For every hour you write a screenplay, you spend 10 defending it - article by David Hare in the series 'My working day' in The Guardian. "Producers [of films] fall into two categories. The great ones make suggestions to help you realise your work more fully. The annoying ones tell you at length how they themselves might have written the story, if only they could write. I have one simple rule. Only those who are invested in the outcome are allowed to give advice.... The hardest thing in film is distinguishing between good and bad input. The whole point of writing screenplays is to provide a platform from which a director, actors and cinematographer will be able to leap to create something infinitely richer and more suggestive. You have to excite your colleagues. If you are too prescriptive in what you write, there is no room for their genius. But if you do not fight for your structure and underpinning, then everything will go to hell in an inchoate mess of actors’ improvisation and directorial overreach."
When They Go Low, We Go High: the best ever political speeches - review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In Philip Collins’s new book, 25 great speeches through history are given around 10 pages or so each. They include a potted biography of the speaker, a sketch of the historical moment, and a discussion in accessible but not simplistic terms of what the speech is doing and how it works. It deserves to find a home in many Christmas stockings, in the library of anyone interested in oratory or political theory, and on the odd A-level reading list. As far as the choices go, it’s a parade of greatest hits: Pericles’s funeral oration; Cicero’s first philippic against Antony; Jefferson’s first inaugural address; Lincoln’s snappy sally at Gettysburg; JFK’s 'ask not'; Churchill’s 'finest hour'; Elizabeth I at Tilbury; Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate; Mandela in court; and Nehru round midnight in Delhi. Collins throws in the odd baddie – Hitler, Castro, Robespierre and Mao – and the odd semi-baddie (Dolores Ibárruri, the communist firebrand better known as La Pasionaria, is ticked off for her lifelong Stalinism but admitted to have been on the right side in the Spanish civil war). And he chooses – unexpectedly and interestingly – Obama’s second-term victory speech over the more usual anthology candidates. But for the most part it’s a middle-of-the-road setlist.... Collins is an unashamed liberal centrist for whom process is all. It’s the project of his book to argue that 'disillusionment with conventional politics' is at best a callow, and at worst a dangerous, form of cynicism. Having recruited everyone from Pericles onwards for his debating team, he more than makes his case."
The reminiscence bump: why America’s greatest year was probably when you were young - article by Matthew Warren in The Guardian's Head quarters blog. "Intuitively, it seems like a person’s age should also be independent of their country’s greatness, over which they presumably have very little personal control. But Professor Maryanne Garry, a memory researcher at the University of Waikato who is well-versed in the reminiscence bump, thought otherwise. Every time Trump said that he was going to 'Make America Great Again', Garry says she suspected that he was 'taking Americans to a place that would be different for every one of them'.... The interesting findings [in her recent study] came from the ... participants who did not pick a 'top ten' year [such as the Declaration of Independence or the Second World War]. When the researchers examined how old these people were in the year they chose, they found that the majority picked a year from their youth, with 60% selecting a date between their birth and their 20th birthday. In comparison, relatively few chose a year in the 100 years leading up to their birth, or after they were 30 years old.... Garry suggests that this could be where slogans like 'Make America Great Again' get their power. For each of us, they invoke a time in our own lives where we had our first love, saw our favourite movies, experienced key life events. 'They’re really effective messages', she says. 'We think we are on the same page, but we are actually on separate pages.'”
ABL WTF? - post by Nick Cartwright on the University of Northampton LearnTech blog. "I came to Northampton burning with a passion to get my students learning by doing because it works and because it engages many students who have been excluded by traditional schooling.... The biggest challenge is letting go and empowering students to find their own way through the issues, generating authentic knowledge which may be different from or even challenge my knowledge. Practically it also involves what I dubbed in chats ‘double thinking’, keeping two chains of thought going at once. One half of my brain is following the students journey, sometimes disappearing down the rabbit hole, whilst the other is focused on what we need to cover and trying to keep an overview of the topic all the time working out what questions I need to throw out to keep the two tracks running in the same direction – if I lose the latter the session suddenly loses any sense of direction and this disengages my students. It’s more challenging and more tiring than how I used to teach, but I believe it is a better, more inclusive experience for my students. I wonder what I’ll be doing 10 years from now and how critical I’ll be of what I do today?"
Howards End on TV: life would be worse for a modern-day Leonard Bast - article by Philip Hensher in The Guardian. "Probably [E.M. Forster's] most important novel is Howards End, but its meaning has rather shifted over the years. For most readers, the novel now matters most when it turns to Leonard Bast: hungry for culture and learning, intelligent but disadvantaged and at the mercy of the whims of the rich. In my view, Forster underestimates what a Leonard Bast could have done to save himself in 1910. There were dozens of literary and popular journals at the time that would have happily published a short story or a piece of reportage from a literate, intelligent, working-class writer, and paid a very useful £20 for it. By contrast, in 2017, a Leonard Bast would be unlikely to meet a Helen Schlegel at a concert in London. He wouldn’t be able to afford to live in London; his education wouldn’t have introduced him to that sort of high culture; there are no libraries with the resources to let him pursue his curiosity. If he lost his job, as Bast does, there would, in effect, be no means of supporting himself through literary expression. That has passed into the hands of the children of the rich. A modern-day Bast would not starve, but he would be seriously deprived, and he would have been kept from the literature that could have saved Forster’s character. Things for him have got worse."
How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into chaos - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. ... It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid?... My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. ... Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture."
Robert Peston: 'I’m not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a blip' - interview by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian. "His new book, WTF, is notionally about Brexit, but presents a disturbing analysis of the underlying economic reasons why so many of us voted to leave the EU. With falling living standards, poor productivity, the decline of social mobility and relentless rise of inequality, Peston regards Brexit as neither a cause of nor solution to our grave economic problems. 'I’m not saying Britain is finished or anything like that. I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.' The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, 'is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions."... If Peston sounds angry with the state of British politics, this may be in part because he is also angry with himself. I can detect a slight tendency for self-flagellation, but do not doubt the sincerity of his self-recrimination. He did not see Brexit coming, he admits, for reasons that make him ashamed. 'I have a sort of self-image to do with an idea that because I went to the local state school, I was not in a sort of bubble of the privately educated privileged – or indeed in a bubble of the privileged in any sense – and that I was somehow more connected to people in this country than people who would have gone to Eton or Westminster or wherever. But among the pretty extensive circle of friends and family, not a single person that I could identify voted for Brexit. It was that bubble, that privileged ghetto – feeling completely disconnected from more than half of the people – that made me feel very ashamed.' "
Monday 4 December 2017
Friday 3 November 2017
Cuttings: October 2017
The Death of Homo Economicus: why does capitalism still exist? - review by Steven Pooole in The Guardian. "'Homo economicus' is the totally made-up creature who is the proletarian hero of mid-20th-century economics: going about his daily life with unimpeachable rationality, efficiently calculating ways to maximise his self-interest. But people don’t actually live like that, as the behavioural economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out. It is a refuted model, yet its malign influence persists.... In the meantime, especially for the young, debt has become 'a way of life' and jobs are increasingly precarious. Fleming has an excellent chapter on the 'theatre of work', where looking busy and adopting the right emotional attitude in an office can be soul-destroying burdens, and he is very astute on the inhumanity of the zero-hours contract, allied to unprecedented methods of electronic surveillance over employees. Delivery drivers, for example, are paid only for each package they deliver, with no sickness or other benefits. Fleming extends the logic remorselessly: why pay a bartender for any time other than those exact seconds when she is pouring a drink? Employers, he writes, should be paying for 'availability' over a period of time; paying only for exactly measured micro-quantities of work is just the newest way to shaft the little guy. About Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit et al, Fleming is particularly scathing: what is dishonestly termed the 'sharing economy' is a cynical monetisation of the widespread hardship caused by the 2008 crisis, and the final stage in the 'atomisation of the employee'. "
Badger or Bulbasaur: have children lost touch with nature? - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, about the origin of his book with Jackie Morris The Lost Words. "Cambridge researchers seeking to 'quantify children’s knowledge of nature' surveyed a cohort of four- to 11-year-old children in Britain. The researchers made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a 'common species' of Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card. The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were 'substantially better' at identifying Pokémon 'species” than 'organisms such as oak trees or badgers'.... Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),' they wrote, but they are presently 'more inspired by synthetic subjects' than by 'living creatures'. They pointed to evidence linking 'loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it'. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren'? "
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia - article by Paul Lewis in The Guardian "A small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics [are complaining] about the rise of the so-called 'attention economy': an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.... There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called 'continuous partial attention', severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. ... 'One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,' [says Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button]. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, [Leah] Pearlman [also on the team that created the Facebook Like] and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls."
Don’t press send … The new rules for good writing in the 21st century - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian, based on his book Write to the Point. "Five simple ways to engage and convince your reader. (1) Bait the hook.... (2) Be clear.... (3) Be correct.... (4) Prefer right-branching sentences.... (5) Read it aloud."
Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science and technology. Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically polarised world.
What I learnt from being a student - blog post by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University. "Here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying... Small stuff is big – for all the talk of revolutionary pedagogy, personalised learning, disrupted education, what really matters most of the time is the straightforward, everyday matters: do I know what I should be doing at any given time? Can I access the material? Is it clearly written? Can I get support within a reasonable timeframe? Is it set out so I can plan my time effectively?... Engaging and challenging – ... I’ve mentioned before that I came to like assessment because this forced me to engage with the content and bring it together. So it’s not just about making sure as educators we cover topics A to E but also that the student wants to learn about them. Give me a reason to interact – given my time constraints, I didn’t do much interaction in the forums. And this was fine with me, I was glad the course didn’t make lots of interaction compulsory just for the sake of it. But also without a major prompt to do so, it was easy to avoid interaction all together, and if this was my first time studying, that would be a shame. It made me vulnerable – and not in a cute puppy way. I am from a science background and so don’t have any art history knowledge. I was therefore winging it a lot of the time, and didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge most of my fellow students had. I would have been reluctant to have been forced to display this scarcity of knowledge in the open, so I was grateful for a closed environment, and careful feedback from tutors to scaffold my learning.... the important aspect was to be reminded of how vulnerable the whole learning process is."
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design - blog post by John Spencer at The Synapse. "One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures. ... I hadn’t even considered the 'user experience' of my pedagogy, classroom management, or classroom space. UX design was a game-changer for me.... Here are eight ideas of UX design that I am trying to incorporate into my course design. (1) Embrace on-boarding.... (2) Begin with users in mind... (3) Create multimedia instructions... (4) Be intentional with copy text... (5) Be linear but be connective... (6) Be consistent... (7) Be simple... (8) Solicit frequent feedback.... The best systems are the ones that feel invisible. You step into it and immediately know where to go and what to do. Don’t get me wrong. Confusion can be a great thing in a classroom if it is leading toward deeper learning. But confusion caused by poorly designed courses leads to disengagement and frustration. It cuts learning short and disrupts creative flow."
Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “I’ve always been fascinated by [Martin Luther], and as the 500th anniversary [of his 95 theses] loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath. One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world... Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary.”
Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti: priorities for feminism in the 21st century - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture. Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman – middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues – and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’t necessarily lead her to any radically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyoncé, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won."
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: the turn against Big Tech - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "This is not a book of small, gentle criticisms. According to Foer, Silicon Valley threatens our souls and our civilisation. Big tech companies, he believes, are on a global crusade 'to mould humanity into their desired image of it'. And this moulding is highly destructive. It involves the demolition of privacy, individuality, creativity, free will, competitive markets, the media and publishing industries, the distinction between facts and lies, the possibility for political compromise, and the space for solitary contemplation.... Because Foer sees collectivism as the problem, he has trouble imagining collective solutions. He proposes that we each make a personal commitment to consuming more artisanal forms of culture. He asks us to forgo the easy pleasures of technology in favour of 'the sustaining nourishment of the contemplative life' – a slow-food movement of the soul. But there are many who don’t find the contemplative life all that nourishing, and others who prefer to draw their nourishment from the new forms of collectivity created by the internet. Telling these people to read more books will do little to curb Silicon Valley’s growing power over our lives.... 'We have deluded ourselves into caring more deeply about convenience and efficiency than about the things that last,' Foer writes. This is a false choice. We can have Twitter and Turgenev. We can keep our humanity intact while enjoying the new tools tech has built – and use politics to make them better."
