Really Useful Knowledge

Elearning and digital (not)natives

2011-12-07T14:39:00.001-08:00

I read an inspiring piece at Online College the other day: Emergence of the new learner. It suggested that the characteristics of the new learner are that they create and broadcast content, they are connected and networked, that they are used to critique and need feedback. Furthermore the new learning environment is peer-to-peer collaborative and process-oriented. This is great stuff and it describes in nutshell some of the key features of 21st century learning.

Inspiring as I say. Or it would be if I'd ever met a learner like that. OK, I exaggerate a tiny, tiny bit. I've tutored several hundred students in the last ten years, and I've lost count of the thousands who've been in forums I have moderated. I reckon I could count the new learners, as described above, on the fingers of both hands. I have no criticism personally of any of the students I have taught or moderated over the years: it's the way they've been taught. As the Online College article goes on to say: “We are brought up, educationally speaking, sitting in neat rows and columns of chairs, listening to instructor-driven lectures, and completing multiple-choice exams at pre-determined intervals.” So people do what they have always done. And it's comfortable to do that. This is connected with my previous post about deep and surface learning. Surface learning is alienated learning, in my opinion – it is personally distant, irrelevant, useful only for jumping through hoops and is often jettisoned as soon as the hoop has been jumped. It's boring and the student can often be resentful and less than fully engaged in a task that is necessary because one is in school, but otherwise meaningless. On the other hand, the student is given little opportunity to explore ways in which the tasks might become meaningful, and no incentive either – surface learning is monotonous and featureless, but on the other hand it makes no personal demands. Real learning can shake your soul, and that is a step too far for many people.

Paradoxically, I don't think I can blame their teachers either. Primary and secondary teaching in the UK has improved greatly since I was at school decades ago. My children were much better taught than I was, which suggests that the teachers and the methods are better. But I don't think many teachers get a chance to teach as they are capable of teaching because they like everybody else in the primary and secondary education system, are focused on grades and league tables. It doesn't matter how good or bad a teacher you are, your one and only job is to get good grades, and as many as possible. So they teach for the exam, which is not necessarily the same as teaching for the learning. And that rubs off on the children who get the message that learning is a) not under their control b) not interesting in its own right and c) aimed at getting grades rather than having any intrinsic value. Perhaps I exaggerate. I'm sure I'll upset many a secondary school teacher if they read this. I don't intend to; I think they are genuinely trying to do a good job, but in a situation that militates against children ever being able to take control of their own learning – a key prerequisite for deep learning, and for thinking.

Also, learning happens in the context of a person's whole world. It's not just the teachers that are responsible, but the whole of society. Teachers don't stand a chance if the child they've been teaching goes home and hears what the teacher is doing rubbished by their family, their friends and their media. Our society teaches us how to do things and what things to do – and by “our society” I mean us, not some mythical thing for which nobody can take any responsibility. Driving is a good example. We get taught the mechanics,and a bit about manners, then we go off and drive the way everybody else does, which causes both chaos and carnage on the roads. More on that here and here. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of how we learn to drive, just to use it as an example of how powerful the learning is that we do from those around us.

I teach level 1 modules for the Open University. Most of my students have done no formal learning since school, regardless of what age they are. We get more and more young-ish people coming to us. Out of 25 current students 7 are under 25. That is they left school less than ten years ago. They, like everyone else, still need to learn how to learn. That is the first and most important aspect of my teaching relationship with them. Linked to that is the fact that they do not know how to learn online, and in fact are completely unfamiliar with the online environment as a place of learning. So I need to address both of these issues – learning how to learn, and learning how to learn online.

Learning how to learn is relatively easy to deal with. Every student arrives with their own motivation. There are some who will listen to me and some who will not. I don't mind that, as long as they get what they want. I can enthuse and inspire those who will listen and are open to being inspired. And I can start to teach them the benefits of critical thinking – the ability to look for the bigger picture, the habit of always asking why, the habit of never taking the taken-for-granted for granted, the habit of questioning everything, habits of honesty and objectivity, openness to new ideas, learning to base judgement on evidence. Interesting, isn't it, how many of these characteristics are personal rather than intellectual ones. It's hard work, it's a tough job, but it's relatively easy to conceptualise.

The elearning thing is a bit trickier though. Generally speaking students are not taking to elearning like ducks to water. They do what they have to, and they otherwise tend to ignore it. This is treated by some as a bit of a puzzle, particularly if you subscribe to the digital natives theory, which says that new generations of learners grow up with the online world. They're used to it, so they should naturally be able to learn in it. Doesn't seem to be the case with my students. Doesn't seem to be the case with other students either – there is an interesting survey from Canada – If Students Are Digital Natives, Why Don’t They Like E-Learning? – the conclusions of which are summed up by the title. And in fact the idea doesn't hold water, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, assuming that they know how to learn online assumes that they know how to learn. This doesn't seem to be the case. That is to say, they use a method of learning (everybody does) – usually the surface method, unless they have a reason for getting involved in something when they may well switch to the deep method. But using the deep method involves developing the skills and practices mentioned earlier on, and if people haven't developed those skills through repeated practice, then they won't be as good at it as they could be. That will be less satisfying for them, and it may be that they will drop back to the old, less effective but less demanding ways of learning. Unless they're consistently and enthusiastically taught to learn in this way. (I'll return to that.)

Secondly the assumption is made that if people are comfortable “being” online, they will be comfortable “learning” online. It ain't necessarily so. Being online for many people is about chatting and pursuing leisure interests. It is specifically not a place to engage the brain. Engaging the brain involves an entirely different set of habits and attitudes, and it takes an effort of will to move from one to the other – until you get used to it, and then the students will switch from Facebook friends to Facebook tutor groups with the same facility with which I do it. But the point is that they have to learn how to do it, and if they are not given the room and motivation to do it, they won't.

And there I think we academics in higher education, with some notable exceptions, are failing our students. There is not enough alignment in our teaching practices, and not enough acknowledgement of the basic skills that need to be learned by most university entrants. Alignment in teaching practice has been a problem for a long time, and remains a problem. Back in the 70s it appeared that lecturers looked for critical thinking, but taught and assessed conformity in ideas and the acquisition of detailed factual knowledge. (Entwistle, N. (2005) 'Introduction'. In: Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N., (eds.) The Experience of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education. 3rd (Internet) edition. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment. p6.

And now I teach two courses where the importance of working online and collaboratively is acknowledged, and the tutors are required to offer online tutorials, but all the marks are given for traditional written assignments. If you think it's important, you should mark it.

Secondly, we don't acknowledge the need for the majority of our students, of whatever age or background, for a proper introduction to what learning online really means – the ability and the need to both control and juggle the sources and the motivations of our learning. When to put effort into working collaboratively so as to get the benefit out of it and when and how to put the effort into and learning critically so as to be able to take full control of their own lives.

The only question that remains is – is it really that important? If students can still learn satisfactorily in the traditional ways, why not let them do it? Because, rather like all those schools that are only “satisfactory”, it's not good enough. Surface learning is an old skill, suited to a world in which you could be a good worker and a good citizen without ever thinking too much. Deep learning has become a necessity for surviving in this world, both as a worker and as a human being. Students can get by making use of their education in a second rate way just as they always have done. And in some ways governments would rather they did – they don't want questioning, persistent, well-informed citizens, they want compliant ones. But for us as individuals, we have two choices, we can stagnate, or we can take control of both the style and the environment in which we learn. That means getting on top of the manifold ways in which data and information are spread across the internet, and learning how to evaluate, manipulate and deploy them. Doing any less means second tier jobs for second tier citizens. So, yes, it is important – important enough for us to insist that our students get the best they can out of both learning and elearning.

Deep and surface learning

2011-12-07T09:02:00.001-08:00

We've been considering issues about deep and surface learning on H812. Good course, H812, but deceptively quick. It's very part time, takes two years, one assignment every three months or so – it's a doddle, I thought. But the weeks fly past with a new topic each week; blink and you miss one, and at my age I blink a lot. Deep and surface learning attracted a lot of chat, and at least one misconception.

There's a very good summary of deep and surface learning at the HEA: Deep and Surface Approaches to Learning. It gets the distinction right between deep learning being critical and surface learning not. The misconception I referred to above was that some people thought that wide learning entailed surface learning, e.g. For a law student who needs to learn by heart a number of not very well connected cases, it would perforce be surface learning. I don't see it that way at all, and I don't think inventors of the distinction thought so either. Even if you're skating the surface, you can learn deeply. It's not about what you're learning so much as the way you do it. To take the law student example above, learning case law is a gritty but necessary undertaking. Broadly speaking, you can either learn a series of unconnected names, dates, principles and applications, or you can learn each case as a contribution towards a (probably fuzzy) understanding of an area of law that may connect eventually to other areas, where you can see the principles operating in similar ways, although in completely different spheres. The first student may well turn into a competent lawyer. The second is likely to turn out to be better,because they understand better the way the law works.

It's interesting that the HEA page concentrates on the meaning of deep learning rather than surface learning. It has a list of the characteristics of surface learning, but, other than that, doesn't go into much detail about it. I would have thought that the primary concern for teachers was how to turn surface learning into deep learning wherever possible. For that we need to understand what surface learning is – what motivates it and embeds it into a student's practice.

For me the key characteristic seems to be that it is a disengaged form of learning, learning that does not involve the student, that is kept at a distance from the student's being. It enters their mind, in a special compartment, marked “Nothing to do with me”, and sits there until the student has been examined on it or leaves school, whereupon it instantly self destructs. But it never enters their soul.

In my view, far too many people learn to learn in a surface way. I'll sketch the reasons why this is in another post, but for now I'll just take it as a given – to go into the reasons in detail would take far too long. Regardless of what the reasons are, that fact is a big influence in determining how we need to teach. One of the big debates of course will be whose responsibility it is – there will be those who say that if a student is learning in a disengaged way, it's only their own fault – they should take responsibility for themselves. And there is a tendency then to say that they should dig themselves out of their own hole. I don't think that follows. To me it doesn't make any difference whose fault it is; we still have to teach in a way that will re-engage them if it is possible.

There are two elements. One is attitude, one is skill. To learn at a deep level, you need an attitude of engagement, and you need the skills to learn. Your attitude can be influenced by your teacher, and the skills can certainly be learned under your teacher's tutelage. So that's our job as teachers sorted.

Identity, place and Eastbourne

2011-10-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

More pics from Eastbourne, this time of interest to DD101 students, on the creation of identity and difference. In this case what we're looking at is the manufacturing of identity, and of difference, through the artificial creation of individuality. I came upon this gated housing estate being built while I was out for a walk.

First, they picture the beach and the sea at Eastbourne. This estate is miles from the sea. The word "Heights" in the name is a bit of a giveaway.

This manufactured community is intended for the over 45s only. No audible children or music etc. (Click on the image to expand it, and you will see the legend on the side of the van.)

This is where it gets really artificial. The estate is still being built while some people are already living there. The bungalows are being built and sold with their own "individuality" already established. This one is sold with its Chinese themed decoration ready installed. The next one, difficult to see here, has, with calculated incongruity, a Beatrix Potter theme. And so on down the street.

I don't know how long this shed has been in place, but not long enough to grow all the creeper. That was installed along with the shed.

Part of this is about the manufacture of community by putting up buildings, putting a (admittedly porous) fence around them and artificially delineating who should live in them. All of those are grist to the mill of the social science student. But in this case there's a specific application to the first few chapters of DD101, where the theme is difference and inequality. In this case the developers, as well as manufacturing community, are manufacturing difference - or to put it another way, manufacturing individuality. Treat it as a street, like the streets you've been examining so far in DD101. But note that this time any differences or individualities you see in the exterior of the bungalows has been put there deliberately and randomly by the developers.

The seaside

2011-10-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

Just some shots I took at Eastbourne the other day.

They make a different class of beach hut there (running water and gas supplied).

They have their own tea chalet round the back. The Union Jack provides an extra touch of something.

And a Dotto train.

There's a very nice pier, and some winches. These are not like the winches at Hastings, which will be illustrated later.

Judging from the rust on the wire, these winches don't get used much.

This is an exercise in the creation of a seaside place and experience. The tea chalet, the train, the pier, and the winches all recall the nineteenth century creation of the seaside atmosphere. It's soggy with nostalgia, to quote Tom Lehrer. For AA100 students there's a lot here than resonates with the material in Book Four.

International Teach Like A Pirate Day

2011-09-19T12:31:00.000-07:00

I'm very disappointed that nobody responded to my eloquent post in the #change11 Facebook group about International Talk Like A Pirate Day. So I thought I'd up the ante by blogging about teaching like a pirate. I don't mean charging into the room shouting "'Zwounds", and "Harrrr", and "Shiver me timbers", complimenting all the women on their buxom figures, and crossing swords with all the men. Though that has a certain appeal compared to some tutorials I've been involved in....I just wondered how far we might get by looking at piracy as a metaphor for teaching. First of all, piracy is a subversive activity, and a lot of teaching nowadays is subversive. Is that a good or a bad thing? I'm sorry to say that in most circumstances it is a thoroughly good thing. Sorry because I wish it didn't have to be. But we live in a world where more and more people seem to be concerned to tell people what to think rather than telling them how to think. For me the essence of teaching and learning is that the learner ends up with their own view of the world and the mental equipment to analyse and evaluate any situation they are faced with. It doesn't matter how many A stars you get; if you can't do that, the learning has failed.Pirates live by their own rules. There are many examples of pirate codes. And teaching nowadays involves many collaborative activities, and many classrooms, particularly online ones, in which the rules are negotiated rather than laid down by a person in charge, thus this part of the method seems to fit quite aptly.Anyone can be a pirate. You just need to know how to buckle a swash. And anyone can be a teacher. Not all are called teachers by any means, and not many go through the qualification process to get a certificate that says you know how to teach, but we now demand a lot more from our students in terms of being teachers as well as learners. Two sides of the same coin, and for far too long we've only let students be one side of the coin.Pirates like dressing up in funny costumes and blowing things up. Well, OK, not all teachers would go that far, but we do stretch the boundaries of what's expected from time to time. Actually some of my best teaching has involved dressing up. That's part of transporting the students into a situation where they live the history they're learning. (As for blowing things up, I took a science course a couple of years ago, at the age of fifty-ahem, to fill in some of the gaps left by my lamentable approach to science when I was at school. It was the OU's S104 Exploring Science, and I loved every minute of it. I have only one regret about it, which is that we didn't get to blow anything up, though I very nearly did with my potato in the microwave experiment.)Pirates don't flinch from a challenge. Teaching is a profession of being constantly challenged. Oh, yes, those long holidays, the easy life, regurgitating the same lecture every year..... If only. Our own learning is a constant challenge, and every bunch of new students is a new challenge as to how to get the message across, how to get them learning and being responsible for their own learning in their own way.Pirates never known where they're going to be tomorrow. Nor do teachers. Any class you start may take you in an entirely different direction to the one you intended. Sometimes you have to bring the class back to the learning outcomes, but even so the way you get there can be astonishingly varied.So, are teachers like pirates? We are quietly subversive, and, more and more, we make our own spaces in the world. Rather as there is a public sphere and a private sphere, perhaps what we have, or can occasionally create, as we do with this MOOC, is a collaborative sphere, in which we agree our own rules, make up our own journeys, and have a jolly good time.

MOOC thinking #change11

2011-09-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

I am a teacher and a lifelong learner. I learn when I teach. I learn sometimes in the interstices of teaching. Sometimes I learn for teaching. Sometimes I learn just for the sake of it. I've signed up for #change11, the MOOC to end all MOOCs. Though I shall be disappointed if there are no more MOOCs.
I still have no idea what I'll be focussing on when the MOOC happens. I've been thinking about my academic priorities for this year (apart from making sure all the students pass...). Here's a short list:

To enable students to be proficient learners whenever and wherever is appropriate
To change their view if the world, to include critical questioning of the taken for granted
To enable students to communicate clearly and purposefully
To link the purposes of education - work and citizenship

Surrounding all these ideas is the issue that technology is changing the way we learn and teach, and shifting us towards more co-operative, more collaborative ways of working with a much more nuanced attitude towards knowledge and authority. These inevitably change people's reactions to the authority and knowledge found in the workplace and in the political sphere. So I want to examine what difference that makes.

I think my third and fourth points will be priorities for the MOOC. Enabling students to communicate is for me about academic voice, finding their own way to communicate with academic language rather than just taking on the words and producing alien writing - how to be themselves as academics. (While refusing to contemplate the horrors I just visited on the English language in that last phrase.) Working online gives learners more and different ways of expressing themselves, and thus changes the way in which learners develop their voice.

The fourth has been a bother to me for a long time. On issues like this I often find myself to be an uneasy liberal. I much prefer people to learn because they want to, not because they have to. And because it improves them, not because it improves somebody else's profit margins. Apart from anything else, it's more effective. But I have no problem teaching people to be good workers. I concede there may be a difference between what I mean by a good worker (thoughtful, critical, purposeful) and what governments and employers mean by a good worker (skilful, compliant). If I'm teaching someone to use their brain, their critical faculties, I'm teaching them to be a better worker, whether their boss likes it or not.

