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?’

Confessions of a teenage 903 user

(The original version of this reminiscence was written for the Centre for Computing History, which occasionally runs demonstrations of its working Elliott 903.)

In 1972, for a school to have a computer was something extraordinary. Computers then were huge and expensive things, owned mainly by universities, large corporate businesses and banks, such as The National Girobank whose TV advertisements made a big deal of the fact that it used a computer to manage its customers’ accounts. So imagine my excitement on starting secondary school that year to discover that we had a computer. And that excitement was undimmed by my first sight of the Elliott 903: a modest metal box the size of a desk, with a few smaller boxes standing on it and a teleprinter to one side. This was a long way short of the rooms full of steel cabinets with chattering line printers and whirring magnetic tape drives which I had been expecting. It was even further short of the talking and intelligent computers we knew from ‘Star Trek’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. But still, it was a real and actual computer, and that meant that it could be programmed to do things. The only question was how.

Fortunately I was friends with the top mathematician in my year, who had already been using the computer for some time, and he showed me how to write my first program in FORTRAN. Other pupils showed me how to use the Teletype in the outer computer room to type out my program onto punched paper tape, which was the 903’s medium for high-speed data input (high speed here meaning 250 characters per second). Making paper tapes was itself pretty exciting: each keystroke produced a row of up to eight holes representing a character in ASCII, with a complete set of holes being a null character to be ignored, enabling you to correct typing errors. (Backspacing the tape and typing Delete punched out any holes already there). Printing out the text encoded in a tape, and realising that we could use it for sending private messages, was also exciting. But of course the main thing was to get access to the 903 and to run a program.

So I went to see the teacher in charge of the computer, who solemnly signed a card authorising me to use it for up to an hour per week. (One hour! And kids today complain about limits on their screen time!) However, I was still a long way from getting my program to run. The computer wasn’t large enough to interpret high-level FORTAN programs directly; what I had to do was to load and run the FORTRAN compiler, one of the massive rolls of paper tape hanging from a pegboard beside the computer, and get it to read in my program and convert it to machine code. It took many efforts before it would do that successfully, because it kept finding syntax errors in my FORTRAN, which I had to find and correct and then remake my tape. Only when I had no syntax errors would it produce a new lot of paper tape containing my program in machine code, which I could load and run in its turn. I can’t now recall what my first program did, but I suspect it was something worthy but dull, probably solving quadratic equations using the standard formula. Whatever it was, certainly it was unmemorable and hardly worth all that effort.

You see there was what we were supposed to do with the computer and there was what we actually did with the computer, and these were two very different things. Our maths curriculum, devised by the School Mathematics Project or SMP, included computer programming, breaking calculations down into simple steps and using a made-up programming language called SMPOL to perform basic arithmetic operations on numbers in registers. The SMP textbooks featured an imaginary computer called Simon (SMPOL Simon, geddit?), but so that we could use our actual computer the maths teachers wrote a SMPOL compiler. We did try programming in SMPOL, but it was dreadful: painfully slow and deeply dull in its limited operations. Even the school’s administrative applications were more interesting: from time to time the computer was used for working out exam timetables, which was fun because it produced desk labels for each exam venue with pupils’ names spelled out on punched paper tape, and also for processing the marks from the scholarship entrance exams – which became exciting when one of my friends found paper tape containing the confidential raw marks in a waste paper bin. (He now works in data security!) We weren’t going to be limited to the curriculum; we took our inspiration from the very camp, very brilliant maths teacher who had first set up the 903 for the school and had actually been a pioneer computer scientist in the post-war years. Think about it: we were reasonably bright teenage pupils, and we had access to a computer. What do you suppose we did with it?

