Why is writing learning materials hard for academics?

When academics first start to write distance learning materials, a few hit the mark straight off, most take a few attempts to work it out, and some never "get it": however hard they try, they continue to produce writing which no matter how excellent from the academic or technical point of view is simply unsuitable as learning materials.

Reflecting on this sad fact with another producer of learning materials from another university, he asked me why I thought academics found writing learning materials hard. Off the top of my head, I replied that I thought it had to do with the prevailing forms of academic discourse. Academic standing and prestige comes from writing and publishing research papers, which is an entirely unhelpful model. Apart from that, there are textbooks and lectures, which are better models in that they at least have a teaching function; but they too are monologic one-to-many forms of communication. What's needed for good learning materials is a different discursive model.

Actually the best model is one with many academics are familiar, although it may not occur to them at first. At The Open University, the relevance of this model for the fledgling university’s teaching was spelled out in a 1973 memo from Derek Rowntree (discussed in more detail in my previous post):

Rowntree... asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time. [He] argued that … it was highly unlikely that you would simply talk at the learner for hour after hour; he didn’t believe it would happen. Instead he thought you would probably regard a one-to-one tutorial as an ideal form of teaching. (Lockwood, 1992 p 25)

This was the model for classic OU learning materials during the 1970s and '80s: what Rowntree called the “tutorial in print”. Some thirty years later, a similar model was adopted by the very successful Khan academy videos, which (as I have already observed) are not video lectures but video tutorials: the camera does not look at the teacher but at the paper or screen on which the teacher is writing down the maths: the view you would have while sitting beside your maths tutor.

What the tutorial model does for the teacher is to replace the one-to-many communication of a lecture with communication that is one-to-one, or one-to-a-very-small-group. Unless a writer of learning materials makes this shift, they will be like one of the speakers in the early days of radio broadcasting who would deliver their talk in stentorian tones, thinking of the millions of listeners they were aiming to reach instead of the individuals or family groups who would each be listening on their own wireless set. Early radio producers, such as Hilda Matheson, the BBC's first Director of Talks, needed to work on speakers to get them to make this transition.

The models for BBC broadcasts were the public lecture, the political speech, the theatre and the variety hall. One of Matheson’s many achievements was to realise that the microphone demanded an entirely different manner from the podium. “It was useless to address the microphone as if it were a public meeting, or even to read it essays or leading articles,” she wrote. “The person sitting at the other end expected the speaker to address him personally, simply, almost familiarly.” She rehearsed, coaxed and harried speakers until they found a mode of speech that worked. (Higgins 2014)

If the one-to-one personal style has been found to be essential for broadcast media, how much more essential it is for learning materials, in which, as Diana Laurillard argued long ago (2002, pp 86-87), the critical element is the conversation or dialogue which goes on between teacher and learner.

References

Lockwood, F. 1992, Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, London, Kogan Page.

Higgins, C. 2014 'What can the origins of the BBC tell us about its future?', The Guardian 15 April 2014, online at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/15/bbc-origins-future, accessed 30 September 2018. 

Laurillard, D. 2002, Rethinking University Teaching; A Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd edn, London, RoutledgeFalmer.

Seen and heard: July to September 2018

Forgotton Anne - well-reviewed graphically beautiful adventure game, with particularly satisfying animation as Anne runs, climbs and jumps her way across a darkened cityscape. Intelligent (if predictable) storyline too, as young Anne gradually comes to realise the corrupt nature of the regime she services, in this world of forgotten and abandoned objects presided over by an elderly clockmaker.

Bach B Minor Mass - performed by English Voices conducted by Tim Brown in Cambridge Summer Music Festival, sung with one voice to a part rendering the counterpoint (sometimes eight-fold) crystal clear, an aural equivalent of ultra-high definition TV, all the parts remaining perfectly distinct with your attention drawn first to one singer then another. A truly astonishing performance.

Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger Halka, performing as part of Milton Keynes International Festival. A great family show (my four-year-old grandson kept on turning round to tell me "I love it!") full of astonishing acts skill and strength, woven together with characterisations and humour.

Selling Politics, by Laurence Rees – 1992 book written to accompany the better-titled BBC TV series ‘We Have Ways of Making You Think’. The TV made a big impact on me at the time, for its demonstration of how the basic techniques of mass persuasion were effectively worked out by Goebbels, the brilliant (if twisted) Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany and the originator of the “great truth” that propaganda must first be entertaining and never try to give its audience information. In the book, successive chapters shows how Goebbels’ principles were, knowingly or unknowingly, taken up by political campaign managers after the Second World War, their effectiveness enhanced and exacerbated by mass television, culminating in the (then) contemporary political campaigning of Ronald Reagan and the UK political parties in the 1992 elections. The final chapter speculates that in the future these trends could make it possible for someone of no political experience but substantial media presence to be elected to high office. Scarily prescient!

Eye in the Sky - nail-biting dramatisation of a classic ethical dilemma (do you fire a missile to kill a group of terrorists about to launch a bomb attack, if you know you will also kill a twelve-year-old girl selling bread just outside their compound?) with tremendous performances by Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in his last role.

