Pushing stuff into people: how NOT to do training, by Charlie Chaplin

I was reminded of this scene from Chaplin's film 'Modern Times' recently when discussing staff development.

Credit for seeing the feeding machine as a metaphor for (bad) training goes to John O'Donoghue, who played this clip during a conference at the University of Wolverhampton's Learning Lab in 2001. His point was that e-learning (as we called it back then) was being seen by managers as a way of avoiding the expense and lost time of sending staff away on training courses, just as the manager in this clip hopes to avoid the expense and lost time of his workers stopping for lunch. But if all e-learning does is try to push information into people, it's likely to be as ineffective and impractical as the feeding machine.

In this connection, the speech from the machine salesman given in the preceding scene (ironically delivered by gramophone record) is particularly interesting, because in 2001 it did sound precisely like the way in which e-learning was being sold.

Good morning, my friends. This record comes to you through the Sales Talk Transcription Company, Incorporated: your speaker, the Mechanical Salesman. May I take the pleasure of introducing Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, the inventor of the Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work? Don't stop for lunch: be ahead of your competitor. The Billows Feeding Machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead. Allow us to point out some of the features of this wonderful machine: its beautiful, aerodynamic, streamlined body; its smoothness of action, made silent by our electro-porous metal ball bearings. Let us acquaint you with our automaton soup plate - its compressed-air blower, no breath necessary, no energy required to cool the soup. Notice the revolving plate with the automatic food pusher. Observe our counter-shaft, double-knee-action corn feeder, with its synchro-mesh transmission, which enables you to shift from high to low gear by the mere tip of the tongue. Then there is the hydro-compressed, sterilized mouth wiper: its factors of control insure against spots on the shirt front. These are but a few of the delightful features of the Billows Feeding Machine. Let us demonstrate with one of your workers, for actions speak louder than words. Remember, if you wish to keep ahead of your competitor, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of the Billows Feeding Machine.

Seen and heard: July 2015

This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Trouble Life of the BBC – book by Charlotte Higgins. A journalist’s touch makes this an easy but illuminating read, moving seamlessly between historical account and perennial broadcasting issues. How far-sighted of Alan Rusbridger (then Editor of The Guardian) to assign her to work on this book, now paying dividends for the wider context it provides as the renegotiation of the BBC Charter – with potentially radical changes to the BBC’s scope and mission – kicks off in earnest.

Mr Holmes – new film, with Ian McKellen, excellent of course, playing Sherlock Holmes convincingly at three different ages or stages: old, very old but healthy, and very old and ill. Great concept: the long-retired Holmes, keeping bees in the Sussex Downs, struggling to remember his last case which was the reason he gave up detection, with the audience invited to solve the mystery – both intellectual and emotional – along with him as detail after detail successively becomes clear. A lovely tale, another great piece of work from BBC Films.

Gloucester Cathedral – a great place to spend a day, wandering along the side aisles and through the quire (sic) and lady chapel (one of the biggest I’ve seen) and around the cloister court, stopping off for the occasional history lesson from the excellent walk-around guide leaflet or for lunch in the café or for souvenir hunting in the shop. Very nice to see so many contemporary statues in the gothic niches, as some kind of replacement for those destroyed at the Reformation.

Eric Whitacre singers with Laura Mvula – performing in Gloucester Cathedral as part of the Cheltenham Festival, with the bonus that we also got hear them rehearse in the afternoon. The Eric Whitacre sound – all the standards, from 'Lux Aurumque' to 'Sleep', wonderful in the resonant acoustic – segued beautifully with Renaissance Polyphony (Dufay’s 'Ave maris stella') and the harmonic backing to three Mvula numbers (which we’ve told them they should record). Well worth the journey, well worth the price of admission.

The Blackwell Deception – fourth adventure game in the Blackwell sequence created by Dave Gilbert. Extraordinary how the basic story premise – a New York medium and her private eye spirit guide find unhappy spirits and help them to move on – has been spun through so many variations and taken to such depths.