Of course, we wrote games. The tone was set by one of my friends, who wrote a program called Dork: the computer asked you quiz questions and called you a dork if you got the answer wrong. Not exactly Fortnite, but we thought it was funny. I followed this up with a program to write random sentences, picking words at random from a deliberately surreal vocabulary list to fit one of a number of grammatical forms: “the zombizical policeman urgently requires the fried egg” was a typical result. Then I wrote a game called Bath, which was a silly variant on one of the few games in the school’s program library. The original version was a (very simple) simulation of a moon landing; you had to set the level of thrust so as to land softly, but if you slowed too early in your descent you would run out of fuel and crash. In my version, you had to set the flow rate of hot and cold water to run a bath of a specified depth and temperature; I made it still more silly by having this be a giant’s bathtub, so the depth was measured in feet rather than inches, and there were appropriate in-game messages (“Fee, fi, fo, fum… (splash)”).

Between us, we also tried writing a game called Animal, of which we’d heard: the computer tries to guess the animal you’re thinking of by asking yes-or-no questions, such as “Can it fly?” The computer obviously has a limited number of questions and the trick is to get it to expand its capability by asking you for more information if you think of an animal it doesn’t already know. We never got that game working properly; I’m fairly sure the logic was flawed. We had more success with a program to play the colour pattern guessing game Mastermind, which was very popular at that time. To get the computer to guess your colour pattern as quickly as possible was a good challenge: the clever bit was to have it work out what guess would give it the most information. (The best first move, by the way, assuming the target pattern is chosen at random, is two pegs of one colour plus two pegs of another colour.) For the other half of the game, in which you try to guess the computer’s pattern, we sneakily made the computer cheat: as you made your guesses, it would change its target pattern so that its answer, while consistent with the answers it had given previously, would give you the least possible information to keep you guessing as long as possible.

By this time, the school had given up on trying to regulate our time using the computer. (The start and finish times we entered in the computer room Day Book were complete fiction anyway; we called it “fudging time”.) We had also given up on high-level languages such as FORTRAN and ALGOL; the compiled code was inefficient, and given the slow speed of the processor we needed all the efficiency we could get. Instead, we ended up programming exclusively in the 903’s assembler language, called Symbolic Input Routine, or SIR, which gave us the efficiency of working at the level of machine code and its 16 basic operations, but with the advantages of defined variable names which made our code comprehensible. So although we got some of our games ideas from the helpful American book 101 BASIC Computer Games, we recreated them all in SIR – partly because we didn’t have a BASIC compiler, but mainly for reasons of speed. Even using SIR, our efforts to get the computer playing draughts, let alone chess, were ultimately frustrated by the length of time the computer took to produce a move – 30 minutes or more, in the case of our chess program. Being inexperienced in systematic testing and debugging, we did not know how to deal with the long cycle time for seeing a problem, identifying its cause and making a change, so we never got these programs working properly. This did not, however, prevent us from mounting displays about them at the exhibitions of the computer room which we started putting on for school open days.

Our computer room exhibitions also featured some more serious mathematical work, given a fun visual twist. My friend the top mathematician, having read that the highest known prime number (at that time) was 2 to the power of 11213 minus 1, set out to calculate and print out that number. Of course this was more complicated than simply instructing the computer to multiply 2 by itself repeatedly; after only a few iterations the number would have been too big for the computer’s usual way of representing numbers, so he had to write a subroutine for handling numbers with very many digits. When printed out, the number took up a very long piece of paper (the teleprinter used continuous rolls), equivalent to three or four sheets of A4. Of course, we had no way of knowing whether the calculation was correct or not, so adapting a song from a much-played album of the time we used to sing:

(To the tune of ‘(Jesus Christ) Superstar’)
Powers of 2, superstar!
Do you think you’re what we say you are?

My mathematician friend also wrote a routine for plotting graphs on the teleprinter – the only kind of output we had in those pre-screen days – by printing Xs on the paper. A spectacular application of this was his graphing of a step function as a Fourier synthesis – in other words, representing it as a combination of sine waves, using more and more sine waves to get closer and closer to the square wave’s cliff edge shape. He scaled the graph so that the top part of the step was on one sheet of paper, which we mounted near the ceiling, with the straight line increasing fluctuating as it approached the cliff edge, eventually plunging downwards towards a second sheet of paper near the floor, where the bottom part of the wave continued. It was a great display; we showed how maths was fun.

