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Learning Design in three stages – the good, the bad and the ugly
I love the beauty of Jenga.
Simplicity has a purity about it. Don’t knock it. Behind its functionality and its look and feel there will be some hard thinking. Keep it simple, stupid (K.I.S.S) may be a training cliche but there is considerable truth in it.
I’ve now had three years here at the OU and here on this Student Blog platform (short of five days). I’ve been working on my ideas regarding learning and e-learning design in particular.
Courtesy of THE OU hosted OLDs MOOC 2013 (Online Learning Design – Massive Open Online Course)
I’m experiencing what feels like undertaking an 8 week written examination – the contents of my brain are being pushed through the cookie cutter.
And out comes this:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
(Of course I had shut down for the gadgets for the day and was brushing my teeth when this came to me).
The Good
Learning events or activities, moments that make the participant smile, think, reflect, nod in agreement, understand, be informed and generally feel good about the world and this particular learning experience. Hit them with some of this, as the say so succinctly across the Atlantic – at the ‘get go’.
The Bad
The effort required and built into the learning. OK, we want them to love this too, and you can if you’re ‘in the flow’, have done your work, have wrestled with what you didn’t understand, asked for help, listen to fellow students, gone out of your way to do extra reading and research until you have it, one way or another.
There needs to be assessment.
An assignment is a soft assessment to me – though like everyone I have terrible days when the thing just slips through my fingers like a snowball on the beach. A dissertation or end of module assignment is tougher, but tough and ‘bad’ in a certain way – like commitment to a triathlon. And a good analogy as working on and developing three issues at 2,000 words a pop is about right. And you won’t get far if you leave training to the week before. It’s a slow burn.
The ‘bad’ has to be the written examination.
They have to be hated and feared, and like learning lines for that school play, you have to get it right on the night (or day). And what do you do if you act? You have good lines to learn, you learn and rehearse your lines and you practice, and do a test run or two. The curtains going up is the equivalent of your turning the examination paper over. I feel the fear from a year ago – April 2012. I hadn’t sat a written exam in 30 years. All my undergraduate and school-boy fears came back. I used rusty techniques that had last seen service during my first degree.
Bad is good. You want to do everything not to feel like you are naked on stage – a dream we all have when faced with such an ‘exposing’ test?
The Ugly
Shock ’em. Not scare the witless. Have up your sleeve some smart stuff. Whether an idea or the technology offer a creepy and certainly memorable surprise.
Boring a student into making a fact or issue stick is like throwing mud at a brick wall – it’ll stick, it’ll coagulate and build up, but is easily washed away in a shower and destroyed in a storm.
Use storytelling techniques perhaps, better still, follow the pattern of a ghost story.
Scare them? I’m back on fear I guess.
We humans are fearful of many things and will go out of our way to avoid, run away or confront our fears. As I said, the idea here isn’t to lose your students, but to empathise with them, understand the ugly side of their learning experience then help them confront their worst fears. It is ugly having to tackle the parts of a subject that stink, but inevitably these are the blocks at the base of JENGA.
So can I apply it? And can I go back to bed now?
Which leads me to another theme – we no longer simply bring work home with us, we take it to bed and sleep with it. If this pisses you off then let me introduce you to ‘working with dreams’. If you are prepared to get up for an hour in the dead of night, or can flick on a light without invoking divorce then scribble stuff down to catalyse the thought in the morning. Can work wonders, can produce nonsense, can just be some things you need to put on the supermarket shopping list … or another dream of being naked on the stage, not knowing your lines and needing the lo but all the exits are locked and the orchestra has stopped and you have to say something.
Which, courtesy of the wonders of the mind, has me in the front row of a performance of The Tempest at the University Theatre, Newcastle when I was 13 or 14. Caliban was naked, covered in mud and wearing a prosthetic erect penis.
HORROR!
P.S. And give me 20 minutes searching the Internet and I will be able to name the actor, date the show and possibly even find a picture. Perhaps you’d like to have a go. But before you do so, be very fearful of what the search terms you use might throw up.
