executive in the cut-throat Hyperion corporation, who descends to the wild-west planet Pandora in a desperate attempt to reverse a career disaster, and Fiona, a Pandoran con-artist whose ambitious scam goes wrong and is driven into an uncomfortable alliance with Rhys in the hope of winning even greater loot. The thrilling storyline has many moments of tension and danger for your characters, and one of the ways the game increases the suspense is by introducing uncertainty through dialogue choices. An early example of this is when as Rhys you have to ask the way from a violent-looking gang of bandits while your friend Vaughn is very obviously carrying a briefcase of money chained to his wrist; as Fiona, your first challenge comes when you need to talk your way past a huge bar-room bouncer, while a Wanted poster with your face on it is prominently on the wall beside him. From the point of view of the storyline, your dialogue choices make no difference; no matter what you say as Rhys, a fight will break out, and even if you completely mess up your lines as Fiona your sister Sasha will rescue you and get you into the bar. But what the choices do is make you identify with your characters: like them, you are forced to make a decision about what to say in a difficult situation which could turn nasty at any instant.

Other sequences get you to share your characters’ uncertainty and confusion by making you search for the way to advance the story. When Fiona returns to the home of her friend and mentor Felix, she is looking for something which will explain his recent actions, and what she finds is a sequence of clues which lead her to a hidden message which he left for her. When Rhys arrives at the concealed Atlas base, he has to find where it is and how to get in by tracing power cables. In such sequences, as in a conventional point-and-click adventure game, you can move your character freely around the immediate environment, examining and using any objects which he or she finds there. For a few minutes at least the tension of the story relaxes, and like your character you experience a period of quiet uncertainty while you hunt around to find something which will help you move on and get closer to your goal.

But it is never long before the pace picks up again and you find your character in immediate lethal danger. In such situations, the game requires you to react quickly. When a bandit is swinging an axe at Rhys, an arrow appears on the screen and you have to swipe in that direction to make him dodge; when Fiona is struggling to close a door before a gunman takes a shot at her, you have to tap the screen repeatedly until a progress bar is full; at other times, targets appear on objects which you need to tap quickly in order to hit them, throw something at them, or jump onto them. If you fail to do so within the time limit, your character dies. The skill challenges are not difficult, and the penalty for failure is not harsh – you simply go back to just before your death so that you can try again – but the need for constant alertness increases the tension and emotion, and the sense that you are protecting your character’s life deepens your investment in them.

Less obviously but more interestingly, the dialogue choices build your involvement with the playable characters by allowing you to fine-tune their personalities and relationships so that they feel realistic and convincing to you. For example, at the start of the second episode, Fiona and her sister Sasha fire their caravan’s turbo boost to get out of danger, but Rhys and Vaughn fall off the back in the middle of the desert.; there is no way that they can stop the caravan and go back for them. “You think the guys will be okay?” asks Sasha. You as Fiona have the response options: “They’ll be fine” / “They have a chance” / “They won’t last the night”. Your choice doesn’t affect the storyline (beyond the immediate dialogue), but having to make it prompts you to work out how you see Fiona’s character and her relationship with Sasha, and what you think about her developing attraction to Rhys (she flirts with him, and you as Rhys have the option whether to flirt back or not).

Another example, from early in the story, involves Rhys and Vaughn, who have survived their certain-death encounter with the heavily-armed bandits by summoning an even-more heavily armed battle-robot who in a blazing shoot-out despatches them one by one. (Though Loaderbot does the actual shooting, it’s you, as Rhys, who instructs him to fire at each target, thus implicating you, the player, in the killing.) It’s very violent, and there is a lot of (cartoon) blood. Afterwards, Vaughn is left a gibbering wreck (“I never wanna see somebody’s brains come out of their nose, not ever again”) and he starts wondering why they’re still alive and thinking about the bandits who died. As Rhys, you have the three dialogue options: “It’s over now, we made it!”, “They got what they deserved”, and “It was kinda fun”. If you want Rhys to comfort Vaughn, you can choose the first option, and his dialogue acknowledges Vaughn’s fear and disgust while observing that they’ve found they have the ability to come through such situations. Vaughn eventually accepts Rhys’s reassurance: “I guess you sort of have a point, somewhere in there.” Alternatively, if you want to play Rhys as someone who trivialises violence or finds Vaughn’s response irritating, you can choose the third option, and he says: “Aw, c’mon, It was a little fun. Right? You cannot honestly stand there and tell me that it didn’t feel kind of great to kick all those guy’s asses.” Again, after some hesitation, Vaughn goes along with your lead: “Okay… yeah… it was a little… awesome. But I’m sure it was as traumatic as it was fun. We’re probably going to need some therapy in the future, you know that, right?”