What else did we show in our computer room exhibitions? Two programs from the school’s library made use of the computer’s sound generator. One tested your reaction time: after a random interval, the tone would change and you had to press a button as quickly as possible, and the computer would output on punched paper tape the time you took. The other used the sound generator to play tunes; for the exhibitions I programmed it to play Scott Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’, which was very popular at that time because of its use in the film The Sting. We also had a program, written by our computer scientist maths teacher, to produce labels in punched tape by punching hole patterns in the shape of letters; I wrote an extended version which could also produce lower case letters and small caps, and also Greek letters for good measure.


Visually, the most striking thing we produced was a poster-sized pin-up of Joanna Lumley in her first famous role as Purdey in The New Avengers, rendered as teleprinter art. We had several examples of teleprinter art in our library, in which a picture was formed by characters of different densities printed from paper tape, greater degrees of darkness achieved through overprinting or double-overprinting; but most of these, and certainly the much-reproduced picture of Winston Churchill, had been produced by some kind of optical scanning to create the subtle shading. I produced my picture of Purdey manually, by tracing the magazine image, ruling a grid over it, and assigning a number representing one of four levels of darkness to each cell, then using a program to take this data and print the corresponding character combinations.

But the star attractions at the computer room exhibition in our final year at school was our implementation of the Star Trek resource management game SPACWR (don’t you just love six-character variable names?) which we adapted from 101 Basic Computer Games. The basic idea is that you command the USS Enterprise, engaging enemy ships in battle, the sector of space around you represented on an ASCII plot with your own ship represented by <*>, the enemy ships by +++, and stars by *. Phasers generally lock on target automatically, but cost you energy; photon torpedoes need to be aimed by setting a directional angle. You can replenish energy and weapons at starbases, represented by >!<, which you can locate with long-range sensors. I think pretty much every large computer installation in the Western world must have had a version of this game, but the beautiful thing about our implementation was that it was genuinely collaborative: one person wrote the shell, and the rest of us wrote various subroutines. I made two contributions: the first was to give the enemies a random name, phonemes being selected from a range biased towards hard and aggressive-sounding consonants, on the model of “Klingon”. (Some of the results were satisfactory, such as “Groshtak”, but others were just silly, such as “Bungon” or “Plibdad”.) My other contribution was to give the enemies a secret weapon, named from a buzzword generator which made a random choice from three sets of impressive words, giving for example “inter-phasing neutronic de-energiser”). One of the junior pupils, who we were treating as a coding apprentice, contributed a self-destruct function: if the final few enemy ships were in the same sector as yourself, you could activate your self-destruct and all the ships would be replaced by stars.

The other good thing about our implementation of this game was that we wrote it for a proper computer screen, the school at last having agreed to supplement the 903 with a visual display unit. This meant that instead of having to print out successive versions of the changing game map on the teleprinter, it could be displayed on screen and constantly refreshed. For the computer room exhibition, it also meant that we could demonstrate the game to a larger audience by connecting the VDU to an old television set in the outer room. I vividly remember, in the quieter period towards the end of the afternoon, sitting in the outer room with a couple of elderly ladies, as they watched the game in fascination, keeping up a running commentary on its progress. It was one of my happiest memories of the computer room.

Looking back at it all now, part of me regrets the things we didn’t do. We didn’t, for example, invent the text adventure, which would have been perfectly possible with the technology; Will Crowther and Don Woods developed the original Colossal Cave Adventure in 1976-77 (using FORTRAN!), though given the limited memory of the 903 we might only have managed a Very Small Cave Adventure. We didn’t write an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons, whose rules were first published by TSR in 1974 but which didn’t become well-known in the UK till a few years later; however, two of my friends did write a role-playing game called Rule the World, in which you managed money and armies to increase your political control over country after country. (I don’t know what they’re doing now, but it’s quite possible that they’re at the top of one of the international companies or financial institutions which really do rule the world.) And we didn’t have the greater speed and memory of microprocessors, which would change the world of computing completely. It was while stopping at a motorway service station during a post-A-levels school trip in the hot summer of 1976 that we saw and played our first micro-powered arcade machines – the tank battle, the dogfight and the cowboy gunfight; it was a glimpse of the future, and we were blown away.