Related articles
- How to design learning using activity cards (mymindbursts.com)
- Supporting educators to rethink their learning design practice with the 7 Cs of Learning Design (mymindbursts.com)
- Treating MOOC Platforms as Websites to be Optimised, Pure and Simple… (ouseful.info)
- Tumbling Tower Sight Word Jenga Game (momto2poshlildivas.com)
- MOOC Platforms and the A/B Testing of Course Materials (ouseful.info)
- Learning Design for a 21st Century Curriculum (MOOC) (classroom-aid.com)
- How more deeply embedded is a visual memory if you crafted the drawing or painting that is the catalyst for its recall. (mymindbursts.com)
OLDS MOOC – Week Two blog
I would encourage people to think what happens next?
What happens beyond this episode and setting?
How does this experience extend and connect with characters lives further into the future (and how can we as designers support the making of these connections and their sustenance)?
Overly complicating ideas as only academics can do …
Fig. 1. The interactions and resources of the Zone of Available Assistance ZAA (Luckin, 2010 p92).
“The ZAA describes the variety of resources within a learner’s world that could provide different qualities and quantities of assistance and that may be available to a learner at a particular time”. (Luckin 2010 p 28)
What is the difference between “Ecology of Resources” and Lave and Wenger’s “Situated Learning”?
The Ecology of Resources (EoR) is a design framework that supports us in designing learning experiences that take into account the learner’s context (it provides a method for modelling the learner’s context in terms of people. tools, environment, knowledge and skills to be constructed, and the learner’s knowledge, motivation, etc). The EoR does not specify that we design for learning in authentic contexts (i.e. contexts where the knowledge would be applied – as situated learning discusses). We might be designing a classroom experience. But modelling the learner’s context through the EoR helps us design that classroom experience so that it is not an isolated, abstract one, but an experience that is connected to other resources (people, tools, etc) in the learner’s context. For example, the learner might come across relevant knowledge/skills/learning outside of the classroom, and with careful design we could create connections to those experiences.
Katerina Avramides (OLDS MOOC 2013 18 Jan 2013)
Uncovering the potentially helpful resources learners and designers can draw requires investigation of context.
Cloudworks forces an asynchronous conversation while other platforms permit something that can be close to synchronous. My experience of three years as a post graduate on the OU MAODE … and before that a decade in e-learning, that messaging, and Twitter and any platform where you can express thoughts in your own time, but have a response soon after is far better than emptying the contents of your head onto the bird table and waiting for others to come and pick at it … or not. I found in Cloudworks, using it a year ago, that I might place all kinds of ‘gems’ about the place and get no response. Looking at the views and comments on e-learning gurus such as Grainne Conole I concluded that far from being clouds (wishful thinking) we were in a desert bereft of precipitation.
Give me a jungle, as a metaphor for a learning ecosystem any day.
REFERENCE
Luckin, R. (2010) Re-designing Learning Contexts Technology-rich, learner-centred ecologies. Routledge.
How to tell the tragedy of two love stories – the power and construction of memorable narrative
Fig.1.Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria-Hungary – Only son of the Emperor Franz Josef
You are one of the wealthiest and privileged men in the world and likely, by all accounts, to be one of the most powerful men too some day soon, but you are deeply unhappy and married as protocol requires to another European royal.
You are Crown Prince Rudolph of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – wanting for nothing and everything. Your are also crushingly unhappy – the privilege a burden.
Then you fall in love and like royals before you the woman becomes your mistress – two years of bliss are doomed when your father the Emperor demands that it ends. Rather than give each other up you commit suicide, shooting first your 17 year old mistress, then turning the gun on yourself.
Love for a girl and hate for the Empire could only be resolved through violence. The year is 1889.
Fig.2. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, wife the Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg and their children Sophie 13, Max 10 and Ernst 8 c 1914.
Some two decades later your nephew, the heir presumptive since your own death, appears to have it all – a compromise had been found when he refused to give up the woman he wished to marry in 1890. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, stunningly wealthy, happily married to the Countess Sophie Chotek – the woman he loves, with three healthy children, and trained up through his military career to rule would expect to become the next emperor soon – his grandfather the Emperor Franz Josef is now in his 80s.
Then, on the morning of Sunday 28th June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s misplaced ‘love’ for his subjects and his unquestioning love for his wife puts them both in an open top tourer on a formal visit to the Austro-Hungarian provincial capital of Sarajevo.