By requiring you to respond to the non-player characters and their take on the unfolding drama, the game prompts you to express what you feel about them and the character you are playing, even though in most cases your choice only affects the next line or so of dialogue. However, some dialogue choices have consequences which are fed back to you later: the characters remember what you’ve said and done to them. For example, if as Rhys you choose to instruct Loaderbot to self-destruct during the fight with the bandits, when he later reappears and greets the other male characters with a fist-bump, he will pointedly not do so with you. It’s a painful moment of rejection, for Rhys and for you playing him, because you are implicated in his action. (You as Rhys have the opportunity to make it up with Loaderbot later.) Such choices are flagged to you as the player, after you have made them, with the onscreen message that the other character “will remember this,” thus notching up the emotional impact of the moment by promoting you to imagine what the implications of your decisions will be. The overall story requires that the main characters move from initial starting positions of mutual mistrust and caution to ones of trust and co-dependency, and your decisions do not change that, but your dialogue choices control the speed and manner in which this happens.

Every 15 minutes on average, you have to make a major and potentially story-changing decision, half the time as Rhys and half the time as Fiona. Most of these decisions have to do with trust and betrayal: whether or not to shout a warning to someone who has betrayed you but is about to trigger a lethal booby-trap; whether to meet up with the other main characters and work together or to proceed separately and possibly reach the prize before they do; whether (as Rhys) to put your fate in the hands of the lying and unreliable Fiona or the ghost of the charismatic but psychopathic Handsome Jack whom you used to idolise. Many of these decisions do actually change the storyline, though in a limited way: sometimes there are two alternative branches which then converge; sometimes the same scenes are played out in a different order with different characters present. But once again the extent of the difference is not what gives these choices their emotional impact; in a story filled with thrills and danger, decisions about trust, mis-trust and betrayal are critical to the characters’ fortunes, and by making you take those decisions the game forces you walk in their shoes for a while, even if you end up in the same place at the end whatever you choose. (A complete list of the major choices, and their consequences, is included in this online Walkthrough.)

I have often made the analogy between games design and learning design (for example here and here), so what are the lessons for learning design from games such as Tales of the Borderlands? What Telltale have done is to abandon the fictional holodeck as a model for interactive narrative, rejecting the techno-fantasy of total freedom and total empowerment for the player / reader, which is neither possible nor desirable; they have returned to the traditional strengths of good story-telling, focusing on just those interactive features which deepen players’ involvement, increase their emotional stake, and give them a sense of agency in moving the story forward, The lessons of this for learning design, I believe, are that we do not have to apologise for the traditional strengths of good teaching – compelling topics, clear explanations, well-designed cognitive scaffolding - and that when we seek to enhance these with technology we should focus our efforts and resources on features which really increase value for the learner. Increasing value through cognitive effectiveness is familiar territory for us; for example, when designing simulations for learning, as I’ve previously observed, we focus on simulating those things which learners are most likely to get wrong, so that they can make those mistakes and learn from them. But another way of increasing value is to deepen learners’ involvement, emotionally as well as intellectually. The emotional aspects of learning, though present in our design practice, barely figure in our design thinking: we have an intuitive sense of what will be interesting for learners, what they will find fun or challenging, and how we can work the occasions for such emotions into the design of our learning experiences, but we do not have well-established ways of thinking and talking about this.

When I first started writing distance learning materials back in the 1990s, I was taught to plan my units in terms of a “storyline” or narrative sequence, which would put the necessary topics into a logical order and give a satisfying shape to the whole. This practice, which I believe originated at the Open University, seems to have fallen out of use, because I've not encountered it since. The metaphor of the narrative and the analogies between teaching and story-telling, between learning design and the design of a reader’s or player’s experience, are I think overdue for a revival.