I also think that learning in formal and semi formal settings must usually have some purpose beyond the student. It can be very satisfying to learn something for my own sake, but given that we are usually spending someone else's money, I don't find it sufficient to say that learning for its own sake is justifiable. (or if the learner is a net tax payer, then a lot of other people are spending their money.) I like the idea of learning for citizenship. People who hone their brains become better citizens, because they can better judge the options before them and their governments, question more cogently the evidence put before them by experts (and by charlatans posing as experts), and arrive more conclusively at decisions that need to be made. (again probably less to the liking of the powers that be than to me.)

So the two purposes amount to the same conclusion about what and how to teach and how people should learn. There's no contradiction, but rather a unity between the purposes. That sounds very nice as a statement, but I want to be able to back it up with better evidence and argument. So that's what I think I'll be focussing on in this MOOC: a small sector of how technology affects the methods and the purposes of learning.

The force of water

2011-09-17T13:32:00.000-07:00

This is a splendid example of the force of water in action. The place is Crackington Haven in Cornwall, where a very small river runs down a steep valley and into a pool near the beach. The water in the pool seeps through a bank of sand and pebbles, and trickles out onto gently sloping sand which stretches seawards several hundred yards when the tide is out. It faces west so low tide on a sunny evening is the essence of holiday.In October 2010, after some steady rain, the pool filled and burst through the pebble bank. On the first night it cut a channel about two feet deep through the top of the beach. By the next day it was three feet.

Here is the pool at the bottom right and the new river flowing upwards to the left.

This and the last shot show the river flowing. It's not very fast which makes the shifting of sand and gravel even more impressive

These two shots show the river at about three feet deep 24 hours after the breakthrough

And on the next day the depth of the channel is six feet. So it's taken a not very fast flowing river 48 hours to cut a six foot channel through some pretty hefty building aggregate. (note: the people in the shots make it look a lot more than that – they are out of proportion. I didn't have a friendly victim with me who was prepared to stand in the river to give a proper impression of the scale.)

It didn't take the sea long to put it back together over the winter though. Here is the beach today, once again filled in.

And to finish some rock formations with a difference.

And another, particularly appealing, rock from a few miles up the coast at Widemouth Bay.

The Tao of spelling

2011-07-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

Conclusive proof that spelling matters arrives in the form of an analysis done by Charles Dunscombe and highlighted by the BBC. He says that spelling mistakes cost companies business on the net. For instance, the specific impact on one company was that sales doubled after a spelling mistake on the sales page was corrected. If it has such an effect on internet sales, we can extrapolate the effect on job applications, for instance, or reports.

I am forever telling my students to check their spelling. I don't expect people to actually be able to spell nowadays (more's the pity) but I do expect them to take a tiny (I emphasise the word "tiny") amount of trouble to use their spell check and to take a little more trouble to get used to things like apostrophes - check whether they're using "it's" meaning "it is" or "its" meaning "of it". I even give them a very limited set of handy hints (behind the OU firewall). I am usually talking to a brick wall - I make the same corrections at the end of a course as I do at the beginning. I need different strategies.

I am thinking of rules:

1) If I find mistakes a spell check would have picked up, you will lose marks
2) If I tell you a rule, like how to distinguish "it's" and "its", you will lose more marks.

But basically the skills for students are simple:
a) if it doesn't matter to you, make it matter, because it does
b) use the spell check before submitting the assignment
c) make a note of mistakes you make regularly and keep it pinned by your monitor
d) get to know my wiki, or another site like the University of Bristol's Improve Your Writing and make continuous use of it.

Meanwhile I can link to another story here, the one about the Swiss political party that has been set up with only one policy objective, to ban PowerPoint. Read the article here, and check the first line of the story.*

....

....

*If you don't see it, check the spelling of "soul".

The Tao of “incredibly”

2011-03-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

I have only recently begun to pay proper attention to the conventions of academic writing. It's not something that I have covered systematically with my students. I tend to take my cue in this regard from the material in the courses I am teaching. But recently I have begun to realise how important it is. Academic writing has its own conventions and its own style. It is important for students to develop their own academic voice as they progress through their studies. I do believe, firmly, that it should be their “own” voice, not just one in which they have taken on the jargon of whichever academy they're in, made completely impersonal. There's a debate about whether academic writing should be impersonal. I tend towards the view that it should be formal but not necessarily impersonal. I know many will disagree with me, but the search for impersonality eventually removes the soul. In my opinion. It's very important, I think, for academics, among whom I include students, to speak in their own voice, although with the register of the academy.

The key characteristics of academic writing are that it is:
- formal. It uses proper sentence and paragraph construction and relatively formal language – not colloquialisms etc
- precise – where description is concerned it must be accurate
- tentative – when conclusions are being drawn, they should not be too definite – in academic study all conclusions are hypotheses, there to be tested, ready to be disproved. Thus we say, for instance, “This suggests that...” rather than “This demonstrates that...”

The reason that I have been thinking about this just lately is that I have noticed more of my students using the adverb “incredibly” in their assignments. I have begun to score it through and write “No, it is not” beside it. This word alone has finally made me decide to pursue the issue of academic voice properly.

Note to students. If you have used “incredibly” in one of your assignments, you have used it in a place where it cannot possibly mean what it says. For instance, “The Benin bronzes are incredibly beautiful”. The bronzes are there in front of you, they are beautiful. Their beauty is, self evidently, credible, otherwise they would not be there. The word “incredibly” is not just loose, it is actually self contradictory, and completely useless in this context.

The reason students use it is that, of course, it is popular in common parlance. I don't mind that. Ordinary language uses words loosely, metaphorically, poetically, and develops with them all the time. What it gains in mood, spontaneity and timeliness it loses in precision. You do need to lose some of the spontaneity in order to gain precision. But if you gain precision, your vocabulary expands, because the riches of the English language lie within your reach. Think of the words you could use to describe the beauty of the Benin bronzes:

amazingly, astonishingly, especially, fabulously, strangely, uncommonly, abundantly, conspicuously, eminently, emphatically, exceedingly, exceptionally, extremely, highly, immeasurably, immensely, incalculably, incomparably, inimitably, intensely, notably, powerfully, remarkably, strikingly, superlatively, supremely, surpassingly, tremendously, extraordinarily, greatly, highly, noticeably, particularly, profoundly, superlatively, surprisingly, truly, unusually, wonderfully....

You could even use “very”.

But do not use “incredibly” in an assignment. Ever.

Tool and use

2011-03-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

While at ICEW, I heard two presentations in succession about the benefits of mhealth – what the use of mobile phones, particularly 3G, could be for patients. All sorts of ideas mentioned and all sorts of benefits. I found it very exciting but a colleague sitting next to me found it difficult because there were so many problems of implementation in the way. One he suggested, which I agreed with, is that so much depends on how medical personnel use the technology, which made me instantly think of my own surgery back home. This is good activity theory territory; how people use the tool determines the object of the exercise.

One person here talked about emailing his doctor and getting a reply back by text. I can't do that. I live in the richest corner of one of the richest countries in the world. Our doctors refuse to use email with patients, and haven't even heard of texting. They have a wonderful patient appointment system, but the patients aren't allowed to use it. They have to go to the surgery or phone in to make an appointment. If you're ill you don't want to go to the surgery just to get an appointment, so you phone up first thing in the morning along with everybody else, and you have to keep phoning or leave the phone on ring back for 20 or 30 minutes till you get through. And this is to a village surgery with six doctors and about as many nurses and support staff. They even now have a computerised arrival system, a big plate by the front door with a note on it that say “Touch the screen to arrive”, (which is a bit disconcerting because I have arrived, otherwise I wouldn't be standing there reading the screen).

When I'm in the surgery, I get to know a lot of other people's business. The receptionist takes phone calls and starts talking to the patient about what the condition is. Often the receptionist has to speak loudly and clearly, so everybody in the waiting room can hear and can deduce the caller's identity and condition. There is plenty of technology available that could reduce that loss of privacy, screens round the phone, boosters for the voice so that the signal could be increased rather than the receptionist having to shout but the surgery has never considered installing any of it. (I have great respect for one of the receptionists who has developed a linguistic and grammatical technique that enables her to get information from the caller without telling the rest of the room what that information is.)

All of this technology has been used in this surgery for the benefit of the staff, not for the patient. The communications technology is used to keep the patients at arm's length. Technology that could be used to protect patients' privacy is simply not used. It's a clear lesson that technology never works by itself. If you make a piece of technology available, you always have to take into account how people are going to subvert your intentions for their own purposes.

Patient safety

2011-02-21T21:08:00.001-08:00

Our first speaker, Uma Nambiar, noted that clinical engineers have to make their value obvious in the medical hierarchy. She suggested that one way to do this would be to make clinical engineering patient oriented, specifically to assert that clinical engineering is about patient safety. Another speaker mused about how the Indian clinical engineering profession might get there, given that he thought Indians had a cultural problem with safety, using the way Indians drive as an example. This gave me pause for thought on the basis of what I had already concluded about Indian driving. There are two ways to approach safety. One is to prevent accidents happening, and the second is to deal with the consequences. Our second speaker mentioned people not using safety belts and cycle helmets – that's minimising the consequences. There is some evidence that minimising consequences actually makes people drive less carefully as they begin to believe they will not get hurt. My view is that it's not a cultural thing so much as an economic thing – safety features in cars, good maintenance of buses, proper replacement of tyres, rebuilding of roads all prevent accidents but don't happen unless they can be afforded. In terms of culture, if anything it goes the other way – Indians, possibly because of their culture, are, in my view, better drivers than people in the UK are.

In terms of patient safety that made me think that there is probably an Indian way of doing patient safety. It will be different from the western way, it will have different strengths and different weaknesses, but it will work better in India becvuase it will be specifically Indian. Western patient safety is based on two principles which are not encessarily the most effective. The first is the highly materialistic Judaeo-Christian life model of western culture in which everything that can be done must be done regardless of the cost in money or the patient's dignity. The second is that a lot of safety features, devices and practices are not about patient safety so much as about doctor safety – there for the purpose of vitiating litigation. It may even work against patient safety in the long run. I would not like to see either of those features replicated in other countries.

India

2011-02-21T21:07:00.000-08:00

My first impressions of India are of a country that I really enjoy and that will continue to grow on me. I've been here two days and seen only urban India in Delhi and Pune. Many things strike me; it's not as hot as I expected – I came at the right time of year. The food has been good, and I have found so far, as I expected, that Indian food in India is very different from Indian food in the UK. All the Indian people I have met so far speak to each other in Hindi, and to us in English. All of the big advertisements round about are in English. I have found some things quite disconcerting. I haven't been bothered about the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth; that is so well known already that direct exposure to it is not a surprise. The way in which streets and spaces are organised was a bit disconcerting but I am getting used to it. I can't quite get my head round the sudden appearance of a shack or a sales pitch in the middle of rubble.

I have had just a surface view of India so far – I have seen a small group of students, professionals and intellectuals. I have mixed with hotel and restaurant staff, and I have seen life on the streets – the driving, the way people walk, the selling of wares on small scales in Hindi and large scales in English.

I feel a clear sense of Indian identity very present to me. I have not been able to define it but there seems to be something very specific and Indian about the way everything is – the way they dress, particularly the colours, the way they talk, the way children behave, the language they use in advertisements and newspapers and on television, their sense of their own history, their sense of themselves, a certain way of mocking their own weaknesses. The history was also very present and real to me, in the tourist places I visited. At Qutb Minar I felt I could see how it would have been when it was built, how the whole place would have been when alive and functioning. At India Gate I felt a sense of profoundness at the guarding of the memory of those who have fallen in India's wars. The memorial was so like others in Britain, France, Germany, the USA, and yet it had an Indian stamp. At best I can express it as a certain sense of warmth and centredness about the people I see all around me. It made me wonder about the relationship between India and the force of globalisation. It seems as if cultural globalisation has just bounced off the surface. The McDonalds, the Costas and the Dominos Pizzas are there but they haven't wormed themselves into the Indian identity the way they have done in some countries. So there is a very different relationship here, it seems, one in which the Indian identity is maintained and vibrant. Some things are the same all around the world. People in India want to get rich and want to have a good time. They are attracted towards certain western products, and lifestyle – I see it in the apartments, the clothing, the cars, the lifestyle that is offered on the big advertisements, but I see no danger that it will ever suck their soul away.

India, driving and order

2011-02-21T21:03:00.000-08:00

I really like India. Our schedule left us time to sightsee in Delhi on Saturday afternoon, and in Pune on Sunday morning. In Delhi we saw the Lotus Temple, the Qutab Minar and the India Gate. In Pune we went for a long drive to a monument and found the road to get there was shut. But we spent a lot of time driving, and that was really fun. The first thing that strikes the English ear is that they use their horns a lot. The second thing is that they need to because lane discipline is an alien concept here. To the English sensitivity the whole thing seems to be entirely chaotic, and possibly quite intimidating, but after looking for a bit longer, I realised that it is very definitely order, just not as we know it.

I've only experienced urban driving in India so I don't know what it's like on the motorways. But urban driving in India is alert, purposeful and highly collaborative. They are better drivers than most UK drivers. Not just because they have to be; I think there's an element of choice about it too. First of all, to describe it.

They drive very close together, both side to side and front and back, much closer than would be tolerated in England. If there is a gap they go into it, regardless of how narrow it is or whether it is between lanes. They drive on the wrong side of the road, even when traffic is coming directly towards them; by the time it gets there they have melted back on to the right side of the road. If they want to pull out into the traffic, either from the roadside, or a minor road, they do. The oncoming traffic flows around them. They hoot for information, not out of vexation. They hoot to let people know they are there. Auto rickshaws and trucks often have painted on their back “Please hoot”. I've never yet heard someone hoot in anger, despite all the manoeuvring and proximity. In Britain we use our horns to tell people they have annoyed us, though my British readers might be interested to know that the official meaning of a horn sounding, as in the Highway Code, is “I am here”, exactly as they use it in India. That was the first thing I really noticed, that the sounding of horns was not an argument as it would be in the UK, but more like a constant conversation. When they drive into a space other people may hoot at them, but it's to let them know that they are very close. They are often driving at 30 mph about 3 inches apart, they are constantly manoeuvring to avoid things ahead of them, and things behind are constantly manoeuvring to avoid them.

So they have to be alert to what is going on around them all the time, they have to anticipate things happening from any direction, they have to be purposeful to make progress, and they have to drive with restraint in order to let all the other drivers around them make progress as well. And they have to be capable of driving inches apart from everything else on the road. They do so very successfully, and I don't think many British drivers would do nearly so well.

Possibly one of the reasons is the different forms of transport. There are cars buses and lorries as in England, there are more motorbikes and scooters, and more bicycles. And of course pedestrians. There are also bicycle rickshaws usually pulling large and heavy loads very slowly, and auto rickshaws, which are little more than 3 wheel scooters. So there's a combination of small and slow vehicles for everyone to negotiate.

The second reason is that very few people are concerned to get to their destination as quickly as possible. In the UK we tend to regard everyone else on the road as an encumbrance. In India they seem to recognise that everybody is trying to get somewhere, and they aren't the most important person on the road. There may be a cultural element in there somewhere, something to do with British culture being very individualistic, whereas Indians are by and large more attuned to collective responsibilities. Although we don't think of it as such, road driving is a highly collaborative activity. Watching traffic at a busy roundabout, say, you can see how drivers co-operate with each other to get everybody through in an apparently random but reasonably fair way. It may also be noticeable that the driver who tries to jump the queue, of whom we have many in the UK, slows a lot of other people down. Individualism can actually prevent people getting what they want in the most effective and efficient way. In a way, seeing how others drive is most influential as a way of reflecting back on how we drive.

The final factor, I think, is about awareness. I have no idea about conscious awareness in Indian drivers. It is certainly high in practice as the lack of accidents in Indian driving. In UK drivers it is lamentable for the most part. Whatever we're taught in driving lessons we forget as soon as we have passed the test; I have met very few British drivers who feel any need to actually concentrate on their driving when they are driving. I get the impression many think that would be a waste of time they could much better use chatting to their passenger, talking on their mobile, whether legal or not, listening to the radio or just day dreaming.

But to return to my original theme, that of order, I see in the Indian situation something that in British eyes would be simply chaos, but which is in fact very well ordered behaviour by thousands of people all in a very small space. It is, in fact, ordering of the highest quality, just different to the we do it in Britain. That in itself raises different questions about how we perceive order. There are very clear and powerful cultural influences on what counts as ordered and as disordered in different situations.

Egypt / AL Jazeera / media power

2011-01-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

I'm watching events unfold on the streets of Cairo on Al Jazeera. They have just put up a side by side feed of what their camera is showing, and what Egyptian state television is showing. It's a very good illustration of the power of the media.