Hate looms in the form of the 19 year old Gravilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, desperately poor, principled, prepared and determined. Under instructions and guidance from the leaders of the radical Serbian terrorist group ‘The Black Hand’ he finds himself positioned on the route the Archduke will take back and forth through Sarajevo with six others – armed and eager to kill.
In their different ways both Franz Ferdinand and Gravilo Princip disliked what the Austro-Hungarian Empire represented and how it behaved – both had ideas of how the problem could be fixed – Franz through compromise and accommodation – he tabled a federation of Austro-Hungarian states in 1906 -while both Count Rudolph at one end of the scale and Princip at the other, both felt that two bullets from a revolver were the pill that wold fix everything when others controlled your life in a way that you found intolerable.
Two world wars later, nearly 50 million dead and conflict only recently resolved in the Balkans and if there is a one word lesson to take from the 20th century it is ‘Diplomacy’.
(Born Aug 24, 1855, died Feb 12, 1944)
My goal is to find a way into this story – my quest might be over.
I’m doing this as an exercise
I’m taking known facts rather than fiction and using the 1939 book ‘Story Writing’ by Edith Ronald Mirrieless as my guide. Narrative is a powerful tool, but compare a factual account, say of the sinking of the Titanic, with the move. Compare too some botched attempts at the telling of the 1914 Sarajevo assassinations where students recall above all else that Gravilo Princip apparently went into a cafe to buy a sandwich when he say the Archduke’s car outside. There is invention and accuracy, but also responsibility to ensure that the facts that matter and can be corroborated are in the story.
The story I tell will be told by the Infant Marie Theresa of Portugal who married Archduke Karl Ludwig a month before her 18th birthday at Kleinheubach on 23 July 1873.
She would have been 32 when Crown Prince Count Rudolph killed himself. Maria Theresa then stood in for the Empress who retired from court life after her son’s death. She carried out honours at the Hofburg Imperial Palace with the Emperor until 1896 and was instrumental in helping her step-son Franz Ferdinand fulfill his desire to marry the Countess Sophie Chotek which he achieved in July 1990.
The following details I sourced from various places and will verify and alter in due course.
It was then Marie Theresa who broke the news of the couple’s death to their children Sophie, Maximilian and Ernst. She also managed to ensure the children’s financial security after telling the Emperor that if he did not grant them a yearly income, she would resign the allowance which she drew as a widow in their favour. (The majority of Franz Ferdinand’s property went to his nephew the Archduke Charles)
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed following its defeat in the First World War. After his abdication, Maria Theresa accompanied Karl and his wife Zita into exile in Madeira, but eventually returned to Vienna where she spent the rest of her life.
In 1929, following a decline in her finances, Maria Theresa engaged two agents to sell the Napoleon Diamond Necklace, a piece inherited from her husband, in the United States.
After a series of botched sales attempts, the pair finally sold the necklace for $60,000 with the aid of the grand-nephew of Maria Theresa, the Archduke Leopold of Austria, but he claimed nearly 90% of the sale price as “expenses”. Maria Theresa appealed to the United States courts, ultimately resulting in the recovery of the necklace, the imprisonment of her grand-nephew, and the absconding of the two agents.
Maria Theresa died in Vienna during World War II.
Related articles
- The first of a million tragic love stories – the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek (mymindbursts.com)
- My fascination with the First War will only grow as we approach the 100th Anniversary – here is one day to remember (mymindbursts.com)
- World War I Centennial: Austria-Hungary Escalates, Kaiser Convenes War Council (mentalfloss.com)
Taken … the comedy version
Fig. 1. Liam Neeson takes revenge in ‘Taken’
Of course our 14 year old son shouldn’t have been watching the moview ‘Taken’, but for the benefit of his 16 year old sister on the long drive home this evening he set about detailing the action.
I found it hand not to laugh all the way through as somehow I had in my mind’s eye the film that I have seen three times as he offered his esoteric description – All Liam Neson did apparently was talk in gutural noises and wave his hands about. Dialogue didn’t feature, nor characterisation – just the action. What more does it need. (What was it Hitchcock said about dialogue, that is was a sound effect?)