Notes

[1] Star Trek’s holodeck was introduced in Encounter at Farpoint (Wesley Crusher falls into a stream) and further demonstrated in Code of Honour (Tasha Yar shows that a holographic opponent can throw you to the dojo floor). Captains Picard and Janeway were seen fantasy role-playing in The Big Goodbye and Persistence of Vision respectively. Many episodes showed the holodeck being used for training (for example, Chain of Command Part 1, Worst Case Scenario) or recreation (for example, Fair Haven), while introducing the more sinister possibilities of holodeck addiction (Hollow Pursuits, Pathfinder) and of being unable to distinguish between holodeck and reality (Ship in a Bottle, Projections). Some holodeck characters were or became self-aware: Professor Moriarty (Elementary, Dear Data), Vic Fontaine (His Way), the Emergency Medial Hologram (Caretaker), and Michael Sullivan (Spirit Folk). The holodeck also allowed the scriptwriters to indulge in genre spoofs: the Western (A Fistful of Datas), James Bond (Our Man Bashir), a French Resistance drama (The Killing Game), and Flash Gordon (Night, Bride of Chaotica!).

[2] See a review by John McLaughlin, and links to other reviews here. See also Murray’s ‘Inventing the Medium’, her introduction to the book New Media Reader.

[3] The problems with interactive narrative are summarised by Steven Johnson in Wired, 'Why no one clicked on the great hypertext story'and by Ernest W Adams in his 2005 lecture to Game Developers’ Conference ‘Interactive narratives revisited: ten years of research’. An academic article summarising the issues is Mark O. Riedel and Vadim Bulitko ‘Interactive narrative: an intelligent systems approach’ in AI Magazine 34 (2013), 67-77.

[4] In the celebrated Façade, you play a guest visiting the home of a couple who are on the edge of breaking up; the narrative is not disrupted by conversational non-sequiturs or failure to respond to your remarks, since the other characters are supposed to be bickering and preoccupied with their own thoughts. (See an article analysing its design by Alex J. Champanard.) In Her Story (many reviewers’ Game of the Year for 2015), you are viewing video clips of police interviews following a suspicious death; the game's interactivity is limited to providing you with clips on the basis of your keyword searches, but the construction of the narrative is entirely yours as you try to understand the story of the woman being interviewed. (See the short discussion in my Seen and Heard blog entry for September 2015, and reviews in Adventure Gamers, The Guardian, and Rock Paper Shotgun).

[5] Indeed, Adventure Gamers website, although reviewing the titles (very favourably), excluded them from their 2016 Adventure Game awards on the grounds that they were pure stories, including neither exploration nor puzzle-solving.

Why a tutorial is like Weightwatchers

Seeing an obituary of Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weightwatchers, reminded me of an Open University student whom I interviewed some years ago about her experience of study. She greatly valued contact with other students, but not for the reasons one might suppose, because she compared her tutorials to Weightwatchers meetings;

You come home with a little book every week, and it tells you, ... “this is what we’re concentrating on this week, and this is how to do it, and this is what we’re going to help you with, and don’t let people distract you, and da, da, da. ... Don’t let people try and make you eat cakes. Tell people that you’re doing this.” Like, “I’m studying, please don’t come in. I need this hour, it’s,” you know.... People need sort of chivvying, … they need a bit of support. And, er, WeightWatchers is very good at that. Very good at that.... That’s why you go to WeightWatchers once a week, so that w–, apart from the ritual humiliation of being weighed. Um. But you go, and there’s other people there, and you all chat in a queue and, you know, ... all girls together, or whatever it may be, which is similar to the tutorials.... In part the reason you go along is the moral support of seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]. Or whatever.

I think of this student whenever I hear colleagues getting pretentious about the importance of contact between students for collaborative knowledge construction. Weightwatchers meetings are not intended for collaborative knowledge construction, or even for sharing information, because the basic principle of dieting is brutally simple – you just eat fewer calories – and all the details of the proprietary system for calorie-counting and meal planning are contained in a handbook which comes with WeightWatchers membership. For this student, the most important aspect of her meetings was the group identity (“all girls together”) and the moral authority which it gave to resist social pressures.

So though students may share information with each other and may build knowledge collaboratively, it’s not necessarily the only or the most important aspect of their relationship with each other. Nor is their sense of community, if they develop one, necessarily founded on shared goals; more powerful may be “the ritual humiliation”, “seeing everyone else looking so depressed about the [next assignment]”. As Ursula Le Guin wrote many years ago: “brotherhood begins in shared pain.”

Where e-learning went wrong

You know those insights which come out of the blue, so that suddenly you understand something clearly, and it seems so obvious that you can't think why you never saw it before? I had one of those the other day, when I knew, clearly and distinctly, where it was that e-learning has been going wrong all these years.

