Seen and heard: September 2012

Fundació Coll Bardolet - a favourite art gallery, when visiting Valdemossa, Mallorca; though his landscapes are impressive, truly stunning are his pictures of Mallorquin folk dancers: energy and movement conveyed in a zen-like way by just a few strokes of the brush.

Paintings by Ingacio Gelabert - the young man who carried our bags at our holiday hotel turned out to be an up-and-coming artist, fresh back from exhibiting in China, helping out in the family business.

Downton Abbey new season - starting with money troubles for the estate, very authentic.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974 - by Domenic Sandbrook, which I bought after watching his compelling TV series, to get more of his historically-detached view of a period which was very formative for me personally, and also (he argues) for Britain as a whole.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold - audiobook with Michael Jayston (Peter Guillam in the 1970s TV dramatisations) reading John le Carré's words very well. Though my wife did think it was an odd choice for holiday entertainment, while sun-bathing.

Maid in Manhattan - Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in a Cinderella / Pretty Woman re-versioning, seen on TV. Interesting, with all the guff talked about Downton Abbey's rigidly divided world of masters and servants: are there less rigid divisions between international celebrities, staying in $2000-a-night hotel rooms, and the maids by whom those rooms are cleaned? Also interesting: invisibility is presented (I'm sure authentically) as being the cardinal quality of a hotel maid, just as it was for domestic servants in the Downton era.

Hope Springs - new film, with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as a middle-aged couple trying to re-discover the romantic marital spark. Nice to see (1) the pair of them, especially Tommy Lee Jones, getting better with age; (2) a positive and realistic-looking presentation of psychotherapy, in this case couple therapy; (3) older people having sex. Sorry kids, your parents did do all that, you know, otherwise you wouldn't be here.

Seen and heard: August 2012

Kelmscott Manor - William Morris's country home, as featured in News from Nowhere. Well worth the visit (especially when shown round by a friend who's a volunteer guide), but the arts and crafts strangely de-politicised.
A History of Art in Three Colours - three-part BBC documentary by James Fox (the art historians are getting younger). Some truly surprising revelations; I'd never before realised the creepy association of White.
The Best of Men - powerful BBC drama based on the pioneering work done at Stoke Manderville hospital by Dr Ludwig Guttmann in the rehabilitation of paralysed and amputee soldiers, which gave rise to the paralympics.
The Last Weekend - compelling but horrifying ITV dramatisation of Blake Morrison's novel; had to keep watching to find out how it ended, even while disliking every single one of the characters.
Parade's End - top-notch BBC dramatisation which runs along at a cracking pace thanks to sharp script by Tom Stoppard and eloquent performances by Benedict Cummerbatch and others; surprised that the contemporary-sounding lines about "Toryism for the pigs trough" aren't quoted more often.
Inspector Montalbano - the second season at last, bellissimo!
Olympics closing ceremony - nice to watch Annie Lennox and Brian May showing the younger generation how it's done.

Seen and heard: July 2012

The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner - a tribute to language, landscape, and local culture.
Mohamad at Eton, 30 min film in Al Jazeera (English)’s Witness series, following a boy from a refugee camp in south Lebanon to Eton on a Horizon Foundation Scholarship.
Heart v. Mind: What Makes Us Human? - Moving and engaging BBC documentary by David Malone on contemporary heart research, showing how the organ is involved in a person's emotional life and much more than a mechanical pump: it actually has its own "little brain".
The Fear Index - latest novel by Robert Harris, clever and gripping and (like The Ghost) very much of the moment. Read it while it's hot.
The Passadena Roof Orchestra - playing at The Stables; 1920s swing, reliably good fun.

Allegri StringQuartet - performing as part of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival. (They never used to be this young, surely?)

The Juice of the Pomegranate - programme of choral music (mainly Renaissance / Baroque) inspired by the Song of Songs, sung by vocal group Exaudi as part of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival.

Olympic opening ceremony - started watching out of curiosity but stayed to the end, moved by the jubiliation of the athletes, many of whom were just pleased to be there and never mind the medals

The Incredibles - one of the greatest of the Pixar animations, having a welcome big-screen presentation at the Leicester Phoenix.

