Killing with kindness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Short writing (2): Virgin media short

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

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

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

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

iTunes University: better than the real thing?

Reviewing some draft course materials about the evaluation of e-learning innovations, I was reminded of a rather nice piece of evaluation research which caused quite a stir when it was published in 2009. The nice thing about it is that it's very simple, yet perfectly illustrates the importance of not taking evaluation data at face value and looking at what's going on beneath the surface.

The experiment was very simple. A university psychology class was divided into two; half went to a regular lecture, and half were given an audio podcast of the same lecture. A week later they took a test on the lecture content - and guess what happened? The students who'd had the podcast scored significantly higher.

Cue headlines in the educational press and blogosphere, along the lines of "iTunesU better than the real thing!", and delight for the proponents of new technology (such as here, here, and here). But there was something puzzling about the result. As any lecturer who has tried producing audio teaching materials knows all too well, the average lecture  makes a pretty poor podcast: stripped of the motivation and engagement factors which come from physical presence at a live lecture, the soundtrack on its own tends to be dull and slow - unless the lecturer is a truly stellar performer, which most are not. So how was it that the students who had the lecture podcast did better in the test?

The answer of course lies in the use which students made of the podcast (which was only reported by some of the commentators, such as here and here). Most of these students took notes, and took really good notes, some of them listening to the podcast several times to make sure they'd understood everything. That they scored highly is not surprising! Those students who DIDN'T take notes from the podcast  - one listened to it while working out at the gym - got rubbish scores. So the real finding turns out to be, not that a podcast is better than a live lecture, but that taking notes is better than not taking notes - and a podcast can be one way of helping students take good notes.

There are two lessons I see I this in story. The first is that evaluation of learning technology needs to get down to the level of student activity, because it's there, in what students do or don't do, that changes need to occur for there to be benefit. The second is that when we introduce new learning technologies, we need also to work on students' understanding of how to use them. There's a cultural norm that you take notes in university lectures, but there's no such common understanding in the case of podcasts. In fact, the cultural norm is rather then other way, a podcast being something you listen to while doing something else, such as working out at the gym. The associations of the technology encourage students to assume that they will learn the information simply by listening to it.

The malignant way in which information technology supports a view of education as the transmission of information is something on which I'm intending to blog in a future post.

References
Dan McKinney, Jennifer L. Dyck and Elise S. Luber, "iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?", Computers and Education, 52 (2009), 617-623
Hannah Fearn, "Coming to a screen near you", Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 June 2009, p 38

Seen and heard: June 2012

Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) sermon for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations - on dedication and public service. It was attacked by the Daily Mail, so he must be getting something right.
Julia Fisher, Bach Violin Concertos - with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Ordered this CD after hearing the first movement of the double violin concerto played on ClassicFM: great sound, great rhythm!
Inca - band specialising in South American music, after the manner of Incantation, one of whose members is in the new group. Nice to hear them perform live at The Stables, but afterwards it was an Incantation CD that I bought.
The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner. For those who think of Alan Garner's books as being about magic, there's no magic here - except for the magic of landscape and language, of stone and iron and wood, of the craft of the hand and the bond of the family.
The Identity of the History of Science and Medicine, by Andrew Cunningham - a collection of articles by my friend and former colleague, including our jointly-authored and already-anthologised "De-Centring the 'Big Picture': The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science" (History of Science, 26 [1993], 407-432).
Antigone - cracking production by the National Theatre, using a straight-to-the-point modern English translation (everyday language, without being colloquial), and a top-notch performance by Christopher Ecclestone. Bang up to date, with modern army uniforms and an opening scene echoing the assassination of Bin Laden, and its themes of authority and morality, power and defiance, terror and fate; a play about Now, not about then. Truly, as the Chorus says: "Today it has happened here."
Amerzone - 1999 adventure game by Benoît Sokal, which led to his later greater Syberia. Lovely artwork, but this being a first-person game (in the mould of Myst) I missed the presence of a protagonist; I think there's a good reason why more recent narrative games have gone for the third-person approach.