Badger or Bulbasaur: have children lost touch with nature? - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, about the origin of his book with Jackie Morris The Lost Words. "Cambridge researchers seeking to 'quantify children’s knowledge of nature' surveyed a cohort of four- to 11-year-old children in Britain. The researchers made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a 'common species' of Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card. The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were 'substantially better' at identifying Pokémon 'species” than 'organisms such as oak trees or badgers'.... Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),' they wrote, but they are presently 'more inspired by synthetic subjects' than by 'living creatures'. They pointed to evidence linking 'loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it'. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren'? "
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia - article by Paul Lewis in The Guardian "A small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics [are complaining] about the rise of the so-called 'attention economy': an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.... There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called 'continuous partial attention', severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. ... 'One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,' [says Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button]. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, [Leah] Pearlman [also on the team that created the Facebook Like] and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls."
Don’t press send … The new rules for good writing in the 21st century - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian, based on his book Write to the Point. "Five simple ways to engage and convince your reader. (1) Bait the hook.... (2) Be clear.... (3) Be correct.... (4) Prefer right-branching sentences.... (5) Read it aloud."
Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science and technology. Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically polarised world.
What I learnt from being a student - blog post by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University. "Here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying... Small stuff is big – for all the talk of revolutionary pedagogy, personalised learning, disrupted education, what really matters most of the time is the straightforward, everyday matters: do I know what I should be doing at any given time? Can I access the material? Is it clearly written? Can I get support within a reasonable timeframe? Is it set out so I can plan my time effectively?... Engaging and challenging – ... I’ve mentioned before that I came to like assessment because this forced me to engage with the content and bring it together. So it’s not just about making sure as educators we cover topics A to E but also that the student wants to learn about them. Give me a reason to interact – given my time constraints, I didn’t do much interaction in the forums. And this was fine with me, I was glad the course didn’t make lots of interaction compulsory just for the sake of it. But also without a major prompt to do so, it was easy to avoid interaction all together, and if this was my first time studying, that would be a shame. It made me vulnerable – and not in a cute puppy way. I am from a science background and so don’t have any art history knowledge. I was therefore winging it a lot of the time, and didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge most of my fellow students had. I would have been reluctant to have been forced to display this scarcity of knowledge in the open, so I was grateful for a closed environment, and careful feedback from tutors to scaffold my learning.... the important aspect was to be reminded of how vulnerable the whole learning process is."
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design - blog post by John Spencer at The Synapse. "One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures. ... I hadn’t even considered the 'user experience' of my pedagogy, classroom management, or classroom space. UX design was a game-changer for me.... Here are eight ideas of UX design that I am trying to incorporate into my course design. (1) Embrace on-boarding.... (2) Begin with users in mind... (3) Create multimedia instructions... (4) Be intentional with copy text... (5) Be linear but be connective... (6) Be consistent... (7) Be simple... (8) Solicit frequent feedback.... The best systems are the ones that feel invisible. You step into it and immediately know where to go and what to do. Don’t get me wrong. Confusion can be a great thing in a classroom if it is leading toward deeper learning. But confusion caused by poorly designed courses leads to disengagement and frustration. It cuts learning short and disrupts creative flow."
Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “I’ve always been fascinated by [Martin Luther], and as the 500th anniversary [of his 95 theses] loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath. One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world... Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary.”
Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti: priorities for feminism in the 21st century - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture. Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman – middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues – and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’t necessarily lead her to any radically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyoncé, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won."
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: the turn against Big Tech - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "This is not a book of small, gentle criticisms. According to Foer, Silicon Valley threatens our souls and our civilisation. Big tech companies, he believes, are on a global crusade 'to mould humanity into their desired image of it'. And this moulding is highly destructive. It involves the demolition of privacy, individuality, creativity, free will, competitive markets, the media and publishing industries, the distinction between facts and lies, the possibility for political compromise, and the space for solitary contemplation.... Because Foer sees collectivism as the problem, he has trouble imagining collective solutions. He proposes that we each make a personal commitment to consuming more artisanal forms of culture. He asks us to forgo the easy pleasures of technology in favour of 'the sustaining nourishment of the contemplative life' – a slow-food movement of the soul. But there are many who don’t find the contemplative life all that nourishing, and others who prefer to draw their nourishment from the new forms of collectivity created by the internet. Telling these people to read more books will do little to curb Silicon Valley’s growing power over our lives.... 'We have deluded ourselves into caring more deeply about convenience and efficiency than about the things that last,' Foer writes. This is a false choice. We can have Twitter and Turgenev. We can keep our humanity intact while enjoying the new tools tech has built – and use politics to make them better."
Tuesday 24 October 2017
Alternatives to telling: what are we forgetting when we put education online?
Most people experienced in online education are clear that it’s not just about presentation of subject matter. Even if that’s your starting assumption – and such is the pernicious influence of IT thinking that even good educators find themselves thinking of teaching as the transmission of information – you quickly realise that online lectures, whether text, audio or video, don’t necessarily lead to learning. So online educators turn to the medium’s great potential for discussing, sharing and collaborating, and supplement online presentations with activities for learning through online social interaction. For many people these days, online education means presentation plus group learning activities.
But if we think like that, we’re forgetting the possibility of individual learning activities. From the earliest years of The Open University, these were the distinctive core of its approach to distance learning, as a deliberate and conscious effort to implement an active constructivist pedagogy through printed materials. As Fred Lockwood tells the story, the approach originated in a 1973 memo by Derek Rowntree, in which he asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time.
But one starts from what one knows. When recently I asked a new OU lecturer what she was planning to add to her throughly planned presentation of subject matter, she responded in terms of online group activities; reasonably enough, she thought of delivering online versions of the lectures and classes with which she was familiar. So it’s not so surprising that individual learning activities should be absent from the online learning design of universities with no previous background in distance learning, such as Phoenix or Northampton.
What’s more surprising is that individual learning activities don’t feature in the OU’s own framework for learning design, even though they are still to be found in OU course materials, both printed and online. In the OU’s typology of learning activities, the only category in which they could plausibly fit is that of “Assimilative activities”, in which the root metaphor does at least connote the building up of structures. However, according to its definition, this category includes nothing more than “attending to information”, with the core task verbs being “read, watch, listen” [1], described as “essentially passive in nature” (Conole 2007, p 84) – bizarre in a typology of learning activities (how can one have a passive activity?) and certainly leaving no room for anything like a “tutorial in print”. But then this typology was developed at the University of Southampton, as part of a programme for promoting the use of educational technology[2], without reference to the tradition of distance learning, at the Open University or anywhere else.
Does it matter if we forget individual learning activities and omit them from our learning design thinking? I think it does, because group activities are not always appropriate ways of making learners active and developing their competence with the subject. For one thing, social learning is not suitable for some learners, most obviously for those in prison or other secure environments in which contact with other learners is limited or impossible. More importantly, group activities are time-consuming ways of working with a topic – typically each learner has to wait for responses from others before they can complete the activity for themselves – meaning that in practical terms they are only suitable where that investment of time is warranted. Most fundamentally, group activities are not appropriate where the range of possible correct responses is limited, so that there’s little for learners to discuss or share. Learners’ time may be better spent initially practicing new concepts on their own, learning to get them right before using them in discussion with others.
Forgetting about individual learning activities also lets authors off the hook of thinking properly about how learners are actually going to achieve competence in the subject. If all learners are going to do is to discuss the subject matter presented to them, that encourages authors to plan and write their materials as if for a textbook, without thinking about learning activities – group or individual – until the presentation is substantially finished. And that is bad, because whereas textbooks have to be complete, covering thoroughly all the topics in their scope, for learning materials completeness is usually not desirable. Rather than presenting a definitive account of the subject, it is actually more effective to leave gaps for learners to fill in for themselves. “Never tell learners anything you can have them work out for themselves,” was the maxim given me by Richard Freeman (formerly of the National Extension College and the Open College) when I started writing distance learning materials; like all maxims, it’s an overstatement, but it reflects the ideal, the ambition which should be ours, as writers and designers of learning materials. We need to be constantly alert to all the alternatives to telling we can think of, and we cannot afford to forget any of them.
Notes
[1] The three original task verbs of “Read, Watch, Listen” have recently been supplemented by “Think about, Access, Observe, Review, Study”, which while at least allowing for a learner taking an active stance does not suggest the kind of focused direction characteristic of an individual learning activity. To include proper constructivist activities, the category should include task verbs such as Summarise, Identify, Classify, Interpret, Compare and contrast, Apply, Analyse and Evaluate. See my post 'Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?'
[2] A conference presentation (Fill et al 2004) locates the development of the DialogPlus toolkit, which embodied the typology, in the perceived gap between the potential of educational technologies and the application of good pedagogic principles.
References
Conole, G. (2007), 'Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice', and Appendix 7 'Taxonomy of learning activities', in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.
Fill et al (2004), 'Supporting teachers: the development and evaluation of a learning design toolkit', presentation at Alt-C conference Exeter, abstract at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126075256/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=79 (Accessed 22 October 2017), PowerPoint at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126114429/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/files/79/DialogPlus%20Toolkit.ppt (Accessed 22 October 2017).
Lockwood 1992, Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, London, Kogan Page
But if we think like that, we’re forgetting the possibility of individual learning activities. From the earliest years of The Open University, these were the distinctive core of its approach to distance learning, as a deliberate and conscious effort to implement an active constructivist pedagogy through printed materials. As Fred Lockwood tells the story, the approach originated in a 1973 memo by Derek Rowntree, in which he asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time.
Rowntree argued that … it was highly unlikely that you would simply talk at the learner for hour after hour; he didn’t believe it would happen. Instead he thought you would probably regard a one-to-one tutorial as an ideal form of teaching when information, source materials, procedures, techniques, arguments, research findings, raw data, etc. would be communicated and learners would be asked to respond to a variety of questions. In some cases the actual answer would be provided, in others a commentary or feedback. In such a context a learner could be asked a whole series of questions, dependent upon the nature of the topic and form the teaching was to take. The learner could be asked to recall items of information, to define concepts, draw together arguments, justify particular statements, consult other sources, interpret data, compare different interpretations of the same data, work out examples, discuss things and perhaps produce something themselves. In short, teachers would expect the exercise of certain study skills by which the learner constructs his or her own picture of the subject and learn to integrate what has just been taught with what had been learnt before feedback was provided.
This “tutorial-in-print” approach came to be the defining characteristic of Open University materials. When I was taught to write distance learning materials on an OU model in the early 1990s, I learned to give priority to such learning activities, preferably planning them before starting to write any subject matter presentation. One set of course materials on which I worked was designed to consist only of individual learning activities, the presentational element being supplied by existing published readings to which learners had access through their professional libraries. When computer-based and internet-based technologies arrived in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I recognised the possibilities which they afforded for interactivity, free exploration of resources and social learning, but we saw these as supplements to individual learning activities, not replacements.(Lockwood, 1992 p 25)
But one starts from what one knows. When recently I asked a new OU lecturer what she was planning to add to her throughly planned presentation of subject matter, she responded in terms of online group activities; reasonably enough, she thought of delivering online versions of the lectures and classes with which she was familiar. So it’s not so surprising that individual learning activities should be absent from the online learning design of universities with no previous background in distance learning, such as Phoenix or Northampton.