At the end of this our 16 year old daughter perked up and said, ‘Granny said I mustn’t see this film and then proceeded to describe it in gory detail’. The image of my late mother drawing attention to the nastiest moments in the film brings a smile to my face, ‘there’s a bit when xxxx’ and you mustn’t see the bit when yyyy’. Oddly enough the threat of ‘white slavery’ as a line used with teenage girls wanting to go out late in the 1970s. There was someone ready to snatch my teenage sisters away around every corner of late night Newcastle upon Tyne.
Listenign to Philip Pullman talking about a new anthology of Fairy Tales we are reminded of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and of ‘Hansel and Gretal’. The contemporary monsters being the likes of Jimmy Saville and Gary Glitter.
The problem is – words can be even more vivid as you create something in your mind’s eye that can be far worse, closer to home and therefore possible.
Narrative is a powerful thing, as is humour and violence if done correctly.
(Reading this back, this last line suddenly sounds like something that would be said by a Bond Villain)
How Storytelling in business (and politics) can turn ugly
Fig.1 Beware the ‘unhappy valley’ of storytelling
I was introduced to this concept at the Open University Business School Residential for ‘Creativity, Innovation & Change’. The thought is that in business – and I believe this applies to politics too – you can apply narrative but only take it so far. Case studies work, anecdotes and short stories too but take care about how far you apply it before you. call on professional input.
Producing narrative drama for training I will plan a treatment then take this to a professional writer – people with credits for drama series or serials. Anything less can sink you into this ‘unhappy valley’. This also applies to casting actors and using a director with a track record in drama. What you want is something creditable.
Several of my own productions are @JJ27VV on YouTube
Telling stories works in learning – always has, always will …
Fig.1 The Bayeux Tapestry
Narrative works
Without the need for smart e-technology – all you require is the imagination of a well informed storyteller to produce a script that is engaging – a journey from which a learner may deviate if something intrigues them, a pattern with a beginning, middle and end that everyone can follow and remember with ease – how else was knowledge passed on before writing?
‘Teachers use narrative to teach children difficult concepts and to bring structure to the curriculum.’ Egan (1988)
- spontaneous inclination to engage in a dialogue with material
- to improve some form of organisation upon it
- to make comparison with it
- as a device for determining functionality
- as a means for engaging users in the stakeholder’s consultation
- bias
- the view of the author/presenter/channel
- (commissioning editor)
- negative or positive
It has been shown that experts in any field tend to embody knowledge in the form of narrative. Schon (1983)
‘Stories are the method by which people impose order and reason upon the world.’ Fisher (1987)
‘By framing events in a story it permits individuals to interpret their environment, and importantly it provides a framework for making decisions about actions and their likely outcomes.’ Weller (2009:45)
The framework is the logic of the narrative, the logic of the plot, the role-play of the protagonist (you the learner), the battle you have with antagonists (concepts you can’t grasp) supported by your allies (the community of learners, your tutor and institution) leading to a crisis (the ECA or exam), but resolved with a happy ending (one hopes).
Film-makers, naturally, but also documentary film-makers, bang on about the ‘narrative’ and the ‘story.’
This is how facts, whether naturally linear or not, need to be presented, if an audience, or a larger part of that audience, are to be suitably engaged by a topic.
Some months ago there was a news story concerning how much could be expressed in 40 seconds – BBC Radio 4, Today Programme. Any recollections?
Three experts were called and in turn tried to explain:
1) Bing Bang
2) String Theory
3) The Offside Rule in soccer
Bing Bang was pure narrative, like Genesis in the Bible, with a clear beginning, middle and end.
String Theory had a narrative in they way the theory came about, and just about got there.
The Offside Rule didn’t even started well, then got hopelessly lost in ifs and buts and maybes. (I got lost at least. Coming to all three equally ignorant I only came away with full understanding of one, some understanding of the second, and barely a clue with the Offside Rule)
The use of scenarios:
Having spent too considerable a part of my working life trying to write original screenplays and TV dramas I am versed in writing themes and strategies, storytelling in three acts, with turning points and a climax, antagonists and protagonists.
I use software like Final Draft and Power Structure.
