For every hour you write a screenplay, you spend 10 defending it - article by David Hare in the series 'My working day' in The Guardian. "Producers [of films] fall into two categories. The great ones make suggestions to help you realise your work more fully. The annoying ones tell you at length how they themselves might have written the story, if only they could write. I have one simple rule. Only those who are invested in the outcome are allowed to give advice.... The hardest thing in film is distinguishing between good and bad input. The whole point of writing screenplays is to provide a platform from which a director, actors and cinematographer will be able to leap to create something infinitely richer and more suggestive. You have to excite your colleagues. If you are too prescriptive in what you write, there is no room for their genius. But if you do not fight for your structure and underpinning, then everything will go to hell in an inchoate mess of actors’ improvisation and directorial overreach."
When They Go Low, We Go High: the best ever political speeches - review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In Philip Collins’s new book, 25 great speeches through history are given around 10 pages or so each. They include a potted biography of the speaker, a sketch of the historical moment, and a discussion in accessible but not simplistic terms of what the speech is doing and how it works. It deserves to find a home in many Christmas stockings, in the library of anyone interested in oratory or political theory, and on the odd A-level reading list. As far as the choices go, it’s a parade of greatest hits: Pericles’s funeral oration; Cicero’s first philippic against Antony; Jefferson’s first inaugural address; Lincoln’s snappy sally at Gettysburg; JFK’s 'ask not'; Churchill’s 'finest hour'; Elizabeth I at Tilbury; Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate; Mandela in court; and Nehru round midnight in Delhi. Collins throws in the odd baddie – Hitler, Castro, Robespierre and Mao – and the odd semi-baddie (Dolores Ibárruri, the communist firebrand better known as La Pasionaria, is ticked off for her lifelong Stalinism but admitted to have been on the right side in the Spanish civil war). And he chooses – unexpectedly and interestingly – Obama’s second-term victory speech over the more usual anthology candidates. But for the most part it’s a middle-of-the-road setlist.... Collins is an unashamed liberal centrist for whom process is all. It’s the project of his book to argue that 'disillusionment with conventional politics' is at best a callow, and at worst a dangerous, form of cynicism. Having recruited everyone from Pericles onwards for his debating team, he more than makes his case."
The reminiscence bump: why America’s greatest year was probably when you were young - article by Matthew Warren in The Guardian's Head quarters blog. "Intuitively, it seems like a person’s age should also be independent of their country’s greatness, over which they presumably have very little personal control. But Professor Maryanne Garry, a memory researcher at the University of Waikato who is well-versed in the reminiscence bump, thought otherwise. Every time Trump said that he was going to 'Make America Great Again', Garry says she suspected that he was 'taking Americans to a place that would be different for every one of them'.... The interesting findings [in her recent study] came from the ... participants who did not pick a 'top ten' year [such as the Declaration of Independence or the Second World War]. When the researchers examined how old these people were in the year they chose, they found that the majority picked a year from their youth, with 60% selecting a date between their birth and their 20th birthday. In comparison, relatively few chose a year in the 100 years leading up to their birth, or after they were 30 years old.... Garry suggests that this could be where slogans like 'Make America Great Again' get their power. For each of us, they invoke a time in our own lives where we had our first love, saw our favourite movies, experienced key life events. 'They’re really effective messages', she says. 'We think we are on the same page, but we are actually on separate pages.'”
ABL WTF? - post by Nick Cartwright on the University of Northampton LearnTech blog. "I came to Northampton burning with a passion to get my students learning by doing because it works and because it engages many students who have been excluded by traditional schooling.... The biggest challenge is letting go and empowering students to find their own way through the issues, generating authentic knowledge which may be different from or even challenge my knowledge. Practically it also involves what I dubbed in chats ‘double thinking’, keeping two chains of thought going at once. One half of my brain is following the students journey, sometimes disappearing down the rabbit hole, whilst the other is focused on what we need to cover and trying to keep an overview of the topic all the time working out what questions I need to throw out to keep the two tracks running in the same direction – if I lose the latter the session suddenly loses any sense of direction and this disengages my students. It’s more challenging and more tiring than how I used to teach, but I believe it is a better, more inclusive experience for my students. I wonder what I’ll be doing 10 years from now and how critical I’ll be of what I do today?"
Howards End on TV: life would be worse for a modern-day Leonard Bast - article by Philip Hensher in The Guardian. "Probably [E.M. Forster's] most important novel is Howards End, but its meaning has rather shifted over the years. For most readers, the novel now matters most when it turns to Leonard Bast: hungry for culture and learning, intelligent but disadvantaged and at the mercy of the whims of the rich. In my view, Forster underestimates what a Leonard Bast could have done to save himself in 1910. There were dozens of literary and popular journals at the time that would have happily published a short story or a piece of reportage from a literate, intelligent, working-class writer, and paid a very useful £20 for it. By contrast, in 2017, a Leonard Bast would be unlikely to meet a Helen Schlegel at a concert in London. He wouldn’t be able to afford to live in London; his education wouldn’t have introduced him to that sort of high culture; there are no libraries with the resources to let him pursue his curiosity. If he lost his job, as Bast does, there would, in effect, be no means of supporting himself through literary expression. That has passed into the hands of the children of the rich. A modern-day Bast would not starve, but he would be seriously deprived, and he would have been kept from the literature that could have saved Forster’s character. Things for him have got worse."
How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into chaos - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. ... It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid?... My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. ... Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture."
Robert Peston: 'I’m not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a blip' - interview by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian. "His new book, WTF, is notionally about Brexit, but presents a disturbing analysis of the underlying economic reasons why so many of us voted to leave the EU. With falling living standards, poor productivity, the decline of social mobility and relentless rise of inequality, Peston regards Brexit as neither a cause of nor solution to our grave economic problems. 'I’m not saying Britain is finished or anything like that. I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.' The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, 'is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions."... If Peston sounds angry with the state of British politics, this may be in part because he is also angry with himself. I can detect a slight tendency for self-flagellation, but do not doubt the sincerity of his self-recrimination. He did not see Brexit coming, he admits, for reasons that make him ashamed. 'I have a sort of self-image to do with an idea that because I went to the local state school, I was not in a sort of bubble of the privately educated privileged – or indeed in a bubble of the privileged in any sense – and that I was somehow more connected to people in this country than people who would have gone to Eton or Westminster or wherever. But among the pretty extensive circle of friends and family, not a single person that I could identify voted for Brexit. It was that bubble, that privileged ghetto – feeling completely disconnected from more than half of the people – that made me feel very ashamed.' "
Monday, 4 December 2017
Friday, 3 November 2017
Cuttings: October 2017
The Death of Homo Economicus: why does capitalism still exist? - review by Steven Pooole in The Guardian. "'Homo economicus' is the totally made-up creature who is the proletarian hero of mid-20th-century economics: going about his daily life with unimpeachable rationality, efficiently calculating ways to maximise his self-interest. But people don’t actually live like that, as the behavioural economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out. It is a refuted model, yet its malign influence persists.... In the meantime, especially for the young, debt has become 'a way of life' and jobs are increasingly precarious. Fleming has an excellent chapter on the 'theatre of work', where looking busy and adopting the right emotional attitude in an office can be soul-destroying burdens, and he is very astute on the inhumanity of the zero-hours contract, allied to unprecedented methods of electronic surveillance over employees. Delivery drivers, for example, are paid only for each package they deliver, with no sickness or other benefits. Fleming extends the logic remorselessly: why pay a bartender for any time other than those exact seconds when she is pouring a drink? Employers, he writes, should be paying for 'availability' over a period of time; paying only for exactly measured micro-quantities of work is just the newest way to shaft the little guy. About Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit et al, Fleming is particularly scathing: what is dishonestly termed the 'sharing economy' is a cynical monetisation of the widespread hardship caused by the 2008 crisis, and the final stage in the 'atomisation of the employee'. "
Badger or Bulbasaur: have children lost touch with nature? - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, about the origin of his book with Jackie Morris The Lost Words. "Cambridge researchers seeking to 'quantify children’s knowledge of nature' surveyed a cohort of four- to 11-year-old children in Britain. The researchers made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a 'common species' of Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card. The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were 'substantially better' at identifying Pokémon 'species” than 'organisms such as oak trees or badgers'.... Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),' they wrote, but they are presently 'more inspired by synthetic subjects' than by 'living creatures'. They pointed to evidence linking 'loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it'. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren'? "
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia - article by Paul Lewis in The Guardian "A small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics [are complaining] about the rise of the so-called 'attention economy': an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.... There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called 'continuous partial attention', severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. ... 'One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,' [says Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button]. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, [Leah] Pearlman [also on the team that created the Facebook Like] and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls."
