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.

What are libraries for?

At some time or another over the last decade or so, probably every librarian in the world has asked themselves what the purpose of libraries is, in an internet-equipped world where all the information and literature of the world is available (at least in our imagination) with speed, ease and convenience at our own desk or in our own palm.

A photograph of a medieval library, in a recent article in the Cambridge Alumnus Magazine (Issue 71, pp 28-33), reminded me of how much things have changed. When that library was built, books were so scarce that there was no need for bookshelves: each book had its own reading desk, to which it was chained. There was no question of borrowing books; to read a particular book, you had to travel to a particular library and sit down at a particular desk. There was no presumption that a library's purpose was to make books available; in fact, Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose only required a slight imaginative twist to conceive of a monastic library actually designed to prevent would-be readers from accessing the books therein.

The huge libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth century were designed in a period in which it seemed an achievable ambition to gather all human knowledge, or a pretty good approximation to it, within the compass of four walls and a very large number of bookshelves. My old university's library was one of the handful in the country designated as "copyright libraries" (the British Library, formerly the British Museum, being the most famous) legally entitled to claim a free copy of every book and periodical published in the UK - a right that even before the advent of the internet was becoming increasingly difficult to exercise.

Now public libraries are re-branding themselves as information resource centres, and librarians spend as much or more time with digital materials as with printed books. At the Open University, where I currently work, and where only a tiny fraction of its students are able to visit the Library in person, the shift to online resources is a natural complement to our distance learning - though it does make the Library building a curiously empty space, with the librarians hidden behind Staff Only doors and the reading desks inhabited by a handful of African research students in need of somewhere to work.

So it was a joy to visit the new Library of Birmingham: a building conceived and designed not just to replace the old Birmingham City Library but to create a new role for itself. No public library is going to compete with the digital resources of the internet, but it can do something which the online environment can't: it can provide a physical space which is a nice place to be. And that the Library of Birmingham has done beautifully. Visiting it on a Sunday afternoon, with my wife and an old friend now a Librarian at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, we were struck by the number of families enjoying the building: browsing, exploring, having a good time.

From the outside, the building looks like a gold and silver jewellery box, but inside nothing is box-like: the internal walls all seem to be curved, running around like a snail's shell. The only obvious straight lines are the escalators, slicing across the central atrium at jaunty angles. Riding them up to the top of the building is like going on a non-scary theme park ride: vaut le voyage just for the pan-optical views alone. The books are arranged so as to be meaningful and convenient to users, rather than librarians and catalogues: there are books for browsing, the one (mainly fiction) most likely to be borrowed; there are books for finding things out (mainly non-fiction), arranged in radial shelves; and there are books purely for reference (such as the Statutes of England), which most users will never consult but look great on the shelves in their identical bindings and are located where they can best be decorative, as a sort of literary wallpaper.

At the top of the building is an observation deck, with large red sofas in which to relax and look out across the cityscape. There's also the Shakespeare memorial room: an elegant Elizabethan-style wood-panelled room, transported from the original library where it was built in 1882. A stone panel from 1887 cryptically connects the Library to its nineteenth century past and remoter medieval history. There's even a (well-signposted) secret garden. On the ground floor is a cafe, where we rounded out our happy afternoon with tea and cakes.

One of the tests of a library is what unexpected discoveries you make there. My unexpected and unlooked-for discovery, from a facing-out display in the non-fiction section, was a book called Writing for New Media - modern in this context meaning 1998,but still deeply relevant and inspirational in several intriguing chapters on the grammar of interactivity. (I've since ordered the book and will no doubt be posting about it soon.) May all the users of this great new library enjoy, as we did, happy afternoons and serendipitous discoveries.

Lessons on usability from The Guardian iPad app

One of the things I've been enjoying on my new iPad is the Guardian app, which I think I can now say I find both easier and more enjoyable to read than the print edition of the newspaper. It's easier to handle, of course, being smaller, but I also find that I browse more and find myself reading more items than I used to do. (I don't use it at the breakfast table though, to avoid marmalade on the screen.)

But the improved readability and usability is down to some great information design, not solely the change of medium. Each issue is clearly divided into sections, and it's easy to switch between them or pop up to the whole-issue level. Within each section, the items are presented to you with a headline, a standfirst, and often a photograph. The photographs are strong, and look really striking on the iPad's retina display, and provide fixation points for each item. But what is more critical in determining whether or not you tap on one of these to read it is the quality of the standfirsts: those short paragraphs before the article proper, which both explain what the article is about and give you a reason to read it (as explained here and here).

Now all of these elements - sections, signature photographs, headlines and standfirsts - are features of the print edition also. They are part of the standard information design repertoire of journalism, and their quality is probably the most critical contribution to the usability of the iPad edition. In a sense all that's needed for the iPad edition is for these to be put on the screen appropriately - not a trivial design task, and one which they could easily get wrong, but one which is made considerably easier by those elements existing in the first place.

