Learning design: through the square window

Any book or guide on learning design will tell you that you're supposed to start by working out learning outcomes. But anyone who's worked on the learning design of a university course will tell you that that's something which academics find it very hard to do. It's the same if you try to get them to start by working on any other abstract and high-level design aspect, such as pedagogic approach, assessment strategy, or even media mix. What they want to work on first is the syllabus: the subject matter which the course is going to teach.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Academics' core competence lies in their subject matter knowledge; it's the essential part of their identity, where they see their value and self-worth as lying - and it's what they most enjoy thinking about. I've recently been working with two groups of academics, who were very willing to do the learning design activity our university now requires of them, but who had great difficulty getting to grips with it until they'd done what they wanted to do first, which was work out their syllabus. It was remarkable how much better and productive the discussions about learning design went after that.

I think the books are wrong and that it doesn't actually matter if academics want to start with subject matter. I came to this conclusion five years ago, when I started my present job, and I came up with a workshop device to embody it. The device is a simple 2x2 window, which I called my Play School window. (See note below.) The four panes were labelled: Subject matter, Learning outcomes, Learning activities, and Assessment tasks. The point is, it doesn't matter which pane you start with. If academics need to start with subject matter in order to feel comfortable, then that's fine, and it may actually be better to have some concrete examples of syllabus topics on the table when thinking about other design aspects. They can't (or shouldn't) get far working out a syllabus before the question arises: what do we want students to be able to do as a result of studying this? Repeat back all the presented information word-for-word? No, of course not; so then, what? And hence looking at syllabus or subject matter can be moved easily into a discussion of learning outcomes, and then into a discussion of assessment tasks - or what students are going to do to show that they've achieved the learning outcomes - and then into a discussion of learning activities - or what students are going to do to develop those abilities. And that will enable a more focussed discussion of the syllabus and subject matter to be covered, and so on.

You can start on any pane and go through them in any order, as many times as you need. All that matters is that you have them all filled in at the end of the day, and that they all align: that the learning activities supported by the subject matter will enable students to achieve the learning outcomes, which they demonstrate by performing the assessment tasks. This is what John Biggs some years ago called "constructive alignment", which is or ought to be one of the fundamental concepts of learning design.

Reference on "constructive alignment"
John Biggs, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd edn (Buckingham: SRHE and the Open University Press, 2003). “A good teaching system aligns teaching method and assessment to the learning activities stated in the objectives so that all aspects of the system are in accord in supporting appropriate student learning” (p. 11). A fourth edition of this work, rewritten with Catherine Tang, is now available (2011) from the same publisher. See also his own website and the wikipedia entry for Constructive alignment.

Note on Play School
For those not of my generation or not in the UK, Play School was a TV programme for pre-schoolers, in which each episode included a film clip, showing something interesting or wonderful, as seen through one of three windows in the studio. In addition to the Square Window, there was also the Round Window and the Arched Window, but those don't fit the needs of learning design so well.)

Seen and heard: August 2014

Bhaktivedanta Manor - the UK home of the ISKCON, bought for them by George Harrison while he was still alive. A walk in the beautiful grounds and an early-evening ceremony, for the birthday of a friend and former resident in the ashram.

The Art of China - BBC TV series with Andrew Graham Dixon. Some fabulous art, from pre-historic to contemporary, brought off the screen by AGD's knack of going to the emotional, and often spiritual, heart of a work.

Who Do They Think They Are? - one-off TV programme reviewing the ten-year-old BBC series and its winning formula, which never fails to turn up something of interest even if you've never heard of the celebrity in question. This is history, not as academic discipline, but as lived, discovered and owned; great stuff.

The Whispered World - a well-reviewed adventure game, but a disappointment to me. Something about the humour and the voice acting for me struck a wrong note. The game contains many dialogue trees, sometimes requiring you to locate the correct response, which inevitably means many efforts and many repetitions of dialogue lines: an extra irritation if you don't much like the dialogue anyway. Design point: anything your player is going to have to do many times needs to be smooth and not liable to become irritating on repetition.