What’s more surprising is that individual learning activities don’t feature in the OU’s own framework for learning design, even though they are still to be found in OU course materials, both printed and online. In the OU’s typology of learning activities, the only category in which they could plausibly fit is that of “Assimilative activities”, in which the root metaphor does at least connote the building up of structures. However, according to its definition, this category includes nothing more than “attending to information”, with the core task verbs being “read, watch, listen” [1], described as “essentially passive in nature” (Conole 2007, p 84) – bizarre in a typology of learning activities (how can one have a passive activity?) and certainly leaving no room for anything like a “tutorial in print”. But then this typology was developed at the University of Southampton, as part of a programme for promoting the use of educational technology[2], without reference to the tradition of distance learning, at the Open University or anywhere else.
Does it matter if we forget individual learning activities and omit them from our learning design thinking? I think it does, because group activities are not always appropriate ways of making learners active and developing their competence with the subject. For one thing, social learning is not suitable for some learners, most obviously for those in prison or other secure environments in which contact with other learners is limited or impossible. More importantly, group activities are time-consuming ways of working with a topic – typically each learner has to wait for responses from others before they can complete the activity for themselves – meaning that in practical terms they are only suitable where that investment of time is warranted. Most fundamentally, group activities are not appropriate where the range of possible correct responses is limited, so that there’s little for learners to discuss or share. Learners’ time may be better spent initially practicing new concepts on their own, learning to get them right before using them in discussion with others.
Forgetting about individual learning activities also lets authors off the hook of thinking properly about how learners are actually going to achieve competence in the subject. If all learners are going to do is to discuss the subject matter presented to them, that encourages authors to plan and write their materials as if for a textbook, without thinking about learning activities – group or individual – until the presentation is substantially finished. And that is bad, because whereas textbooks have to be complete, covering thoroughly all the topics in their scope, for learning materials completeness is usually not desirable. Rather than presenting a definitive account of the subject, it is actually more effective to leave gaps for learners to fill in for themselves. “Never tell learners anything you can have them work out for themselves,” was the maxim given me by Richard Freeman (formerly of the National Extension College and the Open College) when I started writing distance learning materials; like all maxims, it’s an overstatement, but it reflects the ideal, the ambition which should be ours, as writers and designers of learning materials. We need to be constantly alert to all the alternatives to telling we can think of, and we cannot afford to forget any of them.
Notes
[1] The three original task verbs of “Read, Watch, Listen” have recently been supplemented by “Think about, Access, Observe, Review, Study”, which while at least allowing for a learner taking an active stance does not suggest the kind of focused direction characteristic of an individual learning activity. To include proper constructivist activities, the category should include task verbs such as Summarise, Identify, Classify, Interpret, Compare and contrast, Apply, Analyse and Evaluate. See my post 'Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?'
[2] A conference presentation (Fill et al 2004) locates the development of the DialogPlus toolkit, which embodied the typology, in the perceived gap between the potential of educational technologies and the application of good pedagogic principles.
References
Conole, G. (2007), 'Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice', and Appendix 7 'Taxonomy of learning activities', in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.
Fill et al (2004), 'Supporting teachers: the development and evaluation of a learning design toolkit', presentation at Alt-C conference Exeter, abstract at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126075256/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=79 (Accessed 22 October 2017), PowerPoint at http://web.archive.org/web/20101126114429/http://alt.ac.uk/altc2004/timetable/files/79/DialogPlus%20Toolkit.ppt (Accessed 22 October 2017).
Lockwood 1992, Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, London, Kogan Page
Tuesday 3 October 2017
Seen and heard: July to September 2017
The Lego Batman Movie – frenetic, clever and compassionate fun, like the Lego Movie made with the world’s largest (virtual) Lego set.
Wonder Woman soundtrack – top of the Classic FM chart for a couple of weeks in June, and much superior to the acoustic filler which you find on most film soundtracks these days. Definitely captures the Amazon spirit, with great use of drums.
Echo – podcast in the BBC’s Digital Human series. Interesting exploration of how technology can support – develop? improve? – inner dialogue, which of course is critical to advanced learning skills.
Digital Transformation - interview with David Egerton. I loved his Shock of the Old, calling into question the usual accounts of technology change, which he argues focus at the wrong time and place: too early, close to the time of discovery, and not on the technologies which people actually use. Here he argues we make ourselves ignorant by focusing on the digital. Sample: “The promoters of technology for many decades …have argued that we absolutely need this one, two or three new machines and that they will transform our world…. All that changes is the particular machine. So once the radio would bring the world together, later it was television and now it’s the Internet.…It’s extraordinary really that people still get away with giving the impression that this is an original story.”
Phil Spencer: Find Me a Home – neat twist on the usual TV property show in which Phil off Location Location Location tries to find homes for two families facing homelessness. Though not as naïve as he pretends to be for the programme (he’s patron of a homelessness charity), he was I think genuinely shocked to discover how many landlords will simply not let to people on benefits. Happy endings for the families, though in one case it was fairly clear they were successful only because they had Phil and a TV crew on their case.
Diana, Our mother: Her Life and Legacy – probably the best of the slew of TV programmes around the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, because it had her sons talking about things that could never be said at the time: for example, how weird it was to be amongst the crowds, having not to cry themselves while surrounded by all these people in tears who didn’t know her. If they were angry about that, they didn’t show it. True greatness.
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman – beautifully conceived and written, but I think from the storytelling point of view Jane Goldman’s screenplay for the film has a better shape for the final act, as well as introducing the character of the cross-dressing pirate (a star turn for Robert de Niro).
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman – gripping and truly scary in places, taking its setting from Gaiman’s childhood and reminding me powerfully in numerous small ways of my own which must have been contemporaneous, though such exciting and awful things never happened to me. Like Alan Garner (whom he surely also read at that age?) he has a tremendous skill for combining the fantastic and uncanny with the realistic and everyday.
Inception – high-concept thriller, with a Mission Impossible style twisting turning storyline in which you know deceptions are being perpetrated but only find out what they are after they happen, and the plausible-looking (though totally unrealistic) theme of shared dreaming.
Old People’s Home for Four-Year-Olds – we know the mutual benefits old people and young people get from spending time together, but this was an interesting experiment of basing a primary school in an elderly care home, with shared activities including a sports day. Before and after measurements showed not only cognitive but physical improvement in the elderly people. Touching encounters too.
The Brain with David Eagleman – BBC TV series about the brain’s role in shaping and constructing our lives. Nothing new or unfamiliar to anyone who’s been around psychology the last forty years, but it’s well-explained and some of the filmed case studies are great.
My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 – one of the BBC’s programmes as part of the 70th anniversary commemorations (celebrations would be the wrong word). Basically this was ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ with extreme prejudice, literally, with several current British citizens recovering the stories of their Muslim, Hindu and white British forebears through those dreadful days. I knew that there had been massive inter-community violence, but I’d not appreciated before the terrible genocidal spirit which took hold. Scary to realise just how quickly and easily a society can fall apart, as we’ve more recently seen in Burundi and the former Yugoslavia.
Despicable Me 2 – great joy, great fun, with the return of Gru, his adopted orphans and of course his minions, and the introduction of the brilliantly manic Lucy as his romantic partner. Had to see this before getting to see Despicable Me 3.
Diana: 7 days – interesting BBC documentary, covering the same extraordinary week as the fictional The Queen between Princess Diana’s death and her funeral.
Inspector Montalbano, series 4 – a welcome return, and although Salvo, Mimi and Fazio are all noticeably older, and there’s a new Livia, the stories are top quality, perhaps even better than before.
Richard Rohr on The World, the Flesh and the Devil – from Day 2 of the Center for Action and Contemplation conference CONSPIRE 2017. He’s a great presenter with an easy accessible manner and his webcasts are always worth watching, but this time he was really on fire. The theology behind his talk is expounded in one of his Daily Meditations, but it's not nearly as much fun as his talk!
Autoloon ethics training – an example of a branching scenario created by instructional designer Cathy Moore using Twine. Not only a great demonstration of how to build a dialogue choice scenario, but also an interesting exercise in learning design. How quickly can you find the optimal pathway? (I took several wrong turns.)
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, by Richard H. Thaler – autobiographical account of how economists have reluctantly abandoned their theoretical premise that people make economic choices as though they were perfectly rational. For example, real people (as distinct from homini economici) count losses more than gains, pay attention to sunk costs, and don’t necessarily have the willpower to carry out their best decision even if they can work out what it is. All this had practical application, in the US and with the UK’s “nudge unit”, devising policies to "influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves". I wonder if our distance learning teaching methods aren’t similarly based on a premise of ideal rational learners, and whether there are similar “nudges” we should be applying when presenting learners with choices?
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco – global trans-historical conspiracy novel involving the Knights Templar, originally published in English in 1988 and suffering now from eclipse by The Da Vinci Code which did much the same thing but in a more accessible way (less complex, fewer footnotes). Some touching moments, but I do find irritating Eco’s habit of downloading all his research onto the pages of the book (a feature of The Name of the Rose also).
The Keeper of Lost Things, by Ruth Hogan – starts like chicklit, but then becomes something richer, deeper and cleverer, with multiple interconnected plot strands.
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? – fascinating exhibition at the Wellcome Museum for the History of Medicine, with examples ranging from health education (including the “AIDS – Don’t die of ignorance” campaign) to hospital signage. Spoiler alert: the answer is Yes.
Barley, sung by Lizz Wright – a simple, tender, defiant song, beautifully performed.
Wonder Woman soundtrack – top of the Classic FM chart for a couple of weeks in June, and much superior to the acoustic filler which you find on most film soundtracks these days. Definitely captures the Amazon spirit, with great use of drums.
Echo – podcast in the BBC’s Digital Human series. Interesting exploration of how technology can support – develop? improve? – inner dialogue, which of course is critical to advanced learning skills.
Digital Transformation - interview with David Egerton. I loved his Shock of the Old, calling into question the usual accounts of technology change, which he argues focus at the wrong time and place: too early, close to the time of discovery, and not on the technologies which people actually use. Here he argues we make ourselves ignorant by focusing on the digital. Sample: “The promoters of technology for many decades …have argued that we absolutely need this one, two or three new machines and that they will transform our world…. All that changes is the particular machine. So once the radio would bring the world together, later it was television and now it’s the Internet.…It’s extraordinary really that people still get away with giving the impression that this is an original story.”
Phil Spencer: Find Me a Home – neat twist on the usual TV property show in which Phil off Location Location Location tries to find homes for two families facing homelessness. Though not as naïve as he pretends to be for the programme (he’s patron of a homelessness charity), he was I think genuinely shocked to discover how many landlords will simply not let to people on benefits. Happy endings for the families, though in one case it was fairly clear they were successful only because they had Phil and a TV crew on their case.
Diana, Our mother: Her Life and Legacy – probably the best of the slew of TV programmes around the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, because it had her sons talking about things that could never be said at the time: for example, how weird it was to be amongst the crowds, having not to cry themselves while surrounded by all these people in tears who didn’t know her. If they were angry about that, they didn’t show it. True greatness.
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman – beautifully conceived and written, but I think from the storytelling point of view Jane Goldman’s screenplay for the film has a better shape for the final act, as well as introducing the character of the cross-dressing pirate (a star turn for Robert de Niro).
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman – gripping and truly scary in places, taking its setting from Gaiman’s childhood and reminding me powerfully in numerous small ways of my own which must have been contemporaneous, though such exciting and awful things never happened to me. Like Alan Garner (whom he surely also read at that age?) he has a tremendous skill for combining the fantastic and uncanny with the realistic and everyday.
Inception – high-concept thriller, with a Mission Impossible style twisting turning storyline in which you know deceptions are being perpetrated but only find out what they are after they happen, and the plausible-looking (though totally unrealistic) theme of shared dreaming.
Old People’s Home for Four-Year-Olds – we know the mutual benefits old people and young people get from spending time together, but this was an interesting experiment of basing a primary school in an elderly care home, with shared activities including a sports day. Before and after measurements showed not only cognitive but physical improvement in the elderly people. Touching encounters too.
The Brain with David Eagleman – BBC TV series about the brain’s role in shaping and constructing our lives. Nothing new or unfamiliar to anyone who’s been around psychology the last forty years, but it’s well-explained and some of the filmed case studies are great.