Don’t press send … The new rules for good writing in the 21st century - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian, based on his book Write to the Point. "Five simple ways to engage and convince your reader. (1) Bait the hook.... (2) Be clear.... (3) Be correct.... (4) Prefer right-branching sentences.... (5) Read it aloud."
Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science and technology. Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically polarised world.
What I learnt from being a student - blog post by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University. "Here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying... Small stuff is big – for all the talk of revolutionary pedagogy, personalised learning, disrupted education, what really matters most of the time is the straightforward, everyday matters: do I know what I should be doing at any given time? Can I access the material? Is it clearly written? Can I get support within a reasonable timeframe? Is it set out so I can plan my time effectively?... Engaging and challenging – ... I’ve mentioned before that I came to like assessment because this forced me to engage with the content and bring it together. So it’s not just about making sure as educators we cover topics A to E but also that the student wants to learn about them. Give me a reason to interact – given my time constraints, I didn’t do much interaction in the forums. And this was fine with me, I was glad the course didn’t make lots of interaction compulsory just for the sake of it. But also without a major prompt to do so, it was easy to avoid interaction all together, and if this was my first time studying, that would be a shame. It made me vulnerable – and not in a cute puppy way. I am from a science background and so don’t have any art history knowledge. I was therefore winging it a lot of the time, and didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge most of my fellow students had. I would have been reluctant to have been forced to display this scarcity of knowledge in the open, so I was grateful for a closed environment, and careful feedback from tutors to scaffold my learning.... the important aspect was to be reminded of how vulnerable the whole learning process is."
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design - blog post by John Spencer at The Synapse. "One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures. ... I hadn’t even considered the 'user experience' of my pedagogy, classroom management, or classroom space. UX design was a game-changer for me.... Here are eight ideas of UX design that I am trying to incorporate into my course design. (1) Embrace on-boarding.... (2) Begin with users in mind... (3) Create multimedia instructions... (4) Be intentional with copy text... (5) Be linear but be connective... (6) Be consistent... (7) Be simple... (8) Solicit frequent feedback.... The best systems are the ones that feel invisible. You step into it and immediately know where to go and what to do. Don’t get me wrong. Confusion can be a great thing in a classroom if it is leading toward deeper learning. But confusion caused by poorly designed courses leads to disengagement and frustration. It cuts learning short and disrupts creative flow."
Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “I’ve always been fascinated by [Martin Luther], and as the 500th anniversary [of his 95 theses] loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath. One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world... Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary.”
Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti: priorities for feminism in the 21st century - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture. Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman – middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues – and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’t necessarily lead her to any radically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyoncé, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won."
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: the turn against Big Tech - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "This is not a book of small, gentle criticisms. According to Foer, Silicon Valley threatens our souls and our civilisation. Big tech companies, he believes, are on a global crusade 'to mould humanity into their desired image of it'. And this moulding is highly destructive. It involves the demolition of privacy, individuality, creativity, free will, competitive markets, the media and publishing industries, the distinction between facts and lies, the possibility for political compromise, and the space for solitary contemplation.... Because Foer sees collectivism as the problem, he has trouble imagining collective solutions. He proposes that we each make a personal commitment to consuming more artisanal forms of culture. He asks us to forgo the easy pleasures of technology in favour of 'the sustaining nourishment of the contemplative life' – a slow-food movement of the soul. But there are many who don’t find the contemplative life all that nourishing, and others who prefer to draw their nourishment from the new forms of collectivity created by the internet. Telling these people to read more books will do little to curb Silicon Valley’s growing power over our lives.... 'We have deluded ourselves into caring more deeply about convenience and efficiency than about the things that last,' Foer writes. This is a false choice. We can have Twitter and Turgenev. We can keep our humanity intact while enjoying the new tools tech has built – and use politics to make them better."
Badger or Bulbasaur: have children lost touch with nature? - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, about the origin of his book with Jackie Morris The Lost Words. "Cambridge researchers seeking to 'quantify children’s knowledge of nature' surveyed a cohort of four- to 11-year-old children in Britain. The researchers made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a 'common species' of Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card. The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were 'substantially better' at identifying Pokémon 'species” than 'organisms such as oak trees or badgers'.... Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),' they wrote, but they are presently 'more inspired by synthetic subjects' than by 'living creatures'. They pointed to evidence linking 'loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it'. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren'? "
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia - article by Paul Lewis in The Guardian "A small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics [are complaining] about the rise of the so-called 'attention economy': an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.... There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called 'continuous partial attention', severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. ... 'One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,' [says Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button]. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, [Leah] Pearlman [also on the team that created the Facebook Like] and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls."
Don’t press send … The new rules for good writing in the 21st century - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian, based on his book Write to the Point. "Five simple ways to engage and convince your reader. (1) Bait the hook.... (2) Be clear.... (3) Be correct.... (4) Prefer right-branching sentences.... (5) Read it aloud."
Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science and technology. Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically polarised world.
What I learnt from being a student - blog post by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University. "Here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying... Small stuff is big – for all the talk of revolutionary pedagogy, personalised learning, disrupted education, what really matters most of the time is the straightforward, everyday matters: do I know what I should be doing at any given time? Can I access the material? Is it clearly written? Can I get support within a reasonable timeframe? Is it set out so I can plan my time effectively?... Engaging and challenging – ... I’ve mentioned before that I came to like assessment because this forced me to engage with the content and bring it together. So it’s not just about making sure as educators we cover topics A to E but also that the student wants to learn about them. Give me a reason to interact – given my time constraints, I didn’t do much interaction in the forums. And this was fine with me, I was glad the course didn’t make lots of interaction compulsory just for the sake of it. But also without a major prompt to do so, it was easy to avoid interaction all together, and if this was my first time studying, that would be a shame. It made me vulnerable – and not in a cute puppy way. I am from a science background and so don’t have any art history knowledge. I was therefore winging it a lot of the time, and didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge most of my fellow students had. I would have been reluctant to have been forced to display this scarcity of knowledge in the open, so I was grateful for a closed environment, and careful feedback from tutors to scaffold my learning.... the important aspect was to be reminded of how vulnerable the whole learning process is."