Inside Out – very smart new film from Pixar, dramatising the inner emotional life of an eleven-year -old girl. Actually it cheats in a way: whereas Anger, Fear and Disgust and to a lesser extent Sadness are pure emotions and act only according to their type, Joy is actually a rounded character in her own right. She has her hang-ups (an obsession with giving her girl a “perfect day”) and her own inner emotions (fear and panic when events slip out of her control, contempt for Sadness when she is too depressed to continue), and goes on her own emotional journey as she comes to realise that life isn’t all about her. (For me, the beautiful smile which Sadness gives when Joy finally acknowledges and accepts her is the culmination of the film.) A nice article by OU academic Emma Jones points out how the film reflects the rehabilitation of the emotions in our conception of human nature: not so long ago, such a film would have shown cognitive reason in charge of the mental headquarters, with the emotions relegated to a cupboard.

Cuttings: July 2015

This New Noise by Charlotte Higgins - review by Melvyn Bragg in The Guardian. "Charlotte Higgins’s This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC is an account of an organisation that embraces so many aspects of this country’s life, traditions and personality that it seems to represent the British character itself. The book could scarcely be better or better timed. It is elegantly written, closely argued, balanced, pulls no punches and yet wears its respect for the BBC on its sleeve."

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard H Thaler - review by Richard Reeves in The Guardian. "Along with Cass Sunstein, Thaler became an international public intellectual in 2008, with the publication of their bestselling book Nudge. Both have influenced public policy in the US, and even more so in the UK.... In his new book, Thaler tells the gripping story of his own career in economics and the development of the new behaviourally influenced branch.... As his story unfolds, a ragtag band of economists, social scientists and psychologists find each other’s work and begin, bit by bit, to dismantle some of the basic tenets of economic theory. Drawing on studies of how people behave in real life – buying and selling wine, competing in gameshows, drafting NFL players, saving for old age – the rebels showed that people consistently and predictably failed to act as the economics textbooks said they should."

‘Anarchism could help to save the world’- article by David Priestland in The Guardian. "Kropotkin’s synthesis can be found in two of the most important – and readable – texts of anarchism: The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899). Society, he argued, could be run along the lines of the peasant communities he saw in Siberia, with their 'semi-communistic brotherly organisation', free of domination by either the state or the market. And this, he insisted, was not mere nostalgia or utopianism, for new technology and modern agriculture would make such decentralised development highly productive.... Now states have yet again fallen in popular esteem, damaged by the crisis of Keynesian and communist economics since the 1970s, and by the rise of '60s' values, which prize individual self-expression and personal fulfilment over loyalty to nation states and other centralised institutions. This individualism is particularly strong among the educated and the young, just as it was among the Bohemians of Victorian England. And it is no surprise that anarchism should have become important again on the left in recent years – from the 'anti-globalisers' of the late 1990s, to the 2011 Occupy movement."

Why I fasted for 11 days - article by Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian. "It’s important to say that fasting is not starvation. The anxiety and fear that attend lack of food in critical circumstances of famine or enforced deprivation are not present if you are fasting voluntarily. Nor are you beating up your body to get it in line. You are in control, but this is a partnership – your body and you. When I began reading about fasting, before it was my turn to try it, I found that religious visionaries such as St John of the Cross, St Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich all recommended fasting as a way to clear the head and concentrate. Gandhi fasted in order to focus his mind. Pythagoras refused to accept anyone into his school who did not know how to fast....
So what happens when we stop eating? The body first uses up the glycogen stores in the liver. That might take 12 hours, or 24 hours. Afterwards, the body will have to use proteins (muscles) or lipids (fats) to produce the energy (glucose) it needs.... This is where the process gets exciting. Imagine your house is freezing and you have to burn the furniture to keep warm. First you burn the rubbish, stuff you have been hoarding for years and don’t really need. The body does the same. Sick cells, old cells, decomposed tissues, are burned away. This is the ultimate spring clean. It allows the body to eliminate toxins and metabolic waste at the same time as turning them into heat and energy. And you can live off this rubbish for days. Next, the body will go for its fat reserves. Most of us have plenty of fat for the body to get busy on – and belly fat is an easy target. As one doctor at the clinic told me: 'You haven’t stopped eating – only you are eating from the inside for now.' But the process of ketosis is more than the body eating itself. While fasting, the body goes into repair mode."