To write online learning materials as compellingly and addictively browseable as the iPad edition of the Guardian we may need to adopt some of the same techniques, to focus on that same point in time when a reader is scanning the screen and wondering what to do next. Pictures need to be interesting and relevant, titles need to be meaningful, and any introductory matters equivalent to a standfirst needs to sell the item not merely describe it, because it exists in competition with all the other things the reader or learner might be doing instead. We don't need to be apologetic about this; if we have materials which are good and interesting we shouldn't feel embarrassed about promoting them.

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.

The case for formal learning - by Millie (aged 16)

For the past few years, the cutting edge talk has been about informal learning and the death of formal courses and formal educational institutions, now that the internet can provide a learner with so much information to study and so many other learners to whom to connect. This year, with the rise of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course - see review by John Daniels), the trending talk seems to be swinging back towards the traditional course, even if not the traditional institution.

So I was amused to re-discover, while clearing out my clipping collection, a brilliant statement of the case for traditional formal learning, made by a 16-year-old schoolgirl in 2005.

Millie Wilcox (aged 16, from Birmingham), was asked by a Guardian journalist whether she thought English at school should be about classics such as Chaucer or about writing skills. Her answer included the following.

The really  good thing about doing literature in school is that often you have a book and you think "Oh no" but once you've been through it in class and it's been explained to you, you realise it's really good. We've done  Pride and Prejudice and when I saw how long it was, I thought it would be really dull and boring. But in fact it's better than the TV programme. Some bits of Shakespeare are good, too. There are some books you just read for fun, but some you need help to get into.

All of which could be (and has been) said at much greater length by learning theorists and by learning and teaching consultants (such as Clive Shepherd). But I prefer Millie's down-to-earth and learner-centred formulation. The case (or place) for formal learning is for those things you just wouldn't study on your own ("you think 'Oh no'", "really dull and boring"), but when you have studied them thanks to the compulsion of a formal programme you're glad you did ("better than the TV").

Get that: "better than the TV programme". Respect, teacher. Respect, Austen. And respect, Millie.

Reference: The Guardian, 26 April 2005, "Multiple choice: should we study classics such as Chaucer, or concentrate on writing skills?"

Short writing: when less is more

Some tips on writing very, very short stories have been posted by David Gaffney in a Guardian blog. (Some readers' stories, inspired by these tips, are here.)

Most of these tips are applicable also to writing of learning materials, when we need to write concisely to suit the online medium or simply need a punchier, more motivational style than the academic norm.

• "Start in the middle." Academic writing traditionally starts with the most general and abstract statement of the subject, which may make logical sense but is precisely the wrong thing to do for ease of understanding. Just as back-story is best introduced some way in, when you already care about the characters, rather than in chronological order, so generalities and abstractions make more sense once the particulars and concrete instances are established.
• "Don't use too many characters." The teaching equivalent would be: you can't say everything that you know, so you're going to have to be selective.
• "Make sure the ending isn't at the end." The rationale here is that once your reader reaches the end of the text, you've lost contact with them, so if you want to set them thinking about what your conclusion means and what its implications are, you need to do that before the end of the text.
• "Sweat your title - make it work for a living." In academic writing, a title's main function is to describe and summarise the contents. In other kinds of writing, especially online, a title is often the basis on which a reader decides to read your piece or not. A description or summary is one of the ways to bring a reader in, but a good title can do more: it can pique the interest and set the tone, like the titles of a TV series.
• "Make your last line ring like a bell." It's not only in fiction that we can aspire to writing final lines that "leave the reader with something which will continue to sound after the story has finished."
• "Write long, then go short." Sometimes writing longer than the word limit is the only way to begin, but after that you need to prune, prune, prune. I sometimes advise writers to pretend that they live in the days of telegrams, where you had to pay for every single word, and every word you could cut out of your message was money saved.

Recently an academic colleague thanked me for something I'd said to her three years ago when writing her first online course materials and facing a terrifyingly small word limit. What I'd advised her was to think in terms of writing haiku: a small number of words, getting the reader to do the maximum amount of work - active learning, active reading, at its most extreme.

There's an old example sometimes given to illustrate the nature of story. This:

The king died

is an event. This:

The kind died and the queen died

is two events in temporal sequence - still not a story. This:

The king died and the queen died of grief

is a story. Its power lies not in the words but in what the reader is inspired to bring to the text. If you can get the reader to do the bulk of the work, you don't need a lot of words to tell a story or provoke deep thought.

eBook readers and academic reading

Research on the use of eBooks in higher education suggests that reading devices such as Kindles and iPads aren't going to transform university study in the way some have hoped.