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design - blog post by John Spencer at The Synapse. "One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures. ... I hadn’t even considered the 'user experience' of my pedagogy, classroom management, or classroom space. UX design was a game-changer for me.... Here are eight ideas of UX design that I am trying to incorporate into my course design. (1) Embrace on-boarding.... (2) Begin with users in mind... (3) Create multimedia instructions... (4) Be intentional with copy text... (5) Be linear but be connective... (6) Be consistent... (7) Be simple... (8) Solicit frequent feedback.... The best systems are the ones that feel invisible. You step into it and immediately know where to go and what to do. Don’t get me wrong. Confusion can be a great thing in a classroom if it is leading toward deeper learning. But confusion caused by poorly designed courses leads to disengagement and frustration. It cuts learning short and disrupts creative flow."
Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “I’ve always been fascinated by [Martin Luther], and as the 500th anniversary [of his 95 theses] loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath. One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world... Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary.”
Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti: priorities for feminism in the 21st century - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture. Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman – middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues – and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’t necessarily lead her to any radically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyoncé, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won."
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: the turn against Big Tech - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "This is not a book of small, gentle criticisms. According to Foer, Silicon Valley threatens our souls and our civilisation. Big tech companies, he believes, are on a global crusade 'to mould humanity into their desired image of it'. And this moulding is highly destructive. It involves the demolition of privacy, individuality, creativity, free will, competitive markets, the media and publishing industries, the distinction between facts and lies, the possibility for political compromise, and the space for solitary contemplation.... Because Foer sees collectivism as the problem, he has trouble imagining collective solutions. He proposes that we each make a personal commitment to consuming more artisanal forms of culture. He asks us to forgo the easy pleasures of technology in favour of 'the sustaining nourishment of the contemplative life' – a slow-food movement of the soul. But there are many who don’t find the contemplative life all that nourishing, and others who prefer to draw their nourishment from the new forms of collectivity created by the internet. Telling these people to read more books will do little to curb Silicon Valley’s growing power over our lives.... 'We have deluded ourselves into caring more deeply about convenience and efficiency than about the things that last,' Foer writes. This is a false choice. We can have Twitter and Turgenev. We can keep our humanity intact while enjoying the new tools tech has built – and use politics to make them better."
Tuesday, 24 October 2017
Alternatives to telling: what are we forgetting when we put education online?
Most people experienced in online education are clear that it’s not just about presentation of subject matter. Even if that’s your starting assumption – and such is the pernicious influence of IT thinking that even good educators find themselves thinking of teaching as the transmission of information – you quickly realise that online lectures, whether text, audio or video, don’t necessarily lead to learning. So online educators turn to the medium’s great potential for discussing, sharing and collaborating, and supplement online presentations with activities for learning through online social interaction. For many people these days, online education means presentation plus group learning activities.
But if we think like that, we’re forgetting the possibility of individual learning activities. From the earliest years of The Open University, these were the distinctive core of its approach to distance learning, as a deliberate and conscious effort to implement an active constructivist pedagogy through printed materials. As Fred Lockwood tells the story, the approach originated in a 1973 memo by Derek Rowntree, in which he asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time.
But one starts from what one knows. When recently I asked a new OU lecturer what she was planning to add to her throughly planned presentation of subject matter, she responded in terms of online group activities; reasonably enough, she thought of delivering online versions of the lectures and classes with which she was familiar. So it’s not so surprising that individual learning activities should be absent from the online learning design of universities with no previous background in distance learning, such as Phoenix or Northampton.
What’s more surprising is that individual learning activities don’t feature in the OU’s own framework for learning design, even though they are still to be found in OU course materials, both printed and online. In the OU’s typology of learning activities, the only category in which they could plausibly fit is that of “Assimilative activities”, in which the root metaphor does at least connote the building up of structures. However, according to its definition, this category includes nothing more than “attending to information”, with the core task verbs being “read, watch, listen” [1], described as “essentially passive in nature” (Conole 2007, p 84) – bizarre in a typology of learning activities (how can one have a passive activity?) and certainly leaving no room for anything like a “tutorial in print”. But then this typology was developed at the University of Southampton, as part of a programme for promoting the use of educational technology[2], without reference to the tradition of distance learning, at the Open University or anywhere else.
Does it matter if we forget individual learning activities and omit them from our learning design thinking? I think it does, because group activities are not always appropriate ways of making learners active and developing their competence with the subject. For one thing, social learning is not suitable for some learners, most obviously for those in prison or other secure environments in which contact with other learners is limited or impossible. More importantly, group activities are time-consuming ways of working with a topic – typically each learner has to wait for responses from others before they can complete the activity for themselves – meaning that in practical terms they are only suitable where that investment of time is warranted. Most fundamentally, group activities are not appropriate where the range of possible correct responses is limited, so that there’s little for learners to discuss or share. Learners’ time may be better spent initially practicing new concepts on their own, learning to get them right before using them in discussion with others.
Forgetting about individual learning activities also lets authors off the hook of thinking properly about how learners are actually going to achieve competence in the subject. If all learners are going to do is to discuss the subject matter presented to them, that encourages authors to plan and write their materials as if for a textbook, without thinking about learning activities – group or individual – until the presentation is substantially finished. And that is bad, because whereas textbooks have to be complete, covering thoroughly all the topics in their scope, for learning materials completeness is usually not desirable. Rather than presenting a definitive account of the subject, it is actually more effective to leave gaps for learners to fill in for themselves. “Never tell learners anything you can have them work out for themselves,” was the maxim given me by Richard Freeman (formerly of the National Extension College and the Open College) when I started writing distance learning materials; like all maxims, it’s an overstatement, but it reflects the ideal, the ambition which should be ours, as writers and designers of learning materials. We need to be constantly alert to all the alternatives to telling we can think of, and we cannot afford to forget any of them.
Notes
[1] The three original task verbs of “Read, Watch, Listen” have recently been supplemented by “Think about, Access, Observe, Review, Study”, which while at least allowing for a learner taking an active stance does not suggest the kind of focused direction characteristic of an individual learning activity. To include proper constructivist activities, the category should include task verbs such as Summarise, Identify, Classify, Interpret, Compare and contrast, Apply, Analyse and Evaluate. See my post 'Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?'
[2] A conference presentation (Fill et al 2004) locates the development of the DialogPlus toolkit, which embodied the typology, in the perceived gap between the potential of educational technologies and the application of good pedagogic principles.
References
Conole, G. (2007), 'Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice', and Appendix 7 'Taxonomy of learning activities', in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.
Fill et al (2004), 'Supporting teachers: the development and evaluation of a learning design toolkit', presentation at Alt-C conference Exeter, abstract at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126075256/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=79 (Accessed 22 October 2017), PowerPoint at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126114429/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/files/79/DialogPlus%20Toolkit.ppt (Accessed 22 October 2017).