These tools could as easily be used to compose and craft a piece of e-learning. Perhaps I’ll be given the opportunity to do so.
‘Narrative … is a useful means of imposing order and causality on an otherwise unstructured and unconnected set of events, but it also means that some detail is omitted in order to fit into the narrative, and other factors are only considered in the limited sense in which they can be accommodated with the narrative.’ Weller (2009:48)
Writing a narrative, for a novel or screenplay, is to some degree formulaic.
Is design of e-learning as straight-forward?
A decade ago it looked complex, five years ago with HTML code package in plug-ins and excellent ‘off-the-shelf’ software coming along the process appeared less out of reach.
Today I wonder if it is more matter-of-fact than some make out?
Addressing problems, devising a plan (a synopsis, then a treatment), threading it together … maybe its having it operate apart from the tutor or lecturer or teacher is what concerns you (teachers, lectures, profs). You are the ones who must learn to ‘let go of your baby,’ to have an actor or presenter deliver your lines. Once, and well. Or write in a team, as writers on a soap opera.
It works to follow the pattern rather than break it.
It strikes me that in e-learning design there may be only a few structures to cover most topics – really, there can only be so many ways to tell/teach/help someone understand a concept … or to do something, and remember the facts, the arguments and concepts … to be able to do it, repeatedly, build on this and even develop an idea independently to the next stage or level.
There is little meat on a popular documentary
There are micro-narratives and their are journeys, some more literal than others, for example, currently there’s a BBC documentary series, ‘The Normans’ and the third or so series of ‘Coast.’
From an educational point of view, what do audiences ‘learn’ from these programmes?
Can they typically recall anything at all, or do we/are we semi-conscious when watching TV, leaning back, not leaning forward, mentally as alert as someone smoking a joint. (Apocryphal or true?)
Try reading the script, try transcribing what is said and look at how far it goes.
Not very far at all.
Such programmes/series can be a catalyst to go to the website or buy the books, but otherwise the information is extremely thin, predictable and ‘safe.’)
If only links could be embedded into the programme so that as you view the programme relevant pages from the Internet wold automatically be called up.
Do you watch TV with a laptop?
Many do. Traders can manage several screens at a time, why not as mere mortals too?It becomes more engaging when you field of vision is nothing but screens, on topic. My preferred way of working is to have two screens, two computers, a mac and a PC, side by side. They do different things, they behave in different ways. I have a team of two, not one.
The medium may introduce a topic or theme, but there is little meat on the bone and we can be swayed by:
(For any longer list of concerns take a course in media studies.)
And if its on a commercial channel there are interruptions for adverts, while even the BBC chase ratings.
Even seen a lecturer take a commercial break
How about the some rich e-learning sponsored by Lucoxade, Andrex or Persil?
This is how schools receive interactive cd-rom and online websites ‘for free.’
REFERENCE
Bruner, J.S. (1996) Frames for Thinking: Ways of Making Meaning. In: Olson, D. & Torrance, N. (Eds) Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition, 93-105. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cox, R. (2006) Vicarious Learning and Case-based Teaching of Clinical Reasoning Skills (2004–2006) [online], http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ esrcinfocentre/ viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-139-25-0127 [(last accessed 10 March 2011).
Egan, K. (1988). Teaching as Storytelling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School. London, Ontario: Althouse Press.
Fisher, W. R. (1987) Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value and Action. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina.
McCloskey, D. N. (1990) Storytelling in Economics. In Nash, C (Ed.) Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature, 5-22. Routledge, London.
Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
Weller, M. (2007) Virtual Learning Environment. using, choosing and developing your VLE.
FURTHER LINKS
Brown, J. S., Collins, A. and Duguid, P. (1989) Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, January-February 1989, 32 – 42.
Weller, M. (2000). The Use of Narrative to Provide a Cohesive Structure for a Web Based Computing Course. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2000 — http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/viewArticle/2000-1/48#
How long should a video be? A bit like saying should a book have one page or a thousand?
Fig. 1. Fighting for his life – part of a corporate training series aimed at the emergency services and utility companies to create greater understanding of the need to report incidents as they occur.
Some times 10 seconds is too long for a video – while ten hours doesn’t even start to do justice to the speaker or theme.
