Turning junk into art: the Facebook song

One of the joys of television in my childhood was watching Tony Hart - first on Vision On and then on Take Hart - produce simple and beautiful drawings and paintings with apparent casualness and effortlessness. He had a trick of starting with a collection of rubbish - bits of paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, printed or plain, "any old load of junk" as he would say" - and then "get organised": arrange selected pieces on a backing sheet so that when he put a frame around them they looked great. A work of 'art, you might say.

The Australian composer Gordon Hamilton has done something similar, turning status updates from his Facebook friends into a vocal piece for his choir, The AustralianVoices. I had the pleasure last week of hearing them perform it live during a concert in Old Wolverton's Holy Trinity Church; they invited Polymnia, the choir I sing in, to do a guest spot in their concert, which was pretty cool too. The song takes its title from the first of the status updates: "Toy Story 3 =  Awesome".  Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, loved it, and you will too.


I'm not sure what the relevance for learning materials is, other than the obvious one: it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts.

Learning to self-assess: lessons from Graham Gibbs and Prue Leith

After he'd given the keynote address at my faculty's workshop on assessment, Graham Gibbs was rather worried that he'd been teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. Despite being one of the gurus of learning design, having occupied key positions at Oxford Brookes and Oxford University, like  many people coming (or, in his case, coming back) to talk to the Open University, he was concerned that he didn't have anything to offer to an institution whose practice was already good and whose student satisfaction scores were excellent.

I reassured him that his talk and his presence had been valuable. Even if he hadn't said anything that was wholly new to anyone there - the principles of good assessment are, after all, like the principles of good usability, pretty stable and have been known for some time - these were still things of which we needed to be reminded, because we tend to forget them in the pressure of production and delivery. Like, for example, the principle that we should be equipping students to self-supervise and self-assess; not only does it save on staff time, but it gives them the ability to keep on learning and improving when we're not there to assess them, long after their course has finished.

By way of thanks, I shared with him - and I'll now share with you - a favourite anecdote about Prue Leith, whom I saw interviewed back in the 1990s about her cookery school. The interviewer asked her what was the first thing she taught her students, which was a pretty interesting question: traditionally cookery courses have started with boiling an egg (Delia Smith still did so in her 1970s TV series), so I wondered whether her school would do the same, or if not what else would be the first thing she got them to cook.

I wasn't expecting her answer. "I teach them to taste." And of course, once said, it's obvious: it's the fundamental skill for a cook. If you know how to assess your food, and correct and improve it, you can do anything; and if you don't, all the recipes in the world won't help you. I think more of our courses could begin with teaching people to taste, or the subject-relevant equivalent, even if it's not what students are expecting, or - they think - why they've enrolled on the course.

Seen and heard - October 2012

Alexei Grynyuk (young Ukrainian pianist) - playing Chopin and Liszt for a live broadcast at The Stables.
The Sixteen, "The Earth Resounds" - concert in their 2012 Choral Pilgrimage, at Milton Keynes City Church, singing Josquin, Lassus and Brumel.
Strictly Come Dancing, followed by Merlin, followed by Inspector Montalbano - Autumn Saturday evenings are complete!
Hay on Wye - the town of bookshops: a lovely place to spend a weekend.
The Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky ballet - performed by English National Ballet at the Milton Keynes Theatre - feats of grace and endurance by the female and male leads, and a great super-villain with great stage presence in the evil fairy.
Skyfall - proper script, proper acting and proper direction; has James Bond grown up?

Lessons from Pixar (2) - storyboarding

Seeing once again Pixar's wonderful film The Incredibles on the big screen, as I watched the credits go up at the end I found myself having precisely the same thoughts as when I first saw it back in 2004. Screen after screen of names, a vast army of animators, each of whom can only have been working on a very small piece of the film: perhaps a few shots, lasting a matter of seconds. And yet all the pieces had worked together to make a story which is thrilling, funny and moving. Again I found myself wondering: how on earth do they do it? When the effects they're aiming to achieve depend so much on precise decisions about shot composition, movement and above all timing, how do they make sure each animator's miniscule contribution will work together with all the others?