Lockwood 1992, Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, London, Kogan Page
But if we think like that, we’re forgetting the possibility of individual learning activities. From the earliest years of The Open University, these were the distinctive core of its approach to distance learning, as a deliberate and conscious effort to implement an active constructivist pedagogy through printed materials. As Fred Lockwood tells the story, the approach originated in a 1973 memo by Derek Rowntree, in which he asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time.
Rowntree argued that … it was highly unlikely that you would simply talk at the learner for hour after hour; he didn’t believe it would happen. Instead he thought you would probably regard a one-to-one tutorial as an ideal form of teaching when information, source materials, procedures, techniques, arguments, research findings, raw data, etc. would be communicated and learners would be asked to respond to a variety of questions. In some cases the actual answer would be provided, in others a commentary or feedback. In such a context a learner could be asked a whole series of questions, dependent upon the nature of the topic and form the teaching was to take. The learner could be asked to recall items of information, to define concepts, draw together arguments, justify particular statements, consult other sources, interpret data, compare different interpretations of the same data, work out examples, discuss things and perhaps produce something themselves. In short, teachers would expect the exercise of certain study skills by which the learner constructs his or her own picture of the subject and learn to integrate what has just been taught with what had been learnt before feedback was provided.
This “tutorial-in-print” approach came to be the defining characteristic of Open University materials. When I was taught to write distance learning materials on an OU model in the early 1990s, I learned to give priority to such learning activities, preferably planning them before starting to write any subject matter presentation. One set of course materials on which I worked was designed to consist only of individual learning activities, the presentational element being supplied by existing published readings to which learners had access through their professional libraries. When computer-based and internet-based technologies arrived in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I recognised the possibilities which they afforded for interactivity, free exploration of resources and social learning, but we saw these as supplements to individual learning activities, not replacements.(Lockwood, 1992 p 25)
But one starts from what one knows. When recently I asked a new OU lecturer what she was planning to add to her throughly planned presentation of subject matter, she responded in terms of online group activities; reasonably enough, she thought of delivering online versions of the lectures and classes with which she was familiar. So it’s not so surprising that individual learning activities should be absent from the online learning design of universities with no previous background in distance learning, such as Phoenix or Northampton.
What’s more surprising is that individual learning activities don’t feature in the OU’s own framework for learning design, even though they are still to be found in OU course materials, both printed and online. In the OU’s typology of learning activities, the only category in which they could plausibly fit is that of “Assimilative activities”, in which the root metaphor does at least connote the building up of structures. However, according to its definition, this category includes nothing more than “attending to information”, with the core task verbs being “read, watch, listen” [1], described as “essentially passive in nature” (Conole 2007, p 84) – bizarre in a typology of learning activities (how can one have a passive activity?) and certainly leaving no room for anything like a “tutorial in print”. But then this typology was developed at the University of Southampton, as part of a programme for promoting the use of educational technology[2], without reference to the tradition of distance learning, at the Open University or anywhere else.
Does it matter if we forget individual learning activities and omit them from our learning design thinking? I think it does, because group activities are not always appropriate ways of making learners active and developing their competence with the subject. For one thing, social learning is not suitable for some learners, most obviously for those in prison or other secure environments in which contact with other learners is limited or impossible. More importantly, group activities are time-consuming ways of working with a topic – typically each learner has to wait for responses from others before they can complete the activity for themselves – meaning that in practical terms they are only suitable where that investment of time is warranted. Most fundamentally, group activities are not appropriate where the range of possible correct responses is limited, so that there’s little for learners to discuss or share. Learners’ time may be better spent initially practicing new concepts on their own, learning to get them right before using them in discussion with others.
Forgetting about individual learning activities also lets authors off the hook of thinking properly about how learners are actually going to achieve competence in the subject. If all learners are going to do is to discuss the subject matter presented to them, that encourages authors to plan and write their materials as if for a textbook, without thinking about learning activities – group or individual – until the presentation is substantially finished. And that is bad, because whereas textbooks have to be complete, covering thoroughly all the topics in their scope, for learning materials completeness is usually not desirable. Rather than presenting a definitive account of the subject, it is actually more effective to leave gaps for learners to fill in for themselves. “Never tell learners anything you can have them work out for themselves,” was the maxim given me by Richard Freeman (formerly of the National Extension College and the Open College) when I started writing distance learning materials; like all maxims, it’s an overstatement, but it reflects the ideal, the ambition which should be ours, as writers and designers of learning materials. We need to be constantly alert to all the alternatives to telling we can think of, and we cannot afford to forget any of them.
Notes
[1] The three original task verbs of “Read, Watch, Listen” have recently been supplemented by “Think about, Access, Observe, Review, Study”, which while at least allowing for a learner taking an active stance does not suggest the kind of focused direction characteristic of an individual learning activity. To include proper constructivist activities, the category should include task verbs such as Summarise, Identify, Classify, Interpret, Compare and contrast, Apply, Analyse and Evaluate. See my post 'Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?'
[2] A conference presentation (Fill et al 2004) locates the development of the DialogPlus toolkit, which embodied the typology, in the perceived gap between the potential of educational technologies and the application of good pedagogic principles.
References
Conole, G. (2007), 'Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice', and Appendix 7 'Taxonomy of learning activities', in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.
Fill et al (2004), 'Supporting teachers: the development and evaluation of a learning design toolkit', presentation at Alt-C conference Exeter, abstract at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126075256/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=79 (Accessed 22 October 2017), PowerPoint at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126114429/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/files/79/DialogPlus%20Toolkit.ppt (Accessed 22 October 2017).
Lockwood 1992, Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, London, Kogan Page
Tuesday, 3 October 2017
Seen and heard: July to September 2017
The Lego Batman Movie – frenetic, clever and compassionate fun, like the Lego Movie made with the world’s largest (virtual) Lego set.
Wonder Woman soundtrack – top of the Classic FM chart for a couple of weeks in June, and much superior to the acoustic filler which you find on most film soundtracks these days. Definitely captures the Amazon spirit, with great use of drums.
Echo – podcast in the BBC’s Digital Human series. Interesting exploration of how technology can support – develop? improve? – inner dialogue, which of course is critical to advanced learning skills.
Digital Transformation - interview with David Egerton. I loved his Shock of the Old, calling into question the usual accounts of technology change, which he argues focus at the wrong time and place: too early, close to the time of discovery, and not on the technologies which people actually use. Here he argues we make ourselves ignorant by focusing on the digital. Sample: “The promoters of technology for many decades …have argued that we absolutely need this one, two or three new machines and that they will transform our world…. All that changes is the particular machine. So once the radio would bring the world together, later it was television and now it’s the Internet.…It’s extraordinary really that people still get away with giving the impression that this is an original story.”
Phil Spencer: Find Me a Home – neat twist on the usual TV property show in which Phil off Location Location Location tries to find homes for two families facing homelessness. Though not as naïve as he pretends to be for the programme (he’s patron of a homelessness charity), he was I think genuinely shocked to discover how many landlords will simply not let to people on benefits. Happy endings for the families, though in one case it was fairly clear they were successful only because they had Phil and a TV crew on their case.