In the Club - beautifully scripted and acted BBC drama series, centred on the women in an ante-natal group. As they give birth (at the carefully paced rate of one an episode) and their personal lives go through attendant crises, the relationships cross and criss-cross and characters you want to kick in one episode do the decent thing in another - or vice versa. A laugh-out-loud moment for me in the first episode, when the childbirth narrative was interrupted by a car chase complete with white van smashing through a car park barrier: clearly something put in to keep the boys happy!

Dr Who, new season - at last, a Doctor of my own age, with a bit of an edge to him. Astonishing to learn though, that William Hartnell the first Doctor (and my Doctor) was no older than Peter Capaldi is now when he took the role, despite his elderly appearance. Old age came to people earlier in those days.

Gilda - watched on DVD, because I'd somehow never got round to seeing it before; now I understand what all the excitement is about.

Proms 2014 - some lovely performances, including Steve Reich's 'The Desert Music' given a toe-tappingly catchy performance by Endeymion and the BBC Chorus; Bach's St John Passion in a deliberately up-beat interpretation by Sir Roger Norrington, with the chorus doing a really feisty job; and Duruflé's Requiem in a lovely full-orchestra rendition by the National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales.

Cuttings: August 2014

Why “Gone Home” is a game – article on Adventure Gamers website, summarizing talk by Steve Gaynor, the writer / designer, at GDC 2014. "How is Gone Home not a game and also game of the year? ... When people argue that Gone Home isn’t a game, Gaynor explained, they tend to point to its lack of combat/puzzles, the lack of story branching or player customization, players’ inability to fail, and its short runtime.,,, But these are not properties of all games in general, and Gaynor pointed out that Gone Home does rely deeply on properties that are characteristic of games and lacking from passive media like TV or books, such as: variability of player experience (no two playthroughs are exactly the same), a central focus on player agency driving what happens, a spirit of playfulness within the game’s theme and rules.... Playing a video game is 'a mediated discussion where the designer who established the rules of how this thing works is expressing the possibilities of what you can do, and your inputs are changing that conversation at runtime, every session that you play.'"

An intimate portrait of China – review of Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Tash Aw in The Guardian. "Osnos's focus is the collision between aspiration and authoritarianism, a conundrum caused by the Communist party's dedication to the twin pillars of freewheeling capitalism and minute control over every aspect of society.... It is a dichotomy that belies an underlying tension – that of the individual v the collective in a culture where notions of individuality still contain negative connotations."

War and Peace: Many Stories, Many Lives – article by James Wood in The Guardian on rereading War and Peace. "Tolstoy's characters often have to learn the same lesson that Tolstoy himself learned in the course of his reading and writing. Repeatedly, the men and women in this book are forced to break out of their own often infectious solipsism, in order to acknowledge that other people's lives, or other great truths, are as important as the truth of their own existence. Nikolai Rostov imagines that war will be an exciting business of cutting people down. But it isn't much like that, and when he has the chance to kill a Frenchman, he can't do it, because the enemy has 'a most simple, homelike face'. Returning home from battle, Andrei discovers two girls stealing plums from the trees on his family estate and is obscurely comforted, feeling 'the existence of other human interests, totally foreign to him and as legitimate as those that concerned him'. Pierre Bezukhov is forced out of his massive self-involvement by his shattering experiences in Moscow, during which he witnesses the execution of five captives, narrowly escaping the same fate himself. He begins to understand his life in its connectedness to everyone else's, and to a larger metaphysical body: 'the ever-changing, ever-great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him'."