The reproduction here is not so good. The one on the left is Al Jazeera showing a police vehicle that has been set on light by the protesters, and is part of a rolling montage of clips of crowds, destroyed vehicles and burning buildings. The local commentators are also referring to explosions and the sound of gunfire. The picture on the right is Egyptian state TV, taking film, according to Al Jazeera, approximately two hundred yards from the Al Jazeera camera. It shows peaceful scenes across Cairo with no sound feed.

The average Egyptian citizen, if they can't hear the sounds from their own windows, might be forgiven for thinking that nothing is going on. There is the power of the media.

Meanwhile, media or no, protests are widespread across urban Egypt (there is no word of what is happening in the countryside), and the regime has taken time to catch up. Now there is an internet black out, and much mobile coverage is down. But it appears to be too late. People are on the streets, it appears, not because they have been called out by opposition parties, but because they are fed up. The regime has not been able, or has not felt able, to instruct the police to be violent. The army has just moved in to Suez and Alexandria, and is being welcomed by the protesters. Neither police or army is making any effort to enforce the nighttime curfew that was ordered today.

Perhaps they're too busy wondering how to react to Hillary Clinton's statement this afternoon that there has to be reform in Egypt. A mainstay of their international political support is detaching itself, and they have nothing to replace it with. I'm guessing right now that mubarak will be gone very soon.

The Tao of referencing

2010-10-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

I get concerned that we don't teach students enough about the reasons why referencing is necessary, apart from the fact that we din in their ear about plagiarism all the time. I also get concerned about the fact that we teach students rules of referencing that are not strictly logical, but we still get finicky about the students doing them "just so". I think we're in danger of teaching students to obey rules without thinking about the reason for the rules existing. I think our students deserve better than that; we should always be teaching them to look behind things, and to understand the reason for things - to be active in their learning. So here is my view of why we reference, with a note at the end about the game we play.

I think there are four reasons for referencing.

First and foremost is courtesy. You are a member of an academic community. If you use the work of a fellow member of that community, you owe it to them, and to yourself, to say thank you. As a member of this community you should take pride in observing the practice of courtesy.

Second is to enable your reader (me, in this case) to find the material you have used. I may wish to find out more about it. I may wish to check that the way you have used it is what the author intended.

Third, in assignments, it enables me, your tutor, to teach you better, because I can identify more clearly what is your own work and where you have used somebody else's. That means that I get to know your thought processes more accurately, and I can tailor my feedback better to your work. That means you learn more effectively.

Fourthly, and in my opinion least, it's to avoid any issues about plagiarism. Plagiarism is not an issue for most students. It's a big issue for universities because of the rotten few, and because universities are rightly concerned about protecting the quality of the qualifications they offer.

So that's why, as a student, you should reference your assignments. And be proud of doing so.

There is an unfortunate element of game playing to a degree, which is to do with getting the formatting of referencing precisely right, because there are markers who will condemn you to the outer reaches of hell if you get them wrong, even though it makes no difference to your reader's understanding. For instance, the general idea is that when you use somebody's work you put a brief reference to it in the text, and then a full reference in your list at the end of the assignment. In the Harvard system the text reference is supposed to take the form of (name, date)n e.g. (Smith, 2010). Then the end note reads Smith, J (2010) How To Keep Everyone Happy With Your Referencing, Unimportant Press: Nowheresville.

Now if you only refer to one Smith, it's obvious which end reference it applies to. but you still have to put the date. I know this from my own bitter experience (as a student on an OU course):

Tutor: "You must put the date in all text references."
Me: "But if I only have one text by Mr X, it doesn't need the date because it's obvious which reference it refers to."
Tutor: "But if you don't put the date, how do I know which one it refers to."
Me: (goes and finds a nice comfy wall to bang my head against)

It happens. Sometimes you just have to play the game. Get over it. To know how it's "supposed" to be done in the OU, read the guide at http://library.open.ac.uk/documents/Harvard_citation_hlp.doc (It's a Word document for download.)

Now go back to the beginning and remind yourself what the real reasons for referencing are.

Stress management

2010-10-20T05:01:00.000-07:00

I was asked for some resources about stress management in the workplace, and I had to think for a while about how best to present them. I could just give a list of links and leave the reader to it. But I don't think that would be fair for a variety of reasons.

Stress management is quite a difficult area for getting the balance right. On the one hand, everybody has some stress in their lives, and it's fatally easy to start concentrating on stress instead of concentrating on the job. On the other hand, it's also fatally easy to ignore somebody's complaints, or somebody's depressed demeanour because everybody has stress in their lives, etc, etc.

There has been some interesting work done on counselling in organisations like emergency services. When a crisis happens, it has become standard practice in many places for counselling to be offered to those, like police officers and paramedics, who dealt with it. Evidence shows that many people are better off without counselling. Counselling after a traumatic event can make them relive events that their mind is healthily working at forgetting. On the other hand, many people need, or at least can benefit from counselling after such an event. So it's right that employers should offer it. But, when somebody says, “No, I don't want counselling”, the trick is to know when to accept that, and when to press them to change their minds.

It's also tricky because stress can be good for you. Every performer and athlete knows that a certain amount of stress before an event can help to get the best out of you. Each person has their own level at which helpful stress turns into unhelpful stress, so the key lesson here is to know yourself. Observe when you feel good and when you feel bad. Get used to it, and you will predict it better and be able to react better to your circumstances.

Another factor is that reactions to stress are usually intensely physical. Often your best strategy when stressed is to go for a walk. It gets you out of the situation, and it deals with the chemicals that your reaction to stress has produced in your body. You will get to know for yourself whether, for best effect, your walk need to be a long or a short one, a hard, pumping, sweaty walk, or a gentle stroll – everybody's different.

For some more detailed ideas about what to do, go to:
"Stress Management: How to Reduce, prevent, and Cope with Stress".

If you Google “stress management”, you will find lots of alternatives. This is one of the best I've found.

There is also: “A Useful Approach to Stress Management”, which goes in to how to manage stress within a working team. It's a slightly odd resource because the pages look as if they're supposed to be passworded. If you can't get into it, it will be because they've finally figured that out. While it's there, use it – there are a lot of good pages there.

The same but different

2010-10-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I spent three days freezing in a hotel in Bangkok. (They had air conditioning, and they used it.) As a result of that experience, I was invited to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town. UCT runs several courses in the field of Healthcare Technology Management (hereafter “HTM”), and the purpose of my going there was to introduce my company's software, PLAMAHS, to the students, and to do some teaching of generic management skills.

It was the first time I had taught outside the UK, apart from doing conference presentations, so a little bit nerve wracking. I've done the multicultural bit in the UK many times, but never faced a class entirely from other countries. Just before I went, I came across an article about cross cultural teaching, quite up to date, which said that us westerners have to adapt our teaching style because all this interactive stuff doesn't go down well with African students. If the teacher tries to draw learning out of them, they won't accept that they are getting value for money. I won't cite the article because I thought it was a load of rubbish at the time, and my sample of 13 students proved me right. though I did have a back up plan prepared in case I wasn't.

My host was Mladen Poluta, director of the HTM programme at UCT. This is me with him at the Rhodes Memorial.

And this is Mladen with his wife Jean, and they are probably the two best tour guides that Cape Town has to offer. They are so proud of their town, and they love to show it off.

I didn't go with theories to teach, though there are plenty of those. it was more of a practical session, how to do managing. I had my own rubric, forged through years of experience, my own and other people's:

- managers know things

- managers create information

- managers shepherd

- managers solve problems

- managers lead

- managers focus

- managers plan

I also had a little list of what managers don't do, or, more precisely, don't take:

- things for granted

- no for an answer (but see Attila the Hun)

- people in vain

- adversity lying down

The reference to Attila the Hun is to "Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun" by Wess Roberts. It's about 20 years old now, and it was a great success at the time. Fashions come and fashions go. There's always a new book, a new package, but the basics of good management don't change.There are just different, more modern, perhaps more zesty ways of putting it. In this case, one of the leadership secrets of Attila the Hun is "Don't fight battles you can't win". As one of my students instantly pointed out, "Sometimes you have to". Yes, sometimes you can't take something and you have to resist even if resistance is futile. But the point I was making is that you never go into a situation like that without having had a good look, weighed up the options, and taken a deliberate decision.

So we did a series of discussions and exercises on each of the areas in my rubric.

Next exercise.

And the next one.

Getting into it now.

At one point each group had to choose a presenter without using words. This caused some hilarity.

PLAMAHS slotted nicely into the part about creating information. We talked about the relationship between data and information, and how information is shaped by the requirements of the user. I then linked that on the second day to the focussing and planning areas, using Key Performance Indicators as a framework.

Towards the end they got an exercise in interpreting data from a report, which stretched their brains just enough.

There was just time for a trip round some of the Cape with my indefatigable guides, Mladen and Jean, on the way to the airport.

And a final stunning view.

Bignor Roman Villa as a tutorial venue

2010-07-11T01:41:00.000-07:00

I tutor a variety of courses for the OU. My portfolio illustrates my claim to be a tutorial jack of all trades. Currently I am teaching AA100 The arts past and present, B201 Business organisations and their environments, and U116 Environment: journeys through a changing world.

My background is eclectic. My first degree was in classics, so when the staff team for AA100 suggested field trips as a possible substitute for dayschool appearances, I thought about doing a villa. Classics is one of eight disciplines covered in AA100 and they go large on villas and leisure in the final block. So I fixed up a trip to Bignor Roman Villa, and went there to do the risk assessment visit. That was in March when the ground was muddy. The AA100 dayschool visit happened in May and was a success. I dressed in a toga (an authentic one by the way, sewn and stitched in authentic Roman Lewes, none of this cheap fancy dress rubbish). See the photos here. One of the students commented afterwards that when they first saw it, they thought it was just a gimmick but they were impressed that I used it as a teaching tool at various points during the day to illustrate how things like dress demarcate social boundaries. The toga is not designed for manual work, so anyone wearing one is marked out as above that sort of thing. Some of the students also tried it on during the day, and came to realise quickly what a pain it is to get on – another factor in it not being a manual worker's garb.

The villa has plenty of evidence about daily life for both the manual classes and the leisured. We had the opportunity as well to consider how evidence survives and is interpreted. What can you tell about Roman society from this pot, sort of thing. We were able to look at how the Romans used the landscape and the way they farmed. Interestingly, much of that area is being repopulated with vines, so we have come full circle as the Romans introduced viticulture to this country. We were able to look at mosaic techniques; I had a small mosaic set for the students to experiment with. We were able to look at manufacturing techniques and I impressed upon them how differently everything had to be done in an age with no electrical or even steam power. We looked at diet (for the upper classes fish sauce in practically everything, yuck) and farming practices.

So all in all an excellent venue for a dayschool. As one would expect. Good coffee and wonderful cake in the café too.

My next move however was serendipitous. I had a problem with the date for a tutorial for my environment class. When this problem occurred the only available alternative I had was Easter Saturday. I knew that all the colleges we use as venues would be closed, so what to do. I thought of Bignor, and we duly held a tutorial at Bignor. This was remarkably successful, although when I booked it, it hadn't occurred to me why it would be. The key factor was that we could look at the piece of land on which Bignor stands and compare two utterly different ways of relating to it – ours and the Romans'. Geologically the land between the south and north downs is very interesting. It is part of the Weald-Artois Anticline. The south downs (a few hundred yards south of Bignor) are made up of the edges of layers of terrain broken by a massive upward thrust tens of millions of years ago. The north downs have similar edges. The bulge in between was worn away and an accumulation of soil has formed rich and flat agricultural land which has been farmed continuously since before Roman times. Apart from minor changes in temperature that have affected our summers and winters, there has been hardly a visible change over two thousand years. So this was a magnificent opportunity to observe how two entirely different cultures and technologies interacted with the same piece of land.

One of the key changes happened not exactly at Bignor but east and south of it. Stane Street is a well known Roman road that went just east of Bignor from Chichester to London. In Roman times it was a very important road. Nowadays this part of it is simply not used. So what caused the change? In Roman times Chichester was an important garrison, and the road was intended to allow for the swiftest possible movement of troops and equipment to London. Since then Chichester has ceased to be strategically important, for two reasons. Firstly a gradual silting of the harbour has meant that access to all but small boats has become impractical. Secondly boats have got bigger. With advances in technology in early modern times warships in particular got so big that Chichester, even at its deepest, became useless – deeper water ports were found along the coast at Portsmouth and Southampton, which is where the main roads past Bignor now point.

It was particularly interesting to look at ways in which people in Roman Britain might have had to look after their environment despite their small numbers and relatively low impact way of life. The population of Roman Britain at the height of the occupation is estimated to have been around 3 million. That's about four times the size of the population of West Sussex today. Plenty of room then. We had a look at the furnace for the underfloor heating (used mainly in the dining room). It was a salutary reminder about conditions of life. While the family were enjoying their three or four hour meal with friends, some slave or low paid farm worker was standing possibly barefoot in freezing mud, feeding charcoal to the furnace. The evidence points to charcoal being used rather than just baulks of wood. Charcoal production itself was a big industry, demanding technical skill on the part of the burner to get the temperature of the cooking wood just right – too hot and you got ash, not hot enough and you got very hot wood, but not charcoal. The amount of heating needed meant that an awful lot of wood got used to make the charcoal, and that meant that the wood growing round about had to be replaced if the workers were not to go more and more miles to find it. So the basic art of coppicing – sustainable management of stands of trees - was organised, and ensured the villa owners a plentiful supply of heat when necessary.

We also considered windows as a key feature in the relationship of people and nature. Having looked at the basic Roman art of underfloor central heating, we considered what happened as far as light and holes in the wall were concerned. The question is what did Romans put in their windows. They did have glass, but it was translucent rather than transparent – it admitted light but not vision. They might have had glass in the important rooms in the house – the dining room - but probably not elsewhere. Shutters were employed, but otherwise it was just open air. People were simply used to much greater variation in their living temperature, and having no, or very little control over it. That kind of thing makes for a very different relationship to nature than what we have now.

I wasn't sure whether taking my business students there would make sense, but Bignor is after all a business, and in fact currently has plans for an expansion of the operation with a new visitor and education centre. (Being private ,it hasn't been squashed by a lack of public money.) So I took them there. I gave them half an hour to look round the site, so that they could understand what the business was, and then we had a presentation from the site manager, Lisa, about the new business plans. We had a discussion about what they had learned and what they could see of the business. The most fundamental part – what does the business actually do – was one of the most interesting. It is easy to think of the villa as a historical site, in other words, its historical nature forms its business. But in terms of what people actually come for, it makes more sense in many ways to think of it as a small part of Britain's very large leisure sector. That alters the way you look at what the business needs to offer in order to be successful, because you look at what sort of things people expect to find when they visit a site. It's about “experience”, not just something to see, which forms the focus, but how people are treated while they are there. That gave rise to some fascinating discussion. It related neatly to the course theme “ways of seeing”.

I was then really cruel. I divided them into groups. I gave each group a theory out of those we had worked on over the previous few weeks, and I gave them the task of applying that theory to the business, and coming up with ideas for business plans based on their findings. (One of the theories was isomorphism - perhaps that was a bit over the top.) They spent about half the tutorial on that, an hour and a half altogether, while sampling the café's delicious coffee and cake. At the end of it, all the groups had some clear and pointed ideas for how to develop the business, but many of them said how difficult it had been to apply the theory. I thought they were right on target. They've been working through a variety of theories and a variety of approaches to the business world and their own experience, and about now is time they were getting into applying theories thoroughly to real cases. It's not easy (it is after all a level two university course), but it does repay effort.

The toga seemed suitable attire for teaching B201

One of my students overheard a visitor say to his partner, "Hey, there's a bloke in a toga!!" which gave rise to some discussion about the sales potential of dressing up....

So there you have it. One venue. Three entirely different groups of students, three entirely different subjects. And all found something of value. And great cake.

Bignor Roman Villa

2010-04-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

It was a glorious day for an AA100 dayschool at Bignor Roman Villa.

That was lucky because the toga is not the warmest of garments.

Looking good, though the glasses are a bit of a giveaway.

After sending the students round on a tour by themselves (difficult to do a guided tour with the whole group because the rest of the punters can't get past), we spent some time looking at the details of archaeological method. Bignor has a nice little photo album showing how dedicated archaeologists are, with a number of people in wet weather gear digging away in the middle of winter. They reminded me of all the OU tutor-in-a-kagoul videos that we know and love.

The we looked at what sort of deductions we could make about daily life from the evidence we had in the villa. And I pointed people to Lindsay Allason-Jones's book "Daily Life in Roman Britain", which is a very accessible read. I also pointed them to Sheppard Frere's article on Bignor, which demonstrates the kind of academic endeavour that underpins a book like Allason-Jones's. The Frere article is 60 pages long and carries a minutely detailed record of the excavations at Bignor, and is therefore largely indigestible unless you're really determined. But without that kind of work we wouldn't get books like Daily Life in Roman Britain. (Sheppard Frere, C. M. Kraay, Francis Grew, Dorothy Charlesworth, B. R. Hartley, M. G. Wilson, Martin Henig, Christopher Salter, The Bignor Villa, Britannia, Vol. 13 (1982), pp. 135-195. Accessible via the Open University Library.)