But much more than that, I’m glad for what we did do and grateful that we had the chance to do it: grateful to the benefactor whose bequest enabled the school to buy the computer, grateful to the teachers who inspired us and then left us to get on with it, grateful to my friends with whom I learned and laughed. I’m grateful that I learned to operate computers in an era when you could appreciate the physicality of the technology: an era when you acquired the reflex of touching a radiator before handling the machine to avoid disrupting it with a static shock, when you patched the tape reader with small pieces of Sellotape to overcome its mechanical shortcomings. I’m grateful that I became a “digital native” decades before the concept was coined, and so was unthreatened by the idea that a younger generation might have a computer-facility that I lacked. But above all, I’m grateful that I learned to treat computers with familiarity, instead of with awe and reverence, or fear and terror, as did most people at the time. When I saw the film Alien in 1980, I was astonished to see Sigourney Weaver operating her computer while drinking coffee and resting a foot on the console; never before had a computer in a science fiction film been treated so casually, as literally part of the furniture. That, I had learned, was the proper attitude to take to computers. They were there; sometimes they worked, often they didn’t, and you just had to get along with them. That attitude has served me well in later life.

What is immersive VR good for?

I’m coming to the view that online education has reached its climax state. As with Microsoft Word or the Apple iPhone, we’re at the stage where we don't expect the future to bring anything significantly different or game-changing; new versions and new products only improve the features that are already there, they don’t add whole new areas of functionality.

“What about virtual reality?” asked a colleague with whom I shared this view. “Isn’t that going to change anything?” I replied that I didn’t think it would, except perhaps in a few specific subject areas. Like most new technologies with a powerful visible impact, its transformative power has been hyped. If you can't get your students to pay attention and learn something in a real classroom, why should it be any different in a virtual one?

The key thing which virtual reality offers is a sense of immersion in a scene, a setting or a scenario, and while immersion can be critical to some kinds of teaching and learning you don't necessarily need high technology to achieve it. People can experience immersion through text; most of us who have grown up reading books have had the experience of being so engrossed in a story that it was a wrench to return to the real world. Films too can be immersive: the effect is enhanced by a darkened room and an image that fills the field of vision but these are not essential. What matter is how good the story is; if it gets you in its grip, you can be fully immersed even when watching on a small screen – and if the story fails to grip you, even an iMax screen won’t make any difference to your lack of involvement. Computer games too can create involvement and immersion on the small screen, the focus of attention on your game character and their actions putting you in the game scene to the exclusion of the real world around you; I’ve written elsewhere how clever interactive design can enhance character identification and emotional involvement in even a highly linear and cinematic narrative game.

It all comes down to the quality of writing and design, which in the context of teaching and learning means learning design. If your aim is to put your learner into a certain environment, the fundamental design question is (as I have previously noted): what aspects of that environment are you going to simulate? (The very concept of virtual reality is flawed, to the extent that one can never simulate reality in all its aspects; one has to choose which aspects you are going to privilege.) What kind of simulation you need depends on the learning outcomes you are trying to enable. What you want to represent authentically are your chosen tasks and difficulties, with a realistic possibility of success or failure or some kind of feedback on your learners’ actions. In almost all cases, those are things that can be done without virtual reality, and probably done better without it.