Incredibles 2 - not quite as good as the original but still way more fun and sophisticated than almost all other superhero films. Effectively it's an old sitcom trope (mum goes out to work so dad has to look after the baby), but given new life with the Pixar treatment. Anyway, the baby-with-superpowers joke was the best of the three high concepts from the original film (the others being superheroes-living-in-suburban-obscurity and rejected-fan-as-supervillain). Another fine 60s-inspired score from Michael Giacchimo.

The Martian - Robinson Crusoe meets Apollo 13 in neat hardcore SF thriller. We didn't mean to stay up so late, but once started we had to watch to the end to see he got home safely.

Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers - updated edition of the classic revered text by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. Full of really practical tips, with (negative) examples, of how to write or re-write intros, background and headlines, useful not only for journalists but any writer or editor who wants to attract and keep the attention of their readers. (Which should be all of them, really.)

Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage – Channel 4 TV series, contrasting sharply with the BBC/OU series on rites and rituals broadcast over the same weeks. Rather than doing the usual and boring thing of "here's a strange and unpleasant ritual, and here's another", this was truly engaged and high-risk documentary-making: the observation of a ritual in Bali, Papua New Guinea or wherever was only the preliminary to Grayson Perry's creation of a corresponding ritual with and for people in the UK. Most moving was the first programme on Death, which featured a ritual for a couple whose teenage son had been killed in a road traffic accident and a pre-death funeral for a man with terminal motor-neurone disease. Skilled, safe, sound work, which I bet he discussed lots with his psychotherapist wife.

The Marvellous Mechanical Museum / Rodney Peppe’s World of Invention - linked exhibitions at Compton Verney. Beautiful designs, of course, in the former case going back to the 18th century, but most striking was the numerous wooden cam-driven automata being built NOW by artists in (surely) rebellion against digital technology which would be the most obvious way of controlling the movements: for example, the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and Baba Yaga. Most charming was the gallery-filling set of kinetic sculptures called A Quiet Afternoon in the Cloud Cuckoo Valley, by Roland Emmet, who made Caractacus Potts' inventions for the film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: true English whimsy from the post-war era.

Telephones - 7 minute video by Christian Marclay, made of clips from classic films all featuring people using telephones. Very enjoyable, though I don't think I'd have the patience for his follow-up film doing the same with clocks, though apparently that is tremendous even without sitting through the full 24 hours.

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro - sad and haunting novel, about an elderly couple making their way across a post-Arthurian landscape, as traditions of hospitality give way to hostility, suspicion and superstition, and the fragile peace between Briton and Saxon threatens to turn to open conflict once again. The buried giant of the title, I think, is the past, or memory of the past: a mist clouds the memory of everyone, not just the elderly, so that people are forgetful of what happened an hour previously as well as what happened many years ago. At first, this forgetting is presented as an entirely negative thing, but then we start to wonder: is it the forgetting of past conflicts and massacres which has enabled the Arthurian peace to stand? And is even the dear old couple's loving way with each other only possible because they forget or choose to overlook the slights and wrongs which have gone between them before? There's no happy ending, but then (look at Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go) Ishiguro doesn't do happy endings.

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine d'Engle - prize-winning American children's novel from the early 1960s. Apart from its bolshy but likeable heroine, the SF is much of its era - warping spacetime (several years before Star Trek popularised the warp drive) and a decidedly dodgy caricature of Soviet-style centralist communism - but overlooking that I can appreciate now, what I wouldn't have done at the time: the powerful use of body language and poetic imagery to describe the unimaginably strange (the experience of translocation, the encounter with totally alien life forms). And Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who (several years before her doctoral relative appeared on British TV) and Mrs Which make a great trio of wyrd sisters. I wonder what the recent film does with the story.

Love You to Bits - well-reviewed charming and ingenious puzzle game, in which little Cosmo searches for the missing pieces of his beloved robot girlfriend across 28 strange worlds. The basic puzzles are kind - it's always clear what actions are possible, so if necessary you can complete the levels through elimination - but the way they unfold is beautiful and impossible to anticipate. My favourite level is the secret laboratory, where mad scientists are torturing animals and creating monsters; by the end of the level, the monsters have escaped and are torturing the scientists. However the bonus hidden objects - each a momento of Cosmo and Nova's life together - are very challenging to find, and I've often had to resort to a walkthrough.

Cuttings: September 2018

Say goodbye to suspicion - prayer by Phil Harrison SJ, circulated by the Jesuit Refugee Service. "Say goodbye to suspicion, say goodbye to despair, say goodbye to hate. Say goodbye to these three things and I will be revealed in your midst. When suspicion, despair and hate have left the room, I will enter, although cautiously because you may not recognise me at first. I am the one you have passed in the street. I am the one you ignored as I slept on a bed of concrete and nails. I am the one who has been serving you all this time, though you did not know it was me. I am the guest you did not invite, but I have come to invite you to the banquet prepared in the Kingdom of God at which all may rejoice. I will show you that suspicion, despair and hate can never have the last word. Say hello to faith, say hello to hope and say hello to love. Let these three remain among you and let me remain with you."

