The instructions for playing Pong

Pong - the first massively successful video game - has just turned 40 years old. The original Pong machines were placed in bars and pubs, like pinball machines or fruit machines, but they attracted whole new groups of users who were not already players of slot machine games. Which raises the question: given that the technology and the type of game were wholly new to most of those who played it and loved it, how did they learn to play Pong?

From the kind of guidance we produce for students learning to use our online learning systems, you might think that there would have had to be some pretty long and detailed instructions. A lot of things would have been unfamiliar and would have needed to be explained: the rules of the game, how to use the control knobs to move your bat up and down the screen, what happens when the ball hits your bat, what happens when the ball goes out of play, how score is kept, and so on.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.  The instructions for playing Pong, printed on the machine cabinets, read as follows:

Avoid missing ball for high score.

That's it; there was nothing else. Or rather there was a whole lot else: the physical features of the machine and the experience of experimenting with the game. The coin slot was a familiar affordance for the insertion of a coin, which started the game. The knobs were obvious controls, and nudging them visibly moved the paddles on the screen. The contact between the ball and a paddle was marked as a significant event by the distinctive "pong" sound, and one or the other of the numbers at the top of the screen could be seen to increase whenever the ball went off a left or right edge, which was also accompanied by a negative sound. The one thing which the games designers judged needed explaining was the object of the game: to get a high score by avoiding missing (not, interestingly, "hitting") the ball. The single instruction also, as a bonus, identified the dot on the screen as a representation of a ball, which together with the game's name printed on the machine casing ("pong" does not carry its unfortunate British meaning in the USA, and to its first American users would have suggested only "ping pong"), provided further clues to interpretation from the real-world.

I'm not suggesting that instructions for students using online learning systems should be as brief as the original instructions for Pong, but I do challenge our tendency to strive for thoroughness and explicitness. Consider the advantages of brevity: first, students are more likely to read it; and second, by actually requiring students to fill in the gaps for themselves, they have to think about what they're reading and activate their previous knowledge in order to interpret it - in other words, the learning is deeper and more likely to be retained. Of course, not every single student will be able to manage with brief instructions - there may be some key piece of background knowledge which they lack, or  some distraction may lead them to a wrong interpretation; but most will, and will benefit from the brevity, and for those who need it we can also provide longer, more detailed guidance which holds their hand while walking them through stage by stage. (And those who need to refer to the detailed guidance will probably not need all of it.)

I adopted this approach a couple of years ago, when revising the guidance for new users of the Elluminate Live! audiographic conferencing system. The full Walkthrough ran for 15 pages, and included screenshots to show what should be happening at every stage of installation and setup, but I also produced a 2 page Short Guide, without screenshots, for those users who were used to installing new software and adjusting settings, and needed only a few essential details. Earlier this year, I was pleased to see the new edition of the Open University Computing Guide adopting the same strategy: prefacing its information on each feature of the Virtual Learning Environment with a Quickstart  page for those who neither want nor need the full detail.

Not always, but most of the time, less is more.

Reference

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), p. xiii

The slot: establishing dialogue between teacher and learner

We were planning a new edition of some distance learning books, when it turned out that our new tagging system for page layout couldn't reproduce some of the tables quite as they'd appeared before. The tables in question were ones with blank cells, to create empty spaces for the students to fill in themselves as part of learning activities. The technical difficulty raised the question: did we really need these responses spaces in the printed books? And if so, why?

I remembered Fred Lockwood's list of recommended features of learning activities, in which a response space or grid was one - the others being a title, a rationale ("if you cannot think of a good reason why it is worth posing the activity perhaps it isn’t worth posing at all!"), an indicative time, instructions, a example, and feedback. Though a space or grid didn't seem to make much difference to whether students actually wrote a response to the activity (as distinct from just thinking about it - what Lockwood called "degradation" of the activity), research found that students did like and prefer having one. But why, if they often did not use it?

One thing which a response space provides is what discourse analysts call a "slot". This use of the term was coined by the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, to describe the way in which one speaker can create an occasion or opportunity for another speaker to take over or make a specific kind of response. Asking a question, of course, creates a slot; a more subtle example - the one which was the starting point for Sacks' analysis - is "This is Mr Smith, may I help you", which without actually asking the telephone caller their name (which would be inappropriate on a confidential helpline) provides a cue for them to do so. A blank response space on a printed page, in the midst of the teaching text, is in visual terms almost literally a slot, providing a cue and an opportunity for the reader to make a response.

And what a slot does is open up the possibility of dialogue. Presentational text on its own can become a monologue: a single teacherly voice telling the reader how things are. A learning activity, when embedded in the text, establishes the expectation that the reader can and will respond and that that response is a valuable and important thing. Whether or not there is a response grid on the page or screen, and whether or not a student actually writes a response in it or even thinks about a response more than perfunctorily, the slot is there: a response can be made. Even though the medium itself is one-way and non-interactive, there can still be multi-vocal dialogue: what is modelled to the student, and what is encouraged to take place in their mind, is a conversation which moves back and forth between two voices, between teacher and learner.

That back-and-forth conversation enables teaching materials to deliver what Derek Rowntree called a "tutorial in print", in which students are called on to be active participants in their learning. And it is one of the many respects in which teaching materials are not about transmission of information, but about the establishing of relationship and dialogue: the socio-cognitive environment in which learning can occur.

References

Fred Lockwood, Activities in Self-Instructional  Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1992, p. 122, p. 129

Derek Rowntree, Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning; An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1994, p. 14

Seen and heard: November 2012

The Australian Voices - antipodean a capella choir, performing new (and fun) Australian music at a Milton Keynes church.

Graham Gibbs keynote address at faculty workshop - inspirational reminder of how assessment shapes student learning behaviour, unproductively or productively, from one of the gurus of learning design.

Secret State - Channel 4 drama, with Gabriel Byrne playing a decent and honest Prime Minister. The journey was better than the destination, and altogether not a patch on its predecessor A Very British Coup.

Last Tango in Halifax - BBC romantic comedy, with Derek Jacobi and Ann Reid as teenage would-be sweethearts reunited in their senior years. Great to see a drama in which the old folks are normal and its the younger  people who are in chaos.

The Hour, Series 2 - BBC drama set in (BBC) 1960s newsroom; no great depth, but full marks for style and performance.

Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) - video recording of David McVicar's hit 2005 Glyndebourne production of Handel's opera, shown at The Stables as a half-day event with a long interval for picnic lunch; definite added value over watching the DVD at home.

Turning junk into art: the Facebook song

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Seen and heard - October 2012

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

Lessons from Pixar (2) - storyboarding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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