Beauty and surprise in ordinary places

Last Friday was the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast on ClassicFM. To celebrate, a group of musicians did a flashmob performance of Zadok the Priest (the first piece played on ClassicFM, and the best intro of any music track, any genre, ever) in the middle of a supermarket.


What's extraordinary, of course, isn't the performance itself (thought that's pretty good) but where it takes place: in the middle of everyday life, when people aren't expecting it.

I particularly like the bit where a woman phones a friend and then holds up her mobile so that she can listen too (a still of this is used as the title picture of the video).

I also like the fact that the musicians end up performing in the Fruit and Veg section, beneath a large sign reading "Bananas". Yeah, bananas! But also beautiful. And it's a reminder to all of us concerned with writing and producing learning materials that even if much of what we produce is bound to be humdrum and mundane (there are just so many things a course has to get through, just like supermarket shopping) we should always remember to include moments of surprise and beauty too.

Killing with kindness

Last night I watched The Best of Men: a beautifully-made BBC drama about Dr Ludwig Guttman who transformed the care of patients with spinal injuries at Stoke Manderville Hospital and invented the Paralympic Games as part of his rehabilitation programme. One of the things that was made very clear was that the nursing staff whose methods he challenged and overturned were not uncaring or unkind: they immobilised and sedated patients up to the eye-balls because they could see that they were in pain. It was in fact kindness that motivated them, and they initially resisted Guttman's methods because they seemed unkind: he reduced the patients' medication, forced them to move, and woke them up every two hours at night in order to turn them so that they didn't get bedsores.

And then this morning I read the OU production department's super new style guide for writing student guidance material on using our online systems. Many of the problems it identifies with how guidance is too often written are not the products of thoughtlessness or incompetence: they're the products of kindness, of trying to help students, of trying to explain everything to them.

For example: consider a piece of guidance entitled "Using your module website". Its introduction reads: "This document offers a guide to using your module website while studying with the OU." How could this introduction be improved? By being totally deleted. It adds nothing to what's already in the title. Yet kindness motivates people to write such introductions, knowing the trouble which some students have finding their way around the OU websites and concerned that students need to have the purpose of the document explained to them.

The same kind impulse leads to verbosity and unnecessary complexity. For example: "If you are looking for information on forums, the document is called ‘Forum guidance’ and is available in the Computing Guide. The direct URL is http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=252916". Here's what the style guide recommends as an improvement: "For information on forums, see ‘Forum guidance [link]’ in the Computing Guide."

For those accustomed to lengthy reading times and print documents, this style may seem clipped and abrupt, or perhaps even rude. (The style guide actually recommends avoiding using the word "please".) But useless and unnecessary words have a greater cost online: they fill up the screen, making it harder to see the things that are necessary and important, forcing the reader to expend cognitive load on working out where to devote their attention.

I believe that the best way to be kind and considerate to an online user is to respect the value of their time and come to the point quickly, which is why I think this new style guide is great. But I can imagine it attracting criticism in just the way that Guttman did, and for very much the same reasons. Hopefully it will be vindicated, as he was!

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

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

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

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



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

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

Short writing (2): Virgin media short

My sister's two-minute film The Test has just been entered for the Virgin Media Shorts competition.

I think it's great! (And that's not just fraternal loyalty.) But I'm also interested to see how the script has changed since the first draft I saw. She set herself the task of telling a pretty complex story in just two minutes, and the problem from the start was: just how explicit does it have to be, so that viewers can understand what's going on?

The answer turned out to be: pretty explicit. To begin with, people who read the script were saying that they weren't getting it first time (and one can't count on people watching a film more than once), so Ros had to find ways to make the story clearer without increasing the length and weighing the film down. For educational writers and learning designers, this is this is the take-away point: making things explicit doesn't mean using a lot of words and trying to say everything. In the case of this film,visual cues, slight changes to the wording, and a few captions give viewers enough pointers to work out the rest for themselves.

I'm particularly pleased that she used my suggestion to have Adi snap his fingers at one key point - which tells the viewer that the transition which follows is something which he wills to happen, and not a fantasy or a flashback. If that doesn't make much sense without the context, you'll just have to watch the film!