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.

Antigone and Oedipus in the Age of Terror

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...

... 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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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".