The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment - article by Maria Konnokova in The New Yorker, referenced in MindHacks blog, 'Context is the New Black'. "The appeal of the experiment has a lot to do with its apparently simple setup: prisoners, guards, a fake jail, and some ground rules. But, in reality, the Stanford County Prison was a heavily manipulated environment, and the guards and prisoners acted in ways that were largely predetermined by how their roles were presented. To understand the meaning of the experiment, you have to understand that it wasn’t a blank slate; from the start, its goal was to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.... Often, the guards operated without explicit, moment-to-moment instructions. But that didn’t mean that they were fully autonomous: Zimbardo himself took part in the experiment, playing the role of the prison superintendent. (The prison’s 'warden' was also a researcher.) Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. When the 'superintendent' and 'warden' overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are.... Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment.... In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether [the wording of the recruitment advertisement] may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase 'prison life.' They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism."... [So] while it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors."

How business schools lost the moral plot - post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the drivers of inequality ... is the colossal increase in the remuneration of senior executives in major public companies. Since much of this increase is accounted for by the switch from mere salary to salary-plus-stock-options, it has incentivised executives to prioritise share price at the expense of almost everything else. But who taught these executives the techniques needed to boost share prices? Answer: the business schools which gave them their MBAs. But in looking at modern business schools, it’s clear that they are very different from their first predecessors like the Sloan School in MIT.... So what happened to turn an MBA from a sensible preparation for a professional career as an executive into a sausage machine for shareholder-value-maximisation? It might be worth looking to From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by Rakesh Khurana for some answers...." Extract from the book's blurb: "Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits."

The end of capitalism has begun - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian, based on his book Postcapitalism. "With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.... The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.... If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide."

How can we fix unconscious racism? - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian, Headquarters blog. "Xaio and colleagues at Zheijiang Normal University in China repeated a common measure of implicit racial bias: the ‘angry=outgroup’ test. Here photos of faces were morphed so that it was ambiguous whether they were Chinese or African. Each face was presented twice, once looking angry and once looking happy, and respondents asked to decide what race the face was. As in previous tests, Chinese adults and children tended to say that the happy faces were Chinese and the angry faces were African. This is the same pattern as for white American children and adults who tend to say that happy faces are white and angry faces are black. The researchers then introduced a very quick intervention. Four, 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to discriminate between 5 African faces and had to remember what number went with each face before they could proceed to the next step. This task forced children to focus on the individual differences between the faces. When the angry=outgroup test was repeated, the bias had disappeared. Children were just as likely to say that the angry faces were Chinese as African. This simple intervention seems to have disrupted what was previously considered a very deep rooted and difficult to change bias."

Seen and heard: June 2015

Tomorrowland – very interesting Disney live action film, essentially about the optimistic technology-driven vision of the future of the 1950s and 1960s with which I grew up, as did presumably the director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles), and which seems very remote now in our economically, politically and environmentally challenged world. George Clooney and Britt Robertson play the voices of pessimism and optimism respectively. She has a nice parable about two wolves: one being darkness and despair, the other light and hope, always fighting. Which wins? (Answer: the one you feed.) I’m not so comfortable with the film’s conclusion: a celebration of dreamers as the harbingers of a better future, which sounds like West Coast tech company PR. I suppose the Apples, Googles and Facebooks are the natural heirs to the Tomorrowland vision, but their operations are not unproblematically benign. It also ignores the fact that some dreamers (for example ISIS fighters) have dreams which the rest of us would not want to share in any shape or form.

“Summer Delights” concert by Polymnia at Stony Stratford church. A few new pieces for us including Elgar’s Songs of the Bavarian Highlands, otherwise revivals from our 10 year repertoire, and it’s great to feel that we can now do them properly. Nice review from a local blogger.