A literature review by Simon Cross in the OU's Institute of Educational Technology covers twelve recent publications and finds a remarkably consistent picture emerging of the advantages and disadvantages of eBooks. The three main advantages reported are those one would expect, and apply whether eBooks are read online with a conventional computer or on a portable reading device: ease of access (by comparison with a physical library), low or zero cost (by comparison with expensive print textbooks), and the searchability of texts. In addition, where students were issued with reading devices for the purposes of the trial, staff found advantage in being able to assume a common hardware and software platform. The only surprise here is that portability, when accessed through a mobile device, did not seem to figure strongly as an advantage.

The disadvantages, however, reveal an important distinction between leisure and academic use. While respondents were very happy with eBook readers for reading novels or magazines, they experienced significant difficulties in using them for the kind of high-level reading required for university work. As I have already observed, academic reading falls into the category which Jakob Nielsen has called "high-value use", for which mobile devices are less well suited than desktop or laptop machines because of their smaller screen size and inferior keyboard interfaces. With the help of the IET literature review,  it's possible to go further and identify some of the distinctive requirements of academic reading.

1  Non-linear navigation.  When reading for academic purposes, you need to do more than simply move forwards through the document. You may need to skip back to earlier parts to remind yourself of what was said previously or skip ahead to see where the text is leading, and then return to where you were. You may need to flick back and forth repeatedly between two or more parts of the text to compare and relate them. You may need to skim read the text to get a sense of its overall structure. All these things are possible on an eBook reader, but they're not simple, because the devices are optimised to show a single page at a time and to navigate linearly forwards and backwards.
2  Note-taking. Academic reading is active reading, to understand and assimilate and interpret, and that usually involves taking notes. Highlighting text and adding annotations, which are supported (if awkwardly) by many eBook readers, are helpful, but only provide part of what is needed. Deep reading involves incorporating the text into your own understanding, which means making your own synthesis: the notes  need to be part of your own text, not the text of the document you're reading. Mobile devices, because of the limitations of their interfaces, tend not to support such synthesis very well; it was said of the iPad on its launch that it was a consumption device rather than a creation device, and (notwithstanding the iPad paintings of David Hockney) that largely remains true. A more fundamental limitation with mobile devices is that they are designed to do only one thing at a time, so that task switching is poor, whereas for note-taking you need to be doing at least two things simultaneously: reading and writing. The difficulties are such that one lecturer concluded that eBook readers were encouraging passive reading in his students.

What seems to be emerging is a pattern of mixed use: combining screen reading for discovery and searching with print reading for note-taking and deep study; using a mobile device for reading and another device for note-taking; or using an eBook reader as a secondary device for when portability is important. eBook readers may have made on-screen reading more comfortable and convenient, through their high resolution imaging and re-sizeable text as well as their physical lightness; but they are unlikely to transform academic use unless and until they can better support these high value functions. Split screen operation would be a start.


Postscript. Since writing the above, I've seen this interesting post by Alex Golub, an American academic and iPad enthusiast, who makes very similar points about the limitations of an iPad, by comparison with a laptop, for academic work.

References The IET literature review is available only to Open University staff through http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=9673, but the reports surveyed include the following:

• Darden School of Business (2010) Darden Shares Results of Kindle Experiment,
  University of Virginia News and Media. 5 November 2010. Available at:
  http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/Media/Darden-News-Articles/2010/Darden-Shares-
  Results-of-Kindle-Experiment/
• Marmarelli, T. and Ringle, M. (2010) The Reed College Kindle Study. 26 February
  2010. Available at http://www.reed.edu/cis/about/kindle_pilot/Reed_Kindle_report.pdf
• Li, C., Poe, F., Potter, M, Quigley, B. and Wilson, J. (2011) UC Libraries Academic e-
  Book Usage Survey: Springer e-Book Pilot Project, University of California Libraries.
• Foasberg, N. (2011) Adoption of E-Book Readers among College Students: A
  Survey, Information Technology and Libraries, September 2011, 108-128

The Reader

As teachers, we sometimes assume that students will just absorb whatever we write for them and that reading is "essentially passive in nature" (Conole  2007, p 84). IT unfortunately encourages us in this assumption, by turning everything into a problem of information transfer, so that the reader of a text is just a recipient of information.

I've already written about assimilative learning being an active process, and here - in a painting of c1665 - is a picture of it. The painter is the Dutch artist Eglon van der Neer, a contemporary of Vermeer, and it comes from that genre of domestic interior scenes showing people intensely absorbed in some private activity. In the Protestant Low Countries , the devotional intensity which might elsewhere have been expressed in overtly religious art was being brought into the sphere of the personal and the internal.

The reader is clearly a well-educated woman: the writing set on the table shows that she lives through her literacy. The book she's reading is probably what was called an "emblem book": the picture visible on the left-hand page would have been an allegorical image, accompanied by a short and memorable motto, with a longer explanation and exegesis in the supporting text.