For example, ‘Could you lead an ethical investigation?’ is an example of a text-only simulation, based on multiple choice questions; the technology couldn’t be simpler, but the situation could hardly be more challenging. Based on Richard Feynman’s experience after the Challenger space shuttle disaster, it places you in the role of a scientific expert on a committee of inquiry investigating a major accident. It presents you with a number of situations and for each offers you a number of choices; for example, when the Chair says that one of the organisations involved has “done an excellent” job and that they may never be able to identify the cause of the accident, do you say nothing? Accuse the Chair of bias? Ask the other committee members for their views? Ask what’s the point of the inquiry if they don’t expect to find a cause? None of these choices is absolutely right or absolutely wrong, though some would be more or less wise for yourself, and all could have more or less helpful consequences. What the simulation invites you to practise is your ethical principles, your practical knowledge of how inquiries operate, and your sensitivity to power play in the working of committees. The tests are one of judgement, which doesn’t require anything more than text. A full-blown virtual reality simulation of a committee meeting would not only be impossibly impractical to recreate, it could actually be a distraction from the focus of the learning.

But sometimes distractions and sources of confusion will be part of the challenges which you want to simulate, if the skill to be practised is one of making decisions under pressure. This simulator for medical triage, for example, puts you on a city street after some kind of explosion: sirens and alarms are going off, and there are injured or dying people on the ground all around in pools of blood, crying out and begging for help. The task is to examine each person and categorise them as Immediate, Urgent, Delayed or Dead. The shocking and alarming appearance of the scene is clearly essential to the simulation, the aim being to reproduce something of the circumstances in which paramedics may need to make triage decisions. Yet how much more would be added by presenting the scene in virtual reality? The small screen presentation using games technology (it was produced by the simulation division of a games company) already provides a considerable degree of immersion, arguably as much as is needed, short of actual practical experience.

I can only think of one simulation example for which virtual reality is essential, and that’s a fictional example from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode ‘Thine Own Self’, Deanna Troi is taking the bridge officer’s test; as ship’s counsellor she already has an officer’s rank, but that is a honorary status like the rank of an army chaplain, and she wants to see if she actually has command ability. We see her in Engineering, facing a disaster and the imminent destruction of the ship. Even with Worf and Chief Engineer Georgi La Forge to help her, no matter what she does the problem gets worse until the ship blows up – and then we discover that all this, including the presence of Worf and Geordi, has been a simulation taking place on the ship’s holodeck. She tries the simulation again, and again she fails. Only when she reflects on what a colleague says about the first duty being towards the ship does she realise what she needs to do. Running the simulation one last time, she confirms with Geordi that the damage can be repaired from within a certain crawl way, though the radiation there will be fatal to whoever attempts it. Looking him straight in the eyes, she orders him to enter the crawl way and repair the damage – and that turns out to be the solution. The simulation isn’t a test of engineering knowledge but of command ability: whether the officer can, if the situation requires it, order a friend and colleague to their death.

Now that is something which couldn’t be simulated by a multiple-choice test, or by a cinematic presentation no matter how immersive. And this example is actually not that extreme: most of us will not be in an occupation where we might have to order a person to their death, but if we are a doctor we may very well have to give a patient bad news, and if we are a manager we may very well have to give an employee the sack, or to call them out for poor attendance or poor work. The difficult part is not deciding what needs to be done or thinking of the words to say, but saying them to another human being, standing in front of you in the same space. And to simulate that would be a good use of virtual reality.

(And then again, one could just simulate it through role play, as the best training for doctors and managers does today!)

Learning design and educational technology: what’s the relationship?

Many writings about learning design assume or argue that learning design has something to do with educational technology. In Conole et al. (2004), for example, learning design is what links educational technologies to learning theories: theory-enabled design points to which technology to use, and one can read back from an educational technology to the theory which informed its design.

It’s certainly the case that many people turn to learning design because of questions about how to use educational technology or laudable concerns not to use it badly. However, after 20 years of practice in producing online distance learning, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best summary of the relationship between learning design and educational technology is: None at all.

Learning design, if it's a kind of design, is about matching form and function, means and ends: in particular, it is about working out what learning activities will enable students or other learners to reach certain learning outcomes. So the typical output of a learning design process is a set of learning activities, on the principle that learners are only going to learn as a result of what they, as learners, do, not what you, as teachers, do. (See previous post.) But those learning activities could be implemented through many different technologies, and which one you choose will depend on what is available to you, is reliable, and (crucially) is available to learners.