The background to this was that I'd been listening to an interview with John Hattie, part of the Radio 4 series (and OU co-production) The Educators. Hattie has made a massive survey of the research literature on teaching and come to the conclusion that which pedagogic approach a teacher uses is pretty much irrelevant to how well their students do. What is much more significant is how much experience the teacher has had - which is not necessarily a popular message for educational theorists or politicians, or even for teachers.

I'd found myself saying something similar a little while ago, when some colleagues were talking about how to get themselves to a certain level of expertise in learning design. Those of them from a project management background were rather hoping that learning design was a determinate procedure which you could follow and get good results, as long as you understood it and followed it correctly; maybe there was a book or an online tool somewhere which set it out? I had to disillusion them. Theories and books and online tools can all help, but basically to become good at learning design you need to put in what I called the "flying hours". If you want to qualify as a pilot, you need to know the science and the theory and be able to pass some practical tests; but in addition to all of that you need to have logged a certain number of hours at the controls. You just need to have done a lot, and seen a lot of things. (This is of course the message of Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, that the expertise of acknowledged greats such as The Beatles required an estimated 10,000 hours of practice - in the case of The Beatles, acquired during their time in Hamburg.)

And then I remembered that back in the 1980s, when computers became small and cheap enough for individual people to afford, and we first started wondering about their use in education, it was practice that we were thinking of. The great hope we had was that computers would be a way to give learners a huge amount of practice; they could try problem after problem after problem, in whatever domain of skills they were trying to perfect - especially numeracy, literacy and all the key skills - and the computer would never get tired or bored or irritable, but give them all the practice they needed or could cope with.

What went wrong? How did we get side-tracked? I blame the baleful influence of the IT industry, which as I've argued elsewhere has led us to think of the use of computers in terms of the transmission of information. And when the term e-learning was coined in 1999 - as, confusingly but revealingly, a new approach to teaching - the damage was done. Instead of practice, practice, practice, we've ended up with presentation, presentation, presentation.

The 1980s is back in fashion now; my granddaughter's been learning about it in primary school and is the proud owner of a home-made "I [heart] the 1980s" T-shirt. Perhaps it's time for us all to imitate Back to the Future and return to recover what we lost back then, before e-learning went wrong.

Reference
The term "e-learning" was coined or at least popularised by the American technologist Jay Cross in 1999, as "a model for what corporate training [using the internet] can become". 'Elearning: Winning Approaches to Corporate Learning on Internet Time', Internet Time Group, p. 1. Available from http://www.internettime.com/Learning/articles/eLearning.pdf [Accessed 30 November 2014.

The cameraphone generation

Our grand-daughter, aged six and a half, has decided that museums are A Good Thing, and so we took her to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge over the Easter holiday. She had a great time (we could hardly drag her out of the Armoury), but what really struck me was that whatever took her fancy she photographed on her cameraphone.

At first I was alarmed at the rapid and apparently indiscriminate way she took her pictures: "oh, that's nice,`' click; "that's nice," click; click. And then I realised that for the cameraphone generation this is one of the ways in which you experience and process the world, marking those things of interest by taking a photo of them.

It wasn't the only way she experienced the museum objects; we talked about the ones on which she seemed to focus ("which parts of the horse is its armour protecting?), and having obtained some paper and crayons from the Visitors desk she drew about a dozen of her favourite exhibits as we went around. We also hunted for all the cool objects illustrated on the kid's map of the museum: the box of gold coins, the slightly scary painting of a winged skeleton, the giant ceramic owl, the Egyptian sarcophagus, and the figurine of an angry Harlequin (which she spotted before we did). But at the end of a long day she was still snapping with almost as much intensity as when she started.

I'm not worried about whether her pictures are any good, or even whether she keeps a single one of them. I'm happy to accept the cameraphone as one of the tools with which a child these days encounters and tries to make sense of the world. I'm also deeply grateful to the Fitzwilliam for having lifted their ban on photography; clearly our grand-daughter was not their first visitor to experience the Museum through a cameraphone!

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).

Why do people do postgraduate courses?

I saw a surprising statistic the other day: about the study motivation of postgraduate students. They were given a choice of saying that their motivation was (a) mainly employment / career, (b) mainly personal development, or (c) employment / career and personal development equally important.