I wouldn’t give extreme views the time of day, on the other hand, I would listen to everything Mandela had to say for hours. Horses for courses.
Stats lie – they certainly require interpretation.
Is a minute or ten minutes of video too much or too little? When do people turn off or tune in to a piece of AV, whether a movie, TV show, video or slide show mocked-up in PowerPoint? ‘Death by PowerPoint start for me in this first second.
Research from the Open University shows that people decide whether to continue watching a piece of video in under 35 seconds. This is not the same as a 45 minute lecture from an expert that is required as part of a formal course – though there should always be a transcript. Personally I work between the two and replay if there is something important.
Who needs the research? You can tell intuitively if what you are about to see is of interest or not?
My 35 seconds video? A party balloon is blown up by someone with breathing difficulties. The words on the balloon gradually appear – ‘The Cost of Asthma’ – the professionally composed and performed music tugs at the heart strings and a professional broadcaster says some pithy words.
My 35 hour video?
Interviews with some if the greatest thinkers alive in the planet today. Vitally, especially online, as producers we offer what is a smorgasbord – the viewer decides what to put in their plate and whether to eat it – and whether to stuff it down or take it in bite-sized pieces.
You had might was well ask ‘how many pages should there be in a book?’ or ‘how many posts in a blog?’ It depends on many things: context, budget, goal, resources, subject matter, audience, platform, shelf-life …
Do movies such as ‘Girl with a pearl earring’ inspire the desire to paint or study art history?
Fig.1. Images of the portrait ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Vermeer and stills from the film of the same name directed by Peter Webber
E–learning supposes that it is online and interactive, this doesn’t prevent the use of narrative.
If I watch the film, Girl with a pearl earring’ then a BBC 4 Documentary in Johannes Vermeer and I go online to interact with fellow viewers, undertake research and write a blog entry or two – this is interaction; it engages me.
Not that any learning institution has the funding to produce a movie that cost many millions. I wonder though how an executive producer might exploit the assets in this movie, certain scenes or still images.
Fig. 2. Girl with a pearl earring by Johannes Vermeer (1665-1667)
I like to paint and draw so the way the film demonstrates the skills of painting fascinates me, in this film, shot with the eye of a Dutch Master we get some key moments because of the way the director shot the film, from first inspiration, to the first presentation, the first layers and the art of mixing paints.
On this score which films do I rate as showing the artist’s craft and which do not?
Titanic. Kate Winslet – Drawn by the director James Cameron. What do you make of it?
La Belle Noisseuse. Emmannuelle Beart – Brilliant
Stealing Beauty. Liv Tyler – OK? Or exploitative
There are many, many others. I’ll add to this list and fix any inaccuracies as I go along.
Please do offer your suggestions.
Back to the use of narrative, a story well told, that is memorable, relevant and inspirational. This takes craft skills that producers (production managers) and clients (sponsors) need to be reminded cost a good deal to get right. It matters that the words spoken ring true, that characters are cast with imagination, that the direction is subtle and professional. Even with a photostory scripting requires care if it is to appear authentic, and we must remember, as shown in ‘Girl with a pearl earring’ that we communicate a great deal through facial expression and body language rather than by what we say.
Narrative, dreams and early morning semi-consciousness to solve problems and develop ideas
On Desert Island Discs Julian Fellows said how he had written 20 screenplays before he got his break; it helped that he was in the arena as an actor.
I have 8 screenplays and a couple of TV series.
Like Julian Fellowes I have been involved in Children’s TV too, though with much frustration I repeatedly found myself behind a closed door at the very final stage of either directing various children’s dramas or having a script commissioned and produced. Like ideas in the past the ‘next script’ has made it from my head to the page. I woke this morning with the scene that brings the story to a close, a good place to be.
I glanced through the Technique Library for B822, ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’.
This is a Filofax like folder of 200 ideas, one per card, in alphabetical order. My immediate idea would be to have it all in a relational database tool like FileMaker Pro. Indeed, in the early 1990s there was a CD called ‘Ideafisher’ which achieved some of this. It could be an App, though I imagine there are a myriad of copyright issues.