How Minecraft has bewitched 40 million of us - John Naughton column in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Minecraft is the most absorbing and intriguing gaming idea since David Braben and Ian Bell created Elite in 1984….It has none of the CGI faux-realism of the blockbuster computer games marketed by Electronic Arts et al. Players are not compelled to act out the crazed, violent, misogynistic scripts dreamed up for them by programmers working for multimedia conglomerates. In Minecraft, there's no realism and no script….The Minecraft phenomenon runs counter to almost every trend in the contemporary computing industry, which is towards the kind of consumer lock-in and corporate control that we see in the 'normal' games industry, in which teenagers frenziedly play a new game for a few weeks and then drop it. And perhaps therein lies the secret of Minecraft's attraction: it'sopen-ended. Players' possibilities are bounded only by the limits of their imaginations."

eLearning Tips from the Pros - eBook from the eLearning Network. “For the past four years, we've asked members of the eLearning Network to submit their tips in the run up to Christmas. These appear on our Insights blog. We have reviewed the last four year's worth of material, and pulled together the most useful of them into a freely-downloadable ebook…”

Watching kids trying to figure out an old Apple II is totally hilarious – John Brownlee blog Cult of Mac. "YouTubers the Fine Brothers have an entire series of videos in which they sit children down in front of vintage devices like Walkmen and CD players and make them use them blind. They’re usually pretty amusing, but this one, in which the kids take an old Apple II for a spin, is particularly enjoyable. I think it’s easy to forget, even for those of us who were there at the time, just how inexplicable early computers are. For example, while the kids in this video are as mystified as you’d expect by the lack of Internet, mouse or even apps on an early Apple II, they’re completely mystified by the fact that they can’t even figure out how to get it to compute simple math problems without entering the 'PRINT' command first. Or the fact that upon turning on a vintage Apple II, nothing happens until you hit the ‘Reset’ button.”

Maximize the Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen – article from Nielsen Norman group. “One of our readers recently sent us a message complaining about the recent trend of 'horrible menuless windows', which he compared with cars where all dashboard functions were hidden in the glove-box compartment. His annoyance had been triggered by the new desktop version of Firefox that 'copies the Chrome browser' and hides the menu options under a hamburger icon. The hamburger menu is just one incarnation of the current trend to downplay the chrome (UI elements such as buttons, menus, and other widgets) on the desktop. Our recent analysis of homepages noted that chrome and navigation tend to get a smaller share of the homepage nowadays compared with 12 years ago. Behind this antichrome movement stands the mobile-inspired assumption that we should prioritize content over chrome. Of course, users go to a website to engage with the content and not to admire the clever UI, so content is ultimately the king. So, if that’s the case, is hiding the chrome bad?... Summary: On a large screen, hiding the chrome significantly affects discoverability and interaction cost, with virtually no improvement to the content-to-chrome ratio."

Why computer science graduates can't talk themselves into jobs - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Graduates in computer science are so inarticulate as to be unemployable. So says a consortium of prospective employers. The Higher Education Statistics Agency agrees. This week it put computing top for unemployability, along with maths, engineering and media studies. Students should switch from geek to chic....Having sat on innumerable interview panels, I groan as applicants with sound paper qualifications are painfully unable to present themselves in a group, speak well, write clearly, or show simple manners and charm....Two-thirds of new jobs are in services, notably the much-derided 'hospitality sector'. They are about dealing with people. What help is a lonely exam paper or coding on a tablet in that? Indeed, what could be more important to young people than learning to live at peace with themselves and others? We have it all wrong. But try telling a British school that etiquette is more use than algebra."

The concept of stress, sponsored by Big Tobacco – MindHacks blog. "NPR has an excellent piece on how the scientific concept of stress was massively promoted by tobacco companies who wanted an angle to market ‘relaxing’ cigarettes and a way for them to argue that it was stress, not cigarettes, that was to blame for heart disease and cancer. They did this by funding, guiding and editing the work of renowned physiologist Hans Selye who essentially founded the modern concept of stress and whose links with Big Tobacco have been largely unknown.... It’s still little known that psychologist Hans Eysenck took significant sums of cash from tobacco companies....A study by Petticrew uncovered documents showing that both Seyle and Eysenck appeared in a 1977 tobacco industry promotional film together where 'the film’s message is quite clear without being obvious about it — a controversy exists concerning the etiologic role of cigarette smoking in cancer.' The ‘false controversy’ PR tactic has now became solidified as a science-denier standard."