Ways to think about machine learning - blog post by Benedict Evans, referenced in John Naughton's Observer column. "One of the challenges in talking about machine learning is to find the middle ground between a mechanistic explanation of the mathematics on one hand and fantasies about general AI on the other. Machine learning is not going to create HAL 9000..., but it’s also not useful to call it ‘just statistics’. [Drawing] parallels with relational databases, this might be rather like talking about SQL in 1980 - how do you get from explaining table joins to thinking about Salesforce.com? It's all very well to say 'this lets you ask these new kinds of questions', but it isn't always very obvious what questions.... I think there are two sets of tools for thinking about this. The first is to think in terms of a procession of types of data and types of question: (1) Machine learning may well deliver better results for questions you're already asking about data you already have, simply as an analytic or optimization technique.... (2) Machine learning lets you ask new questions of the data you already have. For example, a lawyer doing discovery might search for 'angry’ emails, or 'anxious’ or anomalous threads or clusters of documents, as well as doing keyword searches, (3) Third, machine learning opens up new data types to analysis - computers could not really read audio, images or video before and now, increasingly, that will be possible.... Automation is the second tool for thinking about machine learning. ...One of my colleagues suggested that machine learning will be able to do anything you could train a dog to do... Andrew Ng has suggested that ML will be able to do anything you could do in less than one second. Talking about ML does tend to be a hunt for metaphors, but I prefer the metaphor that this gives you infinite interns, or, perhaps, infinite ten year olds."

Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code - article by Andrew Smith in The Guardian. " 'In some ways we’ve lost agency. When programs pass into code and code passes into algorithms and then algorithms start to create new algorithms, it gets farther and farther from human agency. Software is released into a code universe which no one can fully understand.' If these words sound shocking, they should, not least because Ellen Ullman, in addition to having been a distinguished professional programmer since the 1970s, is one of the few people to write revealingly about the process of coding. There’s not much she doesn’t know about software in the wild. 'People say, "Well, what about Facebook – they create and use algorithms and they can change them." But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and they learn and change and run themselves. Facebook intervene in their running periodically, but they really don’t control them. And particular programs don’t just run on their own, they call on libraries, deep operating systems and so on ...' "

How weak schools serve Trump's agenda - article by Arne Duncan in The Guardian. Education is a complicated issue, but for a long time it’s enjoyed bipartisan support. ... My tenure as education secretary was not perfect, but we were committed to aspirational goals and to students.... Today, no such goals exist. The Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos don’t talk about improving educational outcomes. The Trump administration has no position on increasing access to pre-K, or continuing the work of raising high school graduation rates, or of once again leading the world in college graduation rates.... Some maintain this is due to incompetence, but the more I listen to the president, the more I’m convinced that the administration’s lack of educational goals is by design. A healthy democracy requires an educated citizenry, while an authoritarian regime benefits from the lack of one. President Trump is on record as saying we should all listen to him – he wants to be the final authority and arbiter of truth. ... Upon winning the Nevada primary in February 2016, Trump observed: 'We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.' I wasn’t so amazed he said it, but I was amazed that he said nothing about educating people. Nothing. No goals, no aspirations, no unifying message. The quote succinctly reveals that this is right where he wants people to be: divided and preferably poorly educated."

The mood has shifted: now Corbyn really can transform the economy - article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "The left did not learn from its opponents. The financial crash of a decade ago was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Hungry Thirties. Yet the left’s intellectual cupboard was bare. With little to offer other than fiery speeches about bankers’ greed and defensive slogans against cuts, it presented no coherent alternative. Years of austerity followed, endorsed or even implemented by centre-left parties that signed their own political death warrants in doing so. A decade later, a new intellectual ferment can be found on the left. ... The [IPPR] has attempted to embrace the spirit of our time: the latest report, published by its commission on economic justice, is a critical contribution to a left intellectual revival. Its underlying message is inarguable: the current system is broken. ... The report’s prescriptions challenge assumptions that until recently were considered to be as immovable as the weather. A well-funded national investment bank would modernise Britain’s creaking infrastructure and drive innovation, while a national economic council would design a 10-year plan for the economy. The commission recommends that a genuine, higher living wage should be introduced; and proposes that a target should be set to double the percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining ... Workers would get elected representatives on company boards; and the self-employed ... would be granted work-related benefits. The report also recommends reversing recent cuts to corporation tax, which have failed to increase investment as promised, and a cooperative development act to encourage the mutualisation of the economy."