My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 – one of the BBC’s programmes as part of the 70th anniversary commemorations (celebrations would be the wrong word). Basically this was ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ with extreme prejudice, literally, with several current British citizens recovering the stories of their Muslim, Hindu and white British forebears through those dreadful days. I knew that there had been massive inter-community violence, but I’d not appreciated before the terrible genocidal spirit which took hold. Scary to realise just how quickly and easily a society can fall apart, as we’ve more recently seen in Burundi and the former Yugoslavia.
Despicable Me 2 – great joy, great fun, with the return of Gru, his adopted orphans and of course his minions, and the introduction of the brilliantly manic Lucy as his romantic partner. Had to see this before getting to see Despicable Me 3.
Diana: 7 days – interesting BBC documentary, covering the same extraordinary week as the fictional The Queen between Princess Diana’s death and her funeral.
Inspector Montalbano, series 4 – a welcome return, and although Salvo, Mimi and Fazio are all noticeably older, and there’s a new Livia, the stories are top quality, perhaps even better than before.
Richard Rohr on The World, the Flesh and the Devil – from Day 2 of the Center for Action and Contemplation conference CONSPIRE 2017. He’s a great presenter with an easy accessible manner and his webcasts are always worth watching, but this time he was really on fire. The theology behind his talk is expounded in one of his Daily Meditations, but it's not nearly as much fun as his talk!
Autoloon ethics training – an example of a branching scenario created by instructional designer Cathy Moore using Twine. Not only a great demonstration of how to build a dialogue choice scenario, but also an interesting exercise in learning design. How quickly can you find the optimal pathway? (I took several wrong turns.)
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, by Richard H. Thaler – autobiographical account of how economists have reluctantly abandoned their theoretical premise that people make economic choices as though they were perfectly rational. For example, real people (as distinct from homini economici) count losses more than gains, pay attention to sunk costs, and don’t necessarily have the willpower to carry out their best decision even if they can work out what it is. All this had practical application, in the US and with the UK’s “nudge unit”, devising policies to "influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves". I wonder if our distance learning teaching methods aren’t similarly based on a premise of ideal rational learners, and whether there are similar “nudges” we should be applying when presenting learners with choices?
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco – global trans-historical conspiracy novel involving the Knights Templar, originally published in English in 1988 and suffering now from eclipse by The Da Vinci Code which did much the same thing but in a more accessible way (less complex, fewer footnotes). Some touching moments, but I do find irritating Eco’s habit of downloading all his research onto the pages of the book (a feature of The Name of the Rose also).
The Keeper of Lost Things, by Ruth Hogan – starts like chicklit, but then becomes something richer, deeper and cleverer, with multiple interconnected plot strands.
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? – fascinating exhibition at the Wellcome Museum for the History of Medicine, with examples ranging from health education (including the “AIDS – Don’t die of ignorance” campaign) to hospital signage. Spoiler alert: the answer is Yes.
Barley, sung by Lizz Wright – a simple, tender, defiant song, beautifully performed.
Cuttings: September 2017
Active learning and teaching in online spaces - blog post from the University of Northampton learning technology team. "There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students. (1) Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ... (2) Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ... (3) Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....
Managing the complexity of branching scenarios - blog post by Christy Tucker. "One of the issues with branching scenarios is that you can get exponential growth. If each choice has 3 options, you end up with 9 slides after just 2 choices, and 27 after 3 choices. This is 40 pages total with only 3 decisions per path. For most projects, that’s more complexity than you want or need. So how do you manage this complexity? (1) Use Twine.... Twine makes it very easy to draft scenarios and check how all the connections flow together.... Cathy Moore has an example of a scenario she built in Twine. This scenario has 57 total decision points, but it only took her 8 hours to create. (2) Planning a scenario. ... I usually have an idea of how long the ideal or perfect path will be. If you have a multi-step process, that’s your ideal path. If there’s going to be 4 decision points on the shortest path, I know what those are before I start writing. I also usually know at least some of the decision points based on errors or mistakes I need to address. (3) Allow opportunities to fix mistakes. One trick for managing the potentially exponential growth is by giving learners a chance to get back on the right path if they make a minor error. If they make 2 or 3 errors in a row, they get to an ending and have to restart the whole thing.... (4) Make some paths shorter.... (5) Gook, OK and bad. In branching scenarios, not everything is as black and white as a clear-cut right or wrong answer. You can have good, OK, and bad choices and endings...."
Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’ - interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "Did he get the impression these positions [such as climate change denial] were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? 'Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.' "
I’m like a happy four-year-old with a picture - article by Coralie Bickford-Smith in The Guardian, in the series 'My Writing Day'. "I was making The Worm and The Bird, and had taken a sabbatical from Penguin for three months to finish what I had started.... But all I dreamed about was finishing, and my time was evaporating into nothing. I had lost all my joy from the process of creating. The child in me was constantly asking 'are we there yet?' I became anxious. My sister Abigail called to quell my rising panic; she had read an article about Seneca and I recalled a biography of his for which I’d recently designed a cover. Something clicked. The error of my ways became obvious. I was not in the moment, far away from the present. ... I found the joy of creating again and I forgot about the finish line. It became apparent that I was making the same mistakes in living my daily life as I was in the process of creating a book. I made a choice to be more present in the moment, not just at work but in my life as a whole."
Laugh a minute: six short plays by Michael Frayn - from his Pocket Playhouse. "Hymns Ancient and Modern. From the Morning Post, 23 November 1893. Cable and telegraph offices were overwhelmed last night by the flood of tributes pouring in from fans all over the world to the Reverend Francis Giffard Smith, the legendary creator of some of the best loved and most groundbreaking hymns of the 19th century, who died yesterday aged 57 after a long battle with depression and incense addiction. His 1861 hit 'God’s Gas' was the first Church of England hymn to sell a million copies worldwide. Its words – 'Lord, fill us with Thy heaven’ly gas, / Like street-lights in the dark, / Then like the lamp-lighter supply / The municipal spark!' – spoke to people of all classes and none."
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud: innocence and loss - review by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. "Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally, as it was in 2013 for middle-class white kids of the electronic age in America. The shining goals are wealth and success, but the jobs offered to the young are nanny, barista, waitress, janitor. Work is seldom presented to them as something to be done for its own sake; purpose doesn’t mean much. These kids are likely to see their lives not as a continuity of being with an imaginable past and an imaginable future, but as a rapid succession of unrelated events without history and without promise. And therefore without hope.... Painful as it may be, this is a hard book to stop reading. Messud is a story teller: the ability to compel and hold the reader’s interest may not be the crown and summit of the art of novel-writing, but it’s the beginning and the end of it.... When I was about 15, an excellent teacher put in my hands Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s lyrical novel of doomed adolescence. At that age of course I swallowed all the romanticism of Meaulnes’ mysterious domain and wanted only more. More than 70 years later, I hopefully followed these two girls seeking their own mysterious domain in an abandoned mental hospital, even if I knew only too well that all the romance was imagined, and that any attempt to return to it would end in tragedy."
How do we get out of this mess? - article by George Moniot in The Guardian, based on his book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. "Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. ... You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another."
Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, Review, 9 September 2017, p 12. "TL:DR - Too long: didn't read. VS: SDR - Very short: still didn't read. SR:PW - Should read: probably won't. RB:GB - Read a bit: got bored. SR:MP - Skim-read: missed point. RH:PAC - Read headline - posted angry comments."
Bread for All: how Britain is regressing to the early 19th century - review by Stefan Collinin in The Guardian. "The story of Beveridge and his report and Aneurin Bevan and his National Health Service is by now a familiar and impressive one, and Renwick retells it well. There is, however, a deeper level that can be excavated, which is to explore how the practical concern to alleviate or prevent the sufferings of the poor came to be bound up with – and, intellectually, to depend on – two conceptual breakthroughs that are among the salient achievements of the age. The first hugely consequential intellectual advance was the development of macro-economics and the idea that the state was in some sense responsible for managing the economy as a whole.... The second crucial conceptual achievement was the working out of the rationale for progressive taxation. This, too, was essentially a New Liberal not a socialist idea. Socialism was focused on achieving social justice through nationalisation of the means of production and the redistribution, or even confiscation, of large concentrations of wealth. The argument about progressive taxation, by contrast, rested on the insight that the achievements of individuals, including their financial rewards, were always dependent on the collective operation of society and social experience, whether in the form of infrastructure, public order and the legal system, or shared knowledge, cultural resources and moral attitudes.... One enormously valuable effect of the New Liberal argument was to cast doubt on the absoluteness of the everyday distinction between public and private money. We now get in a great lather when individuals are paid sums of “'public money', while we tacitly accept the vastly greater rewards of executives and financiers because that is 'private money'. But it’s not. All such wealth is in part socially created, and there is no intellectually reputable defence for the astronomical 'rents' that figures in the corporate and banking worlds extract from their advantageous positions."
Managing the complexity of branching scenarios - blog post by Christy Tucker. "One of the issues with branching scenarios is that you can get exponential growth. If each choice has 3 options, you end up with 9 slides after just 2 choices, and 27 after 3 choices. This is 40 pages total with only 3 decisions per path. For most projects, that’s more complexity than you want or need. So how do you manage this complexity? (1) Use Twine.... Twine makes it very easy to draft scenarios and check how all the connections flow together.... Cathy Moore has an example of a scenario she built in Twine. This scenario has 57 total decision points, but it only took her 8 hours to create. (2) Planning a scenario. ... I usually have an idea of how long the ideal or perfect path will be. If you have a multi-step process, that’s your ideal path. If there’s going to be 4 decision points on the shortest path, I know what those are before I start writing. I also usually know at least some of the decision points based on errors or mistakes I need to address. (3) Allow opportunities to fix mistakes. One trick for managing the potentially exponential growth is by giving learners a chance to get back on the right path if they make a minor error. If they make 2 or 3 errors in a row, they get to an ending and have to restart the whole thing.... (4) Make some paths shorter.... (5) Gook, OK and bad. In branching scenarios, not everything is as black and white as a clear-cut right or wrong answer. You can have good, OK, and bad choices and endings...."
Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’ - interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "Did he get the impression these positions [such as climate change denial] were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? 'Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.' "
I’m like a happy four-year-old with a picture - article by Coralie Bickford-Smith in The Guardian, in the series 'My Writing Day'. "I was making The Worm and The Bird, and had taken a sabbatical from Penguin for three months to finish what I had started.... But all I dreamed about was finishing, and my time was evaporating into nothing. I had lost all my joy from the process of creating. The child in me was constantly asking 'are we there yet?' I became anxious. My sister Abigail called to quell my rising panic; she had read an article about Seneca and I recalled a biography of his for which I’d recently designed a cover. Something clicked. The error of my ways became obvious. I was not in the moment, far away from the present. ... I found the joy of creating again and I forgot about the finish line. It became apparent that I was making the same mistakes in living my daily life as I was in the process of creating a book. I made a choice to be more present in the moment, not just at work but in my life as a whole."
Laugh a minute: six short plays by Michael Frayn - from his Pocket Playhouse. "Hymns Ancient and Modern. From the Morning Post, 23 November 1893. Cable and telegraph offices were overwhelmed last night by the flood of tributes pouring in from fans all over the world to the Reverend Francis Giffard Smith, the legendary creator of some of the best loved and most groundbreaking hymns of the 19th century, who died yesterday aged 57 after a long battle with depression and incense addiction. His 1861 hit 'God’s Gas' was the first Church of England hymn to sell a million copies worldwide. Its words – 'Lord, fill us with Thy heaven’ly gas, / Like street-lights in the dark, / Then like the lamp-lighter supply / The municipal spark!' – spoke to people of all classes and none."