Imagined pieces of art that have the quality of a wish [print edition title] – review of Works by Edouard Levé in The Guardian. “ 533 ideas for artworks, in numbered paragraphs. Some of them are a few pages long, others only a line or two. An example of one of the shorter ones, no 529: 'A Philip K Dick story is written in reverse. The last sentence is the first, the second to last is the second, and so on, right up to the first sentence, which is the last.' Or, better, no 471: 'Schopenhauer's The Art of Being Right is read in the tone of a televised soccer commentary.'… If this seems like a lazy excuse for a book, be disabused: many of these ideas bespeak a creative imagination of impressive fecundity. The sketches for film plots that make up paragraph 101 are giddy with manic energy and satiric intent (for example: 'The manager of a famous Berlin brothel brings the son of a murdered diplomat whose inheritance he covets home from the Belgian Congo with the help of a devoted but amnesiac doctor,' and that's just the beginning)… It is both deadpan and preposterous. And some of them you'd quite like to see: '291. Dropped from the thirtieth floor, a camera films its own fall.'" [This last one has actually been done.]

Nobody got rich on his own – campaign speech by Senator Elizabeth Warren, quoted by John Naughton in his Observer column, linking to YouTube video. "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look, you built the factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

Moocs, and the man leading the UK's charge - interview with Simon Nelson, head of FutureLearn, in The Guardian. "So how is FutureLearn different from its American competitors? ... 'We started from the belief that learning has to be social,' [Nelson] explains. 'If you go on many online learning platforms, you see a succession of videos while message and discussion groups are add-ons. Here, on every page, every video, every article' – he switches on his laptop to demonstrate – 'we integrate the discussion right alongside the content. You can click a button, even in the middle of a video, and make a comment, ask a question or answer one. OU facilitators can come in. Learners can choose to follow particular facilitators or fellow students. We have peer review. Learners can write short pieces and then discuss each other's work. We put discussion steps into the course materials. We believe that much of the learning comes from the discussion. Nearly 40% of our learners are actively commenting. At the BBC, I ran message boards for Radios 3 and 4. They could be horrible places, with terrible trolling. We have nothing like that. We are already getting superb results, even though the tools are still rudimentary – we shall develop them much further.'"

Sale of the century: the privatisation scam - article by James Meek in The Guardian, extract from his forthcoming book Private Island: Why Britan Now Belongs to Someone Else. "The reality is that the faceless state bureaucrats of the old electricity boards have been replaced by the faceless (and better paid) private bureaucrats of the electricity companies. Not only are the privatised utilities big, remote corporations; most of them are no longer British, and no longer owned by small shareholders.... By packaging British citizens up and selling them, sector by sector, to investors, the government makes it possible to keep traditional taxes low or even cut them. By moving from a system where public services are supported by progressive general taxation to a system where they are supported exclusively by the flat fees people pay to use them, they move from a system where the rich are obliged to help the poor to a system where the less well-off enable services that the rich get for what is, to them, a trifling sum. The commodity that makes water and power cables and airports valuable to an investor, foreign or otherwise, is the people who have no choice but to use them. We have no choice but to pay the price the toll-keepers charge. We are a human revenue stream; we are being made tenants in our own land, defined by the string of private fees we pay to exist here."

We wanted the web for free – but the price is deep surveillance - John Naughton article in The Observer. "As the security guru Bruce Schneier puts it: 'The business model of the internet is surveillance. We build systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Corporations call it marketing.' When you put it like that, it sounds as though our emerging dystopia is the product of some sinister plot. But it isn't. It happened through the slow aggregation of lots of short-term decisions. ... [For example, a recent article by Ethan Zuckerman describes] the unwitting role he had played in committing what he calls 'the internet's original sin'. From 1994 to 1999, Zuckerman worked for Tripod.com, helping to plan, design and implement a website that sold content and services to recent college graduates. When that business failed to catch on (it wasn't 'free', remember), Tripod.com became a web-hosting provider and then an early type of social network. 'Over the course of five years,' Zuckerman writes, 'we tried dozens of revenue models, printing out shiny new business plans to sell each one. We'd run as a subscription service! Take a share of revenue when our users bought mutual funds after reading our investment advice! Get paid to bundle a magazine with textbook publishers! Sell T-shirts and other branded merch!' In the end, Tripod did find a route to financial viability. 'The model that got us acquired,' Zuckerman explains, 'was analysing users' personal homepages so we could better target ads to them....I'm sorry. Our intentions were good.'"