I gave the students as exercise to do on continuity and change. Looking at what has changed and what is different is a good way of getting to grips with what life was really like and how it works. One very tiny example is the lack of buttons and zips in premodern times - the way clothes work is completely different now. On a larger scale we looked at Stane Street, one of the principal roads of Roman Britain which passes just east of the villa on its way from Chichester to London. It's almost entirely out of use now. There are roads between Chichester and London, but they are by no means the most important in the country. So the question I asked the students was why. The answer is a variety of things but one of the key ones is that Chichester functioned as a very good port in Roman times and hence was a good place to garrison. As the harbour silted up (so now it does a very good trade in pleasure boats) and as ships got bigger, so the natural places to go became the deeper harbours of Portsmouth and Southampton further along the coast.

We had a look at a map of the whole Roman Empire in my trusty atlas of world history, so we got a good look at how trade functioned to unite the empire and to provide ways of funding the imperial apparatus.

Then we had a few goes with the toga.

This is me doing a bit of open air oratory.

This is Miles, one of the students, looking very senatorial. A purple stripe along the edge signifies a senator. Miles already knows that his name actually means "soldier" in Latin, hence "military" etc.

We had a good look at the theme of leisure and work, given that part of the block material in "Place and Leisure" is about leisure in the Roman villa. One of the issues I wanted to get across was the whole idea of someone's leisure being someone else's work. Supplying food and heat for the owner and his family was a full time occupation for quite a few people. This is nicely illustrated by the furnace outside the winter dining room that supplied the hypocaust. While the family were entertaining inside, some poor sucker was outside, probably barefoot in the mud, feeding charcoal into the furnace. (No photo of that, must get one next time I go.) That issue alone organises a lot of the economic and social structure of Roman imperial times, and to be honest, any time that doesn't have electricity. The daily business of life takes up a lot of effort on somebody's part. The Romans were a highly organised society, with a great ability for large scale and accurate engineering works like roads and aqueducts, and they had a very capable bureaucracy, able to keep the empire functioning for hundreds of years. But nearly everything still worked on muscle power, either human or animal, which makes their achievements all the more remarkable.

Our final activity was a quick look at mosaics; I have a little kit. We looked at the process of making the tiles, then constructing the mosaic. Again one of the issues is the time it took to do everything manually. They reckon that the whole of the long corridor (about 50 yards altogether, of which we can see about half) would have taken six people six months to lay, and the much smaller but more complicated box mosaic, would have taken a person eighteen months. Nice work if you could get it, I suppose, compared to being outside feeding a furnace.

A pretty good day altogether, I think, and thanks are due to Lisa and Karen at Bignor for helping it to happen.

How seriously should we take Avatar?

2010-02-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

This is cross posted from my other blog. This is the first time I've cross posted, but I just couldn't decide where to put it. Film goes in A Comfortable Place, stuff about learning goes here. And there are also issues about nterpretation and critique of works of art which will probably bore my AA100 students to tears. So it's here as well as there.

"Avatar" is on my list of all time favourite films. I don't think it's the greatest film ever made, and to be honest I wasn't very taken with the 3D effects. But you don't need 3D to be immersive.There's been a lot of stuff around in education recently about immersive worlds and what they can or can't do for education. The less reflective writing tends to assume that places like Second Life are unproblematically immersive and other environments are equally unproblematically not immersive. But SL isn't immersive if it doesn't engage you. You can be there, and your avatar can be stunning and you can be talking to and interacting with other people, but you can still be aware of the world outside the computer, and you can still be bored, and you can still be checking when the tutorial is going to end, and it is not being immersive in the slightest. By the same token a plain bog standard class in a plain bog standard classroom can be totally immersive if the teacher gets it right. People seem to forget that.

By the same token I found Avatar a totally immersive experience, and that was without the 3D specs on most of the time (because I found them uncomfortable). I thoroughly enjoyed it. I forgot the passing of time. I identified with the characters. I didn't want it to end, and I felt slightly bereft when it did, just like I always used to feel as a kid when I walked out of a cinema.

This is partly about fit between film and viewer. As a viewer, I am very happy to be entertained. I don't need to be thought-provoked in order to enjoy a film. I don't need a deep message. My ever shifting and ever expanding top one hundred contains a lot of films that would make other people wince. They're not in my top one hundred because I think they're great films, but because I like them. I think there are two reasons why I like Avatar. The first is the special effects. Everything works beautifully. Interestingly, the world of Pandora and the Na'vi works better than the rude mechanicals - the diggers, helicopters and firepower - which you might think would be easer to model. And the second reason is the story. Stories don't have to be big and complex in order to succeed In fact very often the simpler the better. And here we have two very simple stories interwoven - boy meets girl and culture clash. Boy meets girl is the simplest of all. Boy meets girl, boy conquers obstacles in the way, boy wins girl. Culture clash is marginally more complex but not much. Boy meets alien culture, boy is attracted by good side of alien culture, boy confronts bad side of own culture, boy and aliens unite to defeat bad side. And that's all there is to Avatar. The green message is there but it's part of the conflict that's there to make the story work, not because James Cameron had a message. So for me it's great entertainment and the right people win.

The question arises of how seriously to take the film. I have to say I don't take it very seriously, though in some circumstances people are right to take it more seriously (see below). James Cameron himself is quoted in the Telegraph: "It's about how "greed and imperialism tend to destroy the environment," he said in a recent interview. "It's a way of looking back on ourselves from this other world."" But this should not necessarily be taken at face value. It is a press interview with a man who knows all about putting bums on seats. I don't believe he really takes the politics of the film all that seriously. And neither do I. It has a "green" message, but the message is there for plot functionality and because it resonates with the market demographic.

I'm now finding other people's reactions to the film very interesting, and wondering whether I need to re-evaluate simply because of the number of people it has upset. The first upset is, I think, badly founded, and based on a misinterpretation of what happens. Progressives are upset at the racist subtext that shows a "primitive" tribe needing a white man to save them. You could read it that way if you wanted to, but I don't see it. What I see is our hero Jake growing through his contact with the Na'vi in such a way that he becomes a different creature. The hero who returns to lead the Na'vi is a synthesis of the best of Jake with Na'vi beliefs and ways. So it's not about western capitalist superiority at all. If anything it's about its limitations. I had a similar dispute once with someone over Tootsie. It's surprising what a ding dong we got into over such a slight film. (It's not in my top one hundred; it would probably be in my top three or four hundred.) The story is difficult and currently out of work actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman to land a short part in a soap, is surprisingly successful, so they extend his contract, leading to the dilemma of how to get out of it, which is eventually resolved. My friend thought it was deeply sexist because it showed a man being more successful as a woman than women could be. I thought it showed that becoming a woman made him learn about the female viewpoint, confront his own masculinity and anger, and emerge a better and stronger person. Hence again it was not "being a man" that made the difference. It was "learning about the opposite". So, although, quite a lot of people have picked up on this idea of Avatar being racist, i don't buy it.

I'm more impressed by the fact that Avatar has upset the American right, the Chinese Communist party, and the Vatican. Any film that can upset those three must have something going for it.

The American right don't like it because of fairly overt references to both the Vietnam and Iraq wars in the context of asking the audience "to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism-kind of" - John Podoretz, in the ABC News link above. OK, but if you're going to get upset about it, try being a little less imperialist when you do go to war in places like Iraq.

The Chinese don't like it because the theme of forced migration is too close to home for a regime that regularly shifts people off places it wants to dam up or build on. I don't know if the film has actually sparked protests, or just that they have moved pre-emptively to ban it. They've been quite clever though, taking it out of 2D cinemas while allowing it to remain in 3D. That way they can say they haven't actually banned it, just that it wasn't doing well in the 2D cinemas. I assume that there aren't that many 3D cinemas and they are located away from potential trouble spots. It's a very good illustration of the dance of power that the Communist party in China is constantly engaged in with its own people. While remaining quintessentially authoritarian, in fact downright repressive in outlook, it is realistic enough to know that it can't upset too many Chinese too often.

And finally the dear old Vatican. Some headlines say the Vatican hates Avatar. Here is what Osservatore Romano actually said: "It has a great deal of enchanting, stunning technology, but few genuine or human emotions.... Its significance is in its visual impact rather than in the story, and in its messages, despite the fact that they are hardly new... The plot descends into sentimentality... and "a rather facile anti-imperialist and antimilitarist parable which doesn't have the same bite as other more serious films." But it ended by saying the spectacle was worth the price of a cinema ticket. All that from the Telegraph. There's not much there that I would disagree with, apart from thinking myself that there's nothing wrong with going to see a film just in order to be entertained. At least they haven't ordered the flock to boycott the film with missionary zeal as they try to turn the world back the way they think it should be - medieval. So basically the Vatican isn't being as reactionary about Avatar as it is about many things.

My favourite links in the OU

2010-01-22T01:52:00.001-08:00

I'm only allowed 20 :-(

April fool: a lesson for all my students

2010-01-02T01:50:00.000-08:00

I got this via Mediactive. Prentiss Riddle (@pzriddle) tweeted on April 1st 2008: "What I like about April Fool's Day: One day a year we're asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365."

Doing things to women's bodies

2009-12-28T12:05:00.000-08:00

In pictures I mean. We've had a bit of a debate in AA100 this year about the relationship between art and reality, focussing particularly on male artists' treatment of the female form. Nowadays that sort of concern focusses less on painters and more on photographers, and their ubiquitous use of Photoshop.

This was very well illustrated lately by Hacker Factor, who went into the technicalities of how you could tell when something had been Photoshopped, using an illustration from the Victoria's Secret catalogue highlighted by "Photoshop Disasters", in a post entitled "Body by Victoria". It's a very instructive read from the point of view of seeing how it's done.

It also raises important issues about what women are and what we are trying to make of them. Much of the Photoshopping was just tidying up (depending on what you think about nipples showing through clothes). But Hacker Factor demonstrates that they lightened her skin tone. The unanswered question is why.

It's also instructive to compare how the owners of the images react. Victoria's Secret reacted openly and fairly. Following the exposure by Photoshop Disasters and Hacker Factor, they revised the image. They left some of the Photoshopping in but it wasn't as bad as before. See also "Still A Secret".

That is in stark contrast to the behaviour of Ralph Lauren, when found by Photoshop Disasters to be indulging in similar behaviour - they slapped a DCMA take down notice on them. You can't see it there any more, but you can see in on Boingboing. So Ralph Lauren are saying they can make women look any way they want, regardless of the woman's real shape, colour, or anything else.

It's interesting that the Liberal Democrats' recent campaign on Real Women was derided in the usual quarters as meaningless. But when photographers and companies are routinely doing this kind of thing to women's bodies, there must be serious implications for gender and power issues. And those impications must be taken into account when studying those issues in book 1 of AA100. (And I note that a couple of weeks ago the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the Olay advertisement featuring Twiggy, which was one of the targets of the campaign, was indeed misleading.)

Employability

2009-12-13T15:07:00.000-08:00

Following my last post about what's the point of studying the humanities, and the issue of employment skills, this video makes my point for me nicely.

It's worth watching all the way through, but - health warning - it has a vibrant sound track. The relevant bit starts at 40 seconds in, and discusses how jobs are changing. We don't know what jobs we will want skills for in ten or even five years time. So what the economy needs is people who can think and who know how to learn what they need for new jobs. Sounds like good OU graduates to me.

(There's an update by somebody different at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8 but it's not so relevant for my purpose and the theme tune isn't nearly so funky.

What's the point of studying the humanities?

2009-12-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

This is a much rehearsed question, particularly in the light of research that suggests that arts graduates are less successful than any other discipline in turning their qualifications into high salaries. In fact it is estimated that some arts graduates would have done better to start work at 18 or even 16. E.g. Male arts graduates may never recoup degree cost.

The problem bothers me a lot as I teach humanities, and is brought into focus by starting out with this year's batch of AA100: The Arts, Past and Present students, most of whom are at the beginning of their OU careers. Should I counsel them to give up their degree now, and go and work in a call centre? Lovely mates, flexible work, meet interesting people, annoy them intensely... No, of course not. But what's the point? How can our humanities students get the best value from their degree, in whatever sense we mean the word value? Particularly when starting with AA100 which has such a wide variety of disciplines. (It's designed to introduce the student to all eight disciplines within the faculty - classics, art, literature, history, history of science, religious studies, music, philosophy.)

I discussed this recently with my students and tried to relate it to the skills they're already learning as they go through book 1. The course is quite well organised in that each chapter has learning outcomes, and the alert student can track their skills as they go through the book. I try to get all my students to anchor their learning by returning, at the end of each chapter to the beginning and analysing what they've learned against the stated outcomes. (Do they all do that? I don't know, but I have my doubts.) The task here is to set the chapter learning outcomes in the wider context of the overall purpose of the course.

Asking the students why they're studying is too wide a question. Twelve students will give twelve different answers, and I wanted to finish by lunchtime. I focussed the question by pointing out that everybody here, even those paying the full retail price, was supported by other people's money in the form of the grant the OU gets from taxes. So I asked them how they could justify spending other people's money on this course. I instantly got the answer from several that they had paid taxes all their lives, and were just getting back what was rightfully theirs. That didn't change the question, just turned it round. If someone is a net tax payer, then what is the justification for somebody else taking their money to enjoy themselves doing AA100.

They got the first answer relatively quickly - it improves employability. Several were intending new careers. We left aside for the moment what exactly they will get from this course that will make them more employable. They got to the second answer a bit more slowly and hesitantly, but eventually they argued that in some way they would be better as people. I became Socrates at that point. "But what do you mean by that?" My answer to that is that people become better citizens. I know that that is very disputable, but to me it's the best way of making the purpose concrete. I think that in saying that I'm not parting company with the liberal tradition of education in the sense that it's something people use for their own purposes. I do part company with the misuse of liberal tradition that implies that education for its own sake is essentially purposeless.

A word of definition before I go further. I'm aware that "good citizen" is a weasel phrase. It can mean anything to anybody. I know that in government speak a good citizen is a compliant one. But in Rob speak a good citizen is a critical one.

The idea of education for its own sake is a fine one, and one to be upheld. But I'm not sure if I can justify spending other people's money on it. I'm also suspicious because some, though by no means all, of the roots of liberal education are class based. They come from the days when leaving the ruling of Britain to largely uneducated landed gentry was no longer sufficient, and what was needed was an entire class of relatively well educated gentlemen. (Note the lack of women.) Knowledge of the classics became one of the markers that distinguished gentlemen from the rest, and enabled us to expand the machinery of government so that it was capable of managing, first of all the great unwashed of these shores, and then the even greater unwashed of the countries we colonised. There's a whole history of the mechanics of imperialism hidden in there which I lack the wherewithal to unravel, but it leaves me uncertain about anybody's right to pursue education for its own sake at somebody else's expense without any other sense of purpose.

So, having established that in my opinion there must be a sense of purpose, here we return to how that purpose is to be expressed in learning. I think here that humanities programmes in general have a lot to answer for. I'm ready to be corrected on this - my smapling is purely happenstance - but my impression is that far too many arts graduates leave university without having a really good idea of what they can do. When an employer asks you what you can do for the company, the answer, "I can read Latin and appreciate Mozart" doesn't really cut it. It used to, for running the empire, but we live in a different world now. So what can arts graduates actually do?

I think that the skills and qualities for being a good worker and for being a good citizen are pretty much the same thing. The issue is how to develop them and how to articulate them. In one way AA100 students are lucky - they have a wide range to choose from. Each of the eight disciplines has its own core skills and concepts, all of which can contribute to the student's development as a critical thinker and problem solver. Philosophy - understanding the structure of an argument and the ways in which language can deploy meaning; history - the organisation and evaluation of documents (and in particular the ability to understand what is not said); art - understanding visual representation and how people react to, and position themselves in relation to, social and historical movements; etc, etc.

At a more detailed level, let's take the learning outcomes for one of the chapters in book one of AA100. I call them learning outcomes, but actually only chapter 1 gives you learning outcomes as such. All the other chapters outline the aims of the chapter, rather than the outcomes for the student. I don't know why. It makes a useful learning exercise though: I get the students to translate the chapter aims into learning outcomes.

From p198 of Waterhouse, H (2008) The Dalai Lama, in Moohan, E (ed), Book 1: Reputations, Open University: Milton Keynes:

"This chapter will enable you to:
l explore the development of competing reputations
2 consider the role and reputation of the Dalai Lama
3 study the past in the light of a religious worldview
4 engage with the beliefs and practices of a non-western religious system
5 use visual and documentary evidence."

I'll miss out the intermediate stage of translating this into actual learning outcomes. All of these can be subsumed into higher order outcomes, ultimately emerging as skills, concepts and qualities that enhance the student's ability to work well or participate well.
- understand how selective representations can be, and hence the need to gather different points of view and understand their motivations
- understand group dynamics and group representation
- understand how cultural differences influence people, and the way they think adn react to other people
- evaluate visual and documentary evidence in all sorts of situations
and so on.