The Syndicate – BBC TV drama series (series 3). We started watching stupidly expecting it to be a comedy because it had Lenny Henry in it (duh, of course since his Open University degree he does serious drama and does it very well), but stayed for the full seven episodes even when we realised the laughs were going to be pretty few. Intricate plotting and a steady stream of jolts and revelations, and a great premise (staff of an impoverished aristocrat have a big lottery win and offer to become co-owners of his stately home in order to save it, to the distress of his second wife and no-good stepson who want to sell it to developers to turn into a golf club).

"I want to be alone, I need to be alone" – psychotherapy and spirituality seminar at Turvey Abbey. Two intense days of talks and small groups. Insights for me included the virtues and strengths of being “alone together”. I also learned that contemplative orders are having trouble with their charitable status, praying for the world apparently not being regarded as having social benefit.

How to be Bohemian – BBC TV series presented by Victoria Coran Mitchell. Both fun and informative in its tour through the history of Bohemianism: from post-Revolutionary Parisian artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, through Bloomsbury, to post-War counter-culture and contemporary hipsters. Good on its politics and distinction between the genuinely poor and starving Bohemians and the comfortably-off types who you feel are more playing at being poor, but a pity that its focus wasn’t wider to include intellectuals as well as arts and novelists. Also it didn’t raise the question of whether being Bohemian is a privilege of youth: the twentysomething 'Friends' stage of life, before mortgages and children start to make hanging loose looking like not such a good idea.

Humans – Channel 4 drama series. Convincingly worked-out exploration of the different ways people might react to “synths” – artificial people – as domestic servants, care workers, factory hands, call centre operators and so on, cleverly blurring the boundary between human and synthetic. A good thriller strand too, and nice to see it so rootedly set in Britain: this feels like British SF of the J.G. Ballard school (even though it's apparently based on a Swedish drama).

Blackwell Unbound, Blackwell Convergence – adventure games created by Dave Gilbert. After the previous Blackwell Legacy, which I found enjoyable but not earth-shattering, the series is picking up and showing the breadth and depth of its storyline. Amazing what can be done with a technically simple interface. Now it’s on to Blackwell Deception and Blackwell Epiphany.

Cuttings: June 2015

What if the problem isn't with MOOCs but something else? - article by Matt Crosslin in EduGeek Journal. "Many other articles have pointed at 'student motivation' as being a huge problems with MOOCs.... Our system in the U.S. relies on motivational techniques that are predominantly extrinsic in nature. We spend decades indoctrinating learners with this context, and then when an idea comes along that relies mostly on intrinsic motivation, we blame the idea itself rather than our system....You can say MOOCs are failing because they lack sufficient 'student motivation,' but what if it was actually the case that society has been failing for decades and MOOCs are just exposing this?"

Creating an online course - cartoon from Edugeeks Comics. "ID [Instructional Designer]: Thank you for meeting with me to create your online course. // Prof: No problem - but there is no need for a long meeting. I am already finished with everything you need. Here you go. // ID: 17 hours of video lectures for your course? Do you hate all of your students, or are you just trying to bore a few select ones to death? // Prof: Don't be silly - that is just the first week. For the second week we actually figured out how to point the camera at my PowerPoint slides..."

Why Technology Will Never Fix Education - article by Kentaro Toyama in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "The real obstacle in education remains student motivation. Especially in an age of informational abundance, getting access to knowledge isn’t the bottleneck, mustering the will to master it is. And there, for good or ill, the main carrot of a college education is the certified degree and transcript, and the main stick is social pressure. Most students are seeking credentials that graduate schools and employers will take seriously and an environment in which they’re prodded to do the work. But neither of these things is cheaply available online.... Even an equitable distribution of technology aggravates inequality....Well-educated men with office jobs disproportionately complete MOOC courses, while lower-income young adults barely enroll. The primary effect of free online courses is to further educate an already well-educated group who will pull away from less-educated others. The educational rich just get richer. So what is to be done? Unfortunately, there is no technological fix, and that is perhaps the hardest lesson of amplification. More technology only magnifies socioeconomic disparities, and the only way to avoid that is nontechnological: Either resolve the underlying inequities first, or create policies that favor the less advantaged."