Diana, Our mother: Her Life and Legacy – probably the best of the slew of TV programmes around the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, because it had her sons talking about things that could never be said at the time: for example, how weird it was to be amongst the crowds, having not to cry themselves while surrounded by all these people in tears who didn’t know her. If they were angry about that, they didn’t show it. True greatness.
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman – beautifully conceived and written, but I think from the storytelling point of view Jane Goldman’s screenplay for the film has a better shape for the final act, as well as introducing the character of the cross-dressing pirate (a star turn for Robert de Niro).
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman – gripping and truly scary in places, taking its setting from Gaiman’s childhood and reminding me powerfully in numerous small ways of my own which must have been contemporaneous, though such exciting and awful things never happened to me. Like Alan Garner (whom he surely also read at that age?) he has a tremendous skill for combining the fantastic and uncanny with the realistic and everyday.
Inception – high-concept thriller, with a Mission Impossible style twisting turning storyline in which you know deceptions are being perpetrated but only find out what they are after they happen, and the plausible-looking (though totally unrealistic) theme of shared dreaming.
Old People’s Home for Four-Year-Olds – we know the mutual benefits old people and young people get from spending time together, but this was an interesting experiment of basing a primary school in an elderly care home, with shared activities including a sports day. Before and after measurements showed not only cognitive but physical improvement in the elderly people. Touching encounters too.
The Brain with David Eagleman – BBC TV series about the brain’s role in shaping and constructing our lives. Nothing new or unfamiliar to anyone who’s been around psychology the last forty years, but it’s well-explained and some of the filmed case studies are great.
My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 – one of the BBC’s programmes as part of the 70th anniversary commemorations (celebrations would be the wrong word). Basically this was ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ with extreme prejudice, literally, with several current British citizens recovering the stories of their Muslim, Hindu and white British forebears through those dreadful days. I knew that there had been massive inter-community violence, but I’d not appreciated before the terrible genocidal spirit which took hold. Scary to realise just how quickly and easily a society can fall apart, as we’ve more recently seen in Burundi and the former Yugoslavia.
Despicable Me 2 – great joy, great fun, with the return of Gru, his adopted orphans and of course his minions, and the introduction of the brilliantly manic Lucy as his romantic partner. Had to see this before getting to see Despicable Me 3.
Diana: 7 days – interesting BBC documentary, covering the same extraordinary week as the fictional The Queen between Princess Diana’s death and her funeral.
Inspector Montalbano, series 4 – a welcome return, and although Salvo, Mimi and Fazio are all noticeably older, and there’s a new Livia, the stories are top quality, perhaps even better than before.
Richard Rohr on The World, the Flesh and the Devil – from Day 2 of the Center for Action and Contemplation conference CONSPIRE 2017. He’s a great presenter with an easy accessible manner and his webcasts are always worth watching, but this time he was really on fire. The theology behind his talk is expounded in one of his Daily Meditations, but it's not nearly as much fun as his talk!
Autoloon ethics training – an example of a branching scenario created by instructional designer Cathy Moore using Twine. Not only a great demonstration of how to build a dialogue choice scenario, but also an interesting exercise in learning design. How quickly can you find the optimal pathway? (I took several wrong turns.)
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, by Richard H. Thaler – autobiographical account of how economists have reluctantly abandoned their theoretical premise that people make economic choices as though they were perfectly rational. For example, real people (as distinct from homini economici) count losses more than gains, pay attention to sunk costs, and don’t necessarily have the willpower to carry out their best decision even if they can work out what it is. All this had practical application, in the US and with the UK’s “nudge unit”, devising policies to "influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves". I wonder if our distance learning teaching methods aren’t similarly based on a premise of ideal rational learners, and whether there are similar “nudges” we should be applying when presenting learners with choices?
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco – global trans-historical conspiracy novel involving the Knights Templar, originally published in English in 1988 and suffering now from eclipse by The Da Vinci Code which did much the same thing but in a more accessible way (less complex, fewer footnotes). Some touching moments, but I do find irritating Eco’s habit of downloading all his research onto the pages of the book (a feature of The Name of the Rose also).
The Keeper of Lost Things, by Ruth Hogan – starts like chicklit, but then becomes something richer, deeper and cleverer, with multiple interconnected plot strands.
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? – fascinating exhibition at the Wellcome Museum for the History of Medicine, with examples ranging from health education (including the “AIDS – Don’t die of ignorance” campaign) to hospital signage. Spoiler alert: the answer is Yes.
Barley, sung by Lizz Wright – a simple, tender, defiant song, beautifully performed.
Wonder Woman soundtrack – top of the Classic FM chart for a couple of weeks in June, and much superior to the acoustic filler which you find on most film soundtracks these days. Definitely captures the Amazon spirit, with great use of drums.
Echo – podcast in the BBC’s Digital Human series. Interesting exploration of how technology can support – develop? improve? – inner dialogue, which of course is critical to advanced learning skills.
Digital Transformation - interview with David Egerton. I loved his Shock of the Old, calling into question the usual accounts of technology change, which he argues focus at the wrong time and place: too early, close to the time of discovery, and not on the technologies which people actually use. Here he argues we make ourselves ignorant by focusing on the digital. Sample: “The promoters of technology for many decades …have argued that we absolutely need this one, two or three new machines and that they will transform our world…. All that changes is the particular machine. So once the radio would bring the world together, later it was television and now it’s the Internet.…It’s extraordinary really that people still get away with giving the impression that this is an original story.”
Phil Spencer: Find Me a Home – neat twist on the usual TV property show in which Phil off Location Location Location tries to find homes for two families facing homelessness. Though not as naïve as he pretends to be for the programme (he’s patron of a homelessness charity), he was I think genuinely shocked to discover how many landlords will simply not let to people on benefits. Happy endings for the families, though in one case it was fairly clear they were successful only because they had Phil and a TV crew on their case.
Diana, Our mother: Her Life and Legacy – probably the best of the slew of TV programmes around the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, because it had her sons talking about things that could never be said at the time: for example, how weird it was to be amongst the crowds, having not to cry themselves while surrounded by all these people in tears who didn’t know her. If they were angry about that, they didn’t show it. True greatness.
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman – beautifully conceived and written, but I think from the storytelling point of view Jane Goldman’s screenplay for the film has a better shape for the final act, as well as introducing the character of the cross-dressing pirate (a star turn for Robert de Niro).
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman – gripping and truly scary in places, taking its setting from Gaiman’s childhood and reminding me powerfully in numerous small ways of my own which must have been contemporaneous, though such exciting and awful things never happened to me. Like Alan Garner (whom he surely also read at that age?) he has a tremendous skill for combining the fantastic and uncanny with the realistic and everyday.
Inception – high-concept thriller, with a Mission Impossible style twisting turning storyline in which you know deceptions are being perpetrated but only find out what they are after they happen, and the plausible-looking (though totally unrealistic) theme of shared dreaming.
Old People’s Home for Four-Year-Olds – we know the mutual benefits old people and young people get from spending time together, but this was an interesting experiment of basing a primary school in an elderly care home, with shared activities including a sports day. Before and after measurements showed not only cognitive but physical improvement in the elderly people. Touching encounters too.
The Brain with David Eagleman – BBC TV series about the brain’s role in shaping and constructing our lives. Nothing new or unfamiliar to anyone who’s been around psychology the last forty years, but it’s well-explained and some of the filmed case studies are great.