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud: innocence and loss - review by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. "Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally, as it was in 2013 for middle-class white kids of the electronic age in America. The shining goals are wealth and success, but the jobs offered to the young are nanny, barista, waitress, janitor. Work is seldom presented to them as something to be done for its own sake; purpose doesn’t mean much. These kids are likely to see their lives not as a continuity of being with an imaginable past and an imaginable future, but as a rapid succession of unrelated events without history and without promise. And therefore without hope.... Painful as it may be, this is a hard book to stop reading. Messud is a story teller: the ability to compel and hold the reader’s interest may not be the crown and summit of the art of novel-writing, but it’s the beginning and the end of it.... When I was about 15, an excellent teacher put in my hands Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s lyrical novel of doomed adolescence. At that age of course I swallowed all the romanticism of Meaulnes’ mysterious domain and wanted only more. More than 70 years later, I hopefully followed these two girls seeking their own mysterious domain in an abandoned mental hospital, even if I knew only too well that all the romance was imagined, and that any attempt to return to it would end in tragedy."
How do we get out of this mess? - article by George Moniot in The Guardian, based on his book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. "Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. ... You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another."
Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, Review, 9 September 2017, p 12. "TL:DR - Too long: didn't read. VS: SDR - Very short: still didn't read. SR:PW - Should read: probably won't. RB:GB - Read a bit: got bored. SR:MP - Skim-read: missed point. RH:PAC - Read headline - posted angry comments."
Bread for All: how Britain is regressing to the early 19th century - review by Stefan Collinin in The Guardian. "The story of Beveridge and his report and Aneurin Bevan and his National Health Service is by now a familiar and impressive one, and Renwick retells it well. There is, however, a deeper level that can be excavated, which is to explore how the practical concern to alleviate or prevent the sufferings of the poor came to be bound up with – and, intellectually, to depend on – two conceptual breakthroughs that are among the salient achievements of the age. The first hugely consequential intellectual advance was the development of macro-economics and the idea that the state was in some sense responsible for managing the economy as a whole.... The second crucial conceptual achievement was the working out of the rationale for progressive taxation. This, too, was essentially a New Liberal not a socialist idea. Socialism was focused on achieving social justice through nationalisation of the means of production and the redistribution, or even confiscation, of large concentrations of wealth. The argument about progressive taxation, by contrast, rested on the insight that the achievements of individuals, including their financial rewards, were always dependent on the collective operation of society and social experience, whether in the form of infrastructure, public order and the legal system, or shared knowledge, cultural resources and moral attitudes.... One enormously valuable effect of the New Liberal argument was to cast doubt on the absoluteness of the everyday distinction between public and private money. We now get in a great lather when individuals are paid sums of “'public money', while we tacitly accept the vastly greater rewards of executives and financiers because that is 'private money'. But it’s not. All such wealth is in part socially created, and there is no intellectually reputable defence for the astronomical 'rents' that figures in the corporate and banking worlds extract from their advantageous positions."
Monday 4 September 2017
Re-blog: active learning and teaching in online spaces
I know what a re-tweet is, but is there such a thing as a re-blog? Well, here's one anyway.
I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.
I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.
There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students.
Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ...
Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ...
Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....(Read more)
Sunday 3 September 2017
Cuttings: August 2017
The Fear and the Freedom by Keith Lowe: the moral surprises of the second world war - review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "As a historian of the modern era, Lowe enjoys an enormous advantage over scholars who write about more distant epochs: he is able – for the moment at least – to draw into his writing the experiences of those who lived through the conflict. Perhaps no historian since Gitta Sereny, in The German Trauma, has grasped that opportunity as firmly as Lowe, or done so much with it. As every journalist knows, the art of the interview rests on two principles: asking the right questions and putting them to the right people. With journalistic nous, Lowe has assembled a remarkable chorus of voices and asks the most probing of questions. Their testimony, combined with the author’s pointed analysis, elevates a laudable volume into a very readable and startling book.... It has been said that the most impressive and worrying features of human behaviour is our capacity to adapt to the most terrible of circumstances.... Yet the testimony in these pages demonstrates that adaptation to the extremes and horrors of war was made possible only by the forging of myth. Both combatants and civilians came to define the war as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, or as a conflict that would save future generations from the abyss. This myth was an essential tool of survival. Now it is an obstacle to a proper understanding of how this most terrible of all wars continues to shape our lives."
Labour is right: social mobility is not a good goal for education - article by Selina Todd in The Guardian. "In the postwar years, opportunities in the professions and other well-paid, secure jobs expanded, benefiting huge numbers of people. But today, social mobility means a scramble for the few jobs that offer security.... social mobility reinforces social inequality. Policymakers inaccurately equate the two, but the social mobility agenda assumes we’re stuck with a hierarchical society. Its supporters uncritically accept that there are 'top' universities – the Russell Group – and 'leading professions', defined by Greening as law, medicine and banking (notably, education, meant to deliver so much, isn’t a sector that the talented are encouraged to enter)."
Rulers, Religion and Riches by Jared Rubin: why the west got rich - review by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian. "500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine... By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about. Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed 'backwardness' of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine... By getting 'religion out of politics', Europe made space at the political 'bargaining table' for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of 'pro-growth' policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them. The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by ... the printing press.... Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s 'search for alternative sources of legitimacy' after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for 'pro-commerce' interests."
Lone Echo - review in Adventure Gamers. "Virtual reality has forced developers to learn to walk all over again – often literally, as they rethink concepts as simple as basic movement. ... Lone Echo is set aboard a space station, letting players move freely, unbound by gravity. But instead of spinning around with thrusters (a mechanic that left many feeling dizzy and sick), Lone Echo lets you reach out and touch the world. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, you can grab walls, pull yourself along, and push off to float free though space. You can finesse your trajectory with wrist-mounted boosters, but even here, everything is in your hands. This simple mechanic manages to reconcile the biggest conflict facing VR design, providing both incredible freedom and a high degree of comfort.... Lone Echo casts you as 'Jack,' a service android aboard the Kronos II mining station orbiting Saturn, [and] de-facto companion to the station’s sole human, Captain Olivia Rhodes. ... After an unexplained anomaly knocks out several of the station’s systems, Jack and Olivia scramble to repair the damage and investigate the mysterious phenomenon.... You’ll interact with the world using a basic set of tools: a data scanner, a plasma cutter, and, of course, your hands. ... Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes is at the heart of this tale, and it’s clear that Ready At Dawn has put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure players bond with her. ... Immersive mechanics; an intimate, character-driven story; and a detailed, believable world all come together to create an experience I could genuinely lose myself in. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for a sequel before another game gets VR this right.
‘When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life’ says my dad - article by Richard Macer in The Guardian. "The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to. One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town.... Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London. The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names. ... When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken."
Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard - article by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian's 'Reformation 2017' series. "Historical research and analysis is a seditious rejection of those who seek to control the past in order to shape the future, and a vital antidote to a world without a perspective to match its challenges. History is too important to be antiquarian window-dressing, nationalist mythology or populist propaganda. We need a reformation of our relationship with the past, a radical shift to place understanding history at the heart of how we think about our world."
Labour is right: social mobility is not a good goal for education - article by Selina Todd in The Guardian. "In the postwar years, opportunities in the professions and other well-paid, secure jobs expanded, benefiting huge numbers of people. But today, social mobility means a scramble for the few jobs that offer security.... social mobility reinforces social inequality. Policymakers inaccurately equate the two, but the social mobility agenda assumes we’re stuck with a hierarchical society. Its supporters uncritically accept that there are 'top' universities – the Russell Group – and 'leading professions', defined by Greening as law, medicine and banking (notably, education, meant to deliver so much, isn’t a sector that the talented are encouraged to enter)."
Rulers, Religion and Riches by Jared Rubin: why the west got rich - review by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian. "500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine... By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about. Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed 'backwardness' of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine... By getting 'religion out of politics', Europe made space at the political 'bargaining table' for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of 'pro-growth' policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them. The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by ... the printing press.... Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s 'search for alternative sources of legitimacy' after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for 'pro-commerce' interests."
Lone Echo - review in Adventure Gamers. "Virtual reality has forced developers to learn to walk all over again – often literally, as they rethink concepts as simple as basic movement. ... Lone Echo is set aboard a space station, letting players move freely, unbound by gravity. But instead of spinning around with thrusters (a mechanic that left many feeling dizzy and sick), Lone Echo lets you reach out and touch the world. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, you can grab walls, pull yourself along, and push off to float free though space. You can finesse your trajectory with wrist-mounted boosters, but even here, everything is in your hands. This simple mechanic manages to reconcile the biggest conflict facing VR design, providing both incredible freedom and a high degree of comfort.... Lone Echo casts you as 'Jack,' a service android aboard the Kronos II mining station orbiting Saturn, [and] de-facto companion to the station’s sole human, Captain Olivia Rhodes. ... After an unexplained anomaly knocks out several of the station’s systems, Jack and Olivia scramble to repair the damage and investigate the mysterious phenomenon.... You’ll interact with the world using a basic set of tools: a data scanner, a plasma cutter, and, of course, your hands. ... Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes is at the heart of this tale, and it’s clear that Ready At Dawn has put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure players bond with her. ... Immersive mechanics; an intimate, character-driven story; and a detailed, believable world all come together to create an experience I could genuinely lose myself in. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for a sequel before another game gets VR this right.
‘When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life’ says my dad - article by Richard Macer in The Guardian. "The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to. One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town.... Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London. The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names. ... When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken."
Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard - article by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian's 'Reformation 2017' series. "Historical research and analysis is a seditious rejection of those who seek to control the past in order to shape the future, and a vital antidote to a world without a perspective to match its challenges. History is too important to be antiquarian window-dressing, nationalist mythology or populist propaganda. We need a reformation of our relationship with the past, a radical shift to place understanding history at the heart of how we think about our world."
Friday 4 August 2017
Cuttings: July 2017
Do not adjust your set: 50 years of colour TV: from tennis and ties to petals and plumage - article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "What’s distinctive about the history of British colour TV is that the switchover was directly responsible for the creation of certain genres that dominate the medium to this day. As the technology was experimental, the corporation decided to trial it on the newcomer, BBC2, which in 1967 was run by David Attenborough. He embraced the new palette, not least because he understood at once its possibilities for his type of broadcasting. Life on Earth, Paradise Birds and The Private Life of Plants would hardly have been worth making if viewers were unable to see the glories of plumage, pelts and petals. It is no coincidence that Gardeners’ World will celebrate its 50th birthday in January next year either... But Attenborough, one of the true visionaries of early TV, was not just looking out for his own genre. He saw at once that two types of content – arts and sport – could now be fully born through the coming of colour.... green seems to have been the primary colour of Britain’s early efforts in the new technology: the grass of Centre Court and Percy Thrower’s garden, the baize of snooker tables, lush French nature in the paintings of Monet, Cézanne and Renoir."
‘Fear of Looking Stupid’: Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods - article by David Matthews for Times Higher Education. "Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.... Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews....One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that 'a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.' But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their 'personal identity affirmation' -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ 'No. 1 challenge' was to make sure that they were 'not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.' Herckis also found that many academics clung to a 'very strong' idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975." (Search for Global Learning Council Summit 2017 "lauren herckis" for more.)
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal – review by Matthew Cobb in The Guardian. "Virtually every characteristic that has been claimed to be uniquely human has eventually turned out to have some kind of a precursor in a close relative. As De Waal explains in a series of engaging accounts, language, self-recognition, tool making, empathy, co-operative behaviour, mental time-travel, culture and many other traits and abilities have turned out not to be exclusively human. This is hardly surprising, given that we evolved from an ape ancestor not so long ago: we share behaviour with our relatives, just as we share anatomy.... De Waal does not explore the underlying processes producing the complex and intriguing behaviours described here: we know very little about them. Instead, he focuses on observations and behavioural experiments from the growing field of evolutionary cognition. These allow us to peer into the minds of non-human animals – mainly social animals such as primates and corvids (crows and their relatives), but also dolphins, elephants and one invertebrate, which differs from the others not only in its anatomy but also in its solitary behaviour: the octopus."