If you have an activity which calls for some kind of group discussion, that could be done face-to-face in a seminar or workshop, remotely and synchronously using online conferencing, or asynchronously using online forums; or learners could watch a recording of such a discussion, or read a transcript, and make some response of their own – probably less satisfactory, but for learners in prison (for whom my university has to make provision on many of its courses) it may be the only practical option.

If you are going to have learning activities designed around some sort of PDP or portfolio function, then you need to consider that particular products for supporting these may come and go. Over an eight or ten year lifespan, which is the norm for courses at my university, then the prevailing technologies are likely to change at least once during that period. Under those circumstances, it seems to me clear that the course’s learning design, the top-level description of the activities which learners will do, is that part of the design which does not change. The question of which technology can best implement those activities is also a design question, but a separate one.


Reference
Conole et al. 2004, 'Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design', Computers and Education, vol 43, pp 17-33.

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.

Technology: an enhancer or enabler of learning?

(An online discussion at the Open University recently posed the question: is technology an enhancer or an enabler of learning? Here is my answer.)

Technology, according to Danny Hills and Douglas Adams, is everything that doesn’t work yet: when it starts to work reliably, it becomes part of the background and we cease to see it as technology. So when we talk about technology-enhanced or technology-enabled learning, it’s to give people a reason why they should put up with something that doesn’t yet work properly: despite the problems, we’re saying, it’s worth persevering with the technology because it will allow us to do better or more efficiently something which we’re already doing (technology-enhanced) or to do something which we currently can’t do at all (technology-enabled).

I can only think of three things in learning and teaching which are genuinely enabled, rather than enhanced, by technology. Learning at a distance is not one of them, because you can (as the OU did for many years) operate through postal and courier services for the delivery of materials and messages. Remote co-presence, however, is really only achievable through audio or video conferencing, such as we regularly use in online tutorials. This is more than a simple matter of communication: the synchronous nature of the medium supports the constant and continuous engagement of participants, which allows a different kind of conversation, not merely a faster one. Even participants who are not actively communicating can have their motivation and relationship strengthened, simply by being present at the virtual event.

The second thing enabled by technology is automated rapid feedback, such as is provided by computerised tests. The promptness of feedback, we know, is massively important for learning, and it also increases motivation when it provides immediate sense of progress or achievement. Automation can also bring the testing more under the learner’s control, allowing them to take it at a time of their choosing, to repeat it if they wish until they are successful, and to interpret and act on the result as they wish. Students, we know, like on-screen tests for precisely these reasons, though unfortunately they are only really effective in areas of knowledge and skill which are capable of being broken into discrete elements and for which questions can have closed answers.

The third aspect of learning and teaching enabled by technology is encounter with authentic situations, which is critical for the learning of many practical situated skills, especially the interpretation of complex situations, such as those involving people. While audio and video can enhance learning of all kinds, by providing illustration or amusement, their richness is essential for allowing the development of holistic understanding, in which the presence of micro-cues allows learners not to be limited by what can be consciously articulated. Listening and speaking in a foreign language, for example, unlike reading and writing which can be taught through text alone, require actual aural models and authentic situations in which to practice, and one can trace the use of successive technologies for sound recording and reproduction as they were developed: gramophone records and language laboratories in the 1960s, cassette tapes in the 1970s, CDs in the 1980s, multimedia DVD-ROMs in the 1990s, internet delivery in the 2000s, and mobile apps in the 2010s. The distance learning of people skills, such as is relevant to many professional practice disciplines, has also been I would say enabled (rather than enhanced) by audio and video. It remains to be seen how far virtual reality technologies, hitherto too clumsy and low quality to compete seriously with remote audio and video or with face-to-face role play, may allow these possibilities to be expanded in the future.

Talking on the radio or on the web

Reading Charlotte Higgins' excellent history of the BBC, and its accompanying articles in The Guardian, I've been struck by the analogies between the early broadcasters, working out how to use the new medium of radio, and those of us in universities working out how to use the online medium.