Now the result needs to be taken with a large barrel of salt. The main focus of the investigation was something else entirely (about website resources for postgraduate students), and the number of responses was low (42 out of a sample of 300). But there's no obvious non-randomness to the respondents, and the results are (I think) still surprising. These were:

• Employment / career and personal development equally important: 18
• Mainly personal development: 14
• Mainly employment / career: 3

Now would you have guessed that only 3 respondents would say that their motivation was "mainly employment / career"? For several years now, since the UK's new funding regime for HE introduced much higher fees, my university (like others) has been striving to focus courses, qualifications and student support on career advancement, and presumably higher income - on the assumption that that is what will most motivate students and justify their investment in their study. But now I'm starting to doubt this. How can "personal development" really mean so much to postgraduate students that they are prepared to pay so many of thousands of pounds in fees?

Here's a dark thought. Postgraduate students, at least at my university, are overwhelmingly in mid-career, already engaged in professional practice, and one change which has affected professionals in all disciplines over the past decade or so is the increasing buraucratisation of their working lives. Tight performance management, inflexible reporting systems, and management by targets and strategic cascade have all combined to make professional work more like that of a white collar production line, so that it's harder for professionals to keep in touch with the reasons why they entered the profession in the first place. Those who think of themselves as creative in their professional practice find this particularly difficult (as this Dilbert cartoon about management obstruction of creativity illustrates).

Under such circumstances, what does a professional do? Leave and do something else? But usually there are mortgages to pay and children to feed. And most of the time the reasons for doing the job are still visible and salvageable - but they need support outside of anything which the workplace itself provides.

And perhaps that is where postgraduate study comes in: supporting "personal development" in the sense of reaffirming the professional's identity as someone who is good at their calling, who shares core values and standards with other co-professionals, and is more concerned about perfecting their practice than advancement in a management hierarchy, which will usually mean doing less of what they love and doing more of what they hate. So the return on investment for postgraduate study may be not so much about career advancement but career sustenance: not enabling students to get a better job, but to live with the one they have.

How to care for introverts / extroverts

This pair of wonderful diagrams has been circulating around the internet without source or acknowledgement – but as far as I can see the original designers are here, and we should acknowledge their brilliance.

For me, there are several reasons why these diagrams are great. First, they get right the meaning of introversion and extraversion. The popular misconception is that introverts are shy and don't get on with people, or are lacking in social skills, whereas extraverts (or extroverts, as it's now often spelled) are gregarious and get on with people splendidly. But in Jung’s original conception, introversion is a focus on the inner contents of one’s mind, and extraversion is a focus on external objects and the outside world. So extraverts get energy from other people, and introverts get energy from thinking. It isn’t that introverts don’t like other people or don’t know how to deal with them: it’s that they find them draining of energy (though not quite in the sense of this Dilbert cartoon). Introverts can be very socially skilled, though they’re unlikely ever to shine in a field such as telesales. It’s rare to find an extrovert with poor social skills (though they do exist), but it’s common to find extroverts who prefer to do their thinking by talking to other people.

The second reason these diagrams why these diagrams are great is that they’re actually useful. Most discussions of extraversion and introversion in pop psychology or HR literature focus on “finding your type” or working out where you are on the introversion-extraversion spectrum, but don't tell you what to do about it - except, usually, to imply that if you're an introvert you shouldn't be promoted into management or do any kind of job which involves working with people. (Hence the need for ripostes, such as Susan Cain's Quiet.) These diagrams address the problem that if you're an extrovert you probably don't know how extroverts like to be treated (and they're unlikely to tell you), and if you're an introvert you may know what extraverts like but don't have the confidence to do it for them. These are diagrams which offer the possibility of a better world.

And the third reason why these diagrams are great is of course that they're superb pieces of design. Pithy and memorable text, engagingly laid out. (I think the variation in type sizes forces one subconsciously to slow down and pay more attention while reading the text, hence encouraging one to pay attention to what it actually says.) Writers and designers of motivational aphorisms, take note.

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.

Designing emergent collaboration: lessons from games design

Having written about what learning design has to learn from games design, I've just read an extraordinary account of the development of an extraordinary game, which has something to teach everyone concerned with collaborative learning activity.

The game, called Journey, has already created something of a sensation. Visually powerful, wordless and emotionally intense, it was specifically intended to be a co-operative experience, allowing simultaneous players linked through the PlayStation online network (it's only available for PlayStation, unfortunately) to meet (though not talk) and help each other.