Why I love my Leica – Observer article by John Naughton. "100 years ago this year in Wetzlar, a small town in Germany, ...a 35-year-old technician invented a camera that would shape the way we perceived the world for the rest of the 20th century. His name was Oskar Barnack, and he worked for a company called Leitz which made microscopes for scientific research. ... His abiding passion, however, was not microscopy but photography, an art form that at that time required not just technical skill but a physique strong enough to lug around a large plate camera and its load of 16.5cm x 21.6cm glass plates....One of his colleagues, Emil Mechau, was working on a project to improve the performance of movie projectors, particularly the infuriating fluttering of the images when projected on to a screen. He was working with 35mm celluloid roll film – a format invented by Thomas Edison in the 1890s which eventually had become standard for the emerging motion-picture industry. Barnack had found the lightweight recording medium he sought. All that was needed was a camera that could handle it. Barnack set about designing and building one. The prototype he came up with was made of metal (hitherto cameras were hand-built, often exquisitely, with hardwood). The camera took one picture at a time, the film being wound on manually by means of a sprocket wheel that engaged with the holes on the sides of the film strip. Because the film moved horizontally – rather than vertically as in a movie camera – he decided that the dimensions of each image should be 36 x 24mm, and that a roll of 36 images would fit in the camera body.”

Why bad news dominates the headlines - Tom Stafford article in Mind Hacks blog. "When you read the news, sometimes it can feel like the only things reported are terrible, depressing events. Why does the media concentrate on the bad things in life, rather than the good? And what might this depressing slant say about us, the audience?... Trussler and Soroka invited participants from their university to come to the lab for 'a study of eye tracking'. The volunteers were first asked to select some stories about politics to read from a news website so that a camera could make some baseline eye-tracking measures. It was important, they were told, that they actually read the articles, so the right measurements could be prepared, but it didn’t matter what they read.... The results of the experiment, as well as the stories that were read most, were somewhat depressing. Participants often chose stories with a negative tone – corruption, set-backs, hypocrisy and so on – rather than neutral or positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news. And yet when asked, these people said they preferred good news. On average, they said that the media was too focussed on negative stories."

Hallucinating in the deep waters of consciousness - Tom Stafford post in Mind Hacks blog. "Narcose is a French documentary about a dive by world champion free diver Guillaume Néry. It documents, in real time, a five minute dive from a single breath and the hallucinations he experiences due to carbon dioxide narcosis. Firstly, the film is visually stunning. A masterpiece of composition, light and framing. Secondly, it’s technically brilliant. The director presumably thought ‘what can we do when we have access to a community of free divers, who can hold their breath under water for minutes at a time?’ It turns out, you can create stunning underwater scenes with a cast of apparently water-dwelling humans. But most importantly it is a sublime depiction of Néry’s enchanted world where the boundaries between inner and outer perception become entirely porous. It is perhaps the greatest depiction of hallucinations I’ve seen on film. Darken the room, watch it on as big a screen as possible and immerse yourself."

What should a simulation simulate?

Some of the lecturers in my faculty have become interested in simulations as a way of bringing more practical experience into their learning materials. As I prepare to advise them on the possibilities and pitfalls, I'm remembering the best piece of advice I ever received on simulation design.



Computer simulations for professional practice have been around almost as long as I have, especially in business and management where the funding for high-specification products is more forthcoming; I can remember my school contemporaries in the 1970s playing a computer-based business simulation against teams from other schools. They sent their decisions off by post, and received back lineprinter output with tables of figures, showing how all the teams' simultaneous decisions affected their shared market. By contrast the management simulation which I saw demonstrated at a conference in 2001 was stupendously impressive in its production values: graphical realisation of the business premises, video inserts of actors playing the various characters, a sophisticated "co-pilot" or animated mentor to give you in-simulation access to all the business management concepts and theories you might need. Truly, an embodiment of the notion of theory-in-practice.