By contrast, in my work life, I was at that time coming to the end of a project involving the assembly of a huge amount of web content, the creation of which had similarly been atomised into a vast number of minute tasks. It wasn't looking good. As we tried to put together the tiny fragments, some of which were just a single sentence of text, we found that some of them repeated the contents of others, some of them no longer fitted where they were meant to go because the author had "improved" them in the writing, and some of them, we only now realised, could never have fitted in their designated slot. There had been a master plan, of course, in the form of a vast spreadsheet, but it was so complex that few people understood it, and it was so large that it was impossible to print out the entire thing and have the text at a size which was actually readable. And now that we were starting to see the plan realised, we were starting to see all kinds of flaws, in terms of what it would mean for the experience of users - in this case, students. After some frantic editing, we managed to fix the worst of the problems before it all went live, so as to ensure that the content actually made sense when it was read together and that student experience would be okay. But it was never going to be great. The experience won't be like watching The Incredibles.

So again I find myself thinking, how do Pixar do it? Are there lessons we can learn?

As is well known, what they do is what every animation company does: they turn the script into storyboards - a sequence of graphic images to show, in rough, what the audience is going to see. But what I think is NOT well known is just how much detail animators go into with their storyboards. Here for example is the storyboard sequence for the Army men scene from Toy Story - which also shows how Pixar demonstrate it and test it out with their staff, a presenter pointing to each storyboard as they talk through the script and explain the key story points.

But they don't stop there. When they've a worked-out hand-drawn storyboard sequence, they animate it using video-editing software and set it against a temporary sound track, with the lines spoken by members of staff. This enables them to check even more closely how the scene will work, and to refine the pace and timing - as well as the shot composition and script - to tell the story with the proper emotional impact. They can also judge how the scene works in the context of the entire film, and some scenes never proceed beyond this stage. Here for example is one scene which was deleted from Ratatouille: the heist scene, in which the rats act as a team to steal food from the restaurant's rubbish bins, and Remy, who is supposed to be keeping lookout, becomes distracted by the vision of the splendid cuisine being prepared in the kitchen.

To sum it up, Pixar use their storyboards to make an entire film in rough, before they ever switch on their computers.

Contrast that with the type of student-experience planning which is described as "storyboarding" in online learning. The term was borrowed by the producers of multimedia applications in the 1990s, for their detailed records of the text, pictures, AV and interactions which would appear on screen together (see the linked examples at the bottom of this page from Michael Verhaart's teaching wiki ); but these "storyboards" were primarily used as assembly instructions for those building the applications, and insofar as they were used for testing, it was for testing usability, as a kind of low fidelity prototype, not for testing higher-order user experience.  Today, in online learning, as used by the University of Leicester for example, the term "storyboarding" seems to mean little more than putting the components of learning design into temporal sequence - an important piece of planning, to be sure, but quite remote from learner experience; you couldn’t talk through one of these storyboard sequences, like a Pixar presentation, and expect the audience to experience anything like what is supposed to be experienced by the learners.

Of course, the experience of studying an online course is very different from the experience of watching an animated film, which makes it intrinsically less suitable to storyboarding. For one thing, watching a film is strictly linear, whereas in a course a learner will switch their attention from place to place and even in a linear sequence will move backwards and forwards. For another, a film lasts matter of minutes or hours, rather than the tens or hundreds of hours entailed in studying a course, so it would be impractical to reproduce the experience in anything like real time. A third difference is that a film is (usually) intended for the general public, so its developers themselves are part of the intended audience, whereas following a course (usually) requires previous knowledge and understanding (to say nothing of interest in the subject!) so developers are typically not able to work through a storyboard and experience anything like an intended student.

Nevertheless, I think we should continue to strive to find ways to prototype not just the product, not just the usability, but the learner experience - and to prototype it in as close and as detailed a way as possible. Otherwise, our design efforts will focus on what is easy to plan and test, the delivery of information, without properly thinking about what learners will do with it, let alone how they will learn from it. Can we produce courses which are as great and compelling as the great Pixar films? Yes, I think we can, but to do so we need to design and craft the learner experience  at just as fine a level of detail, and not simply generate content.

Postscript

Harley Jessup, a production designer at Pixar quoted by Ian Sansom,  provides some interesting details of the number of paper storyboards created for various Pixar films, for example: The Incredibles 21,081; Monsters Inc. 46,024; Ratatouille, 72,000.

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?"

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.