The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world - article by Oliver Bullough in The Guardian, based on his book Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. "In the years after the first world war, money flowed between countries pretty much however its owners wished, destabilising currencies and economies in pursuit of profit. Many of the wealthy grew wealthier even while economies fell apart. The chaos led to the election of extremist governments in Germany and elsewhere, to competitive devaluations and beggar-my-neighbour tariffs, to trade wars and, ultimately, to the horrors of the second world war. The allies wanted to prevent this ever happening again. So, at a meeting at the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire in 1944, they negotiated the details of an economic architecture that would – in perpetuity – stop uncontrolled money flows. ... One banker in particular was not prepared to tolerate [the controls]: Siegmund Warburg.... [He] had been a banker in Germany in the 1920s and remembered arranging bond deals in foreign currencies. Why couldn’t his bankers do something similar again?... If [Warburg's] bonds had been issued in Britain, there would have been a 4% tax on them, so [his colleague Ian Fraser] formally issued them at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. If the interest were to be paid in Britain, it would have attracted another tax, so Fraser arranged for it to be paid in Luxembourg. He managed to persuade the London Stock Exchange to list the bonds, despite their not being issued or redeemed in Britain, and talked around the central banks of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain, all of which were rightly concerned about the eurobonds’ impact on currency controls. The final trick was to pretend that the borrower was Autostrade – the Italian state motorway company – when really it was IRI, a state holding company. If IRI had been the borrower, it would have had to deduct tax at source, while Autostrade did not have to. The cumulative effect of this game of jurisdictional Twister was that Fraser created a bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and which could be turned back into cash anywhere.... There was no register of ownership or any obligation to record your holding, which was not written down anywhere.... The eurobonds set wealth free and were the first step towards creating the virtual country of the rich that I call Moneyland.... This is the dirty secret at the heart of the City’s rebirth, the beginning of the process that eventually led to today’s stratospheric inequality. It was all made possible by modern communications – the telegram, the phone, the telex, the fax, the email – and it allowed the world’s richest people to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship."

Here’s the science behind the Brexit vote and Trump’s rise - article by Michele Gelfand in The Guardian. "Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures are the opposite. In the US, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to arguing loudly on the street. By contrast, in Singapore, gum is banned, streets are pristine and jaywalkers are rare.... We’ve shown that US states with histories punctuated by high threat, including more natural disasters, higher pathogen prevalence and food instability, are much tighter than those that enjoyed relative safety. Similarly, communities that face financial danger – hunger, poverty, bankruptcy – and higher occupational hazards, are substantially tighter. This helps explain why those on low incomes have consistently told us they desire strong rules and leaders. In fact, when we ask respondents to free-associate from the word 'rules', low-income subjects consistently write positive words such as 'good', 'safe' and 'structure', while wealthier ones write down words such as 'bad', 'frustrating', and 'constricting'. These preferences arise early: in our lab, three-year-olds from low-income families were more visibly upset than peers from wealthier homes when they saw puppets violate clear rules.... Threats lead to a desire for stronger rules – and obedience to leaders who promise to deliver a tight social order. Our research confirms that the strongest Trump supporters, as well as the supporters of Marine Le Pen in France, believe their country is threatened, whether by terrorism, illegal immigration, natural disasters or disease. They felt their countries were too loose, and they wanted tighter rules and stricter leaders. Fearful voters also drove the UK’s Brexit decision and the candidacies of far-right or autocratic politicians in Poland, Russia, the Philippines, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy."

The Coddling of the American Mind: how elite US liberals have turned rightwards - review by Moira Weigel in The Guardian. "Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focus on students demanding 'protection' from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them....The methods they teach come from cognitive behavioural therapy, which Lukianoff credits with having saved his life when he suffered from depression. He and Haidt argue that student demands for social justice are expressions of 'cognitive distortions' that CBT can correct, and that the problems that young people and their parents worry about are not as grave as they think.... Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help.... The Coddling of the American Mind is less interesting for its anecdotes or arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style. That style wants above all to be reasonable.... The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. ... The style that does befit an expert, apparently, is the style of TED talks, thinktanks and fellow Atlantic writers and psychologists. ...As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as 'clicktivism' or mere 'hashtags', right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking 'up their monopoly on discourse. ...The core irony of The Coddling of the American Mind is that, by opposing identity politics, its authors try to consolidate an identity that does not have to see itself as such. Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.... As the right liberals insist that students are suffering from pathological 'distortions', a sense of unreality prevails. In their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and think pieces, the genteel crusaders against 'political correctness' create their own speech codes. As their constituency shrinks, their cant of progress starts to sound hysterical. The minds they coddle just may be their own."

Think we can rewind to the heady days before Trump and Brexit? Think again - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. The dominant mood among liberals is that we need to go backwards to better times. Brexit followed by the election of Donald Trump provide such undeniable illustrations of self-harm to some that they should be reversed or even erased. ... In pursuit of one enormous do-over, they want Trump impeached and another Brexit vote.... [These calls] not only don’t go far enough but ... could have unintended consequences that make things worse. For there is a crucial distinction between challenging a decision that is procedurally flawed or unlawfully enabled, and nullifying a decision because you think it’s a mistake. ... In both scenarios – impeachment or a second referendum – the suspicion of elites would become even greater, and the political alienation and economic marginalisation that contributed to it would still exist. That’s not a reason not to support them. It is a reason to be wary."

'It's impossible!' Christian Marclay and the 24-hour clock made of movie clips - article by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious. Entitled The Clock and lasting 24 hours, the world’s most popular piece of concept art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock. It is a staggering, almost superhuman feat of research that has gained a cult following ever since it was unveiled at the White Cube gallery in London in 2010. The Clock’s easy-to-grasp governing principle coexists with the almost ungraspable fact that its creator, Christian Marclay, really has pulled it off, beguilingly combining the utter randomness of each individual clip with the strict form of his overarching idea, allowing everyone to meditate on time, how we’re obsessed with it, how there’s never enough of it."