As I watched the demonstration, I wasn't surprised to learn that the simulation had been the brainchild of a former McKinsey management consultant, nor that the cost of the simulation licence was £750 per single copy. I tried to estimate what the development and production cost must have been, and ran out of zeros in my mental calculator. I was working at the time for LMD Learning Solutions, where most of our clients were public sector organisations, and I knew that though they would drool over the prospect of such a product there was no way that any of them would be able to afford to develop one.

I'd also done enough game design (adventure games) to know the basic problem which you quickly encounter: you can't simulate everything. The idea of a simulation - a virtual world, in which you can lose yourself, like the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation - is very attractive. But outside of science fiction, I knew, you have to be selective: you can't create every detail of the environment a user might choose to inspect, or program a response for every action they might think of doing. So I realised what my question to the speaker from the simulation company needed to be: not "How do you produce this kind of thing on a budget?" - although I did want to know that - but the more important and deeper question "How do you decide what things to simulate?"

Her answer was so blindingly obvious in retrospect that I felt embarrassed at not having thought of it myself. You simulate those things which a learner is most likely to get wrong. There's no point in spending effort and resources in simulating the things which they can do without any trouble; you need to simulate the possibility for learners making the kind of mistakes which they're likely to make in real life, so that they can make them safely and learn from them without penalty.

If you want to theorise this, I'd say that a teaching simulation needs four components: Situation, or the practical setting and challenges in which the learner is going to find themselves; Action, or the possibility for the learner to do things in the setting; Feedback, or the results of those actions, whether immediate or long-term, made evident to the learner; and Reflection, or some kind of debriefing, to turn the simulation experience into learning.

Of these, Situation is the most immediately attractive and the one on which salespeople for simulations tend to focus - as in the Imparta video above. It speaks to the fantasy or game-like aspect of a simulation: you can be a management consultant to a blue-chip multi-national corporation; you can be a newly-qualified social worker thrown into the deep-end of a potential child abuse case; you can be a starship captain leading a covert mission in the Romulan neutral zone; and so forth. But if we're designing simulations which are going to be learning and not just fun - which isn't to say that they can't or shouldn't be fun, just that we're not going to spend the time and resources unless they make a pretty good contribution towards learning outcomes - then we need to plan also for Action, Feedback and Reflection.

(As a contrast to the Imparta video, see this simulation, about which I've already blogged, in which you play a scientific expert on a commission investigating a high-profile accident. Technically, it's very simple indeed; there's no video, no graphics, just very-well-written text, on which I suspect the authors spent a good many hours. But it's very thought-provoking, which surely needs to be one of the characteristics of a simulation at university-level.)

Stars of YouTube and the limits of the digital world

Yesterday, Channel 4 news covered a convention at Alexandra Palace for fans of YouTube bloggers and musicians. Cue predictable comments about how incomprehensible this must be to anyone above their teenage years or not of the YouTube generation, with supporting clips of accompanying parents deeply grateful for the Adult Crèche where they could wait while their children queued to get a selfie with their internet idols.

But what occurred to me was how completely the success of this event contradicts the utopianism of the techno-evangelists, who have been prophesying for some years now the total domination of the digital world. Yes, its digital technology which has given these YouTube celebrities their global following. But what do their digital fans want and are willing to queue for hours to get? To be in the same physical location as them, to see them with their own eyes, to be able to speak to them in person. They're wanting something which the digital world cannot provide.

It's like David Edgerton says, in The Shock of the Old (and in his Guardian interview): new technologies hardly ever displace old.






YouTube's biggest stars in person - Channel 4 news items

http://www.channel4.com/news/youtubes-biggest-stars-in-person-video

"They're global celebrities: but not as you know them. Young people turned massive social media stars - who've been mobbed by thousands of fans at Britain's biggest YouTube convention."

