Bignor Roman Villa as a tutorial venue

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.

On information and judgements

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.

Course on a stick

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.

Innovation and resistance

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.