One reviewer's account of playing the game is here. And the designer's account of developing the game is here. What's interesting from the learning design point of view is the repeated playtesting, to check how players were responding to each other the game environment, and the tweaking of the game rules, so that the cooperative and trusting behaviour they wanted the game to afford was positively encouraged.

Later addition. To spell out the take-away point for learning design: if you're designing a collaborative or cooperative group activity, the most important thing to clarify and specify is what kinds of interactions you want there to be between the learners - and then design the task accordingly, and check that those are the interactions which actually happen.

Learning design: where do you get your ideas from?

A recent Guardian Review feature invited several novelists to write about the art forms other than novels which had inspired them. It turned out that, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro got inspiration from films, Colm Tóibín from opera, and John Lanchester from video games. In the editor's introduction, there was a hint that there was something surprising or unexpected about this - which I myself found surprising, because I've always found ideas for my own work in all kinds of places, as is testified by the diverse entries in this blog. Learning design in particular, because it is a form of design - that is, of matching means to ends, of creating a product or structure which will produce certain intended results - is a craft in which it's always possible to learn from designers in other fields, especially those concerned with achieving effects on people's minds, whether cognitive, aesthetic, or affective.

So here are some of the things, other than learning, from the designers of which I've learned.

Websites and interfaces. Like many others, I'm a fan of the writings of Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman, who in the 1980s between them pretty much invented the whole field of usability, in response to the problems posed by new consumer technologies which people were unable to use. Apart from Norman's own book, the other two great classics of usability and human-machine interaction are John Carroll's observations of office workers trying to use a new IBM personal computer and Lucy Suchman's study of dialogues from people puzzling out the operation of their first duplex sorting photocopier. Their writings, and Nielsen's ongoing Alertbox newsletter, are a rich source of design exemplars, good and bad - the bad ones being especially interesting for the poor design thinking which they reveal: designing for people like oneself instead of actual users, forgetting that users come with and develop mental models of what's going on and what they can do, assuming that users will be happy to read and memorise complex instructions when in fact all they want to do is get on. Learning design, of course, can go wrong in precisely the same ways.

Computer games. There's a close analogy, about which I've written and blogged, between the design of games and the design of learning: in both cases, you're designing a system of resources and affordances which will result in a good and rewarding experience for the player / learner - while having no control at all over what they do with what you've provided. The ways in which games and learning experiences can fail are also analogous: no grab or motivation, too hard, too easy, too boring. The key book on games design, for my money, is Salen and Zimmerman's Rules of Play.

Marketing and publicity. Again this is all about producing an effect (for example, Awareness, Interest, Desire or Action, as they say in marketing) in the minds of people you do not know and with whom you have no direct contact, and whose attention you cannot assume. One blog which I follow is Writing Matters, from an American consultancy which specialises in writing online communications for marketing and sales: mailshots, order processing, complaint handling. Pretty much everything they write about creating and sustaining a good relationship with customers and potential customers is relevant to creating and sustaining a good relationship with learners.

Literature, film, TV drama, comics. Here the central craft is storytelling, of which the basic requirements are the same across all media: creating tension and resolution; changing pace, direction or point of view; establishing voice and relationship; engaging and directing attention; generally taking a narrative from start to conclusion). I enjoy the writings of expert practitioners (such as Ursula Le Guin, Alexander Mackendrick and Scott McCloud), who are both willing and able to reveal the techniques of their own special area (fiction writing, film-making and comic creation respectively). And alongside the techniques of storytelling there are the techniques for planning and coordinating the telling, such as the storyboarding most spectacularly used by Pixar, which allows their animators to check the shape and pace and punch of a storyline, beat by beat, before they ever switch on their computers.

Painting and graphic art. A picture can also tell a story, despite presenting only a single moment in time, by its implication or assumption of a past, its suggestion or promise of a future. I'm particularly interested in pictures which create gaps or spaces, calling on the viewer to fill these with their own imagination: Dutch interiors, such as Vermeer's The Letter, are supreme examples of this, and I have already blogged about The Reader - which as I observed is a picture about what is not on the page. I'm also interested in medieval stained glass and wall paintings, such as the spectacular series at Eton College, which were designed with the deliberate intention of educating a largely illiterate population: a useful corrective for those of us who find it difficult to think of teaching other than in words.