At an operational level they translate into "transferable skills", and we see a slight parting between employability and citizenship. But it is still important that students can turn the study of the Dalai lama, Cézanne and Shostakovich into transferable skills. Some of the skills are more generic, are not mentioned in the chapter summaries, but are equally important for both spheres:
- being able to search for and evaluate information, electronically as wella s physically
- being able to set out an argument in writing and use supporting evidence
- being able to meet timetables and deadlines
- being able to work with other people - which we do in tutorials, both face to face and online.

The books are less help here, because of the lack of relevant learning outcomes in the chapter summaries, which makes it more important that students are aware of what they are developing for themselves. Emerging with an OU degree demonstrates that you have the skill and the ability to organise yourself and achieve goals. There are still some benighted employers who think an OU degree is worth less than a brick one. Fortunately more nowadays realise that putting yourself through a part time degree means you have just the kind of self discipline and commitment they are looking for. These attributes are not specific to humanities degrees, but sometimes humanities students forget to articulate them.

That's why, when one of my students, badly behind with assignment one, asked if it would be all right to leave it and go on with assignment two, I said that was a bad idea/ I said it was their choice (I always do - I don't dictate to my students unless the rules say I have to, and sometimes not even then). But I said I wanted to see the assignment. They did complete it and hand it in, and it was good. Now they're working on assignment two, and they are also, because of making themselves do that task, a step closer to getting a decent job.

In the sphere of citizenship there is a different emphasis. The ability to assimilate complex information is crucial as in employability. People need to be able to work out for themselves who they believe on issues like climate change, terrorism, international relations and so on. The ability to make complex moral judgements is also salient. Questions like what should our policy on recreational drugs be need to be debated and answered on the basis of values as well as evidence. These abilities tend (I simplify greatly here) to emerge more from the fine arts, which deepen the ability for self knowledge and reading your own and other people's emotions. This cannot be taken for granted though and neither can the assumption that a finer knowledge of yourself and other people will make you into a better sort of person. I think that there are still remnants of that view around largely for historical reasons. It used to be taken that knowledge of the classics and the fine arts unproblematically translated itself into being a better person (or in the language of the time a gentleman). This understanding was rudely shattered in a single historical moment not that long ago. At the end of the second world war Allied armies liberated the concentration camps. The liberating armies were largely conscript armies, containing numbers of officers and men who had had a liberal education and fervently believed in its benefits. They had to confront the dreadful reality that they were taking into custody German officers who would do the most unspeakable things during the day and then go home and read Goethe and listen to Beethoven in the evening. Some people have found it very hard to accept that basic truth that any moral development requires a choice. That , I believe is one reason why arts students still leave universities relatively ill equipped in terms of understanding what they have achieved - some of their teachers still believe that it ought to be taken as read, when in fact it cannot.

Several of my AA100 students are reading this, I hope, and this last piece is addressed to them. All that above, the need for a sense of purpose, the reasoning behind employability skills, and the reasoning behind citizenship skills, are why I want you to be working at two levels.

"By the end of this chapter, I will be able to use some technical language used to describe and discuss music" (chapter 6 of book 1) and

"by the end of this chapter I will be better able to understand and deploy the technical language of any field I have to familiarise myself with; hence I will be better able to adapt myself to any new situation".

That way at any time you will be working on the skills of the moment and also aware of how those fit into the larger picture of what you will get from this course and from your degree. I will welcome comments from anyone on this piece, and particularly from my students. If my students do comment, please remember that, unlike the group forum, this is a public place.

Successful learning

2009-11-10T16:01:00.000-08:00

This is the first meme I've ever done. Not really a meme because I didn't get tagged. So I don't really know what to call it, but Pat did this on her blog, and challenged her readers to answer these questions. So I have.

What is the most important thing you do to grow yourself as a learner?
I work on learning all the time, not on the knowledge or concepts of what I'm learning - I work on *how* I'm learning, how I can do it better, consciously and continually. I teach a lot of level one university students, and whether they've been in learning recently or not, I find that this is often the most difficult thing to get across - they need to consciously learn about learning as well as learning about the subject matter.

What do successful learners do that make them successful?
It's a very personal thing, different in every case, I think. The thing they have in common is that they have found it. I just keep plugging away. And I set great store by learners taking charge of their learning, especially when they're my students. I actively teach basic student skills, like how to fillet a book for the assignment answer. And I teach them that it's all capable of being fun. And if it isn't then, get interested. That was a lesson told to me by my Latin teacher when I was 13. He told all of us if we weren't interested in Latin to get interested. Possibly the only lesson I really learned when I was at school. I found that it worked.

What do successful learners do to maximize their efficiency?
Again it's a question of what works for you. many people go for walks, limit their time at their learning, leave it at a good stage. Some - not enough in my opinion - keep a journal. I'm quite lazy about that. I've kept journals over the last fifteen years or so (ever since I became a teacher) but it's haphazard. I'll keep one going for a few months, then leave it for a year. In the last couple of years, this blog has served that purpose, but there's a lot of more personal stuff that I wouldn't put down here.

What hinders your success as a learner?
I get bored very quickly. Some of those who know would put that down to spending too much time online, but that's not the case. I've always been like it, especially when I was at school. If were fifteen now, I would probably have been labelled ADHD by now. I'm actually a slow learner. I imbibe facts and stuff at a fairly fast rate, but then I have to wait while I make sense of them. making sense doesn't seem to be something I have much control over. I need to wait while it kind of composts down, and then I can go to a place where I'm not going to be disturbed for an hour or two and sketch it out on a piece of paper. the best places for doing this, I find more and more nowadays, are cafés. There's enough clutter going on in the background to absorb the butterfly part of my brain, and nobody is going to interrupt me because nobody knows I'm there.

What do you do to get over that obstacle?
I have learned to pace myself and to be patient with the times when everything is whirling round in my mind with absolutely no shape or form.

What do successful learners do when they are not motivated?
Get really ratty.

What do successful learners do when they do not know the subject well?
The first thing I do is find out if there's a Dummies book on the subject. I go for something really simple so that I can get the whole picture, and then go for the details.

How does your attitude affect you as a learner?
I've learned persistence. I think that's the most important attitude I have; I just keep going.

To what do you attribute your learning success?
Am I successful? I'm 57 and my learning journey is nowhere near complete. In terms of certificates, yes, I am successful, but I know I am nowhere near the soul of the things I have been examining. I'll keep learning till the day I die. And maybe there are libraries in heaven.

What I got from elearn

2009-10-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

What have I gained from this conference? Lots of things that still need to be articulated - things to do with online and blended learning mostly. A lot of thinking about informal learning. The insight that the dichotomy between informal and formal learning implies that students learn differently in the two situations, which I don't think is true. I've been chucking the idea back and forth with lizit for the last couple of days and if anything I'm more confused now than I was before.* But, wherever my thoughts are taking me I think it's worth probing a bit more. I'm concentrating on what the literature says people do when they learn (which is the context of the wildfire activities stuff, which is how I got interested in it). I want to look at how that relates to formal learning contexts and whether and how much we could change formal systems to make more effective use of that.

And I have the germ of an idea about how to blend informal and formal learning contexts, which will remain mysterious for the time being while I work on it.

*That's not to imply that lizit is a bad teacher, far from it ;-)

And I got to meet a beautiful city.

Reflections

Local transport. I didn't have the opportunity to try one.

Houseboats

The Lost Lagoon

Locals

Elearn Friday

2009-10-31T14:13:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, feeling crap today. Still haven't got over the jetlag. I wake at four every morning. I have survived well so far, but last night was awful. Now I am supposed to be presiding; which means paying attention. As it turns out I presided two really good performers.

James Helfrich - Leveraging Interactivity to Increase E-Learning Effectiveness.
It's about effectiveness - many definitions of interaction, two basic approaches computer centric, and user centric. User centric categorised as observe, choose, perform - each broken into sub categories. Technology centric - toggle select, many select, text, voice, immersion - also subcategorised. Under Observe, pace is much more effective than watch - students take much better notes, and notes result in better learning. Mayer 2003 observed that just having a continue button to press resulted in better performance, because it gave the student control.

Gagne taxonomy of learning objectives. Puzzling result "watch" is better for higher level problem solving than "do". Suggestion is that "do" allows people to skip important things. Students believe voice feedback more than written feedback. (I wonder if I could do assessment summaries that way.) Taxonomy is amalgamated from Schwier Sims Burgon.

M.R. (Ruth) de Villiers, University of South Africa, South Africa - Applying controlled usability-testing technology to investigate learning behaviours of users interacting with e-learning tutorials' UNISA sixth biggest university in the world. Question was what is added value of usability testing. Real enthusiasm about the process of finding out what students actually do. Some pie charts showing difference of time spent on different tasks; same marks. One was really haphazard, but it worked. The point is that, whatever the pattern, it works for them.

Part of testing was to get people to think aloud - this didn't work well, participants were inhibited. So got them to work in pairs or groups, and they talked to each other. Could still assess time on task for individuals. Student P5 was the real test - he just wasn't an elearner. No general conclusions yet about learning, but a promising method.

Ben Daniel, Virtual Learning Community Research Group, Canada; Richard Schwier, University of Saskatchewan, Canada - A Consideration of Learning Processes in Virtual Learning Communities. Two broadly defined learning variables, intentional and incidental. Really good presentation that I'm still digesting. I went to the conference site to download the paper, and the link pointed me to another of Ben Daniel's papers. A very interesting one but not the one I wanted. But it's available at vlcresearch which is a website worth bookmarking.

Valerie Greenberg, Darlene Carbajal, University of the Incarnate Word, USA - Using Convergent Media to Engage Graduate Students in a Digital and Electronic Writing class: Some Surprising Results - blogs twitter SecondLife - reshape how we exchange experience. Forces tutors to revisit instructive interaction. Study on 13 students, 8 male 5 female. Blogs anchored collaborative learning - shared perspectives, common goals and knowledge, and opinion and interpretations. Provocative assignment was around SecondLife - had very strong emotions about SL. Woznitsa on emotions. Why was she surprised that students didn't like SL? I asked her thatand she didn't answer (she answered a different question. Just like students do sometimes.)

It's the afternoon and I'm now stuck listening to two presentations I'm not interested in. I offered to preside, but the one I was interested in has cancelled and been replaced by another one.

Today's fact I didn't know before: Ebbinghaus proposed the curve of forgetting in 1885.

Kui Xie, Mississippi State University, USA; Fengfeng Ke, University of New Mexico, USA - Understanding Deep Learning in Asynchronous Online Discussions - does it occur and how do we know? Learning as acquisition; learning as participation. And how do you test it? Scardamalia - learning as knowledge construction. Table from p3263 of this presentation may be useful for marking scheme for collaboration. One to keep an eye on as they are just beginning antoher phase of their research.

Elearn Thursday

2009-10-30T10:39:00.001-07:00

I have officially designated this the no show conference. The number of presenters not turning up to give their presentations is quite shocking. There was one session today, fortunately not one I wanted to go to, where three presenters were booked for the hour, and none of them turned up.

Martin Ebner, Graz University of Technology, Austria
OLPC (one laptop per child) primary school children using, e.g. ReckonPrimer for number learning - one aim to pilot for roll out in developing world - that struck me as instantly a very diffcult aim, especially when he went on to say that one of their biggest problems had been connectivity. If it's a big problem in Austria, what's it going to be like in the developing world. I dont' have any doubt about the OLPC model, but I have serious misgivings about the way some people think they can set about implementing it. It's the same problem as elsewhere, an assumption that we can unproblematically export western technological models to other places. To be fair to this speaker he made the problems of cultural export clear, but he did seem to be making easy assumptions about the technological model.

Reuben Dlamini, Ohio University transforming the walls of the classroom - the three paradigm change for FutureMinds Initiative. He described the fundamental ideas underlying the initiative (e.g., mindset change, invention process, broad stakeholder ownership, consensus-building process, and participatory leadership), and the strategy by which the FutureMinds Initiative operates. This seemed to me to be at least partly about recognising the fact of informal learning and its power; and about the massive changes needed within the school system in order to engage effectively with it. This pushes me further into thinking that "informal learning" is entirely the wrong phrase for what it refers to. It means what learners actually do regardless of the formality or informality of the situation. Interesting how you see things through your own lenses - I'm thinking a lot about informal learning at the moment, so I see it everywhere.

Zehra Akyol, Suleyman Demirel Universitesi - Design Tips for Online and Blended Learning to Develop an Effective Community of Inquiry. This was based on teh Garrison model - social presence, cognitive presence, teaching presence, back to Athabascaaaa. Research on how this all developed in online and blended learning context. The big issue taht came out is that every COI is different, therefore needs effective design before start

Michelle Scribner-MacLean, UMass Lowell Graduate School of Education, USA; Heather Miller, Walden University, USA - Online Team Teaching: Strategies for Success for Creating an Online Learning Community
Students demanding and needing immediate feedback. We're being paid to facilitate course content, but reality is students bring their admin needs. Team teaching helps here. I was hoping to compare this with my experience on AA100, but I rapidly realised I couldn't call it team teaching because we don't actually do that. It's cluster teaching in which a certain amount of co-operation goes on, but it's really three different groups in the same space, not a team approach at all. I expect some clusters will develop a team teaching approach but it's not mandated.
Elements of a successful team -
- open to the approach
- similar educational philosophies and styles
- strong technology background, esp within course platform
- instructors see benefit of suggestions to improve their teaching

Syllabus is online, instructions are online; dso it's all there for the students to get on with - but teaching is still active.

DIfficulties
- if there is not clear communication between teachers (could do more of that)
- if one teacher is feeling more burdened and taking additional responsibilities for the course
- if students' assessments are being evaluated more quickly by one teacher. (This is apparently a big issue for the students.) Also need to keep interventions roughly equal.

Strategies
- reach out by phone calls or emails, especially at the beginning
- provide a lot of initial support
- set up personal pages with resumes etc

Building assessment criteria together; with rubrics and checklists; is very important. That doesn't work because of the division of labour on AA100. The mods do it on T183 and TT280; can we blend that with tutoring responsibility? Of course we can - that's what they have done.

Dina Kurzweil, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, USA - A Missing Link - instructional design. Or I should say on instructional designers. It's all about relationships; workign *with*. Status issues, teamworking issues, etc. One designer in the audience is introduced to each new faculty, spends a whole day with them, and team teaches with them, so isn't seen as "the tech person" any more. If you consider yourself as a peer, people respond to that.

Renata Vincoletto and Hawa Sydique, Camfed International - empowering young women in rural area in Zambia - through education to university or to business. Introduced new technology a year ago. Goal to train 200 girls in skills like IT, business, etc. A very interesting facet was online mentoring - allowing the women to be mentored by successful entrepreneurs in the UK. There was no electricity supply. Entire system with 18 terminals, 2 servers, projector, printer, modem - less than 1500 watts - less than a kettle. They started with a generator, but are now moving to solar power. First alumnae are now managers in the centre.
Phase 1 introduces concept of entrepreneurship, leadership, lots of games; second phase putting skills into practice; phase three same as 1 but more advanced. They taught them how to use Twitter. http://twitter.com/camfedzambia
Goldman Sachs award "hungry to learn across the world".

Beverly Leeds: Demystifying Reusable Learning Objects - unpackaging objects to change for local context or to repurpose. Good example here of speaking to your audience. Objects intended for teachers so "Evolution" put them into lesson plan format - tasks with objects as drop in resources. Resources developed as mini presentations - enhance ppt using Adobe Presenter. Any block can inform - assess - apply. And any block can be exploratory, enquiry based, directive or diagnostic by moving the objects around.
Evolution materials depository at employability.org.uk. All zip files. All SCORM compliant.
glomaker - for creating multimedia learning objects that can be added to ppt files. She mentioned glo maker: but the site is not currently responding.

Hsin I Yung, National Taipei University of Technology - Integrating the pedagogical agent with eye tracking system to measure extraneous cognitive load - very important to track learners' attention - you can see what they're actually doing (referring back to the thread about informal learning). Key issue is to avoid extraneous cognitive load; split attention effect is negative impact. I wonder if there is a possible negative in terms of being so focussed that you detract from people's learning creativity. Interaction is crucial - the more you have the more you learn.
Yesterday's speakers were telling us Chinese people follow the master. Hsin calls her pedagogical agent tool Confucius, which adjusts instruction level to previous answers. They have another one called Socrates Dialog. Story telling activities.

Marvin LeNoue, Ronald Stammen, North Dakota State University - Building Online Learning Communities with Web 2.0 Tools - LeNoue, works from Knowles basis - andragogy etc. While saying that he thought learning was the same whatever people were doing it. I agree with him, which as far as I can see means I disagree with Knowles. Ho hum. Sociability aspects of web2.0 are so good; ideal for courses. Their work is centred on social network tools, especially ning. Quotes Boyd and Ellison 2007.
Students can customise their personal page (private to the class) - and are very quick to do this. They are ESL students, but they have no problem with basic functions even if not good at writing about it. They try to design pedagogy that takes advantage of this space.
Key issue here is this is flat network, not teacher or institution dominated.