Cuttings: August 2018

5 Things to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed by Your Workload - article by Alice Boyes in Harvard Business Review.  "Practice your acceptance skills with healthy self-talk... Track your time to give yourself an accurate baseline... Check your assumptions about other people’s expectations... Examine your assumptions about what success requires... Start taking time off now instead of waiting for the 'right' time."

How to get away with financial fraud - article by Dan Davies in The Guardian, based on his book Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round. "Some places in the world are what they call 'low-trust societies'. The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid and people rightly fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the 'high-trust societies', conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high.... Commercial fraud is parasitical on the overall health of the business sector on which it preys. It is much more difficult to be a fraudster in a society in which people only do business with relatives, or where commerce is based on family networks going back centuries. It is much easier to carry out a securities fraud in a market where dishonesty is the rare exception rather than the everyday rule.... Fraudsters don’t play on moral weaknesses, greed or fear; they play on weaknesses in the system of checks and balances – the audit processes that are meant to supplement an overall environment of trust. One point that comes up again and again when looking at famous and large-scale frauds is that, in many cases, everything could have been brought to a halt at a very early stage if anyone had taken care to confirm all the facts. But nobody does confirm all the facts. There are just too bloody many of them. Even after the financial rubble has settled and the arrests been made, this is a huge problem."

The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump - article by Michiko Kikutani in The Guardian. "Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, 'The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.' Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling description of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today... For decades now, objectivity – or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth – has been falling out of favour.... The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disfranchised to be heard. But it has also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated.... In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis ... says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realised that 'in the face of that, you could play with reality' and in the process 'further undermine and weaken the old forms of power'."

The Monarchy of Fear: Martha Nussbaum makes the case for hope - review by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian. "We have a president who nourishes fear, enables hatred and hastens the disappearance of truth with almost everything he does. Americans who engage in hate crimes have been 'radicalized by signs of permission and approval'. The internet has made it easier for hate groups to find one another, social media encourages 'informational cascades' of dishonesty (much faster than television), and Twitter promotes the preposterous notion 'that everything worth saying can be said right away'. ... In the face of so many warning signs about the condition of the republic, [Martha Nussbaum,] professor of law and ethics [at the University of Chicago] is all about resisting visions of calamity. ... Despite all of its current traumas, America is a much better place today than it was in the much-mourned 1950s.... Nussbaum reminds us that three of the most effective leaders of modern times were fierce disciples of hope and forgiveness, and enemies of hate: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.... Nussbaum’s fundamental idealism is undiminished by the coarseness of our time... She proposes two structural solutions to the nation’s problems, both as worthy as they are unfashionable: genuine integration of America’s public schools, and a requirement of three years of national service for all young Americans.... 'Hope really is a choice,' says the author, 'and a practical habit.'"

Dark money lurks at the heart of our political crisis - article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "A mere two millennia after Roman politicians paid mobs to riot on their behalf, we are beginning to understand the role of dark money in politics, and its perennial threat to ... Dark money can be seen as the underlying corruption from which our immediate crises emerge: the collapse of public trust in politics, the rise of a demagogic anti-politics, and assaults on the living world, public health and civic society. Democracy is meaningless without transparency.... The problem is exemplified, in my view, by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).... What is this organisation, and on whose behalf does it speak? If only we knew.... The only hard information we have is that, for many years, it has been funded by British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International, Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris International. When this funding was exposed, the IEA claimed that its campaigns against tobacco regulation were unrelated to the money it had received. Recently, it has been repeatedly dissing the NHS, which it wants to privatise; campaigning against controls on junk food; attacking trade unions; and defending zero-hour contracts, unpaid internships and tax havens. Its staff appear on the BBC promoting these positions, often several times a week. But never do interviewers ask the basic democratic questions: who funds you, and do they have a financial interest in these topics?"

What liberals (still) get wrong about Trump's support - article by Henry Olsen in The Guardian. "Liberals and progressives are forever predicting Donald Trump’s political demise. After each purported outrage ... they confidently contend that this latest event will finally force Trump’s supporters to abandon him. Yet not only does this not happen, Trump’s support has actually risen by 6% since late 2017. How do they keep getting it so wrong?... The data clearly shows that Trump’s political coalition is pretty much the traditional Republican coalition. And the often virulent behavior of anti-Trump partisans has made partisan Republicans especially unwilling to abandon their leader even when he stumbles.... Evangelicals are a case in point.... Their support for Trump now is highly transactional: so long as he nominates the judges they think will protect their beliefs and way of life, they will overlook virtually anything else he says or does.... Analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins found that Trump’s general election support broke into five groups. Only one, the American Preservationists, contained a large number of voters who could be said to be generally hostile to racial and ethnic minorities per se. They were outnumbered by another group, the Free Marketeers, whose attitudes towards racial and ethnic minorities were as or more tolerant than the attitudes of Hillary Clinton supporters. Each faction’s continued support for Trump is based upon how he acts on their priorities, not on one overarching theme.That doesn’t mean Trump backers are blind. Polls show an unusually high share of Republicans do not say they 'strongly' approve of his performance; they are well aware of his many foibles and flaws. But in our bipartisan system, opposition to Trump means supporting the Democrats. Absent any indication that Democrats are open to Republicans’ views, these voters, sometimes reluctantly, remain in Trump’s camp."