Music. Lyrics and libretti aside, this too is a craft which is essentially non-verbal, operating at a non-cognitive, visceral level. If, like me, you're concerned about the affective as well as the cognitive aspect of teaching and learning, it can be encouraging to be shown or reminded - as composer Howard Goodall does in his TV programmes - that the power of music to move and excite is the result of skill and design technique, and not just god-given inspiration. I have a favourite story (which I have just retold) about George Martin, the record producer of the Beatles, who with one small intervention turned a so-so song into the quintessential hit of the band's early years; the beauty of the story is that the George Martin trick is applicable to the design of writing, especially web writing, also.

Psychotherapy and spirituality. Even more obviously than with the other crafts listed here, these are all about the effect on the audience (the client or pilgrim) because there is no persistent mediating artefact: any words spoken are evanescent and their meaning is peculiar to their local situation. Furthermore, these are crafts which depend on the client doing the majority of the work; the ideal therapist, like the ideal teacher, does nothing except create the safe environment necessary for the work and awaken the client's own inner teacher. For these reasons, the design of psychotherapeutic and spiritual practices are difficult to discuss meaningfully, except in an experiential way. There are books about psychotherapy and spirituality, of course; but these are not the craft itself; as Freud remarked, writing about psychoanalysis doesn't cure people, any more than distributing menus relieves hunger during a famine. In these crafts, perhaps more than any other, the best influence on one's own practice is being party to good practice oneself. Writing and talking about learning design can only accomplish so much; to really understand what good learning design is and what it can do, one needs to experience some well-designed learning

How to be patronising

Claire Warwick, of the Guardian Higher Education Network, has imagined a lovely piece of spoof guidance to academics, on how to give a talk.

Walk into the room – do make sure that you open the door first, or you might get a nasty bang on the nose! You might notice there are people sitting in seats in front of you. Don't be scared. They are called the audience, and they are there to listen to you. They might ask questions afterwards. You will need to think carefully about your answers: you wouldn't want to say anything silly!

Would anybody ever write anything so crass? Perhaps not. But her point was that much of the guidance to academics on how to use Twitter is just as patronising and inappropriate. And immediately after reading this article, I was looking for something helpful on work-related stress and found that the best that one major employee-assistance company could offer was "Quick fixes" (their own title) such as the following:

Don’t bottle it up
Talking to people is a good way to beat stress because it helps us see the problem more clearly – it may not be as bad as we thought, and other people may have different perspectives and solutions we hadn’t considered.

Worries? What worries?
Worrying about the ‘what ifs?’ in a situation takes a lot of time and energy, and anxiety can quickly escalate. First, find out the facts about a situation – your worries may turn out to be unfounded. If you’re still concerned, plan your strategy, with a friend if necessary, so that you feel more in control of the situation.

Take time out
Ring-fence time in your day to unwind and reflect – it will help you recharge your batteries and get things into perspective.

The problem with these suggestions isn't that they're wrong, but that anyone who has got to the point of needing help with work-related stress will almost certainly have thought of them already and tried them and still be in trouble. (One of the awful things about high-level stress being that it reduces one's ability to deal practically with the things that are causing it.) What these suggestions imply that the reader is too stupid to have thought of them for themselves. If I were suffering from stress and someone were to talk like that to me, I think I'd probably hit them - which, though very bad of course, might actually be more effective than any of these ideas in relieving my stress.

What makes these efforts to be helpful so patronising, wrong and offensive ? They tell you things that you already know (or think you know), and by making a big deal about them as though they're a great secret or revelation, they position you, the reader, as ignorant and stupid. They don't address the mistakes which you might actually be making, or tell you things you actually want to know; when it comes to areas that are difficult (responding to audience questions, dealing with weak management) they avoid them or fudge the issue completely.

How often do we do the same with the guidance we provide for students, I wonder? When they reach out to us asking for our help, all too often we ignore their actual needs (or remain ignorant of them) and just provide them with information which they most likely have already. But at least we don't usually finish, like call centre operators do, by asking - after they've completely failed to solve your problem - "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Why IT is bad for education

For my work, I make it my responsibility to know the drawbacks and downsides of IT, as well as its benefits and advantages. Since reading a magazine article by Marcus du Sautoy two years ago, I've been aware of a particularly insidious side-effect of IT's use in education, which has the potential to degrade and undermine the educational enterprise. That side-effect wasn't mentioned or discussed in the article: it was visible only in one particular phrase, the implications of which Marcus du Sautoy seemed only dimly aware.