Joan Thormann, Lesley University - Use of Synchronous Conferencing to Help Build Learning Communities - using Skype; has Skype Out ($3 per month) ready to use for any students who are unable to use Skype. Groups of 3 or 4. 1/3 of students reported technical difficulties - but she didn't report on how much this put them off.

Hasan Cakir (pronounced checker), Gazi University, Turkey; Omer Delialioglu, Middle East Technical University, Turkey - Factors Affecting Student Engagement in a Blended Learning Environment. Student engagement defined as effort on educationally purposeful activities. Elements of engagement - time on task, contact between student and faculty, co-operation among students, active learning (learning is not a spectator sport), giving prompt feedback, communicating high expectations, diverse talents and ways of learning.

Cisco's CCNA programme - Cisco provide all materials and assessment material. 40% ftf 60% online. 51 junior pre service teachers 33% female. There was a lot of discussion about the impact of gender on engagement. Turkish woman says they are directed towards things other than maths and science. Some research findings show girls engage less but get higher grades. Perhaps they are better at self directed work. The other speaker for the session did not turn up, so several of us used the spare time to stay around and have a general group discussion about gender and technology, and about learning and improvement.

Hasan

Key issue for definition of informal learning is what is actually being described - are we describing the fact that everyone learns differently. If we looked at the different definitions offered, could we find common themes which afford a different definition e.g. will we find that they all say that students learn differently.

Richard N. Landers, Old Dominion University - Using Social Networking and Learner-Centered Measurement in Automated Social Mentoring Systems. He was motivated to look at inexpensive ways of delivering training to avoid cuts in hard times - I like it. Starts with automated assessment system; then adds mentoring system. Assesses students on 7 point scale from newbie to grand master, different permissions for different levels - grand masters can set up own tutorials. This is well thought out, provides for both collaboration and motivation. This is the kind of thing that really makes me feel I'm not being creative enough - a guy who is doing just the same job as me, and has created a complete environment to encourage his students to learna s well as they can.

Fumihiko Anma, Toshio Okamoto, The University of Electro Communications, Japan - Development of a Participatory Learning Support System based on Social Networking Service "University of Electro Communications" sounds really retro, and a touch goth. Something you might find in a Terry Gilliam film maybe. The speaker wasn't though. Problem: participation in learning communities is necessary but difficult. Many of the easterners here read their ppts. For some it may be better than trying to speak off the cuff in English, but others have good command of the language.This was about using a social networking model to assess cumulatively how well students learn by aggregating their interactions - I think - I'm not at all sure. It's very mathematical.

Elearn Wednesday

2009-10-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

My presentation went well - small audience, but enthusiastic applause, and a bit of decent networking.

Joël Fisler, University of Zurich on eLML and OLAT open source tools for production of learning material; has aa demo server, which will be fun to play with if I ever get any time again.

Marius Dieperink, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa - on failing to connect. How technology can be best used in S Africa to encourage learning. Black students often alienated in class. 80% not English mother tongue. Use of computers and English learning programme positive effect on unmotivated students. The key thing that came out was the big digital divide - should they continue at their own pace or should they try and import technology and ideas from elsewhere. He mentioend specificaly importing ideas from the developed world. I felt strongly and said so, that that would be a big mistake as Africa was developing so differently, e.g. the ascendancy of the mobile phone. He pointed out that many have low tech mobiles, but we discussed the use of texting for teaching. He is currently examining bulk sms as a possible vehicle.

...Another no show - I wonder how many people got the ticket to Vancouver paid and are now enjoying a week off....

Mark Salisbury, and David Olson, Western Oregon University, USA on innovative learning organisations - organisations need to find new and innovative ways to maintain old knowledge and create new knowledge, which means building into work processes a window for new and innovative ways of doing things.

We need to move tacit knowledge into the explicit zone
metacognitive (expert advice)
procedural (examples)
conceptual (instructions)
factual (documentation)

Technologies to support this innovative learning
moodle - only works on Linux
sharepoint - has to be paid for
dotnetnuke - this looks really good
Salisbury's book on ilearning probably worth a dip into.

They're presenting very basic things but in a persuasive sort of way. I don't think they said anything I wouldn't have thought of, but they have the experience of using the three platforms mentioned above. Much food for thought for my other job.

Panel session on cross cultural design
Today's travel tip: take off your shoes before entering a Malay household. A tweet in response to mine about this suggests you can geenralise that to most of Asia. Content: make sure you represent all races, and religions. Another speaker noted Canadian literature tends not to represent Canadian aboriginals.
Research on teaching and learning as uniting tribes of students and tribes of teachers by belnding cultures. Cultural connecting point will be key to open the connecting door. One finding so far for international students is trust is very important.
The 20 Rs
Wei - female and male culture. Also across colours. Cultural barriers intertwine.
Okhwa Lee - trained in western culture. frustrated when returned to Korea. Lot of Korean instructional content is video or media rich. Western is text oriented. In portraits western are face or upper body focussed not often full body. Oriental portraits usually full body with rich background material. Asian viewers focus on background as well as foreground; wetsern focus on central object and often ignore background. Space in west as series of individual objects; in east as inter-relationships between objects. That might blow a hole in the thinking I presented. Are wildfire activities as described by Engeström culturally specific: eastern cultures are taught to learn from the master? In the west speaking develops thinking; in east truth is out there, and speaking is means to express understand - if you know more you speak less. They don't respect people who speak a lot.

Ashraf of Sussex University - his students didn't ask questions in class, so one day he suggested they text him with questions - and they did. So eloquently that he used some of the texts as assignment questions.

Bjorn Pederson - Reflectii - web based video reflection for trainee teachers with friends etc

Joanna Muukkonen - networked model of action, using Activity Theory as a framework.
The aim of the project is to promote active citizenship through open learning environments. Several factors hindering the development of Sense of Community or at least "Sense of Network" have been identified... This is very interesting - it focusses precisely on one of the nodes of the AT triangle. And the project it comes from is about promoting more active and more effective citizenship.

Luke Lecheler - Confetti, online text annotation tool. Looks very nice. Creating a place rather than a space - space is the world, place is your home. My basic question is what does this do that diigo doesn't. - integrates with sources of free texts e.g. Gutenberg. And may integrate with Adobe buzzword. So it does have advantages. But do the advantages justify the extra cost ? Perhaps they do. As this tool develops, it will come to have a great deal of functionality that Diigo doesn't have - and if that functionality enables people to learn better (big "if"), then it will have been worth it. It's a gamble, as all software development is, but this looks like quite a good punt.

And that gives rise to a second question - is there a kind of hierarchy of usability, or maybe a progression. Teachers could try using tools like diigo - public andf freely available, and if they like them could move on to harder stuff, or put a case for developing a bespoke product (is there a market niche?)

Last night

2009-10-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

After waking at four for the first two mornings, I thought maybe last night I would conquer the jetlag. But I was woken at four by a persistent tapping. I realised eventually that it was someone tapping at my door. I opened it to find a very good looking young Asian woman there who wanted to come in. Unfortunately it was the wrong room.

Mixed bag

2009-10-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

A very mixed bag so far. Slow start, perhaps conferences always are. Not helped by the first presenter not showing up. And two more that I wanted to hear didn't show up in the course of the day. There's been some comment on the conference twitter stream.

Mansour Aldojan from the University of Jordan talked about getting faculty to integrate technology into their teaching. He described various issues which all sounded familiar. Many faculty say they use internet fully, but searching questions show they are not using it in teaching. Faculty are used to being in control of the subject matter - I liked his way of putting that. The less innovative faculty demanded more user friendly levels of support. And then after all these and others, he said one faculty member identified biggest problem as lack of good internet access for staff and students. Which kind of leaves the other reasons behind - if the tool you have isn't up to the job, you're not going to be very in favour of it. We forget too easily the simple issue of how capable the internet connection is. Clearly an issue in Jordan; also an issue in the developed world. I was talking to a woman who lives on a farm in Quebec and says her university will not use Second Life because not enough students have enough bandwidth to support it. She herself, like many of her students' families, over a very large area, is on satellite broadband with low bandwidth.

Kaarina Pirilä on how much students' personal differences make to their learning online.
She said her research showed that epistemic styles made a difference; but teachers do not know what learning styles they have with them when they are teaching. I've always been sceptical about learning styles, far too prescriptive, but she says she has research finding that it makes a difference. Maybe I need to take more notice. She lectures groups of 100-150 students; difficult; but we should know them better, she says.

Wei-Ying Hsiao - WIMBA (video interactive classroom) used for online learning and interaction for trainee teachers. She made them do group presentations. The presentations enhanced group interaction - (thinks, of course it did), more so than a discussion board. But not everybody liked it; they found the group meetings intrusive on their own plans.

Robyn Hill on patterns of participation. Two types of participation - educational or cognitive, and social. This reinforces idea of learning as a collective endeavour. Greater participation is associated with better grades. (Tutor participation made no difference except at extremes of too little and too much.) these findings are very similar to my own, which suggests I'm on the right track. Or we're both on the wrong track.

Kari Liukkunen - from material distribution to VLEs. A splendidly laconic presentation of the move into digital learning, recounted mostly as a series of steps provoked by the availability of funding. First they had to distribute computers; then they discovered they needed to learn how to use them. Then they didn't know what to do with them. The advantages and disadvantages of progression by grant - you do what's wanted as long as they pay, but then they stop paying and expect you to continue. There's always another problem. He thinks companies and universities can learn from each other, but I didn't hear any cogent examples. Everything was going fine till mobile came along. (Why did it go that way? Finland has always been at the forefront of mobile phone usage.) Trial reporting was students thought it great; but in reality students did not have good enough phones and didn't want to pay for better phones to use them. Thus good ideas and good products don't substitute for knowing the market (my interpretation).

Then a key issue. He discovered that teachers did not listen to production staff e.g. on advice to use videos. So production staff stopped giving advice. The key is the relationship between academic staff and production team. A production worker in audience advocated having instructional designer as go between.

Liukkunen

Meanwhile Spurs beat Everton 2-0 in the Carling Cup; it seemed a bit strange to be celebrating that in the middle of the afternoon.

Ye-Lim Su of South Korea
ICT literacy as essential. Ministry goals how to create, process, analyse and utilise information - interesting as a governmental goal.

She shouts into the microphone. It's quite painful. But she has to to drown out the sound of the guy next door who is also shouting into his microphone. Luckily she's just reading out what's written on the powerpoints so I can read what's on the screen while shutting out the noise.

The next guy is a much more practised presenter. He doesn't use the mike, walks about among the audience, gets reactions. But he keeps walking in front of the data projector, and actually stopping there when he makes a point. He draws too sharp a distinction between digital native and digital immigrant. His son tells him that learning has changed. "You were just in case learner, I'm a just in time learner." He says the question is not how smart are you but how are you smart? Digital natives work in 10-15 minute sprints, so do you and I (he omits to say that we always have). It's interesting how a presentation can have a fundamental flaw but still stimulate thinking. He presents as if he has found the rainbow pot, he's so excited he just has to tell people about it. But his content is about five years old I reckon. Not the sage on the stage but the guide on the side, that is so last year.

Intan Azura Mokhtar from Abu Dhabi - weblogs for non native English speakers. This electrified me. It didn't have a huge amount of substance - it was a case study of a group of seven female students. But its potential was huge. There are many more women in ME universities than men. (Why?)

It was about using blogs to learn English for students who were going to be English teachers themselves. Post course survey - positive response. Interesting reasons - able to type instead of handwriting, which was the norm in other classes. (How much of what they are saying is due to using computers and networking; not specific to blogs.) Female students tend not to open up in class, and found blogging liberating from this point of view. But good grief - everything was on blogger, and public. The women were aware of this and up for it.

One of those really provocative talks, mind's buzzing with ideas and issues - I want to know so much more - how much is it to do with gender; do women value their university education more; do men not bother because they know they'll get a job if they want one
do women see blogs as great because they're developing a subversive social network outside male control - if so what impact does the fact of the blogs being public have. how does this relate to patriarchy in the Middle East. Etc etc.

Reluctant learners - Patricia Shaw
Daloz effective teaching and mentoring - teaching about trust; looks interesting.
Mostly about AR students or those with specific difficulties.
Now they're getting excited about Learning Management Systems - yawn.
One woman in the audience hijacked the Q&A time by asking about D2L (Desire to learn) which the speaker is now rabbiting on about. Meanwhile the woman who asked the question has left.

I wonder how much you can tell about the orientation of universities by whether they call their systems Virtual Learning Environments or Learning Management Systems.

Another speaker fails to turn up; could be because he couldn't find the room. Not the easiest in the world to find by any means.

Kinney et al - web2 literature review
O'Reilly web2 as harnessing the power of collective intelligence. They restricted their search to conference proceedings 2007-08 higher education. Ruled out lower stages and business training.

Findings:
blogs do nicely
wikis OK
students like podcasts, largely for controllability. Textbooks vs podcasts mixed results. Like mp3s but don't listen to lectures.
Second Life: 11 studies, inconclusive. Very different from other web2 stuff - kinaesthetic learning. does support standard content, but other tools do it better.

One audience member said in his experience of doing research, there is deeper learning online than ftf because of thinking time.

But the general conclusion from this session was that research into web2 tools is in its infancy, still at the describing and getting excited stage. There are more exacting and more useful stages to come.

A bit more Vancouver

2009-10-27T18:09:00.001-07:00

View from the bedroom window. I like the reflections of buildings on buildings in this one.

And this is what it's like at night.

Oh, conferences...

2009-10-27T18:07:00.000-07:00

I am amazed again at how much we are paying to this hotel chain that shall be nameless, and getting such unhelpful facilities. The conference wireless is flaky; it ought to be the biggest beefiest channel imaginable, but no, it falls over at the first sign of two people logging on together. To be fair it's been better today.

Most of the presentation rooms open out on to the public areas. The doors are open most of the time, and sometimes it's difficult to hear the presenter because of the noise outside. If people aren't talking, staff are rattling past with trolleys full of the next refreshment break. If the doors are closed, they rattle really loudly whenever anybody moves in and out.

For refreshment breaks, the hotel has eschewed caffeine. They are determined to ensure that we do not go hypoglycaemic. They provide freshly made pink lemonade, which is basically sugar with some lemon flavouring and pink colouring waved over it. And massive cookies, which many people here are wolfing down.

The employees are all dressed in black suits. They also have earwigs with flexi cords disappearing into the shoulders of their suits. They look like secret service agents; I expect to get jumped on whenever I take my camera out of my bag. But they're all pushing trolleys around with stuff on.

Sound proofing between many of the rooms is poor - they are ballrooms, divided into three or four smaller spaces, and what's going on next door interferes with here.

Presentation facilities have all worked so far. That's a blessing.

My abiding memory of this conference is going to be people sitting on the floor near where the few power sockets are. They have plenty of tables; none sited near the sockets. Whyyyyyyyy?

Update: I've just discovered why the soundproofing between the parts of divided rooms is so poor - the walls are not fixed, they sway when you lean against them, so the sound is leaking round all the edges.

Vancouver

2009-10-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

The serious action starts tomorrow. Today so far has been for getting over jetlag (yuck) and seeing the city. Very nice place. Absolutely grim earlier this morning - cold, wet, dark, miserable. But it cleared up mid morning and I went out for a walk. I like the city scape very much. It's a kind of blended jumble. Many of the buildings seem to have been fitted in with no reference to other buildings around them, or at best only one of the other buildings around them, but it all works very nicely. Very difficult to get pictures of because there's always something in the way, usually trees or tram cables.

All those are a triumph of cropping with minimal tools.

All I've seen so far is beautifully flat, but there are mountains beyond.

The Sun Yat Sen classical Chinese garden in Chinatown.

Art gallery, advertising an exhibition, but it's not open. The steps are clearly useful though.

I can confidently say this is the best crepe maker in Vancouver.

And finally this shows what a tiny cog I am in a massive machine.

Limbering up for Vancouver

2009-10-24T12:35:00.000-07:00

By making truffles:

Informal learning and truffles

2009-10-16T01:29:00.000-07:00

I was asked for a truffle recipe, and I was just going to post the recipe but there's a story behind so pull up your chair and settle down to read. I made some truffles yesterday and fed them to my work colleagues. None died. Some couldn't believe that I'd made them because they tasted so good. Some asked for the recipe. I was going to just give them the recipe but it's different from the written one I started with and that caused a moment's reflection on informal learning, which I have written about before.

This is the original recipe (don't follow it; the one I used is at the end):
Ingredients:
250g butter
250g drinking chocolate powder
250g icing sugar
grated zest of half an orange
box of (insert brand name here) chocolate vermicelli

Method:
Combine and sieve chocolate powder and icing sugar
Put butter in a pan over a very low heat
Add combined chocolate powder and sugar
Add orange zest
Beat till fully mixed
Allow to cool
Roll into balls
Pour the vermicelli out on to a plate
Roll the balls around in the vermicelli till completely covered

Now that doesn't work for us for a variety of reasons. First of all, I have to cater for a family full of allergies. We don't do wheat, milk (in fact any cow product) or eggs. What fun is there left in life? So I know from experience that I have to adapt any recipe like this. I also know from experience what is likely to work and what is likely not to.