This passage from a letter by Hilda Matheson, BBC Director of Talks between 1926 and 1931, seems particularly relevant to our making of audio and video in which academics talk to students.

The thing broadcasting does, or can do, its chief claim as far as the spoken word is concerned, is that it provides not a silent-printed word, a dead word if you like, but a living and very personal contact with an individual. The crucially affectionate link that grows between listeners and announcers, between listeners and regular broadcasters ... is something quite peculiar to broadcasting. [p 35]

If a lecturer's audio or video is doing nothing more than delivering information, then we might as well have put that information in text and saved some money, as well as improved convenience for students. But of course, we are not in the business of content delivery: we are in the business of education, for which the relationship - the personal relationship - between teacher and student is a vital part of the magic, the spell, the spiel.

The learning technologies of 1990

To celebrate a colleague’s clocking up 25 years on the staff of The Open University, I put together a slideshow to remind us all just how long ago 1990 was. Amongst other things, that was the year in which Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign, Germany was re-unified, and the first Gulf War began. Top films of the year included Ghost, Pretty Woman, Home Alone, and Back to the Future III.

But what was learning technology like in 1990? Three events from The Open University’s history remind us how things were back then.

First, there was a change to the transmission timings of the TV programmes made and broadcast by the BBC for OU students. From the time of the OU’s first course in 1970, when domestic video recorders were many years in the future, these programmes had been transmitted late at night or in the early morning, so that – as became a legendary British curiosity – not only OU students but insomniacs and early risers could study art history, theoretical physics or human psychology in the hours before or after regular programming. In 1990, the BBC moved all its educational broadcasting, including OU programmes, to an overnight “Learning Zone” (“zone” was very much a word of the period) on the basis that people who wanted them would record them and watch them later at a time of their convenience. This marked a technology milestone, in that for the first time the OU was working on the assumption that video recorder ownership was now so widespread that all of its students owned and (perhaps more crucially) were able to program it.

At that time at the OU, only students on certain courses were required to have a computer, or at least access to one. The minimum specification of that computer had been the subject of much debate, being eventually fixed around the capabilities of the Amstrad 1512: an IBM PC “clone” from the company of Alan Sugar, who was then famous not for firing apprentices but for manufacturing cheap and sturdy computers for the business market. In 1990 however, the argument erupted again when the minimum specification was breached by a computing course which – because of the requirements of a database package – demanded that students have a computer with TWO floppy disk drives, instead of just one. (Most personal computers at this time did not have a hard disk drive, let alone a CD-ROM reader.)

In 1990 an internet connection was also a rarity for domestic computer users, though about two thousand OU students and lecturers were required to have one in order to use CoSy, an early computer conferencing system. Such things were new and unfamiliar to those outside academic science and the computer industry; CoSy had to be accompanied by a long and detailed manual, in which operations were explained through the analogy of working on a desktop with different files and folders which might be open or closed. (Few people other than users of the Apple Macintosh had experience of a windows-icon-menu-pointer system; Microsoft’s attempt to create a rival system called Windows had only reached version 3.0 in 1990, and was still vastly inferior to the Mac OS.)

These kinds of trips back into the past can be great fun. (So can seeing what kids of today make of the cutting-edge technologies of yesteryear.) But if we find the VCRs, floppy disk drives and dial-up internet connections of 1990 quaint, we should resist the temptation to imagine ourselves superior to the people we were back then or to congratulate ourselves on how much progress has been made. Rather we should be reminded of how many of the technologies which now seem so obvious and central to our lives will in fact prove transitory and doomed to ultimate obsolescence. William Gibson, the author of the 1984 SF novel Neuromancer and regarded as something of a prophet of the digital world, once commented on his attitude to new technologies:“whenever I’m shown something like Google Glass, … [I imagine] what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a [charity] shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do.”

That’s the great thing about history: it can give strip away our temporal chauvinism and give us perspective. How will the learning technologies of today look in 25 years time, I wonder?

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.

Simulations and games, feedback and scores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Waggler

The Knocker

The sponge on a stick