‘Alternative Scenarios’
This strikes me as less of a process as something we do automatically. I woke to this, dwelling on things that may or may not work in relation to a business problem. A narrative, with its alternatives scenes, is a way to think something through and even share your thinking.
I then realise there had been a dream too. This happens when you reposition yourself in bed and find yourself lying the way you were when you had the dream; try it. I attended a meeting where I felt neither my experience, nor my ideas were heard and rather than hang around as I knew the thing would ramble on with many opinions being expressed, no decision taken and the idea from the highest ranking person would trumping all others.
I can run through a list of 20+ questions that help analyse this further, I won’t (certainly not in public), however I will offer this.
I could have taken myself back into the dream, in a semi-conscious state and behaved differently. Indeed, I may try it tonight. I can see the set up, the meeting place as a train carriage or a marquee (don#t ask!) I know the protagonists. I know why I was thinking about the issue.
This time what do I do differently?
Lobby everyone before hand? Ensure that I have an ally? Invite in a new comer to mix it all up? Change the venue. Aim to be the last to leave rather than the first?
Decades ago, when I first got into this, on a family holiday where my older sister introduced me to the concept of interpreting dreams, I got used to sitting up and jotting down the ideas. You can’t do this for long. You realise you may dream four or five times a night. By becoming conscious of them you wake up of course. And the very act of consciously thinking about the dream changes what it was, or embeds the scenario. I’ve analysed a few in this blog.
Martin Weller is the ‘Digital Scholar’ (Chapter 13) Skimming and skipping about instead of deep reading.
Skimming and skipping about instead of deep reading
Easily distracted, or persuasively detracted.
But the overall tenure will be rearing to you hear the narrative.
• British Library Google Generation study (Rowlands et al. 2008)
• Has the need to learn by rote diminished?
• Outsourcing mundane memory to Google.
• Skittish bouncing behaviour Wijekumar et al. (2006)
• Web 2.0 and the ‘mass democratisation of expression’.
To Think About
‘Low quality individual items because of their obvious ease of production, can be seen as an invitation to participate’. Weller (2011)
‘If the intention is to encourage engagement then low-quality routes may be more fruitful than seeking to produce professional broadcast material’. Weller (2011)
‘Amateurs’ often create content which addresses subjects that academics may nit and also in a manner which differs from traditional teaching’, Weller (2011)
A facial truism.. Any time you learn anything your brain is ‘rewired’ at a synaptic level. VS. The pronouncements of the likes of Carr and Greenfield.
Vague and ill-founded arguments.
Plasticity is as true of playing a computer game, or from my experience, coaching swimmers. Adaptation is desirable, ditto for touch-typing, drawing, sight reading when playing a musical instrument even driving a car.
… Based on supposition and anecdote.
‘The Internet hasn’t changed the way we think any more than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food’. Joshua Greene.
Also see Gerschenfeld (2010)
… VS pseudo-scientific explanations to back up prejudices will not help us address the issues. Weller
CF Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schonberger (2009)
Idea of giving internet content a shelf-life. I disagree. Once rain water flows from a river into the ocean it is there, for potentially consigned to the depths, for ever.
Bug successes, something going viral, is not the norm.
For success, choice of tools and their perceived relevance to the main area of study are crucial elements. See Cann and Badge (2010).
VS. Creepy tree house syndrome (Stein 2008)
VS an LMS that is ‘organisationally controlled, bland and singular in focus’.
NB How to do it? ‘By making mistakes’ with each iteration generating an improvement (Hilbert space et al. 2000/2001)
Experience is required to understand what approaches are suitable.
It also requires a reasonable mass of contributions to work, a motivation for those contributions and an easy means to contribute.
Just as with the initial dot.com. bubble
The fact that there is hype doesn’t mean the overall direction isn’t correct. A technology may not completely change the world in the next 18 months, but it may significantly change practice in the next decade’. Weller (2001)
Roy Amara: we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Weller (2011)
It will never go back to the way it was.
The people best placed to understand it and adapt to it will be those who have immersed themselves in the current technological climate.
A willingness to experiment with new approaches and to explore the tensions between new possibilities and established practice is essential. Weller (2011)
REFERENCE
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| From Open University MAODE |
Mind Bursts 