That's where the informal learning bit comes in. Where does the experience come from on which I was able to base the recipe for the unbelievable truffles? Well, it's all informal - I've never "been taught" any kind of cooking apart from a few recipes reluctantly learned from my mother (one of which I still use regularly). I've picked it all up from recipe books, recipes in magazines, watching TV, sampling things at other people's houses and generally experimenting. One of the key features, it strikes me, is having the confidence to try things, which, even in circumstances as minor as this, can be an issue. Try making something new to be greeted by the triple whammy of "it looks horrible", "will it be like the last thing you did?" and "has it got anything I'm allergic to in it? Did you wipe the entire kitchen surface down and thoroughly wash your hands? Did you make sure the pan was completely clean? Did you check the plates for breadcrumbs? Well, did you?????"

Two kinds of informal learning have come into play here. The first is a general knowledge about cooking, and knowing from experience that I don't have to follow recipes slavishly. Partly that has come from necessity: on occasion I have made something without having the right ingredient to hand. I can vaguely remember the slight anxiety I felt doing this as a young adult which very gradually turned into an understanding that I could be creative. (But not until well after I'd left my parents; being creative around them wasn't allowed. But that's a piece of personal history that will be different for everybody.)

Another feature of that general knowledge is that I have become alert over the years to adapting recipes in such a way as to use fewer implements. If I followed the recipe as above the kitchen would be littered with chocolate covered pans and implements, which is great if you're the one that gets to lick them, but which results in fewer truffles.

The second kind of informal learning has been specific to catering for allergies. Once we found we had allergies we obviously had to cater for them. Some of it was adaptation by trial and experimentation, some was adaptation by going and looking for specific recipes with non-wheat flour, non-milk margarine etc. It took me a while to realise that these recipes were just like all the original recipes that I'd tried - lots of unnecessary ingredients and lots of unnecessary work. So eventually I started to adapt these, and to be creative with my own ideas. It took some trial and error experience - you really need to experience the glutinosity of corn pasta if you are to work with it successfully.

So how did I adapt the truffle recipe? First of all, change the ingredients:

1 orange
250g soya margarine (wheat free, milk free etc)
250g cocoa (we use organic, apart from that just plain bog standard cocoa)
250g icing sugar
box chocolate vermicelli (carefully selected for ingredients - you wouldn't believe how many ingredients sugar strands have, including wheat starch)

and the method:
First of all, I didn't use the orange in yesterday's truffles. I forgot to get one. It does make a nice addition, but if you do use the zest you need to grate it really, really fine and that's a lot of work, so it's optional.

Second, I've never used the heating method. I think it's there just to make the job of combining a bit easier. I harbour a suspicion that it might have strange chemical effects on soya marge (though we use it a lot for sauces and so on), and it results in a sticky, sticky, sticky mix, so I just don't use it. Also avoids getting a pan dirty.

Third I don't do the sieving thing. Unnecessary. Also means no sieve to wash up. (I originally didn't do this because I couldn't be bothered. That's how I discovered it wasn't actually necessary.)

So what I did yesterday was:

Combine marge, cocoa and sugar in a bowl and mix with a fork. Start slowly otherwise icing sugar goes everywhere. And keep going for a while - takes some time and some elbow. But eventually and unexpectedly the mix goes smooth.

Pour the vermicelli out on a plate.

Ditch the fork. Pick small amounts of mix out with your fingers and roll in the palms of your hands. Some sticks to your hands. Don't lick your fingers yet.

Roll each ball around in the vermicelli till covered and put on a plate. Repeat until all the mix is used up.

At this stage even hand warmth has left them quite squashy. Put in the fridge to cool for a few hours. Control yourself.

Take them out after a few hours, let them warm up again to somewhere near room temperature. (You can have them straight from the fridge, but there's something about cold chocolate that doesn't appeal to me.)

Impress your friends.

The Tao of word count

2009-10-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

Students often take word counts far too seriously, and at the same time not seriously enough. The instant you see the phrase "word count" in the assignment book you start to worry about entirely the wrong things. You focus on the minutiae - does the title count, do the section headings count, does the bibliography count, the references in the text, are you sure?? are dates one word or three, what about hyphenated words, do footnotes count, do quotes count, if you put somebody's initials in do they count, what about appendices, how much can you go over without being penalised, how much can you go under without being penalised, what about words in diagrams, what about words in tables, and so on and on and on and on and on.

Instead of writing the assignment, you're worrying about the word count all the way through. I can tell this because often the first question that is asked is "How far can we go over without being penalised?" The answer is usually 10%. Then you set out to write to the word count + 10%, which is entirely the wrong way to do things. If I give you a 1000 word essay to write, I'm interested in you writing 1000 words, not 1100. The extra 100 is for you to stop dinning in my ear about diagrams, references, dates and hyphenations, because you have a whole hundred word buffer to deal with that stuff.

Assignments are exercises in conciseness. That's what we aim to teach all the time. The reason why is that conciseness aids learning. If you can explain something concisely, that means you've learned it well, and you can explain it well. If you can't explain something concisely, that means, nearly always, that you haven't yet learned it well enough, so you need to revisit it - or you need to revisit the way you've explained it.

So when you've written your 1000 word assignment, and it comes to 1105 words, you look at what you've written. And the question in your mind should not be "Is that part of the word count?", it should be "Which bits can I write more concisely?"

However, boundaries do need to be reasonably clear, so here is a handy and short three part guide to what to look for and what to do. I should note, by the way, that my students will get more detailed guidance than this before their first assignment.

1) Check up on, be familiar with, any guidance given for this course and this assignment in the course companion and the assignment book. Make sure that you're aware of them.

2) After that, when it comes to small things - the dates, the section headings, initials and so on - aim at the word count, and let the buffer (10% or whatever is stipulated) take care of the rest.

3) For the big things - quotes, tables, footnotes, diagrams - go on the following principle. What you've written is either there to gain you marks, or it isn't. If it's there to gain marks, then you should regard it as part of the word count. If, as some students have tried to argue from time to time, it's not, then what the heck is it doing there?????

Follow those basic principles and you won't need to worry about word count any more, so you can concentrate on writing the best assignment you can.

Simples.

Of statistics and imagery

2009-08-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Chris Grayling, Conservative shadow home affairs person, compared parts of Britain to Baltimore, as depicted in The Wire.

This turned out to be a bit of an own goal as Grayling's ignorance of cutting edge TV was quickly shown up, and his grasp of realities was also challenged with reactions such as that of Julia Goldsworthy, the LibDems home affairs spokesperson "We look forward to Chris Grayling's reassessment of the devastating impact of Thatcherism on this country once he's watched series 2".

And now the coup de grace is administered by the Mayor of Baltimore, who points out that the murder rate in Baltimore is significantly less than that in the popular British TV series Midsomer Murders. (hat tip: Liberal Conspiracy).

Delightfully, she even refers to a website that tracks the Midsomer body count.

Those who base dodgy comparisons on TV shows they're not very familiar with will get shot down in flames.

Update: 'twas a hoax. But I'm leaving it here because it deserves to be true.

Informal learning

2009-08-25T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'm responding to a post at lizit who wanted answers to her question where does informal learning take place. I've been puzzling over informal learning for a bit, because the key question for me is "what is it?" which I have to answer before I can answer where does it take place. The traditional and obvious definition that formal learning is learned in classes (physical or virtual) with teachers, and that informal learning takes place elsewhere doesn't do the job any more as it becomes increasingly obvious that formal learning has a lot of informal components in it. In fact for me the issue is really that I can't find a use for the dichotomy at the moment. I think that one of the key dimensions of the split is that formal learning is under the control of the teacher, and informal is under the control of the learner. But I think we recognise that even formal learning is under the control of the learner, viz my favourite saying about learning. (But I'm not sure if the literature will support me in this.)

And there is an older and slightly less subtle version, that I first read in a book by Eric Midwinter, though I can't remember which one. A primary school teacher in Liverpool gives her class an assignment to write about the police. Little Johnny's assignment consists of four words: "Livpool plice is bastids". The teacher is concerned about little Johnny's world view so she contacts the police who arrange a day out at the local police station. The kids all have a great time trying on helmets, sitting in the cells, blowing whistles, turning the sirens on, using the radio, patting the dogs and so on. A few days later the teacher asks the class to write another assignment about the police. Little Johnny's assignment now has five words in it: "Livpool plice is cunning bastids". Whatever we try to teach, people will take their own lessons from it.

Colley et al (Colley, H., Hodkinson, P. & Malcolm, J. (2003) Understanding informality and formality in learning. Adults Learning, 15(3), 7-9.) try to unpick the issues surrounding informal learning, and find themselves saying things like attributes of both formal and informal learning are present in all forms. They move from this to an attempt to conceptualise the relationship between formal and informal learning, and arrive at a series of criteria which, they posit, may determine the relationship:
- process - where learning processes are incidental to the activity they are more informal
- location and setting - synergy between practice and setting may enhance learning, and is a feature of both formal and informal learning (I think that's what they're saying, but I don't understand it)
- purpose - and in particular whose purpose lies behind the learning
- content - an established syllabus or something new, etc

Whatever you think of this attempt at conceptualising a complex relationship, the answer to Liz's question for them would be "everywhere". but that doesn't really help.

Moving on a bit, part of the difficulty for me lies in the fact that I'm working on a different dimension - that of control - at the moment, and the spectrum of formal to informal seems to cut across that in ways which are not too helpful. So I move on to a couple of anecdotes about learning which may help to understand what it looks like to me.

The first is cooking. I've used this example often as a way of getting new students to think about when they learn. Most of us did not learn to cook in formal settings, or at least not exclusively. I didn't do food tech at school, although my children did. But my children also learned by observing and listening to me and helping me. (And my wife, though they noticed early on that she does the boring drudge cooking and I tend to do the exciting meals for occasions and guests.) They learned by catching the odd TV programme, by noticing recipes in magazines, by eating things in restaurants or at other people's houses and then trying them for themselves, by experimenting with different flavours and vegetables and so on. Most of that was informal learning.

I've done a lot of learning myself on a squash court. Back in the days when I was younger, thinner and fitter I played a lot of squash. I remember one incident in particular. After I'd been playing for some years I found myself playing regularly a guy with whom I was very evenly matched - roughly the same size weight and speed, roughly the same level of skill, roughly the same level of court cunning. But for the first few games he beat me every time. I noticed after a while that he beat me because he tried harder. He would keep running when it looked hopeless, go for balls that I would give up on. So I started trying harder and found that I won more games as a result. I learned a lot about myself. (It's also significant that this learning happened when I was ready for it - I'd been playing similar people for years, but hadn't put two and two together before.)

So there are two anecdotes about location to fulfil my obligation to lizit. But maybe there is an issue here about definition. The literature appears to be veering towards saying that formal learning always entails informal learning. But does informal learning always entail formal learning? I cannot see what kind of formality was present on the squash court or, some of the time at least, in my kitchen.

Orlando

2009-07-23T14:52:00.001-07:00

I got to go to a conference in Orlando. I blogged it elsewhere. Here are the links:
EISTA at Orlando
The trouble with…
Orlando weather forecast
Peer assessment
Technology
Our presentations
Low end ICTs in teacher education in S Africa
Pics of EISTA09 at Orlando
Pics of EISTA09 at Orlando II
Pics of EISTA09 at Orlando III
Final post from Orlando - on the effect of conferences

Academic integrity

2009-07-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

I really thought, and hoped, that the OU was on to something with the launch of its Good Academic Practice and Developing Good Academic Practice pages, and would push towards enabling students to be students, to develop and take ownership of, and take pride in, their own thinking and their own academic voice.

So I was disappointed to find that the Good Academic Practice page was in fact all about plagiarism. Don't get me wrong, a plagiarism policy is a necessity, for the very few cases where it occurs. And a plagiarism practice is also a necessity (rather than them just being let off, which, judging by anecdotes from ALs, has happened too often in the past). But there is so much more to good academic practice than the avoidance and/or punishment of deliberate misrepresentation.

I was even more disappointed to find that the Developing Good Academic Practices pages open to students were also primarily about plagiarism. To be sure they put plagiarism into a context, but it is still, in my opinion, emphasised more than the good reasons for good academic practice. I think this is important. The issue of plagiarism has become salient for us, but we shouldn't make it too important when we talk to our students. If we treat people like potential criminals, there is more chance that they will start to think like potential criminals. Should we not be more positive in the way we approach this? The vast majority of our students want to learn and are not interested in cheating. I'm interested in teaching my students how to learn; I don't need to teach them how to avoid deliberate misrepresentation. There is so much that we should be saying about academic integrity and good academic practice before we broach the subject of plagiarism. Maybe it does have a place on the front page of a site about developing good academic practice but it should be at the bottom, not slap in the middle.

What we should be starting with and emphasising, I think, is helping people to learn their own academic voice. There are so many positive reasons for teaching it, and for weaving into that issues about good academic practice, without having to tell them we think they are bound to try to cheat us at some point. There are many more positive reasons to give to students for distinguishing their own work from somebody else's in assignments:

a) the habit of accuracy. It's accurate to say where a thought comes from.

b) better learning. When your assignment is being marked, if your marker knows clearly which are your thoughts and which are somebody else's, they can address their comments more precisely to what you have done, rather than to what somebody else has done, and they can better help you to develop your thinking process.

c) the habit of courtesy. When you borrow omebody else's lawnmower you thank them for it. When you borrow somebody else's words, you should thank them for those as well. After all, some day, you may be in the position that somebody else will borrow your words.

d) greater awareness of developing your own voice. You are at one stage or another in evolving the way you think, and the way you express what you think. Awareness of when you are using somebody else's words and when you are using your own can help greatly in that process. It's a never ending process - the world's greatest academics are all still doing it. And it's the most important process of all in being a student. You will not stop doing it till the day you stop thinking. And the key point here is that it's *your* voice, not anybody else's, so telling the difference is very important to you.

e)... f)... g)... and anything else you can think of, and then - only at the bottom of the list - comes the issue that we need to avoid the possibility of plagiarism.

Making Connections and digital cameras

2009-06-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

Several people here at Making Connections are taking photographs of slides in presentations using their digital cameras. Don't mind that at all. But there's a certain irony in the fact that these cameras make artificial noises - beep, beep, clickety click, beep, beep, clickety click, beep, beep, clickety click, which disturbs people around them. This to me comes under the heading of politeness as I have blogged elsewhere - do please take photos, but do please switch the sound off. It's your toy, you ought to know how to use it. I twittered this and was told by somebody else that they thought the sound could not in fact be switched off on some cameras, and in fact it was illegal, they thought, in some jurisdictions to take photos silently because of privacy issues. I'd like to know if that's true, but if that is the case then the owners of those cameras should not be using them in a situation where they disturb other people.

Teach a man how to fish...

2009-05-26T16:12:00.001-07:00

This is a brilliant example of students learning in exactly the way their teachers tried to prevent them from learning.

Prisons wot I know

2009-04-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

At the start of AA100, I had three students in Lewes prison.

They got on very well together, and it was fun doing a proper group tutorial, which they all participated in intelligently and enthusiastically. They also all, in their individual ways, did well on the course. They get decent marks on assignments; they have plans for continuing. One is thinking of doing philosophy, one philosophy or art history,a nd one art history or criminology.

My group broke up though when one was transferred to Parkhurst, and then a fortnight later another was transferred to Ford. It happens, apparently, on "transfer Tuesday" and the prisoner is given little or no notice, but is just told to tidy up their belongings and get in the van. It must be incredibly disruptive, but both students survived the experience, and have continued with their assignments. I went to visit today. I visited Ford first.

It's an open prison. They do try to remind the staff that there is some security. This sign is in the car park, quite a way from the prison entrance.

Then I went to Parkhurst, being rained on all the way. The ferry over was grim.

And Parkhurst is frightening. Huge horrible concrete walls with no relief. Inside, pictures of the weapons found in various prisoners' cells.

But my prisoner was doing OK, and we discussed his ECA, which he had already started planning, and had some good ideas about.

And the ferry back was much nicer - we even saw some sunshine.

Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely

2009-04-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

Not original and I'm sure it's been around a long time, but I've only just heard it. And I have a few presentations coming up soon so I did a bit of trawling around to see if I had what other people call good practice or not. I found some useful stuff, including Don McMillan:

a load of presentation tips from The Impact Factory

and some decent ones from Suite 101.

From these I have picked a short list of things I will aim to do in each of my next few presentations:

don't put all your words on the slide (McMillan and the Impact Factory)
make a maximum of six words per line and six lines per slide (the Impact Factory)
use graphics where appropriate but not too much (the Impact Factory)
don't have too many slides (McMillan and the Impact Factory). McMillan prompts this law, "The usefulness of the talk is inversely related to the number of slides in the presentation".
don't pimp (Suite 101)
know your content (the Impact Factory) - I'm never confident about this.
know your way around PPT, how to get around your presentation quickly and smoothly - so that you look as if you know what you're doing

I may report back after I've done them.