That phrase was his summary statement of “what it is that I do as a mathematician and a writer”:

My job is, as the jargon goes, to “deliver content” in as many different forms and to as many different people as possible.

What he was doing was explaining how his venture into e-books and smartphone apps was simply an extension of  his work as a professional mathematician (“I prove theorems”), his formal teaching (lecturing in universities, schools and prisons), his informal teaching through books and programmes on television and radio, his collaboration with theatre companies and musicians on art pieces to explore mathematical themes, and his work on internet maths games. He was showing how all this work formed part of a single domain. But to do so, he used a phrase  - "deliver content" - which (as the scare quotes and the distancing "as the jargon goes" showed he was aware) came from quite a different and specialist domain: that of IT.

Now the word "content" sounds quite innocuous. Teachers or academics may use it and suppose that it means "course content" or "teaching content", roughly equivalent to "subject matter" or "subject knowledge". "Delivering content" sounds very like delivering a lecture, a class or a training course. Academics may also understand “content” as being opposed to “form, or perhaps to “structure”, allowing them to think of how essentially the same subject matter can be presented in different ways.

In IT, however, “content” has a different meaning. It means the information contained in a website, a database, or a computer file – as in the expression “content management system”. Delivering content means moving information from one place to another, irrespective of what that information, that content, actually represents. If you're emailing a digital photograph to a friend, it may matter to the IT system what format the file is in and how big it is, but the system does not know and does not care what the photograph shows. If you want to put some learning materials on a website, the IT people will want to know how many words there are, and whether you’ve got audio or video, but they won’t care what the words say or what’s in the audio and video or what students are supposed to do with it in order to learn.

Delivering content is what the IT industry does. It is the practical and commercial application of the central premise of information theory: that complex problems can be solved by reducing them to issues of signal, channel, noise and gain. The IT industry’s strength and success rests on the extraordinary degree to which real-world problems really are susceptible of treatment in terms of information flow: of not knowing and not caring what the information or content actually is, and focusing solely on whether it is delivered correctly. Just like postal services or courier companies, IT people's responsibility is limited to delivery on time and in good condition, and their relationship with sender or receiver need go no further than that. (You may be lucky enough to have a web developer who is actually interested in what you are trying to say and do with your web content, just as you may be lucky enough to have a courier or postal worker who is actually interested in you as a person, but this is not something which you should expect.)

The consequence of this is that when IT people approach the subject of education, they tend to see it in terms of transmission of information, because that's what they're good at. The technology which they design and build, therefore, tends to focus on the flow of information between teacher and student - and also, in these days of social media, between students - rather than any other aspect of teaching and learning. For example, when “virtual learning environments” or VLEs were first created for university teaching, they were designed on the assumption that their purpose was to get information - lecture notes, PowerPoints, articles to read - from teachers to students, and so that was the way in which university teachers found it easiest to use them (Britain and Liber, 2004, p. 4).

And this is the problem: that information theoretical thinking does not stay within the domain of IT, but through the widespread use of the technology and the surrounding vocabulary it bleeds out into the language and thinking of teachers, so that they too start conceiving their work in terms of information transmission instead of teaching. So even a good teacher such as Marcus du Sautoy can come to believe that his job is to "deliver content".

Why is it a problem to conceive of teaching as the transmission of information? Three reasons.

The first is that it’s bad teaching. Learning, even memorisation or assimilation, is an active process, and to treat students as though they're a passive receiver of information like a radio set or a hard disk is to encourage them to work at too low a level, not trying to do anything more than remember and repeat it.

The second is that it widens social divisions. If teaching only delivers information, it favours those with the educational experience and intellectual capital to make good use of it, disadvantaging those with less privileged backgrounds. This may not be a problem if you are happy to focus on the education of elites, but if you have a mission for social justice, as we do at the Open University, this most definitely is a problem.

The third problem with seeing teaching as the delivery of information - a problem for universities and other educational institutions at least - is that it threatens their existence. Information is cheap, or thought of as such thanks to the internet; there are no fees for the MOOCs or Massive Online Open Courses which a few leading institutions have started to provide (see here, here and here). If all universities do is provide access to information, they have no economic or moral basis for continuing in their present form.

But of course, even focusing solely on their teaching function, that is not all that universities do.
Those of us who work in such institutions and believe that we do have a social role to play may need to remind ourselves, and keep reminding others, that the business of a university is not the delivery of content but the transformation of lives.