But the most remarkable thing about the painting is that she's not looking at the book. Her gaze is straight ahead of her, into empty space: she is looking inwards. It "suggests a life of the mind that remains impenetrable, inaccessible to even the most persistent viewer" (Wieseman, 2011, p 194).

Of course she is. For reading - meaningful reading, not just sounding out the words on the page, aloud or silently - involves thinking. And reading which is challenging - which is presenting something not only new but different, as is inevitably the case in education - involves a lot of thinking. So she is re-making her understanding, re-making her thought processes, perhaps re-making her very soul and identity; and for all this the words on the page are merely the start.

References:

Conole, G. (2007), “Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice”, and Appendix 7 “Taxonomy of learning activities”, in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.

Marjorie E. Wieseman (Curator of Dutch Paintings a the National Gallery), Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 2011).

The van der Neer painting was included in a Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition of that name between October 2011 and January 2012. It is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Emblem books could be both sacred and secular. For an interesting tour of some 17th century Dutch love emblem books, see http://emblems.let.uu.nl/emblems/educational/home.html on the Emblem Project Utrecht website.

Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?

To take in something external and make it part of oneself: assimilation or digestion is a powerful metaphor for learning. It's a long-established one too; the Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer famously asks that believers should "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the holy scriptures.  Today, "assimilative tasks" are one of the categories of learning activities in the classification system used by learning designers at the Open University. According to this system, the characteristic "assimilative tasks" are reading, viewing and listening, which even in the digital world remain the core activities of a university student.

But there's something slightly pejorative about the label "assimilative" in that classification, especially when set alongside the other categories: experiential, information-handling, communicative, productive and adaptive (simulations to you and me). Grainné Conole puts her finger on it when she describes assimilative tasks as "essentially passive in nature" (Conole 2007, p 84). Taking it for granted that we're all aiming to get students to be active in their learning, the implication is that reading text, watching video or listening to audio is somehow less active than, say, communicating, handling information or getting new experiences.

Now it's certainly possible to listen passively to a lecture or a podcast, or to read through written words passively without thinking about their meaning. But that's not assimilation: that's swallowing. To take in food takes minutes, or seconds; to digest it takes hours, and that digestion is a very active process, involving peristaltic movement, gastric acids, enzymes and so on. If we're to take assimilation as a model of learning, then the important part isn't putting the stuff in the mouth, or eyes or ears, but working on it to break it down and make it part of oneself. And that's the part on which a good teacher will focus.

This is something in which the Open University has excelled for the past forty years. The reasons its course materials are so good is not that the information is well-organised or that the explanations are clear - although they are - but that they're always accompanied by learning activities to help students build their own understanding of the subject. It's these activities, rather than the reading, viewing and listening, which are the real assimilative tasks. Here are some of the most common types, divided for convenience into three levels:

Basic

• summarising - for example: "List the three most important characteristics of theory X." "Write a single sentence explanation of concept Y."
• representing diagrammatically - for example: "Draw a mind map to show the relationship between the concepts of theory X., including examples from case study Y."
• organising - for example: "List the different aspects of this topic, and create a system for arranging them."
• classifying - for example: "Sort the instances A., B., C.… into the categories / concepts X., Y., Z.."
• comparing and contrasting - for example: "List points of similarity and difference between X. and Y."
• identifying - for example: "Identify the features of concept X. which make it an instance of concept Y."
• exemplifying - for example: "Find an example of concept X. in material Y., or in your own experience."

Intermediate

• interpreting - for example: "Describe the most important features of case X., according to theory Y."
• analysing - for example: "Outline the structure of case X., according to theory Y."
• applying - for example: "Describe what you would do in case X., according to principles / procedure Y." "Identify the salient features of case A., according to theory B."
• reflecting - for example: "Interpret your experience of X. according to theory / framework / protocol Y."

Advanced

• contextualising - for example:  "Relate case X. to its theoretical / social / historical / political / environmental etc. context."
• evaluating - for example: "Say how far case X. meets standards Y., and give reasons for your judgements."
• discussing critically (in the academic sense) - for example: "Argue for an interpretation of case X., and give reasons for preferring this over other possible interpretations."

A better name for this category of tasks might be "comprehension and application", rather than "assimilative", if assimilation is going to be mistaken for simple reception of material. But whatever we call it, properly conceiving the acquisition of knowledge and understanding as an active process is vital to higher education, since every academic discipline requires it to a greater or lesser extent. In the face of subject matter experts' tendency to teach a subject just by expounding it, the reminder which we need is that good teaching requires not only clear exposition but a process for learners to assimilate it.

References

Book of Common Prayer (1662), Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent.

Conole, G. (2007), “Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice”, and Appendix 7 “Taxonomy of learning activities”, in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.