Museums are not the proper home for our greatest works - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Pressure to return items from museums is becoming relentless, especially in the case of Europe’s great historic collections. ... Museums are clearly facing an identity crisis. Most of the big London institutions are losing visitors. ... Museums protest that they are the last guardians of a fragile past. They hold and hoard the relics of the past for scholars to study and people to view, one day if not now. Their critics say museums are where art goes to die. The cult of authenticity is just that, a cult. The Victorians did not fuss over what was original. They replicated medieval statues and rebuilt castles and churches, much to our benefit. Facsimile reproduction is now so good that replicas can be made of almost anything. I want to see how Rocket worked, and stand on its footplate, not know whether each bit of its metal is original. I want to see the Parthenon marbles as Phidias intended, even if recarved by a computerised jig.... Sensible people would long ago have replicated [the Parthenon marbles] and sent the old ones back to Greece. If people mind so much, give Ethiopia back its hair, Manchester its Rocket and Lewis its chessmen. London can have copies. So many great works – not all of them – derive meaning from where they originated. Malraux was right: a museum is without walls, a place of the imagination. The wonder of an object lies not in its material antiquity but in its story and its appearance."

Cuttings: July 2018

Models of online & flexible learning - blog post by Martin Weller. "I have been doing some work with Dominic Orr and Rob Farrow ... looking at various models of open, online and flexible technology enhanced learning (what we labelled OOFAT). The full report is out now... "We identified five [business models]: (1) Fixed core model, where providers maintain a legacy approach to their products and services and to their target market, although they may be innovating in other areas; (2) Outreach model, where providers maintain the same products and services, but are innovating in the dimensions of target group recruitment and utilising new communication channels; (3) Service-provider model, where providers maintain a focus on their target group whilst particularly innovating in the areas of product and service and communication channels; (4) Entrepreneurial model, where providers adopt innovative strategies for the areas product and service, target group and communication channel, i.e. they aim to be transformative in their services and provision; (5) Entrepreneurial model with fixed core, where providers maintain a legacy focus to their core services (teaching and learning), but focus on being innovative in all other areas."

If people cannot write well - quote from George Orwell. "If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." Inscribed above a bust of Orwell recently installed in the foyer of the school library at Eton (where as Eric Blair he was a scholarship pupil). "Attributed to Orwell by John H. Bunzel, president of San Jose State University, as reported in Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), p. 151; but not found in Orwell's works or in reports contemporaneous with his life. Possibly a paraphrase of Orwell's description of the rationale behind Newspeak in 1984."(Wikiquote)

Do People Recall Information Better Through Virtual Reality? - note by Jim Ellis in eLearning Digest (internal OU circulation) no. 167 July 2018. "University of Maryland researchers conducted in-depth analyses on whether people recall information better through virtual reality, as opposed to desktop computers. Their sample of 40 participants (who were all familiar with VR) showed a statistically significant 8.8% overall improvement in recall accuracy using the VR headsets compared to a desktop equivalent which, according to the Dean of College, Amitabh Varshney, 'suggests that immersive environments could offer new pathways for improved outcomes in education and high-proficiency training'. No Amitabh, you’ve used expensive techno-gimmickry to get people to remember where photos of famous people were positioned in a 3D model. That’s barely Bloom Level 1 so its future might lie more in cabaret than college."

The Tale: a key film of the #MeToo era deserves more than NowTV - review by Guy Lodge in The Guardian. "The first narrative film by the accomplished documentary-maker Jennifer Fox, The Tale was the uncontested toast of a low-key Sundance film festival in January, inspiring the most impassioned reviews out of the snowy Utah hills, as well as some of the fiercest deal-making. The excitement was understandable: by virtue of unplanned timing as well as its own candid, considered storytelling, Fox’s deeply personal work was instantly hailed as a defining film of the #MeToo era.... Fox’s nonfiction experience is apparent in a layered work of autobiographical truth-telling. A superb Laura Dern stars as the adult Fox, returning to a period of childhood abuse that she has only more recently come to understand as such. As a 13-year-old girl (beautifully played by Isabelle Nélisse), she wrote of her experience of entering into a sexual relationship with an adult sporting coach as one of elated, consensual erotic awakening. Using deft cinematic sleight of hand, Fox pitches her past and present-day perspectives against each other, revealing how innocence and precocious desire can be exploited in ways that sometimes take years to reveal themselves as violent."

What is immersive VR good for?

I’m coming to the view that online education has reached its climax state. As with Microsoft Word or the Apple iPhone, we’re at the stage where we don't expect the future to bring anything significantly different or game-changing; new versions and new products only improve the features that are already there, they don’t add whole new areas of functionality.

“What about virtual reality?” asked a colleague with whom I shared this view. “Isn’t that going to change anything?” I replied that I didn’t think it would, except perhaps in a few specific subject areas. Like most new technologies with a powerful visible impact, its transformative power has been hyped. If you can't get your students to pay attention and learn something in a real classroom, why should it be any different in a virtual one?