Seen and heard: July 2014

Cognition Episode 4 –I wasn’t the only one to be disappointed at this conclusion to a great sequence of adventure games, especially after the nerve-shreddingly climactic ending to the previous episode. What went wrong? After all that built-up momentum, the tension is just dissipated with three extensive backstory sequences; basically, there’s not that that much left to tell. Also, I found the main secondary character unconvincing, now that we know them to be a murderous psychopath. A pity, when I think of some of the great game endings I’ve played (The Longest Journey, Syberia I and Syberia II). It’ll be the earlier episodes I treasure (if that’s the right word, for stories so grim and gore-laden) in my memory.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, by David Edgerton – vision-changing book, in which he takes apart the innovation-centric view of the history of technology (as explained in this Guardian interview). Looking at the technologies which people actually use shows that “old” technologies persist for all kinds of reasons and frequently remain more practical or more effective than the new. Futurism has definitely had its day.

Edge of Darkness - reshowing of the 1985 TV series on BBC4. Nice, in a creepy kind of way, to be taken back to the 1980s and the era of revelations about the Secret State (and we thought that was bad, so the Snowdon revelations about NSA surveillance should have been no surprise). It's the slow-paced brooding thriller quality which has lasted best, helped by a great script by Troy Kennedy Martin (creator of of Z Cars) and a magnetic performance by Bob Peck. The semi-mystical ending, which impressed me so much back then, left me cold this time. Ah well, not everything survives.

The Honourable Woman - BBC TV drama. I wonder how well this look in thirty years time; in fact, I wonder how well it looks right now, given the unfolding events in Gaza (where it is partially set, in an eight-years-ago flashback), though that may depend on how it ends. Fantastic performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal and many others, with some tremendous cinematography, and ingenious plotting with steady week-by-week revelation of twists and hidden depths which is this drama's best defence against critical attack in this politically dangerous area.

Aurora Jitterbug - absolutely sensational concert, in the wonderful Saffron Hall, by a combination of the Aurora Orchestra (classical chamber group) and Man Overboard (four-piece jazz band), the common element being the lead violin Thomas Gould, who we have marked down as the new Stephan Grapelli. The magic began when the Aurora's first number was Rameau's music from Les Indes gallantes morphed seamlessly into Man Overboard playing Duke Ellington's Jubilee Stomp. (You couldn't ask for a better demonstration of how small a distance there lies between 18th century French dance music and 20th century American jazz.) Later in the first half, the band played a couple of numbers in which the orchestra was used as a backing group - which I'd heard done before on Simon Rattle's CBSO recording of Duke Ellington numbers, but this was far more smooth and subtle and simply gorgeous. I hope they find the resources to do more of that combination; the sound is truly unique. In the meantime, I'm enjoying Man Overboard's CD 'All Hands on Deck', in which, as a bonus, their vocalist is properly audible.

Anna Hashimoto (clarinets) - free lunchtime concert at the Fitzwilliam Museum, accompanied by Daniel King Smith. Lively and talented young performer (British of Japanese ancestry), playing a range of clarinets from long to tiddly, opening with a stupendous rendition of Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fuge in D minor (transcribed) which echoed through the cleristory of the Fitzwilliam Museum gallery.

Polymnia: Choral Kaleidoscope - the summer concert of the choir in which I sing, in the beautiful (but accoustically challening) Chrysalis Theatre. Essentially a re-run of favourites from our Spanish tour, with the added bonus of being able to capture a few performance videos, including the lovely Señor de las Cimas and Piazzolla's tango Verena Porteño.

The Phoenix - year-old British weekly comic for six-to-twelve-year-old kids. After the strong endorsement in The Guardian, and checking out the sample online issue, I signed my grand-daughter up for a subscription as a present for her seventh birthday. She's loved her first couple of issues, and there's a great mix of content: some things she can read on her own, other things for which she needs help and explanation, and some things for which at present her stamina is limited - but plenty of room to grow.