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: trouble with algorithms - review by P D Smith in The Guardian. "Her main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives."
Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance? - article by Jonathon W. Penney, on Slate. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "My findings suggested that once people were made aware of different online threats, they were less willing to engage in a range of activities online. For example, when made aware of online surveillance by the government, noteworthy percentages of respondents were less likely to speak or write about certain things online, less likely to share personally created content, less likely to engage with social media, and more cautious in their internet speech or search. In other words, there was a clear chilling effect.... My statistical findings also suggest a greater chilling effect on women and younger internet users. In every scenario examined, I found a statistically significant age effect: The younger the participant, the greater the chilling effect. This association was strongest in the scenario involving government surveillance.... I also found female internet users in the study were more likely to be chilled in scenarios involving surveillance and personal legal threats for content posted online, with the statistical association strongest in the latter scenario. Besides being more often the victims of online harassment, my findings suggest women may also be more negatively affected when targeted with legal and regulatory threats."
Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism - article by Anne Quito and David Yanofsky in Quartz, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "With a two-word tweet, French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled his official portrait yesterday. Taken in his office at the Élysée Palace 46 days after being sworn into office, the 39-year-old centrist’s striking portrait is a masterclass in soft-power symbolism.... Working with his official photographer, Soazig De La Moissonnière, Macron carefully planned the location, pose, props, and publicity for the portrait, which will decorate the walls some 50,000 French government outposts around the world. In the tradition of power portraiture in art history, the so-called 'Jupiterian president' carefully chose props that hint at his personality and underscore his centrist politics. Every detail matters."
The party’s over: how tuition fees ruined university life - article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. "It seems very strange that students should be seen as both demanding consumers and timid thinkers. But perhaps one leads to the other. Certainly [one] English literature tutor believes that 'there is a customer entitlement that erodes students’ sense of personal entitlement'. So even as they demand more of the service, they are 'more submissive to the institution'. There is 'an alliance of subjugation', he says, in which 'they feel they have got to do what’s asked of them, and we feel we have to help them achieve what’s asked of them. It makes me quite sad. I want a student who says: ‘Are you sure about that? Why do you think that?’ But those are fewer and further apart.' "
Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield: luxury communism, anyone? - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, 'time has been diced into the segments between notifications') with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. It’s about what Greenfield calls 'the colonisation of everyday life by information processing', and this new colonialism, in the author’s view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokémon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhone’s operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or the world of increasingly networked objects... What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures – just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk.... Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warn progressives against technological utopianism. 'Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hype is couched in superficially appealing language.' "
Drama queens: why it’s all about women and power on screen right now - "Superhero movies are conspicuously fables about power: they are preoccupied with its sources, how to control it, how to justify it. They are the fantasies of superpowers. What made Wonder Woman seem so different, and such a pleasure to so many viewers, was that its story remained focused throughout on the question of women’s relationship to power. Made by and starring women, the film has been a global blockbuster, giving the franchise commercial power, which is the only kind Hollywood pays attention to; but the film itself has provoked a debate over what this allegory of female power is actually saying. Meanwhile, one of the year’s most-discussed television series was also about women and power, albeit in a far less celebratory mode. The Handmaid’s Tale asks explicit questions about what happens in a totalitarian patriarchal society that denies women access to all economic, legal and political rights. And now Game of Thrones, which is equally interested in women and power, has finally premiered its seventh series to its tenterhooked fans.... Countless words of journalism have debated whether Game of Thrones is feminist or misogynist; that either supposedly mutually exclusive position can be persuasively argued should suggest something of the show’s complexity. ... Watching Game of Thrones play out the storylines of all its varied, fascinating women, in other words, is like watching the culture do battle with its own ideas about women: overt misogyny, internalised misogyny, at least three waves of feminism and post-feminism are all fighting it out before our eyes. It is by no means clear who, or what, will win. What we see is what the struggle over women and power looks like.... While there is a tiny bit of hocus-pocus, most of the supernatural power in Game of Thrones is prosthetic, rather than symbolic. Women don’t have internal magical power, because they operate in a recognisably realistic political world – but they can acquire power externally (from dragons, potions, weapons or gods). And any power will do. In one of the best moments of the entire six series so far, Cersei is informed by an enemy that knowledge is power. With a signal, she has her guards put a sword to his throat before correcting him: 'Power is power.' Game of Thrones is not a story about dragons. It is a story about power."
Cast adrift - article by Ellen E. Jones in The Guardian Guide (29.7.17, pp 14-17). "The Handmaid's Tale, a bracingly up-to-date screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, has been praised for its cinematic visuals and compelling central performance from Elisabth Moss as handmaid Offred, but one element remains controversial: the inclusion of race without the depiction of racism. It's this that New York Magazine has described as the show's 'greatest failing'. ... 'The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies,' wrote actor and rapper Riz Ahmed in the Guardian last year. 'Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.'"
‘Fear of Looking Stupid’: Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods - article by David Matthews for Times Higher Education. "Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.... Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews....One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that 'a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.' But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their 'personal identity affirmation' -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ 'No. 1 challenge' was to make sure that they were 'not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.' Herckis also found that many academics clung to a 'very strong' idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975." (Search for Global Learning Council Summit 2017 "lauren herckis" for more.)
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal – review by Matthew Cobb in The Guardian. "Virtually every characteristic that has been claimed to be uniquely human has eventually turned out to have some kind of a precursor in a close relative. As De Waal explains in a series of engaging accounts, language, self-recognition, tool making, empathy, co-operative behaviour, mental time-travel, culture and many other traits and abilities have turned out not to be exclusively human. This is hardly surprising, given that we evolved from an ape ancestor not so long ago: we share behaviour with our relatives, just as we share anatomy.... De Waal does not explore the underlying processes producing the complex and intriguing behaviours described here: we know very little about them. Instead, he focuses on observations and behavioural experiments from the growing field of evolutionary cognition. These allow us to peer into the minds of non-human animals – mainly social animals such as primates and corvids (crows and their relatives), but also dolphins, elephants and one invertebrate, which differs from the others not only in its anatomy but also in its solitary behaviour: the octopus."
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: trouble with algorithms - review by P D Smith in The Guardian. "Her main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives."
Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance? - article by Jonathon W. Penney, on Slate. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "My findings suggested that once people were made aware of different online threats, they were less willing to engage in a range of activities online. For example, when made aware of online surveillance by the government, noteworthy percentages of respondents were less likely to speak or write about certain things online, less likely to share personally created content, less likely to engage with social media, and more cautious in their internet speech or search. In other words, there was a clear chilling effect.... My statistical findings also suggest a greater chilling effect on women and younger internet users. In every scenario examined, I found a statistically significant age effect: The younger the participant, the greater the chilling effect. This association was strongest in the scenario involving government surveillance.... I also found female internet users in the study were more likely to be chilled in scenarios involving surveillance and personal legal threats for content posted online, with the statistical association strongest in the latter scenario. Besides being more often the victims of online harassment, my findings suggest women may also be more negatively affected when targeted with legal and regulatory threats."
Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism - article by Anne Quito and David Yanofsky in Quartz, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "With a two-word tweet, French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled his official portrait yesterday. Taken in his office at the Élysée Palace 46 days after being sworn into office, the 39-year-old centrist’s striking portrait is a masterclass in soft-power symbolism.... Working with his official photographer, Soazig De La Moissonnière, Macron carefully planned the location, pose, props, and publicity for the portrait, which will decorate the walls some 50,000 French government outposts around the world. In the tradition of power portraiture in art history, the so-called 'Jupiterian president' carefully chose props that hint at his personality and underscore his centrist politics. Every detail matters."
The party’s over: how tuition fees ruined university life - article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. "It seems very strange that students should be seen as both demanding consumers and timid thinkers. But perhaps one leads to the other. Certainly [one] English literature tutor believes that 'there is a customer entitlement that erodes students’ sense of personal entitlement'. So even as they demand more of the service, they are 'more submissive to the institution'. There is 'an alliance of subjugation', he says, in which 'they feel they have got to do what’s asked of them, and we feel we have to help them achieve what’s asked of them. It makes me quite sad. I want a student who says: ‘Are you sure about that? Why do you think that?’ But those are fewer and further apart.' "
Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield: luxury communism, anyone? - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, 'time has been diced into the segments between notifications') with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. It’s about what Greenfield calls 'the colonisation of everyday life by information processing', and this new colonialism, in the author’s view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokémon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhone’s operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or the world of increasingly networked objects... What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures – just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk.... Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warn progressives against technological utopianism. 'Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hype is couched in superficially appealing language.' "
Drama queens: why it’s all about women and power on screen right now - "Superhero movies are conspicuously fables about power: they are preoccupied with its sources, how to control it, how to justify it. They are the fantasies of superpowers. What made Wonder Woman seem so different, and such a pleasure to so many viewers, was that its story remained focused throughout on the question of women’s relationship to power. Made by and starring women, the film has been a global blockbuster, giving the franchise commercial power, which is the only kind Hollywood pays attention to; but the film itself has provoked a debate over what this allegory of female power is actually saying. Meanwhile, one of the year’s most-discussed television series was also about women and power, albeit in a far less celebratory mode. The Handmaid’s Tale asks explicit questions about what happens in a totalitarian patriarchal society that denies women access to all economic, legal and political rights. And now Game of Thrones, which is equally interested in women and power, has finally premiered its seventh series to its tenterhooked fans.... Countless words of journalism have debated whether Game of Thrones is feminist or misogynist; that either supposedly mutually exclusive position can be persuasively argued should suggest something of the show’s complexity. ... Watching Game of Thrones play out the storylines of all its varied, fascinating women, in other words, is like watching the culture do battle with its own ideas about women: overt misogyny, internalised misogyny, at least three waves of feminism and post-feminism are all fighting it out before our eyes. It is by no means clear who, or what, will win. What we see is what the struggle over women and power looks like.... While there is a tiny bit of hocus-pocus, most of the supernatural power in Game of Thrones is prosthetic, rather than symbolic. Women don’t have internal magical power, because they operate in a recognisably realistic political world – but they can acquire power externally (from dragons, potions, weapons or gods). And any power will do. In one of the best moments of the entire six series so far, Cersei is informed by an enemy that knowledge is power. With a signal, she has her guards put a sword to his throat before correcting him: 'Power is power.' Game of Thrones is not a story about dragons. It is a story about power."
Cast adrift - article by Ellen E. Jones in The Guardian Guide (29.7.17, pp 14-17). "The Handmaid's Tale, a bracingly up-to-date screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, has been praised for its cinematic visuals and compelling central performance from Elisabth Moss as handmaid Offred, but one element remains controversial: the inclusion of race without the depiction of racism. It's this that New York Magazine has described as the show's 'greatest failing'. ... 'The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies,' wrote actor and rapper Riz Ahmed in the Guardian last year. 'Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.'"
Monday 3 July 2017
Seen and heard: April to June 2017
The Sense of an Ending – lovely, compassionate (but not cosy) film, from a Julian Barnes novel, played with down-to-earth style by Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, and excellently suitable for anyone of advancing years given to looking back at their life.
How To Be Both – novel by Ali Smith, notable for its two halves being readable in either order. My order seemed perfectly natural, and I can’t imagine it working so well in reverse – but I gather than people who read them the other way round feel like that too. There’s supposed to be a point here about apparently distinct times, for example 'before' and 'after', being more entangled and simultaneous than we usually credit. I’m not sure I came away more aware of that than I was already, but it was certainly an enjoyable excursion.
Madonnas and miracles – exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, cleverly dressing a gallery to evoke rooms in a renaissance house, so that the artworks could be displayed in a setting at least suggestive of their original context. Unfortunately – as I heard a Benedictine monk comment – what was missing was the faith context, which was only described in objective terms, and how meaningful can that be unless you at least temporarily and imaginatively enter into the relevant spiritual world in which a rosary, say, has actual and living power?