The key thing which virtual reality offers is a sense of immersion in a scene, a setting or a scenario, and while immersion can be critical to some kinds of teaching and learning you don't necessarily need high technology to achieve it. People can experience immersion through text; most of us who have grown up reading books have had the experience of being so engrossed in a story that it was a wrench to return to the real world. Films too can be immersive: the effect is enhanced by a darkened room and an image that fills the field of vision but these are not essential. What matter is how good the story is; if it gets you in its grip, you can be fully immersed even when watching on a small screen – and if the story fails to grip you, even an iMax screen won’t make any difference to your lack of involvement. Computer games too can create involvement and immersion on the small screen, the focus of attention on your game character and their actions putting you in the game scene to the exclusion of the real world around you; I’ve written elsewhere how clever interactive design can enhance character identification and emotional involvement in even a highly linear and cinematic narrative game.

It all comes down to the quality of writing and design, which in the context of teaching and learning means learning design. If your aim is to put your learner into a certain environment, the fundamental design question is (as I have previously noted): what aspects of that environment are you going to simulate? (The very concept of virtual reality is flawed, to the extent that one can never simulate reality in all its aspects; one has to choose which aspects you are going to privilege.) What kind of simulation you need depends on the learning outcomes you are trying to enable. What you want to represent authentically are your chosen tasks and difficulties, with a realistic possibility of success or failure or some kind of feedback on your learners’ actions. In almost all cases, those are things that can be done without virtual reality, and probably done better without it.

For example, ‘Could you lead an ethical investigation?’ is an example of a text-only simulation, based on multiple choice questions; the technology couldn’t be simpler, but the situation could hardly be more challenging. Based on Richard Feynman’s experience after the Challenger space shuttle disaster, it places you in the role of a scientific expert on a committee of inquiry investigating a major accident. It presents you with a number of situations and for each offers you a number of choices; for example, when the Chair says that one of the organisations involved has “done an excellent” job and that they may never be able to identify the cause of the accident, do you say nothing? Accuse the Chair of bias? Ask the other committee members for their views? Ask what’s the point of the inquiry if they don’t expect to find a cause? None of these choices is absolutely right or absolutely wrong, though some would be more or less wise for yourself, and all could have more or less helpful consequences. What the simulation invites you to practise is your ethical principles, your practical knowledge of how inquiries operate, and your sensitivity to power play in the working of committees. The tests are one of judgement, which doesn’t require anything more than text. A full-blown virtual reality simulation of a committee meeting would not only be impossibly impractical to recreate, it could actually be a distraction from the focus of the learning.

But sometimes distractions and sources of confusion will be part of the challenges which you want to simulate, if the skill to be practised is one of making decisions under pressure. This simulator for medical triage, for example, puts you on a city street after some kind of explosion: sirens and alarms are going off, and there are injured or dying people on the ground all around in pools of blood, crying out and begging for help. The task is to examine each person and categorise them as Immediate, Urgent, Delayed or Dead. The shocking and alarming appearance of the scene is clearly essential to the simulation, the aim being to reproduce something of the circumstances in which paramedics may need to make triage decisions. Yet how much more would be added by presenting the scene in virtual reality? The small screen presentation using games technology (it was produced by the simulation division of a games company) already provides a considerable degree of immersion, arguably as much as is needed, short of actual practical experience.

I can only think of one simulation example for which virtual reality is essential, and that’s a fictional example from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode ‘Thine Own Self’, Deanna Troi is taking the bridge officer’s test; as ship’s counsellor she already has an officer’s rank, but that is a honorary status like the rank of an army chaplain, and she wants to see if she actually has command ability. We see her in Engineering, facing a disaster and the imminent destruction of the ship. Even with Worf and Chief Engineer Georgi La Forge to help her, no matter what she does the problem gets worse until the ship blows up – and then we discover that all this, including the presence of Worf and Geordi, has been a simulation taking place on the ship’s holodeck. She tries the simulation again, and again she fails. Only when she reflects on what a colleague says about the first duty being towards the ship does she realise what she needs to do. Running the simulation one last time, she confirms with Geordi that the damage can be repaired from within a certain crawl way, though the radiation there will be fatal to whoever attempts it. Looking him straight in the eyes, she orders him to enter the crawl way and repair the damage – and that turns out to be the solution. The simulation isn’t a test of engineering knowledge but of command ability: whether the officer can, if the situation requires it, order a friend and colleague to their death.

Now that is something which couldn’t be simulated by a multiple-choice test, or by a cinematic presentation no matter how immersive. And this example is actually not that extreme: most of us will not be in an occupation where we might have to order a person to their death, but if we are a doctor we may very well have to give a patient bad news, and if we are a manager we may very well have to give an employee the sack, or to call them out for poor attendance or poor work. The difficult part is not deciding what needs to be done or thinking of the words to say, but saying them to another human being, standing in front of you in the same space. And to simulate that would be a good use of virtual reality.

(And then again, one could just simulate it through role play, as the best training for doctors and managers does today!)

Seen and heard: April to June 2018

Thimbleweed Park – funny, ingenious and astonishingly rich game, a worth winner of the Adventure Gamers 2017 award for best adventure. It’s 1987, and two FBI agents investigate a murder in an American small town, to find a pair of plumbers dressed as pigeons, a haunted hotel, an abandoned pillow factory, a circus clown who insults everyone, a toxic late-night diner, and the daughter of a technical genius who wants to become a computer game designer. Completely mad, but conforming to a twisted logic all of its own.