My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 – one of the BBC’s programmes as part of the 70th anniversary commemorations (celebrations would be the wrong word). Basically this was ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ with extreme prejudice, literally, with several current British citizens recovering the stories of their Muslim, Hindu and white British forebears through those dreadful days. I knew that there had been massive inter-community violence, but I’d not appreciated before the terrible genocidal spirit which took hold. Scary to realise just how quickly and easily a society can fall apart, as we’ve more recently seen in Burundi and the former Yugoslavia.
Despicable Me 2 – great joy, great fun, with the return of Gru, his adopted orphans and of course his minions, and the introduction of the brilliantly manic Lucy as his romantic partner. Had to see this before getting to see Despicable Me 3.
Diana: 7 days – interesting BBC documentary, covering the same extraordinary week as the fictional The Queen between Princess Diana’s death and her funeral.
Inspector Montalbano, series 4 – a welcome return, and although Salvo, Mimi and Fazio are all noticeably older, and there’s a new Livia, the stories are top quality, perhaps even better than before.
Richard Rohr on The World, the Flesh and the Devil – from Day 2 of the Center for Action and Contemplation conference CONSPIRE 2017. He’s a great presenter with an easy accessible manner and his webcasts are always worth watching, but this time he was really on fire. The theology behind his talk is expounded in one of his Daily Meditations, but it's not nearly as much fun as his talk!
Autoloon ethics training – an example of a branching scenario created by instructional designer Cathy Moore using Twine. Not only a great demonstration of how to build a dialogue choice scenario, but also an interesting exercise in learning design. How quickly can you find the optimal pathway? (I took several wrong turns.)
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, by Richard H. Thaler – autobiographical account of how economists have reluctantly abandoned their theoretical premise that people make economic choices as though they were perfectly rational. For example, real people (as distinct from homini economici) count losses more than gains, pay attention to sunk costs, and don’t necessarily have the willpower to carry out their best decision even if they can work out what it is. All this had practical application, in the US and with the UK’s “nudge unit”, devising policies to "influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves". I wonder if our distance learning teaching methods aren’t similarly based on a premise of ideal rational learners, and whether there are similar “nudges” we should be applying when presenting learners with choices?
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco – global trans-historical conspiracy novel involving the Knights Templar, originally published in English in 1988 and suffering now from eclipse by The Da Vinci Code which did much the same thing but in a more accessible way (less complex, fewer footnotes). Some touching moments, but I do find irritating Eco’s habit of downloading all his research onto the pages of the book (a feature of The Name of the Rose also).
The Keeper of Lost Things, by Ruth Hogan – starts like chicklit, but then becomes something richer, deeper and cleverer, with multiple interconnected plot strands.
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? – fascinating exhibition at the Wellcome Museum for the History of Medicine, with examples ranging from health education (including the “AIDS – Don’t die of ignorance” campaign) to hospital signage. Spoiler alert: the answer is Yes.
Barley, sung by Lizz Wright – a simple, tender, defiant song, beautifully performed.
Cuttings: September 2017
Active learning and teaching in online spaces - blog post from the University of Northampton learning technology team. "There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students. (1) Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ... (2) Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ... (3) Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....
Managing the complexity of branching scenarios - blog post by Christy Tucker. "One of the issues with branching scenarios is that you can get exponential growth. If each choice has 3 options, you end up with 9 slides after just 2 choices, and 27 after 3 choices. This is 40 pages total with only 3 decisions per path. For most projects, that’s more complexity than you want or need. So how do you manage this complexity? (1) Use Twine.... Twine makes it very easy to draft scenarios and check how all the connections flow together.... Cathy Moore has an example of a scenario she built in Twine. This scenario has 57 total decision points, but it only took her 8 hours to create. (2) Planning a scenario. ... I usually have an idea of how long the ideal or perfect path will be. If you have a multi-step process, that’s your ideal path. If there’s going to be 4 decision points on the shortest path, I know what those are before I start writing. I also usually know at least some of the decision points based on errors or mistakes I need to address. (3) Allow opportunities to fix mistakes. One trick for managing the potentially exponential growth is by giving learners a chance to get back on the right path if they make a minor error. If they make 2 or 3 errors in a row, they get to an ending and have to restart the whole thing.... (4) Make some paths shorter.... (5) Gook, OK and bad. In branching scenarios, not everything is as black and white as a clear-cut right or wrong answer. You can have good, OK, and bad choices and endings...."
Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’ - interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "Did he get the impression these positions [such as climate change denial] were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? 'Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.' "
I’m like a happy four-year-old with a picture - article by Coralie Bickford-Smith in The Guardian, in the series 'My Writing Day'. "I was making The Worm and The Bird, and had taken a sabbatical from Penguin for three months to finish what I had started.... But all I dreamed about was finishing, and my time was evaporating into nothing. I had lost all my joy from the process of creating. The child in me was constantly asking 'are we there yet?' I became anxious. My sister Abigail called to quell my rising panic; she had read an article about Seneca and I recalled a biography of his for which I’d recently designed a cover. Something clicked. The error of my ways became obvious. I was not in the moment, far away from the present. ... I found the joy of creating again and I forgot about the finish line. It became apparent that I was making the same mistakes in living my daily life as I was in the process of creating a book. I made a choice to be more present in the moment, not just at work but in my life as a whole."
Laugh a minute: six short plays by Michael Frayn - from his Pocket Playhouse. "Hymns Ancient and Modern. From the Morning Post, 23 November 1893. Cable and telegraph offices were overwhelmed last night by the flood of tributes pouring in from fans all over the world to the Reverend Francis Giffard Smith, the legendary creator of some of the best loved and most groundbreaking hymns of the 19th century, who died yesterday aged 57 after a long battle with depression and incense addiction. His 1861 hit 'God’s Gas' was the first Church of England hymn to sell a million copies worldwide. Its words – 'Lord, fill us with Thy heaven’ly gas, / Like street-lights in the dark, / Then like the lamp-lighter supply / The municipal spark!' – spoke to people of all classes and none."
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud: innocence and loss - review by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. "Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally, as it was in 2013 for middle-class white kids of the electronic age in America. The shining goals are wealth and success, but the jobs offered to the young are nanny, barista, waitress, janitor. Work is seldom presented to them as something to be done for its own sake; purpose doesn’t mean much. These kids are likely to see their lives not as a continuity of being with an imaginable past and an imaginable future, but as a rapid succession of unrelated events without history and without promise. And therefore without hope.... Painful as it may be, this is a hard book to stop reading. Messud is a story teller: the ability to compel and hold the reader’s interest may not be the crown and summit of the art of novel-writing, but it’s the beginning and the end of it.... When I was about 15, an excellent teacher put in my hands Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s lyrical novel of doomed adolescence. At that age of course I swallowed all the romanticism of Meaulnes’ mysterious domain and wanted only more. More than 70 years later, I hopefully followed these two girls seeking their own mysterious domain in an abandoned mental hospital, even if I knew only too well that all the romance was imagined, and that any attempt to return to it would end in tragedy."
How do we get out of this mess? - article by George Moniot in The Guardian, based on his book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. "Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. ... You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another."
Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, Review, 9 September 2017, p 12. "TL:DR - Too long: didn't read. VS: SDR - Very short: still didn't read. SR:PW - Should read: probably won't. RB:GB - Read a bit: got bored. SR:MP - Skim-read: missed point. RH:PAC - Read headline - posted angry comments."
Bread for All: how Britain is regressing to the early 19th century - review by Stefan Collinin in The Guardian. "The story of Beveridge and his report and Aneurin Bevan and his National Health Service is by now a familiar and impressive one, and Renwick retells it well. There is, however, a deeper level that can be excavated, which is to explore how the practical concern to alleviate or prevent the sufferings of the poor came to be bound up with – and, intellectually, to depend on – two conceptual breakthroughs that are among the salient achievements of the age. The first hugely consequential intellectual advance was the development of macro-economics and the idea that the state was in some sense responsible for managing the economy as a whole.... The second crucial conceptual achievement was the working out of the rationale for progressive taxation. This, too, was essentially a New Liberal not a socialist idea. Socialism was focused on achieving social justice through nationalisation of the means of production and the redistribution, or even confiscation, of large concentrations of wealth. The argument about progressive taxation, by contrast, rested on the insight that the achievements of individuals, including their financial rewards, were always dependent on the collective operation of society and social experience, whether in the form of infrastructure, public order and the legal system, or shared knowledge, cultural resources and moral attitudes.... One enormously valuable effect of the New Liberal argument was to cast doubt on the absoluteness of the everyday distinction between public and private money. We now get in a great lather when individuals are paid sums of “'public money', while we tacitly accept the vastly greater rewards of executives and financiers because that is 'private money'. But it’s not. All such wealth is in part socially created, and there is no intellectually reputable defence for the astronomical 'rents' that figures in the corporate and banking worlds extract from their advantageous positions."
Managing the complexity of branching scenarios - blog post by Christy Tucker. "One of the issues with branching scenarios is that you can get exponential growth. If each choice has 3 options, you end up with 9 slides after just 2 choices, and 27 after 3 choices. This is 40 pages total with only 3 decisions per path. For most projects, that’s more complexity than you want or need. So how do you manage this complexity? (1) Use Twine.... Twine makes it very easy to draft scenarios and check how all the connections flow together.... Cathy Moore has an example of a scenario she built in Twine. This scenario has 57 total decision points, but it only took her 8 hours to create. (2) Planning a scenario. ... I usually have an idea of how long the ideal or perfect path will be. If you have a multi-step process, that’s your ideal path. If there’s going to be 4 decision points on the shortest path, I know what those are before I start writing. I also usually know at least some of the decision points based on errors or mistakes I need to address. (3) Allow opportunities to fix mistakes. One trick for managing the potentially exponential growth is by giving learners a chance to get back on the right path if they make a minor error. If they make 2 or 3 errors in a row, they get to an ending and have to restart the whole thing.... (4) Make some paths shorter.... (5) Gook, OK and bad. In branching scenarios, not everything is as black and white as a clear-cut right or wrong answer. You can have good, OK, and bad choices and endings...."
Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’ - interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "Did he get the impression these positions [such as climate change denial] were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? 'Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.' "
I’m like a happy four-year-old with a picture - article by Coralie Bickford-Smith in The Guardian, in the series 'My Writing Day'. "I was making The Worm and The Bird, and had taken a sabbatical from Penguin for three months to finish what I had started.... But all I dreamed about was finishing, and my time was evaporating into nothing. I had lost all my joy from the process of creating. The child in me was constantly asking 'are we there yet?' I became anxious. My sister Abigail called to quell my rising panic; she had read an article about Seneca and I recalled a biography of his for which I’d recently designed a cover. Something clicked. The error of my ways became obvious. I was not in the moment, far away from the present. ... I found the joy of creating again and I forgot about the finish line. It became apparent that I was making the same mistakes in living my daily life as I was in the process of creating a book. I made a choice to be more present in the moment, not just at work but in my life as a whole."
Laugh a minute: six short plays by Michael Frayn - from his Pocket Playhouse. "Hymns Ancient and Modern. From the Morning Post, 23 November 1893. Cable and telegraph offices were overwhelmed last night by the flood of tributes pouring in from fans all over the world to the Reverend Francis Giffard Smith, the legendary creator of some of the best loved and most groundbreaking hymns of the 19th century, who died yesterday aged 57 after a long battle with depression and incense addiction. His 1861 hit 'God’s Gas' was the first Church of England hymn to sell a million copies worldwide. Its words – 'Lord, fill us with Thy heaven’ly gas, / Like street-lights in the dark, / Then like the lamp-lighter supply / The municipal spark!' – spoke to people of all classes and none."
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud: innocence and loss - review by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. "Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally, as it was in 2013 for middle-class white kids of the electronic age in America. The shining goals are wealth and success, but the jobs offered to the young are nanny, barista, waitress, janitor. Work is seldom presented to them as something to be done for its own sake; purpose doesn’t mean much. These kids are likely to see their lives not as a continuity of being with an imaginable past and an imaginable future, but as a rapid succession of unrelated events without history and without promise. And therefore without hope.... Painful as it may be, this is a hard book to stop reading. Messud is a story teller: the ability to compel and hold the reader’s interest may not be the crown and summit of the art of novel-writing, but it’s the beginning and the end of it.... When I was about 15, an excellent teacher put in my hands Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s lyrical novel of doomed adolescence. At that age of course I swallowed all the romanticism of Meaulnes’ mysterious domain and wanted only more. More than 70 years later, I hopefully followed these two girls seeking their own mysterious domain in an abandoned mental hospital, even if I knew only too well that all the romance was imagined, and that any attempt to return to it would end in tragedy."
How do we get out of this mess? - article by George Moniot in The Guardian, based on his book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. "Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. ... You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another."
Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, Review, 9 September 2017, p 12. "TL:DR - Too long: didn't read. VS: SDR - Very short: still didn't read. SR:PW - Should read: probably won't. RB:GB - Read a bit: got bored. SR:MP - Skim-read: missed point. RH:PAC - Read headline - posted angry comments."
Bread for All: how Britain is regressing to the early 19th century - review by Stefan Collinin in The Guardian. "The story of Beveridge and his report and Aneurin Bevan and his National Health Service is by now a familiar and impressive one, and Renwick retells it well. There is, however, a deeper level that can be excavated, which is to explore how the practical concern to alleviate or prevent the sufferings of the poor came to be bound up with – and, intellectually, to depend on – two conceptual breakthroughs that are among the salient achievements of the age. The first hugely consequential intellectual advance was the development of macro-economics and the idea that the state was in some sense responsible for managing the economy as a whole.... The second crucial conceptual achievement was the working out of the rationale for progressive taxation. This, too, was essentially a New Liberal not a socialist idea. Socialism was focused on achieving social justice through nationalisation of the means of production and the redistribution, or even confiscation, of large concentrations of wealth. The argument about progressive taxation, by contrast, rested on the insight that the achievements of individuals, including their financial rewards, were always dependent on the collective operation of society and social experience, whether in the form of infrastructure, public order and the legal system, or shared knowledge, cultural resources and moral attitudes.... One enormously valuable effect of the New Liberal argument was to cast doubt on the absoluteness of the everyday distinction between public and private money. We now get in a great lather when individuals are paid sums of “'public money', while we tacitly accept the vastly greater rewards of executives and financiers because that is 'private money'. But it’s not. All such wealth is in part socially created, and there is no intellectually reputable defence for the astronomical 'rents' that figures in the corporate and banking worlds extract from their advantageous positions."