The Invisible Learners Taking MOOCs - blog post by George Veletsianos on Inside Higher Ed Blog U. "So far we have interviewed more than 70 individuals who have completed a range of MOOCs. Three of our initial findings question the initial excitement that surrounded MOOCs and contradict the initial hope that these types of courses can help anyone, anywhere, at any point in time to succeed.... [1] Successful online learners have sophisticated study skills. For example, nearly every individual that we have interviewed described his or her notetaking strategies.... [2] Flexibility and a flexible life are often essential for engaged participation. A significant proportion of the learners we interviewed either live flexible lives that enable them to participate or appear to be exceptional in their abilities to create time to participate in these courses.... [3] Online learning is an emotional experience....Anxiety, appreciation, embarrassment, and pleasure are some of the emotions that learners used to describe their experience in these courses to us....Ultimately, our research calls into question whether open courses, in their current form, are the democratizing forces they are sometimes depicted to be... In order to create more egalitarian structures for education, we need to start peeling away the multitude of barriers that prevent the most vulnerable populations from participating."

When Actors Replace Instructors as On-Camera Talent - article by Dian Scaffhauser in Campus Technology. "Instructors have typically been the on-screen talent for the recorded lectures used in online courses. But when Purdue University began expanding the online certification courses in its Engineering Professional Education program, the design team came to a fundamental realization: Mundane 20- to 40-minute lecture videos of a 'talking head' no longer provided a learning experience that professionals taking online courses would tolerate....As a result, Purdue has begun pulling away from the use of subject-matter experts (SMEs) for pre-recorded lectures, replacing them with professional actors instead. The result has been much happier students."

You Can't Always Get What You Want - text of lecture by John Naughton at Trinity College Dublin, 29 April 21015. Video in his Memex 1.1 blog. "In saying that technologies are socially shaped, I don't mean to imply that the nature of these technologies is unimportant or irrelevant... Digital technologies are particularly interesting because they have particular affordances which make them radically different from earlier general-purpose technologies which have changed our world....
First, there are zero - or near-zero - marginal costs... Then there are network effects - the phenomenon whereby the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of users... Thirdly, there is the strange fact that wherever you look in cyberspace you never see a normal distribution. No bell curves. Instead, what you see are power law distributions - the ones in which a very small number of actors, sites, agents attract the vast majority of the interest, interaction or trade, with everybody else scrabbling for business or attention in the so-called Long tail. Fourthly, there is the phenomenon of technological lock-in - the process by which a proprietary technical standard becomes the de-facto standard for an entire industry."

Prejudice and a BBC pioneer: the amazing story of Grace Wyndham Goldie - article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "On the night of 23 February 1950 the evening’s television began with the usual announcement of the schedule.... This was an exceptional evening: the night of the general election, with Clement Attlee’s huge 1945 majority contested by Winston Churchill. The turnout that day was an immense 83.9%.... The election programme went on until shutdown at 2.13am, shifting between Wilmot [former war reporter Chester Wilmot) and the experts in the studio and Richard Dimbleby in Trafalgar Square... There had been endless kerfuffles about how to get the checked and verified results to the TV studios – in the end they were telephoned in from Broadcasting House, where they were being collated for the wireless operation. Studio hands in gym shoes ran the results between Studios A and B. They were then handwritten on caption cards by volunteers from the design department. 'It took about 40 seconds from the result being handed to the caption artist for them to put in the figures, and that was time enough for my people to use their slide rules, and then pass me a slip of paper with the result percentaged, so I could say, "A swing of such-and-such",' remembered Butler [psephologist David Butler] .... The evening established, from a standing start, the basic recipe for election-results programmes that is still followed today – an anchor and experts in the studio providing analysis aided by now unrecognisably whizzy graphics, along with outside broadcasts. And it was very largely the work of one woman: its producer, Grace Wyndham Goldie."

How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "In most histories ... , the users who began swapping MP3s on the internet are presented as ordinary folk: college students on Napster and then pretty much everyone on BitTorrent. This gives the story a democratic feel, with the music-loving people rising up against the venal idiocies of the corporate music world. But, as Stephen Witt shows with a kind of gonzo glee in his closely reported and brilliantly written book, it was not ordinary people who were doing most of the 'ripping'. There was in fact an organised criminal conspiracy to steal music."