Cuttings: July 2014

How to think about writing – Oliver Burkeman column in The Guardian. "The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is 'cognitively unnatural'. For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this? Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach 'joint attention'. Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? 'When you write,' Pinker says, 'you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing.'"

Facebook reveals newsfeed experiment to control emotions – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "[Facebook] has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of 'emotional contagion'. In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' 'positive emotional content', resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to 'negative emotional content' and the opposite happened. The study concluded: 'Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.'"

Facebook emotion study breached ethical guidelines, researchers say – article by Charles Arthur in The Guardian. "Researchers have roundly condemned Facebook's experiment in which it manipulated nearly 700,000 users' news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions, saying it breaches ethical guidelines for 'informed consent'. James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, points in an extensive blog post that 'Facebook didn't give users informed consent' to allow them to decide whether to take part in the study, under US human subjects research."

The BBC informs, educates and entertains – but in what order? – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "It is precisely the noisy jumble of cultures within the BBC that has been one of its strongest and most exciting characteristics. In 1935, the pioneering documentary maker John Grierson made a film for the GPO called BBC: The Voice of Britain. The two musical stars of the film were Adrian Boult, the great conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the toe-tappingly brilliant Henry Hall, band leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra. Between them they represented the extreme edges of rarefied and populist culture then projected by the BBC. There is a similar bifurcation in drama: while the film shows the delightfully homemade sound effects being created for a broadcast of Macbeth, the lighter end of theatre is represented by Eric Maschwitz, the debonair head of variety, seen urging a producer to make sure a music-hall act’s jokes are cleaned up (‘It won’t get by for a moment, old boy’)."

The BBC: how the voice of an empire became part of an evolving world – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "In the psychological warfare conducted by the BBC [during the 1930s and '40s], its great weapon was the truth – which is neither as simple nor as pious as it sounds. Truth became a formidable force, skilfully deployed, difficult to combat by the enemy. According to Webb: ‘The truth can be self-flagellation, government-bashing, and admitting failure. But admitting failure gives you more strength, and that is what Goebbels didn’t get, and that’s what the BBC learns in the war. And the BBC also learns that if you keep doing that, so if there’s a consistency in the way you report failure and problems, then you end up with even more credibility.’ By the time decisive allied victories such as El Alamein and Stalingrad finally came, the BBC had built up enough trust for its accounts of them to be believed."

We shouldn't expect Facebook to behave ethically – article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "When the story of this period comes to be written, one thing that will astonish historians is the complaisant ease with which billions of apparently sane people allowed themselves to be monitored and manipulated by government security agencies and giant corporations.... I suspect that once the fuss has died down most users will continue to submit to the company's manipulation of their information flow and emotions. Those who the gods wish to destroy, they first make naive.... The idea that corporations might behave ethically is as absurd as the proposition that cats should respect the rights of small mammals. Cats do what cats do: kill other creatures. Corporations do what corporations do: maximise revenues and shareholder value and stay within the law. Facebook may be on the extreme end of corporate sociopathy, but really it's just the exception that proves the rule."

Can we take something positive from the Facebook furore? – article by Pete Etchells in The Guardian Headspace blog. "A central ethical tenet of psychological research is the requirement for informed consent – people should be able to make a decision about whether they want to take part in a study, based on an awareness of what the research actually involves. In some cases it’s acceptable to mask the true purpose of the study, but nevertheless people should be (at the very least) aware that they are being tested. This didn’t happen with the Facebook experiment. By all accounts, the researchers involved took advantage of a clause in Facebook’s data use policy which states that '…we may use the information we receive about you… for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.' ... I can’t help but feel that we risk missing a huge opportunity to improve the process by which digital research is conducted in the future. We’ve been offered a glimpse of the potential insights we can get from social media research. We’ve also been warned about what needs to change for that work to be ethical and responsible."

Amazon at 20: billions, bestsellers and legal battles - article by Mark Hooper in The Guardian, summarising key events and key products in Amazon's history, year by year, from 1994 to the present. "It's 20 years since an ambitious entrepreneur named Jeff Bezos registered the company that would become Amazon. How did it get so big so fast?