Monday, 4 September 2017
Re-blog: active learning and teaching in online spaces
I know what a re-tweet is, but is there such a thing as a re-blog? Well, here's one anyway.
I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.
I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.
There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students.
Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ...
Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ...
Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....(Read more)
Sunday, 3 September 2017
Cuttings: August 2017
The Fear and the Freedom by Keith Lowe: the moral surprises of the second world war - review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "As a historian of the modern era, Lowe enjoys an enormous advantage over scholars who write about more distant epochs: he is able – for the moment at least – to draw into his writing the experiences of those who lived through the conflict. Perhaps no historian since Gitta Sereny, in The German Trauma, has grasped that opportunity as firmly as Lowe, or done so much with it. As every journalist knows, the art of the interview rests on two principles: asking the right questions and putting them to the right people. With journalistic nous, Lowe has assembled a remarkable chorus of voices and asks the most probing of questions. Their testimony, combined with the author’s pointed analysis, elevates a laudable volume into a very readable and startling book.... It has been said that the most impressive and worrying features of human behaviour is our capacity to adapt to the most terrible of circumstances.... Yet the testimony in these pages demonstrates that adaptation to the extremes and horrors of war was made possible only by the forging of myth. Both combatants and civilians came to define the war as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, or as a conflict that would save future generations from the abyss. This myth was an essential tool of survival. Now it is an obstacle to a proper understanding of how this most terrible of all wars continues to shape our lives."
Labour is right: social mobility is not a good goal for education - article by Selina Todd in The Guardian. "In the postwar years, opportunities in the professions and other well-paid, secure jobs expanded, benefiting huge numbers of people. But today, social mobility means a scramble for the few jobs that offer security.... social mobility reinforces social inequality. Policymakers inaccurately equate the two, but the social mobility agenda assumes we’re stuck with a hierarchical society. Its supporters uncritically accept that there are 'top' universities – the Russell Group – and 'leading professions', defined by Greening as law, medicine and banking (notably, education, meant to deliver so much, isn’t a sector that the talented are encouraged to enter)."
Rulers, Religion and Riches by Jared Rubin: why the west got rich - review by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian. "500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine... By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about. Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed 'backwardness' of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine... By getting 'religion out of politics', Europe made space at the political 'bargaining table' for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of 'pro-growth' policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them. The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by ... the printing press.... Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s 'search for alternative sources of legitimacy' after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for 'pro-commerce' interests."
Lone Echo - review in Adventure Gamers. "Virtual reality has forced developers to learn to walk all over again – often literally, as they rethink concepts as simple as basic movement. ... Lone Echo is set aboard a space station, letting players move freely, unbound by gravity. But instead of spinning around with thrusters (a mechanic that left many feeling dizzy and sick), Lone Echo lets you reach out and touch the world. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, you can grab walls, pull yourself along, and push off to float free though space. You can finesse your trajectory with wrist-mounted boosters, but even here, everything is in your hands. This simple mechanic manages to reconcile the biggest conflict facing VR design, providing both incredible freedom and a high degree of comfort.... Lone Echo casts you as 'Jack,' a service android aboard the Kronos II mining station orbiting Saturn, [and] de-facto companion to the station’s sole human, Captain Olivia Rhodes. ... After an unexplained anomaly knocks out several of the station’s systems, Jack and Olivia scramble to repair the damage and investigate the mysterious phenomenon.... You’ll interact with the world using a basic set of tools: a data scanner, a plasma cutter, and, of course, your hands. ... Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes is at the heart of this tale, and it’s clear that Ready At Dawn has put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure players bond with her. ... Immersive mechanics; an intimate, character-driven story; and a detailed, believable world all come together to create an experience I could genuinely lose myself in. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for a sequel before another game gets VR this right.
‘When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life’ says my dad - article by Richard Macer in The Guardian. "The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to. One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town.... Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London. The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names. ... When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken."
Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard - article by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian's 'Reformation 2017' series. "Historical research and analysis is a seditious rejection of those who seek to control the past in order to shape the future, and a vital antidote to a world without a perspective to match its challenges. History is too important to be antiquarian window-dressing, nationalist mythology or populist propaganda. We need a reformation of our relationship with the past, a radical shift to place understanding history at the heart of how we think about our world."
Labour is right: social mobility is not a good goal for education - article by Selina Todd in The Guardian. "In the postwar years, opportunities in the professions and other well-paid, secure jobs expanded, benefiting huge numbers of people. But today, social mobility means a scramble for the few jobs that offer security.... social mobility reinforces social inequality. Policymakers inaccurately equate the two, but the social mobility agenda assumes we’re stuck with a hierarchical society. Its supporters uncritically accept that there are 'top' universities – the Russell Group – and 'leading professions', defined by Greening as law, medicine and banking (notably, education, meant to deliver so much, isn’t a sector that the talented are encouraged to enter)."
Rulers, Religion and Riches by Jared Rubin: why the west got rich - review by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian. "500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine... By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about. Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed 'backwardness' of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine... By getting 'religion out of politics', Europe made space at the political 'bargaining table' for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of 'pro-growth' policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them. The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by ... the printing press.... Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s 'search for alternative sources of legitimacy' after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for 'pro-commerce' interests."
Lone Echo - review in Adventure Gamers. "Virtual reality has forced developers to learn to walk all over again – often literally, as they rethink concepts as simple as basic movement. ... Lone Echo is set aboard a space station, letting players move freely, unbound by gravity. But instead of spinning around with thrusters (a mechanic that left many feeling dizzy and sick), Lone Echo lets you reach out and touch the world. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, you can grab walls, pull yourself along, and push off to float free though space. You can finesse your trajectory with wrist-mounted boosters, but even here, everything is in your hands. This simple mechanic manages to reconcile the biggest conflict facing VR design, providing both incredible freedom and a high degree of comfort.... Lone Echo casts you as 'Jack,' a service android aboard the Kronos II mining station orbiting Saturn, [and] de-facto companion to the station’s sole human, Captain Olivia Rhodes. ... After an unexplained anomaly knocks out several of the station’s systems, Jack and Olivia scramble to repair the damage and investigate the mysterious phenomenon.... You’ll interact with the world using a basic set of tools: a data scanner, a plasma cutter, and, of course, your hands. ... Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes is at the heart of this tale, and it’s clear that Ready At Dawn has put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure players bond with her. ... Immersive mechanics; an intimate, character-driven story; and a detailed, believable world all come together to create an experience I could genuinely lose myself in. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for a sequel before another game gets VR this right.
‘When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life’ says my dad - article by Richard Macer in The Guardian. "The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to. One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town.... Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London. The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names. ... When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken."
Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard - article by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian's 'Reformation 2017' series. "Historical research and analysis is a seditious rejection of those who seek to control the past in order to shape the future, and a vital antidote to a world without a perspective to match its challenges. History is too important to be antiquarian window-dressing, nationalist mythology or populist propaganda. We need a reformation of our relationship with the past, a radical shift to place understanding history at the heart of how we think about our world."
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