Longplayer: the app that lets you listen to a 1,000-year-long song - article by James Bridle in The Guardian. "At midnight on 31 December 1999, a piece of music began to play for a thousand years. At heart, Jem Finer’s Longplayer is the application of a few simple and precise rules to six short pieces of music, but the result is an infinite composition which will not repeat itself until 31st December 2999.... Released this week, the Longplayer iOS app brings the experience of listening to deep time to everyone’s pockets. Created in collaboration with Daniel Jones, a sound artist whose work includes musical pieces based on live weather conditions and Twitter conversations and the designer Joe Hales, the app introduces users to Finer’s circular score, allowing them to follow the passage of reverberating chimes as they intersect, or to slide them into the background to play out continuously. It’s deceptively simple, belying both the complexity of the piece itself, and the thought that has gone into it."

Reading the Comments by Joseph M Reagle Jr - review by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "What can we learn from the internet’s 'bottom half'? How does one distinguish in the first place between content and comment? Is comment a quintessentially modern form, created by and fashioning the internet? Or is it a continuation of the more ancient arts of critique, review, heckle and abuse – as old as language? It is plain to me that the modern comment is quite distinct from communication that came before it, whether a letter in green ink or a glowing, 'Dear Points of View, imagine my delight … '. Comments need to crowd around a source – since the internet began, media new and old have experimented with getting readers to go off and chat on their own: it’s almost never worked. But once they have converged on a source, the presence of the original author is not required, indeed, it can become a bit of a killjoy."

Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B Atkinson - review by Tom Clark in The Guardian. "Atkinson does not want a revolution, nor even to eliminate all economic distinction incrementally, as reformist socialists such as Bernard Shaw once hoped to do. After a lifetime of analysing inequality, the Atkinson ambition is merely to narrow the gap in the UK to where it stood when he started. It ought to be a realisable dream – it is a reality in egalitarian corners of northern Europe – but after an election in which Britain rejected moderate social democracy in favour of an inequality-indifferent Conservative government, it may seem impossible. Atkinson demonstrates how – without violating any fiscal constraints – different political choices could start to make a difference.... "

Poetic visions: my Vingt Regards to Messiaen - article by Michael Symmons Roberts in The Guardian. "Vingt Regards [sur l'Enfant-Jésus] consists of 20 short piano pieces, ranging from two minutes to nearly 15. Each piece has a subtitle, and each represents a particular regard on the newborn Christ. For regard, read gaze or contemplation, but also a different angle on the scene. Some of these regards are from familiar perspectives: God the father, the star above the stable, his mother, the angels. But others are much stranger: regard from the heights, from time, from silence, of the son upon the son."

The crisis in non-fiction publishing - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "Amid the ambient wails of doom about the publishing industry, I’d like to enter a note of encouragement. The mainstream may be getting dumber by the day, but we are living in what looks like a golden age of publishing for, of all people, the university presses.... These days I’m very seldom excited by a trade non-fiction title, roaring as most of them are down the middle lane of the same motorway, to the degree I’m excited by the original and vital byways that university presses are exploring for the general reader."

Seen and heard: May 2015

Earthsea – radio dramatisation by Judith Adams of the original three novels of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea sequence. Not as compellingly good as The Left Hand of Darkness last month, perhaps because (in Wizard of Earthsea anyway) there are more action sequences which feel abbreviated and rushed (or do I just know the original text too well?), but the characterisation and dialogue are strong and vivid, especially in The Tombs of Atuan. The varied accents also work well; it would never have done for all the characters to be speaking RP.

Broken Age, Act 2 – adventure game by Tim Schafer. At last, we have the conclusion of the story, after the cliff-hanger ending to the first half. Some players were disappointed that there were no new locations or characters, but duh, the whole point is that the two protagonists Vella and Shay have now exchanged places and are having to work in each other’s world. If you see it as a story primarily about the two of them, the whole structure makes perfect sense and the resolution is satisfying. The whole thing shines quality, of writing and voice-acting, puzzling and interaction design, and is the adventure game I recommend first to newcomers to the genre.