Seen and heard: May 2012

Debussy's Danse Sacrée et Danse Profane, at a concert by the Milton Keynes City Orchestra - also on the programme Britten's Simple Symphony and Vaughan Williams' Dives and Lazarus, and three short pieces by pupils at The Purcell School, following a week-long project with the Orchestra.
The Night Shift, by Sarah Waters
West Wing spoof - starring several members of the original case, in a public service film to promote walking (though talking while you walk, as the West Wing people characteristically do, is strictly optional)
The King and the Playwright - BBC TV series presenting Shakespeare as a Jacobean rather than an Elizabethan author, showing how his later plays reflected the religio-politics and social concerns of the reign of James I / VI.
War and Peace - the Russian version, directed by and starring Sergey Bondarchuk, with the Red Army as extras in the battle scenes.
Bette and Joan, starring Anita Dobson as Joan Crawford, Gretta Scacci as Bette Davies, in a two-hander exploring the friction between the two stars during their filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.
Episodes, series 2 - not as good as the first series (now that there's no obvious sense of direction) but still very funny.
Cloven tongues - Rowan Williams sermon on the theology of biblical translation, given last year during the commemoration of the King James Bible.

Being known, as a condition for learning

One of the few good things about being ill over a bank holiday weekend is that it gives you a chance to catch up with those videos you've been meaning to watch for ages - in my case, a documentary called "We Are the People We've Been Waiting For", distributed with The Guardian a couple of years ago. The film is a call for transformation in the educational system, to give the next generation the creative and human qualities (and not just the employability skills) they will need for the road ahead. The case is well-made and engagingly stated, though I don't think there's anything in it which would be new or surprising to anyone working in the field.

Except perhaps one thing. The film featured an American school called MetWest High where they have a zero per cent drop-out rate and a 96% graduation rate, which Eve Gordon the Principal explained by the three conditions for learning which they aimed to fulfil. When she started her list, the very first item surprised me completely and had me scrabbling for a notepad.

What would be your top three conditions for learning, those circumstances in which people learn best? My guess is that most learning theorists would include the second on Gordon's list:

"People learn best when they are intrinsically motivated, when they are learning about something that they chose, that they are excited about, that they have real questions about."

The third of her conditions for learning might not occur quite so readily to people in higher education:

"People learn best when they do mind and hand learning together."

Manual operations of course tend to be ignored or disparaged in universities, as though the only learning processes of relevance to their curriculum are purely intellectual.  We acknowledge the importance of "active learning", but we tend to conceive this only in terms of mental activity. Perhaps we should be more explicit about the importance of physical action even in academic learning: the physicality of writing actual notes and actual answers, the embodiment of knowledge and understanding in physical artefacts, the physical transfer of resources from one location or context to another. I found myself thinking that we still have much to learn from school education.

But it was Eve Gordon's very first condition for learning which was the surprise for me.

"People learn best when they are known well, in the context of a relationship."

Now the importance of relationship is  I believe seriously under-acknowledged by theorists. My experience is that if you try to talk about it, people think that you're talking about learning communities or social learning: about peer relationships between learners, not what Gordon is talking about here, which is the fundamental relationship between learner and teacher. Ken Robinson described it like this, elsewhere in the film: " The kids who are not doing well suddenly find themselves in a programme with a teacher, somebody who looks into their eyes and sees who they really are, gives them a different way of doing [things], and they come back to life."

Practitioners have long acknowledged the importance of knowing your learners (in the sense of connaître, acquaintance, rather than savoir, cognition) and of giving them a sense of being known. It's why at the Open University we have from our foundation put much more effort and investment into tutorial support than other distance learning providers; when students come to us short on self-confidence or familiarity with high-level study, the sense of there being someone else who believes in them may make all the difference between their being able to marshal the resources to continue and giving up the unequal struggle. In our learning materials, where the relationship with our students is mediated through text, we always address the student in the second person, as "You", adopting the voice of what Derek Rowntree called "a tutorial in print" - and when we get it right, as I have found in my research, students do indeed feel that there is a teacher who knows and understands them, and with whom they develop a relationship of trust.

I wish there was better theoretical understanding of how this works: what's happening in the learner when they have this sense of being known, of there being someone who believes in them, who will hold the promise, the future for them, and how it is that this can affect their learning so profoundly. What is it that the teacher reaches in and touches, that brings about this transformation? If somebody understands this, I wish that they would tell me.

Reference: Derek Rowntree, Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers (Kogan Page, 1994), p 14.