Patience – Gilbert and Sullivan performed by English Touring Opera. Good clean fun for all the family. I’d forgotten the bit where the male chorus of soldiers have to get themselves up like artistic ponces to woo their girlfriends, who’ve entirely gone over to the aesthetic movement. Troubled by the female grotesque character, though, who I realise is a sexist recurrence in the G&S operas.
Rogue One – entertaining Star Wars prequel. I particularly liked the way (spoiler) everyone gets killed at the end, like in Blackadder. Except for Darth Vader, of course, he just carries on and on and on.
Their Finest – amusing, touching and understated very British film, rather like the WW2 morale-boosting film whose making it depicts. Class acts from Bill Nighy and Gemma Aterton.
Pina – beautiful film by Wim Wenders, watched on video, featuring the stunning and imaginative choreography of Pina Bausch.
Naturally 7, ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ - performing on Later with Jools Holland. Amazing a capella.
The Journey – bold imagining of the conversations through which Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley went from being mortal enemies to the best of buddies, here compressed into a single long car journey together. Very convincing performances from Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall, and agreeable comic relief from Toby Stephens who plays Tony Blair like Hugh Grant.
The Conversations – transcripts of four long conversations between master film editor Walter Murch and novelist, Michael Ondaatje. Illuminating and inspirational on all kinds of issues to do with film editing and sound design, with stories from The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient.
Broken – TV drama by Jimmy McGovern. Misery television at its finest: completely depressing subject matter, poverty and social conflict in a northern town, made into totally compelling viewing because of the vivid and compassionate portrayal of the characters, all anchored by Sean Bean’s humane and decent Catholic priest.
Old Man’s Journey – beautiful, meditative top-rated iPad game, in which you lead the titular old man across a sequence of landscapes towards a destination which is initially unknown, though the reminiscences which appear every time he sits down to rest gradually build up a picture of his life story.
The Art of Japanese Life –BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, as beautiful and ennobling as you’d expect, but so meditative that I don’t think I got through a single episode without falling asleep.
How To Be Both – novel by Ali Smith, notable for its two halves being readable in either order. My order seemed perfectly natural, and I can’t imagine it working so well in reverse – but I gather than people who read them the other way round feel like that too. There’s supposed to be a point here about apparently distinct times, for example 'before' and 'after', being more entangled and simultaneous than we usually credit. I’m not sure I came away more aware of that than I was already, but it was certainly an enjoyable excursion.
Madonnas and miracles – exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, cleverly dressing a gallery to evoke rooms in a renaissance house, so that the artworks could be displayed in a setting at least suggestive of their original context. Unfortunately – as I heard a Benedictine monk comment – what was missing was the faith context, which was only described in objective terms, and how meaningful can that be unless you at least temporarily and imaginatively enter into the relevant spiritual world in which a rosary, say, has actual and living power?
Patience – Gilbert and Sullivan performed by English Touring Opera. Good clean fun for all the family. I’d forgotten the bit where the male chorus of soldiers have to get themselves up like artistic ponces to woo their girlfriends, who’ve entirely gone over to the aesthetic movement. Troubled by the female grotesque character, though, who I realise is a sexist recurrence in the G&S operas.
Rogue One – entertaining Star Wars prequel. I particularly liked the way (spoiler) everyone gets killed at the end, like in Blackadder. Except for Darth Vader, of course, he just carries on and on and on.
Their Finest – amusing, touching and understated very British film, rather like the WW2 morale-boosting film whose making it depicts. Class acts from Bill Nighy and Gemma Aterton.
Pina – beautiful film by Wim Wenders, watched on video, featuring the stunning and imaginative choreography of Pina Bausch.
Naturally 7, ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ - performing on Later with Jools Holland. Amazing a capella.
The Journey – bold imagining of the conversations through which Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley went from being mortal enemies to the best of buddies, here compressed into a single long car journey together. Very convincing performances from Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall, and agreeable comic relief from Toby Stephens who plays Tony Blair like Hugh Grant.
The Conversations – transcripts of four long conversations between master film editor Walter Murch and novelist, Michael Ondaatje. Illuminating and inspirational on all kinds of issues to do with film editing and sound design, with stories from The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient.
Broken – TV drama by Jimmy McGovern. Misery television at its finest: completely depressing subject matter, poverty and social conflict in a northern town, made into totally compelling viewing because of the vivid and compassionate portrayal of the characters, all anchored by Sean Bean’s humane and decent Catholic priest.
Old Man’s Journey – beautiful, meditative top-rated iPad game, in which you lead the titular old man across a sequence of landscapes towards a destination which is initially unknown, though the reminiscences which appear every time he sits down to rest gradually build up a picture of his life story.
The Art of Japanese Life –BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, as beautiful and ennobling as you’d expect, but so meditative that I don’t think I got through a single episode without falling asleep.
Cuttings: June 2017
Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins: ‘People really thought that only men loved action movies’ -
interview by Hermione Hoby in The Guardian. "In one scene, Diana annihilates an enemy sniper, and takes out the better part of an ancient church. After a suitably suspenseful pause, our heroine emerges, straddles the wreckage, and patiently grants the camera some adoring seconds on her immaculate face. Watching this, I was overcome with the perfection of her liquid eyeliner. I tell Jenkins as much and she laughs uproariously. Was it important to her that Diana look gorgeous at all times? 'Absolutely. As I always say, it would be more practical if Batman were built like a very small rock climber, it would be much easier to get into spaces, to do all kinds of things. Well, that’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is he’s unreasonably big and built. Good. My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully but that everybody would love me too. I think that’s intrinsic to fantasy – fantasy is fantasy.'"
Jeremy Corbyn has won the first battle in a long war against the ruling elite - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "The British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers.... When most socialists treated the working class as a kind of bee colony – pre-programmed to perform its historical role – Gramsci said: everyone is an intellectual. Even if a man is treated as 'trained gorilla' at work, outside work 'he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line of moral conduct'. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks] On this premise, Gramsci told the socialists of the 1930s to stop obsessing about the state – and to conduct a long, patient trench warfare against the ideology of the ruling elite."
Baileys prize winner Naomi Alderman on fame, Trump and Wonder Woman - interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Naomi Alderman writes novels and video games, teaches, makes radio programmes about science, art, fantasy and culture for the BBC.... The Power is 42-year-old Alderman’s fourth novel... A work of science fiction featuring four protagonists, it imagines a world in which women have physical dominance over men via their ability to electrocute them at will, and where institutional, social, political and personal power reverses. ... In her Baileys acceptance speech, Alderman declared that 'my life would be more possible with the women’s movement existing and no running water than the other way around … And I suppose one of the things the book is about is that the support and the power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity.' She also implored the audience to go and see Wonder Woman, throughout which, she says, she wept."
Being Wagner by Simon Callow: what makes Wagner so controversial? - review by Thomas Laqueur in The Guardian. "This book grew out of the research Simon Callow did for a play, Inside Wagner’s Head, which he wrote for the composer’s bicentenary in 2012. What was it about this man, he asked himself, that made him so controversial – in his day and since? It is an actor’s book and he came up with an actor’s answer: his subject’s 'demiurgic personality'.... In this book, as in the 2012 play, Callow is still engaged with what was going on inside Wagner’s head – 'What was it like to be Richard Wagner?' But he expands on that question here: 'What was it like to be with Richard Wagner?' And, more revealing, 'What was it like to become Richard Wagner?' It is a book about the production of a man for whom 'self-dramatisation was his essential mode' and who, in his autobiography My Life, set the standard."
Tiananmen Square: the silences left by the massacre - article by Madeleine Thien in The Guardian. "Each year around the anniversary of 4 June 1989, the Beijing massacre, words vanish from the Chinese internet. A comprehensive list of blocked words is published by China Digital Times, which keeps an extensive database. Digital censorship has pushed Chinese citizens to create an irreverent, ingenious and hilarious counter-language of puns, gifs, memes, nicknames and more, to fill in the spaces otherwise left blank. I turned to those missing words to record the events of 1989 and the aftermath.... The poet Bei Dao wrote: 'Life’s only a promise / Don’t grieve for it / We knocked down midnight’s door / alone like a match polished into light.' Today, 27 years later, even the words yesterday and tomorrow are so politically charged, they disappear." (Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien was shortlisted for the Baileys prize.)
Blooming marvellous: the world's first female photographer and her botanical beauties - "Anna Atkins is considered to have been the first female photographer. She was born in Kent in 1799, and she made her most significant contribution across 10 years in the mid-19th century in which she created at least 10,000 images by hand. But it was what she did with those pictures that gave her a place in art history. Atkins realised what millions of social media users know today: that images are for sharing. She created the first book to contain photographs, and she paved the way for photography’s power to connect people.... It was Atkins’s interest in the study of algae that prompted her book. She was so disappointed by the lack of illustrations in a guide to British algae published in 1841 that she decided to do something about it. In the autumn of 1843 she began work on creating images of hundreds of different types, using Herschel’s cyanotype method. It was a meticulous task whose skill rested in working quickly to assemble the dried algae arrangement, before leaving the paper exposed to sunlight for precisely the right amount of time."
Essayism by Brian Dillon: pure creativity on the page - "Dillon himself is a superbly varied essayist; the author of a range of books about photography, hypochondriacs, the great explosion at a munitions factory in Faversham, Kent, in 1916, and another written in 24 hours called I Am Sitting in a Room, his lines of inquiry are the body and its afflictions, contemporary art and literature, the history of place and ruins. He has a natural affinity for the essay 'as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things'. Lists are a wonderful tactic of essayism – consider Georges Perec’s astonishing lists in Species of Spaces, from the food and drink he consumed in 1974 to the objects on his desk. Dillon helps us see, via Joan Didion in The White Album, the list as incomplete, the very act of making a list a gesture at what cannot be listed or will always be left out: 'the list, if it’s doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making'."
interview by Hermione Hoby in The Guardian. "In one scene, Diana annihilates an enemy sniper, and takes out the better part of an ancient church. After a suitably suspenseful pause, our heroine emerges, straddles the wreckage, and patiently grants the camera some adoring seconds on her immaculate face. Watching this, I was overcome with the perfection of her liquid eyeliner. I tell Jenkins as much and she laughs uproariously. Was it important to her that Diana look gorgeous at all times? 'Absolutely. As I always say, it would be more practical if Batman were built like a very small rock climber, it would be much easier to get into spaces, to do all kinds of things. Well, that’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is he’s unreasonably big and built. Good. My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully but that everybody would love me too. I think that’s intrinsic to fantasy – fantasy is fantasy.'"
Jeremy Corbyn has won the first battle in a long war against the ruling elite - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "The British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers.... When most socialists treated the working class as a kind of bee colony – pre-programmed to perform its historical role – Gramsci said: everyone is an intellectual. Even if a man is treated as 'trained gorilla' at work, outside work 'he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line of moral conduct'. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks] On this premise, Gramsci told the socialists of the 1930s to stop obsessing about the state – and to conduct a long, patient trench warfare against the ideology of the ruling elite."
Baileys prize winner Naomi Alderman on fame, Trump and Wonder Woman - interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Naomi Alderman writes novels and video games, teaches, makes radio programmes about science, art, fantasy and culture for the BBC.... The Power is 42-year-old Alderman’s fourth novel... A work of science fiction featuring four protagonists, it imagines a world in which women have physical dominance over men via their ability to electrocute them at will, and where institutional, social, political and personal power reverses. ... In her Baileys acceptance speech, Alderman declared that 'my life would be more possible with the women’s movement existing and no running water than the other way around … And I suppose one of the things the book is about is that the support and the power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity.' She also implored the audience to go and see Wonder Woman, throughout which, she says, she wept."
