The seaside

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

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

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

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

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”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

I'm only allowed 20 :-(

April fool: a lesson for all my students

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

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.)