Gypsy Fever, performing at the Quecumbar. Our friend Katarina’s band has really moved up a level. Their new line-up includes some great additions, including a notable second singer, and they’re now specialising in folk songs from the Bosnia Dalmatia Serbia Macedonia region, re-integrating in music what was divided by war and politics. Magic work; by the end of the gig, Serbs and Croats were up and dancing together, so important work too. This act is definitely going places, but in the meantime they have some of their songs on SoundCloud: hear for example U Stamololu Na Bosforu.

Review of Never Alone on Adventure Gamers website. If you’ve from a traditional society, concerned about passing on your culture before it disappears, you could write a book, make a film – or create an adventure game. Never Alone is an interesting attempt to teach players about the ways of the Inuit, and according to the review it’s a pretty good game too.

The Padagogic wheel [sic] – diagram by Allan Carrington, making sense of the relationship between new technologies and their applications for education and learning, significantly placing motivation and learning activities at the centre. There seems to be a generally felt need to organise the chaos of thinking about learning; another diagram I’ve recently found comes from the HoTEL project (that’s Holistic Approach to Technology Enhanced Learning).

Margin Call – tremendous film from 2011, about a Lehman Brothers type investment scandal which triggers a general market collapse. Great performances from an all-star cast, including Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, and Zachary Quinto. All men, because this is a very male field: the one woman amongst the broker-managers is the person sacked as a sacrificial lamb once the crisis hits. I like the Shakespeare-like, Greek tragedy-like way in which the public action – wars, disasters, flights and famines – is all off-stage, but is conjured into imagination just through people talking. And the way the main action takes place in just one long night: after the terror in the accounts is discovered in the evening and before trading opens the next day.

A Royal Night Out – supposedly based on real events, but the only plausibly true aspect of this is that the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret went out incognito to mingle with the nighttime crowds during the VE Day celebrations. As a Channel 4 documentary made clear, they were never unchaperoned for a second, which doesn’t mean that the episode was uninteresting: very significantly, I think, Princess Elizabeth was part of the crowds outside Buckingham Palace shouting “We want the King!” and cheering when the Royal family (minus the Princesses, of course) finally appeared – in other words, she had the experience of seeing the Monarchy from the people’s point of view, surely of importance to her when she herself came to lead The Firm. The film is actually a fantasy, it’s basically Roman Holiday, re-written for Britain in 1945.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell – BBC TV adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s novel. I seem to be in a minority here, but I really liked this: superheroes and sword-and-sorcery are all very well, but it’s undeniably original to set a magical fantasy in the Napoleonic period. The BBC gave it the full Austen with period locations and costumes, and the whole thing is as English as roast beef – which may be part of the problem. If people these days are more familiar with Hollywood-mediated fantasy than the English tradition, they may have had trouble appreciating the fairy-lore which is rather important to the plot. Ironic, given that the revival of English magic is what the story is all about.

Talking on the radio or on the web

Reading Charlotte Higgins' excellent history of the BBC, and its accompanying articles in The Guardian, I've been struck by the analogies between the early broadcasters, working out how to use the new medium of radio, and those of us in universities working out how to use the online medium.

This passage from a letter by Hilda Matheson, BBC Director of Talks between 1926 and 1931, seems particularly relevant to our making of audio and video in which academics talk to students.

The thing broadcasting does, or can do, its chief claim as far as the spoken word is concerned, is that it provides not a silent-printed word, a dead word if you like, but a living and very personal contact with an individual. The crucially affectionate link that grows between listeners and announcers, between listeners and regular broadcasters ... is something quite peculiar to broadcasting. [p 35]

If a lecturer's audio or video is doing nothing more than delivering information, then we might as well have put that information in text and saved some money, as well as improved convenience for students. But of course, we are not in the business of content delivery: we are in the business of education, for which the relationship - the personal relationship - between teacher and student is a vital part of the magic, the spell, the spiel.