How The Internet Got Its Rules

2009-04-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

I had no idea this anniversary happened yesterday (April 6th) till I read Howard Rheingold's tweet about it.

It was an absolutely seminal moment in the development of the internet, and set the tone for the manner of engagement its proponents would follow from then on. Steve Crocker has much to be proud of.

And the fortieth anniversary of the RFC is only a few days ahead of the fortieth anniversary of the OU (April 23rd).

On information and judgements

2009-02-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

I didn't think I'd ever find myself arguing in support of Tony Blair, but Martin Weller, via Phil Greaney, has made me.

Martin's argument, based on ideas about the wisdom of crowds, is that in the run up to the Iraq war, Tony Blair had so much information that it prevented him from making a proper choice about the war. The ordinary people, though, with much less information to go on, were able to "see the salient features of the war, and ... instinctively judged it to be 'wrong'".

Alan Cann disagrees, and I am more on his side than theirs. The point Alan makes is that there is no such thing as too much information; there is just inadequate filtering. I think that he is right in that, but also that he is wrong, as the others are, to treat this as purely an issue of information.

When decisions have to made, information is only sometimes your friend. Take the issue of going to war in Iraq as an example, and let's say there are two clear choices, either to go to war, or not to. If we are lucky, the information we have makes the decision for us. Either it is clear that Saddam Hussein has been neutralised, and we do not need to go to war. Or it is clear that he is still as madly aggressive as always and needs to be stopped by military means. In either of those two cases, the information we have makes the decision easy. Tony Blair was not in that position. He was in that awful in between state where the information doesn't tip you one way or the other. People put in this situation often in fact go seeking more information, in the hope that new information will make the decision clearer. Alas, in politics that is rarely the case. I don't believe, in fact, that Tony Blair had too much information. What he had was equivocal information, and he did what he was being paid to do in such circumstances - he made a decision. To be frank, I respect him for that. He did not beat around the bush, pardon the pun, and make half a decision, or some lame compromise, he followed it through properly.

The other side of the coin is about what crowds do. I like the thesis of the wisdom of crowds, but again I think you have to put it into the context of decision making. Nobody who was protesting against the decision to join the Americans in the invasion of Iraq actually had to make that decision. Martin makes the point that Blair might say what if they knew what I know, and counters it by suggesting that Blair should have asked himself "What do they know that I don't?" Again I think that misses the point. It's often easier to be on one side or the other when you don't have to make the decision. But suppose someone else were put in Blair's shoes - in the sense of having to be responsible. It suddenly becomes your job to decide who will live and who will die. All of a sudden, that information that Blair has will become very precious to you, as you search for anything, any tiny clue that will tell you which direction you should be pointing in. Somebody's blood will be on your hands whichever decision you make. You might well end up making the opposite decision to that which Blair made. But you will realise that it was not nearly as clear cut as you thought it was.

Antigone and Oedipus in the Age of Terror

2009-02-05T04:51:00.000-08:00

This is advertising, pure and simple:

Pitchy Breath Theatre in partnership
With The Open University presents:

Antigone and Oedipus in the Age of Terror

Hawth Theatre, Hawth Avenue, Crawley West Sussex RH10 6YZ

2nd to 4th April 2009
First performed in the rubble of a bombed out theatre during the Bosnian civil war this version of the Oedipus and Antigone tragedy is a celebration of drama, music, and humanity in a time of war, economic collapse, and conflict.

There is darkness on the edge of town moving slowly and inevitably to destroy our way of life. But who is to blame, those in power or those who suffer at the hands of tyranny? And why is it always the next generation who pay the price. Is redemption possible?

All will be revealed in this festival of theatre magic from Pitchy Breath Theatre Company in partnership with The Open University.

The production is, of course, open to all and might be of particular value to students studying on the Open University’s exciting new course ARTS: PAST AND PRESENT (AA100)

Promenade Optional at some points.

Running time approx 2½ hours including two 20 minute intervals. Performances at 7.30 on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Also at 2.30 on Saturday.

My last Christmas present...

2009-01-16T07:23:00.000-08:00

... has finally arrived.

The cats are not sure what to make of it.

And the mechanism makes too much noise for it to surprise people (curses), but it's fun.

My favourite learning metaphor

2009-01-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he sits in a boat drinking beer all day long." A classic statement of the fact that whatever we think we are teaching, students will learn what matters to them far more readily than they learn what matters to us.

Disjunction and flow

2009-01-03T10:08:00.000-08:00

Liz Thackray blogs on troublesome learning and flow. Flow as a description of the feeling of being absorbed in what one is doing (Chen et al), and troublesome learning, linked to stuckness and disjunction, a point at which knowledge becomes troublesome - in other words a perception emerges that what one knows now does not sit well with what one already knows. Savin-Baden suggests transitional learning spaces as a metaphor for the mental places where these transitional moments occur. (Only transitional, of course, if one actually transits through them. One might equally look at the scary world beyond and decide to backtrack.)

It occurred to me that this whole description of the issue of learning that becomes challenging maps neatly on to Vygotsky's idea of the zone of proximal development. The idea is that wherever you are in your learning, that is a ZPD which encompasses what you can realistically move on to next. My impression is that the idea is most useful for teachers in determining how to pace lessons and activities. The idea is also closely related to scaffolding, in which teachers allegedly make scaffolding on which students can take their next hesitant or not so hesitant steps. I say allegedly because I've never been completely convinced by scaffolding, although I'm not able to say why coherently. It's something to do with the fact that learning is different from teaching, and learners will always take their learning in a different direction to that which the teacher anticipated. So there is a need for some sort of mapping, but it seems to be there's not much point in scaffolding up Tower Bridge if the student chooses to scale Buckingham Palace. Perhaps my view of scaffolding as being restrictive is not the right idea. Anyway, that is a digression. Back to the ZPD. (I know that many people link the ZPD to the idea of scaffolding, and Vygotsky did himself by assuming that the ZPD was primarily activated in the presence of teachers or more able students, under whose influence the subject is able to stretch his or her knowledge. But I think that is too mechanistic a view of the learning process. The ZPD exists, and can be just as big when the student is physically isolated - because even when physically isolated, the student is not socially isolated. But I digress even further.)

My initial image was of disjunction and flow being opposed to each other, and my metaphorical overlay was of the point of disjunction being at or near the edge of the zone of proximal development. But another bout of thinking suggests to me that neither of these is the case. First of all, learning itself, I think, *is* a flow activity. When one is learning properly all of Chen's nine characteristics can come into play. And this includes the troublesome experiences. My primary evidence is anecdotal - at the age of 24 I was preparing to write an assignment about education. I spent day after day and night after night in my room (my housemates dubbed me "the hermit" after this experience) reading one Penguin paperback after another, and literally sweating day after day, night after night, because of the implications of what I was reading for me. It turned into one of the pivotal experiences of my life, wrecking my previously held assumptions about my schooling, my family and ultimately myself. It was quintessentially troublesome learning, and I was also in the flow - I lost self-consciousness much of the time, I lost a sense of time, the experience became autotelic, and there is no way I would have put those books down, despite all the arguments with my parents which they subsequently caused. The key point here is that the learning being troublesome in fact made it a flow experience. So my answer to Liz's question, "does disjunction which leads to understanding involve a flow process?" is an unequivocal yes.

For me this locates the experience of troublesome learning as part and parcel of learning, usually located well within the zone of proximal development. I wonder then how much the notion of troublesome learning as to do with its cognitive siting in a place where it conflicts with already acquired knowledge, and how much it is to do with whether or not that fact causes me problems.

To move to the focus of Liz's work, Second Life, this is something I haven't yet got into properly, though I want to. To me this is something much more like what I would call a troublesome learning situation, but not because it conflicts with anything that I know already. It is because it will take time and concentration that I don't currently have to spare, and simply because it will involve a lot of new stuff. This may be what Liz is referring to when she discusses "Being presented with the stress of being asked to create within Second Life" - this may be not an experience which causes contradictions, just a new environment, the learning of which is quite demanding - which is why I've avoided it so far.

Second Life would be very applicable for both the courses I currently teach for the OU - B201 Business organisations and their environments and AA100 The arts past and present. Must put it in my diary of things to do...

Jack Straw gets knickers in twist

2008-11-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

According to the BBC, Jack Straw has personally intervened to order the cancellation of comedy classes at Whitemoor prison. Apparently they are "totally unacceptable".

He says, correctly, "Prisons should be places of punishment and reform, and providing educational, training and constructive pursuits is an essential part of this."

And then he goes on: "But the types of courses available, and the manner in which they are delivered must be appropriate in every prison.... There is a crucial test: can the recreational, social and educational classes paid for out of taxpayers' money (or otherwise) be justified to the community?"

Prison officials will be reminded, we're told, of the need for the courses taken by prisoners to pass the test of public acceptability. Now, maybe there is an issue about public understanding, as exemplified by the Daily Mail's (comic) attempt to capitalise on the issue: "Jail forced to scrap comedy course for Al Qaeda terrorist" - yes, one of the beneficiaries would have been Zia Ul Haq who plotted bomb attacks on London. What would we rather have him doing, I wonder, sulking in his cell thinking of more ways to blow strangers up, or suddenly discovering he has a talent for making jokes, and another way to make people take notice of him. The organisers' justification for the classes is that they boost teamwork and communication skills, and again Zia Ul Haq's intended targets might just benefit from him discovering that working *with* people is a lot more fun than working against them. You never know, he might even discover a truer Islam. Though that of course would be of no concern to the Daily Mail. Or, by extension, to Jack Straw, whose decision is surely not based on any criterion other than keeping not too far left of the Mail. In that he is destined to fail, as the Mail will foam with outrage if a prisoner gets so much as a pencil to write his name with.

If comedy is not a fit subject for prisoners to study, then nothing is. Comedy is not just about pratfalls and belly laughs. It's about timing and teamwork and it's about understanding the times we live in. Comedians who don't mine a seam of the society they live in don't get very far. Comedy twins with tragedy in its observation of the human race in all its glories and its perversities, and it can at its best get deep into the human soul. Which is by common consent the best episode of Blackadder? It's Goodbyeee..., the one where they die. And that is no isolated episode. It stands in a long tradition of acute observation by gentle piss taking. There was a cartoonist of the First World War, Bruce Bairnsfather, whose work was mistrusted by the powers that be at first but his popularity with the troops saw to it that he kept going. His best known cartoon is "If you knows of a better 'ole, go to it", but my favourite is one I can't find a reproduction of. A British soldier sits at a table in the open air. Behind him is the ruin of a farmhouse, around him are blasted trees, a shattered well, a smashed wagon and dead animals. Smoke rises from broken walls. He is writing a letter. "Dear Mum, We are staying at a farm...".

Comedy pierces the balloon, shatters the illusions of the egomaniac and the violent. What better way is there for Zia Ul Haq to learn an alternative to the nihilism that's been injected into his soul? But, if we were to allow that, we'd have to acknowledge that people can change, and in Daily Mail territory that is the ultimate sin.

Reworking history - the Versailles Treaty

2008-11-12T15:15:00.000-08:00

A good example of the constant reworking of history. For this year's Armistice Day the BBC carries an article by Professor Gerard De Groot revisiting the reasons for the rise of Nazism in Germany, and suggesting that the settlement at the end of World War One is not as much to blame as is usually suggested. The principal reason, he says, for Germany's abilityto act on its resentment was the decision of the USA to absent itself from European affairs - isolationism.

Perhaps this interpretation is influenced by the fact of America's current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ultimate interventionist wars. Perhaps the issue of whether or not to intervene has been made so salient by these wars that it influences our historical thinking, and makes us re-evaluate the reasons behind the rise of Nazi Germany.

Reading history 2

2008-10-16T01:15:00.000-07:00

Another gem from Brown and Duguid, p 187:

"The Irish writer Flann O'Brien imagined a book handling service for the culturally insecure. For a fee, book handlers would crease the spines of your books, turn down pages, mark passages, put intelligent comments in the margins, or, for a slightly greater sum, insert tickets from operas or classic plays as bookmarks."

Apart from the image it creates, and particularly the idea of a price differentiated service, this is a good marker for the handling of historical evidence. I am not suggesting to budding historians that they should view every document or item as inherently false, designed to give a wrong impression, but just that every document or piece of evidence should be read with a spirit of critical curiosity. One need not assume that an opera ticket in a book is designed to mislead, but also one cannot assume that it means that the owner of the book went to that opera. And if he did, one cannot assume that he was "an opera goer" as opposed to someone who just went to that opera, and maybe slept right through it. The ticket and the book must be examined more critically than that, with attention to the possible and probable explanations, and to the context provided by other similar pieces of evidence.

Reading history

2008-10-16T00:59:00.000-07:00

While reading Brown and Duguid's "Social Life of Information", I came across this brilliant example by Paul Duguid of witting and unwitting testimony (2002 edition, p173).

"I was working in an archive of a 250 year old business, reading correspondence from about the time of the American Revolution. Incoming letters were stored in wooden boxes about the size of a standard Styrofoam picnic cooler, each containing a fair portion of dust as old as the letters. As opening a letter triggered a brief asthma attack, I wore a scarf tied over my nose and mouth. Despite my bandit's attire, my nose ran, my eyes wept and I coughed, wheezed and snorted. I longed for a digital system that would hold the information from the letters and leave paper and dust behind.

"One afternoon another historiam came to work on a similar box. He read barely a word. Instead he picked out bundles of letters and, in a move that sent my sinuses into shock, ran each letter beneath his nose and took a deep breath, at times almost inhaling the letter itself but always getting a good dose of dust. Sometimes, after a particularly profound sniff, he would open the letter, glance at it briefly, make a note and move on.

"Choking behind my mask, I asked him what he was doing. He was, he told me, a medical historian. (A profession to avoid if you have asthma.) He was documenting outbreaks of cholera. When that disease occurred in a town in the eighteenth century, all letters from that town were disinfected with vinegar to prevent the disease from spreading. By sniffing for the faint traces of vinegar that survived 250 years and noting the date and source of the letters, he was able to chart the progress of cholera outbreaks.

"His research threw new light on the letters I was reading. Now cheery letters telling customers and creditors that all was well, business thriving and the future rosy read a little differently if a whiff of vinegar came off the page. Then the correspondent's cheeriness might be an act to prevent a collapse of business confidence - unaware that he or she would be betrayed by a scent of vinegar."

Course on a stick

2008-10-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

Arrived in the post today. The whole of B201 contents on a memory stick.

I wonder what size stick would be needed to put the whole OU on a stick.

Cézanne's Leda and the Swan

2008-10-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

Cézanne's version of Leda and the Swan, eloquently captioned by one of the students at my first AA100 tutorial:

"Don't look at me like that. I haven't got any more bread."

Innovation and resistance

2008-10-12T03:07:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading Brown and Duguid "The Social Life of Information", one of those books that periodically comes along and kickstarts the creative juices. It's full of telling anecdotes,including Bell and the telephone. The spread of the telephone, once invented, didn't just happen. It had to be marketed. Bell tried to sell patents to Western Union in the USA and the Post Office in the UK and failed in both cases. Neither company understood its usefulness. Brown and Duguid attribute this partly at least to the power of experts. The telegraph needed experts to mediate it, clerks at both ends who could encode and decode the written word into Morse code (the original codecs, one could say). I don't agree with that: the operating clerks, who were the experts B&D mention, were not in a position of sufficient power within their organisations to influence a decision like that. And if the organisations had been looking properly they should have seen the potential for expert management e.g. of cabling, switching equipment and switchboards. I would think it was more likely the standard myopia of comfortable organisations, resistance in the Argyris sense.

So Bell had to do marketing. He put phones in hotel rooms for people to ring reception with so that people who used hotels got used to them and could see their benefits. He put phones into offices for internal communication, knowing that sooner or later the penny would drop and they would realise the usefulness of the phone for external communication. To go beyond the work and hotel sectors of the population he put phones at lunch counters so that people having lunch would see other people using them, and so on, and so on.

It's a very good lesson in the way organisations respond to innovation. And it also shows that Bell knew a thing or two about marketing.

Really Useful Knowledge

2007-08-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

Early in the nineteenth century some more enlightened business owners started funding teaching for their workers. They realised that workers were more productive if they understood what they were doing. This was the beginning of things like the Mechanics' Institutes, and the knowledge that men learned there - maths, physics, engineering - was called "useful knowledge". It had to be "useful" of course or there was no reason to pay for it.

Later in the nineteenth century the workers began to demand a different kind of learning. They wanted to know about why it was that businesses worked the way they did. They wanted to know about their place in the world. They wanted to know about their relations to other peoples and about the human condition. They wanted politics, economics, philosophy. This was the birthplace of organisations like the Workers' Educational Association, which still carries on that philosophy today, both nationally and internationally. And ultimately they were ancestors of the Open University and its open admissions policy.

To distinguish this knowledge from the knowledge they learned on their bosses' behalf, they called it "really useful knowledge".