Ordeal by Innocence – Agatha Christie drama, in a cracking TV adaptation by Sarah Phelps with typically magnetic performances by Bill Nighy and Anna Chancellor, the tension being kept up with constant flashbacks to the night of the murder, revealing more each time. Coincidentally an earlier attempt to craft a Geraldine McEwan Miss Marple story out of the same novel was repeated on TV several weeks later: very flabby and pedestrian by comparison.

Youn Sung Nah, Momento Magico – Korean skat singing?

An Art Lover’s Guide – TV series in which Janina Ramirez and Adrian Sooke (who seem to have really cracked the double-presenter problem) show each other, and us, round Lisbon, Beirut and Baku.

The Little Mermaid – breathtaking ballet adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s story (not the Disney movie), Northern Ballet accomplishing the extraordinary as usual, this time having dancers move like they’re swimming underwater.

Sully – well-crafted docu-drama about the pilot who landed his airliner on the Hudson river following a total engine failure shortly after takeoff. Interestingly the focus of the film is his airline’s efforts to prove through simulator trials that he could actually have landed at an airport, and Sully’s demonstration that when they took account of the human factor the simulator pilots crashed in the middle of New York, every time.

Catch Me If You Can – amusing true life drama, with Leonardo di Caprio magnificent as a loveable rogue, living the high life, literally, as a fake airline pilot in the era when huge glamour was attached to air travel, and Tom Hanks as the pedestrian FBI agent who pursues him.

Experiment 20 – dramatic reconstruction from audio recordings of the experience of several women who took part in Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to authority” experiments in 1961 – and who rebelled, refusing to (fake) kill the supposed experimental subjects (really stooges) as the experiment “required” them to do.

No Time to Spare – final collection of writings, blog posts, from Ursula Le Guin (d. 22 January), the title taken from her comment on a survey questionnaire from her alma mater, asking amongst other things what she did with her spare time. “What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.”

America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keefe to Hopper – disappointing exhibition at the Ashmolean, the O’Keefe and Hopper works on show being striking enough but there was nothing else of note. The excellent tabouleh in the museum café was far more memorable.

Prague "old car tour" – the highlight of our stay in the Czech capital as part of Polymnia’s concert tour, other memorable moments being a lunch of dumplings at a restaurant on the Old Town square while national dances were performed on a nearby stage, walking across Charles Bridge, singing to a packed St Vitus cathedral for a drop-in concert evening, and an evening dinner cruise on the Vltava river busking our way through as much of our repertoire we could summon from memory ending up (of course) with Good King Wenceslas.

Conversations on writing – a final collection from Ursula Le Guin, being a transcript of radio conversations with fellow novelist David Naimon. (Excerpt.)

Kathy Rain – beautifully constructed adventure game with an engaging steadily unfolding plot and logically sequenced actions, plus an underlying feeling of menace with a few genuinely scary moments. Kathy herself is a great protagonist – a journalism student from a dysfunctional family, with a stroppy attitude but a kind heart – and I’d be happy to see her again (as the narrative hints).

Her – surprisingly intelligent SF film, given the premise: man falls in love with the female persona of his computer operating system. I was expecting a teenage nerd without social skills, but he’s actually a middle-aged man, just separated pending divorce, and an expert crafter of personal letters: he has the ability to write those personal and tender things which people do not know how to say for themselves. With both humans and operating systems, the film balances constantly on the question-edge: is this just excellent linguistic simulation, or is it genuine?

Kung Fu Panda 2 – pretty decent sequel to the wonderful original. Nice to discover Po’s backstory and to find that there’s still good mileage in the joke of a slobbish panda who wants to be a kung fu master.

RED – enjoyable thriller, with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren playing elderly secret service agents dusting off their kick-ass skills. I rather like the title acronym: Retired, Extremely Dangerous.

Matilda the Musical – great family show, and good value despite the price of the tickets. The child cast was superb and the songs were actually good; Miss Honey has two particularly moving numbers. My only quibble with the adaptation: the nasty adults have redeeming features; they’re allowed (occasionally) to be funny and cool, as well as horrible, which is absolutely not the spirit of the book. Children prefer things to be more black and white.

Tacoma – very fine adventure game, from the makers of the structurally similar Gone Home. This time you’re exploring a space station, recovering data after evacuation of the crew. (But did they really evacuate? Was there really an accident? Those are things you have to discover. And what are you yourself doing there? That is only brilliantly and unexpectedly revealed at the end.) The core game mechanic is the recovery of recordings of the crew’s final months and days, which you view in augmented reality: the people appear and talk around you, in outline form, and you have to follow them around the station in order to hear all of a conversation. Added to that the personal artefacts (including numerous books!) and communication records of the crew members, and you really begin to care about them and worry about what’s going to – or rather did – happen to them. A lovely story, involving corporate greed, AI replacement of human jobs, and the way people cope with difficult or impossible situations. See this 15 mins of gameplay video, and this interview with the designer.