Being Wagner by Simon Callow: what makes Wagner so controversial? - review by Thomas Laqueur in The Guardian. "This book grew out of the research Simon Callow did for a play, Inside Wagner’s Head, which he wrote for the composer’s bicentenary in 2012. What was it about this man, he asked himself, that made him so controversial – in his day and since? It is an actor’s book and he came up with an actor’s answer: his subject’s 'demiurgic personality'.... In this book, as in the 2012 play, Callow is still engaged with what was going on inside Wagner’s head – 'What was it like to be Richard Wagner?' But he expands on that question here: 'What was it like to be with Richard Wagner?' And, more revealing, 'What was it like to become Richard Wagner?' It is a book about the production of a man for whom 'self-dramatisation was his essential mode' and who, in his autobiography My Life, set the standard."
Tiananmen Square: the silences left by the massacre - article by Madeleine Thien in The Guardian. "Each year around the anniversary of 4 June 1989, the Beijing massacre, words vanish from the Chinese internet. A comprehensive list of blocked words is published by China Digital Times, which keeps an extensive database. Digital censorship has pushed Chinese citizens to create an irreverent, ingenious and hilarious counter-language of puns, gifs, memes, nicknames and more, to fill in the spaces otherwise left blank. I turned to those missing words to record the events of 1989 and the aftermath.... The poet Bei Dao wrote: 'Life’s only a promise / Don’t grieve for it / We knocked down midnight’s door / alone like a match polished into light.' Today, 27 years later, even the words yesterday and tomorrow are so politically charged, they disappear." (Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien was shortlisted for the Baileys prize.)
Blooming marvellous: the world's first female photographer and her botanical beauties - "Anna Atkins is considered to have been the first female photographer. She was born in Kent in 1799, and she made her most significant contribution across 10 years in the mid-19th century in which she created at least 10,000 images by hand. But it was what she did with those pictures that gave her a place in art history. Atkins realised what millions of social media users know today: that images are for sharing. She created the first book to contain photographs, and she paved the way for photography’s power to connect people.... It was Atkins’s interest in the study of algae that prompted her book. She was so disappointed by the lack of illustrations in a guide to British algae published in 1841 that she decided to do something about it. In the autumn of 1843 she began work on creating images of hundreds of different types, using Herschel’s cyanotype method. It was a meticulous task whose skill rested in working quickly to assemble the dried algae arrangement, before leaving the paper exposed to sunlight for precisely the right amount of time."
Essayism by Brian Dillon: pure creativity on the page - "Dillon himself is a superbly varied essayist; the author of a range of books about photography, hypochondriacs, the great explosion at a munitions factory in Faversham, Kent, in 1916, and another written in 24 hours called I Am Sitting in a Room, his lines of inquiry are the body and its afflictions, contemporary art and literature, the history of place and ruins. He has a natural affinity for the essay 'as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things'. Lists are a wonderful tactic of essayism – consider Georges Perec’s astonishing lists in Species of Spaces, from the food and drink he consumed in 1974 to the objects on his desk. Dillon helps us see, via Joan Didion in The White Album, the list as incomplete, the very act of making a list a gesture at what cannot be listed or will always be left out: 'the list, if it’s doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making'."
Thursday 1 June 2017
Cuttings: May 2017
Francois-René de Chateaubriand, 1841, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “When steam power will be perfected, when, together with telegraphy and railways, it will have made distances disappear, it will not only be commodities which travel, but also ideas which will have wings. When fiscal and commercial barriers have been abolished between different states, as they have already been between the provinces of the same state; when different countries, in daily relations, tend toward the unity of peoples, how will you be able to revive the old mode of separation?”
Big stories are complex: here's how we're trying to explain them better - article by Vicky Frost, Nick Haley and Natalie Hanman in The Guardian. "You may have noticed some small blue boxes sitting within articles on the Guardian’s site and app. These are what we have called 'explainer atoms' – ... a user-, digital- and mobile-friendly way to explain and contextualise news events. These distinctive explainers answer questions such as 'Why do migrants and refugees head for the north coast of France?' inside an article about the refugee crisis, or 'Who is Emmanuel Macron?' for people reading about his victory in the first round of the French elections. By answering questions such as these inside an article, we aim to provide a richer, clearer reading experience for those who haven’t followed every cough and spit of a story (or even for those who have, but never quite caught the initial explanations), and to do it in such a way that it isn’t intrusive for readers with more knowledge. That means communicating the maximum amount of information in the minimum number of words. We trialled this approach over the EU referendum last summer, with 100-word explainer atoms considering 'What is article 50?' (the question everyone was asking the morning after the night before), 'How might Brexit affect Ireland?', or 'Why is the referendum happening now?'. The idea was that, whenever you joined in the debate, you could catch up with the important elements of it."
Part-time student numbers collapse by 56% in five years - article by Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian. "The latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that part-time student numbers in England have fallen 56% since 2010.... The Open University, which solely delivers distance learning and relies on older, employed learners, ... as its bread and butter, has been hit especially hard, with its numbers falling by 30% between 2010-11 and 2015-16.... Part-time enrolments in England hit the floor in 2012 when the government raised the cap on part-time fees, doubling or even tripling the cost of many courses. To counter this, the government extended loans for tuition fees to part-timers, who previously hadn’t been eligible to apply. But ... research shows that about two-thirds of would-be part-time students were not eligible for this support, often because they were studying a more bite-size course, or already had a degree."
Raymond Tallis: [My working day] ‘In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’ - article by Raymond Tallis in the series 'My working day' in The Guardian. "My books ...begin in notebooks, emerging by a process akin to crystallisation. Eventually a provisional title announces itself, signalling and reinforcing commitment to a topic, to a line of inquiry. The lineaments of a structure loom through the fog in the form of chapter headings that both provoke ideas and give them a home. Thus the journey from initial tingles – the whoosh of a connection, the micro-illumination of a phrase, the sudden sense of an expanding cognitive space – to a completed work. With successive drafts, writing becomes an increasingly clerical activity – synopses, cross-referencing, footnotes. Paul Valéry spoke of the conflict between the process of thinking and the products of thought. Teasing out an idea is fundamentally different from seeing where it might fit into a publishable book."
Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin: the damage done by Silicon Valley - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The argument of Taplin’s new book: the titans of the digital age frequently behave like spoiled and ignorant brats with far, far more money than sense; and their victims include many of the artists who create things of real value and who can no longer earn a living from doing so. Taplin’s sense of outrage is palpable and his case is often compelling. Unfortunately, the two parts of the argument don’t really hang together. The first claim is hard to dispute – Silicon Valley does increasingly resemble some kind of nightmarish children’s playground, populated by overgrown babies with no idea of the consequences of their actions – but the evidence he marshals is mainly second hand, drawn from newspaper commentary and some well-known histories of the digital revolution. As a result, it feels a little overfamiliar.... He leans too heavily on the assumption that the 1960s and 70s represented an artistic golden age whose like we will never see again. Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde aren’t quite enough to build a case like that. Any era will value its own products, and that will be especially true of the people who helped make them. Imagine a period 30 or 40 years from now when podcasting has been destroyed by some new economic model (though it will probably happen far sooner than that)."
Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things - interview by B.R. Cohen on Public Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "At the moment, I am trying to write a history of the United States from 1492 to the present... I’ve been trying to weave a history of technology into an account of the origins of American political ideas and institutions, which is A) not easy, and B) alarming. ... I do think about things like the Constitution as having a vital relationship with the technologies of writing and printing.... It’s difficult not to be susceptible to technological determinism. We measure the very moments of our lives by computer-driven clocks and calendars that we keep in our pockets. I get why people think this way. Still, it’s a pernicious fallacy. To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible.... I once wrote a piece about the history of the breast pump. I was using a breast pump at the time and every time I hooked myself up to that monstrosity I felt like I was in a Mary Shelley story... So I looked into it. And do you know why we have breast pumps in the United States? Because we don’t have maternity leave. Pumps are a very cheap and crappy substitute." See her website https://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/home.
Sandy Hook father Leonard Pozner on death threats: ‘I never imagined I’d have to fight for my child’s legacy’ - article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "Even in a country all too used to mass shootings, the merciless killing in Newtown, Connecticut of 20 six- and seven-year-olds, along with six of the school’s employees, retains a terrible hold on the US’s imagination, gripping the memory after too many other shootings have faded away. For most, it is too horrible to mention without a shudder. But for a tenacious few, it is too horrible to believe, and soon after Noah was killed, when Pozner thought he had already seen the worst of humanity, he came into contact with the latter group. Just days after the massacre, when the US was still reeling from the tragedy, and Pozner himself was, he says, 'pretty much in a catatonic state', the theories started spreading: Sandy Hook had never happened, it was staged by actors, the children had never existed, it was a ruse by President Obama/the anti-gun movement/the 'New World Order global elitists'. So-called Sandy Hook truthers – Pozner prefers the term hoaxer – pored over photos of the families and children on social media, triumphantly pointing to any visual similarities they could find between the dead children and living ones. The families were harassed by hoaxers, online and off, insisting that they stop their fake grieving. When Pozner roused himself from his catatonic grief to post photos of Noah online, hoaxers would leave comments: 'Fake kid', 'Didn’t die', 'F***ing liar'. "
Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis: one of the greatest political memoirs ever? - review by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice. In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis."
'Strong and stable leadership!' Could Theresa May's rhetorical carpet-bombing backfire? - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "'In general, there is evidence that repetition of political frames tends to be effective,' [says political psychologist Aleksandra Cichocka] 'especially when the aim is to reach an audience that is not highly knowledgable about politics.' Repetition, of course, has been a key device in the art of rhetoric for millennia. And there is a view that brute repetition itself can smuggle an idea past the critical faculties to nest in the subconscious. This is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, according to Victor Klemperer, who lived through the era and analysed its rhetoric in his classic book The Language of the Third Reich. Nazism didn’t prevail in Germany because of the individual speeches of Hitler or Goebbels, Klemperer explains. 'Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.' It is instructive to compare this with what Tony Blair’s former director of communications, Lance Price, told the BBC: 'You have to do it over and over again. It doesn’t matter that journalists are sick and tired of hearing it; the point is that voters have to hear it a lot before it sinks into their subconscious and starts to have some resonance.' "
Constructing the Golem - blog post 123 by Ursula K. Le Guin, 21 February 2017. "The legend of the golem varies according to the teller, but I will follow the version that tells how in a time of persecution a rabbi made a mighty giant out of mud, a golem, and wrote a sacred word on its forehead — 'Truth' — that gave it life. With its frightening size and enormous strength, the golem was to defend and safeguard the Jews. But the golem was not rational, not controllable. It was a danger in itself. So the rabbi removed a single letter from the word on its forehead, which then read 'Death,' and the life went out of the giant, leaving only mud.... Looking at the New World from the ancient one I inhabit, I am appalled at the constant, obsessive attention paid to Trump. ... Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. ... Every witty parody, hateful gibe, clever takeoff, etc., merely plays his game, and therefore plays into his hands.... I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way. He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud."
Post Truth by Matthew D’Ancona and Post-Truth by Evan Davis: is this really a new era of politics? - review by John Gray in The Guardian. "Blair’s assertion that the world is fashioned from our beliefs was echoed by an anonymous aide of George W Bush (widely thought to be Karl Rove) when in an interview reported in October 2004 he dismissed the 'reality-based community' – 'people who believe solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality' – as no longer important in politics. 'That’s not the way the world really works any more … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.' If the post-truth era is defined by the conviction that reality is constructed through the exercise of power, this is when it began to shape democratic politics.... While the notion that we entered a new age 12 months ago is far-fetched, D’Ancona’s punchy polemic asks questions that are urgently topical and undeniably important. He is right that the internet and social media have transformed communication, giving disinformation and deception in markets and politics added potency. Davis considers how this has happened, and in a rich and probing analysis of the use and misuse of the media suggests the answer can be found in the economics of information. What seems like an irrational message may contain information of a subtle and tacit kind to which people respond. Even when what is being communicated has little or no cognitive content, there are rational explanations as to why such messages can be so effective. Distinguishing between post-truth, post-fact, nonsense and gibberish, Evans’s ambition seems to be to develop a general theory of bullshit."
Negativity bias: why conservatives are more swayed by threats than liberals - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian Headquarters blog. "There is a widespread psychological bias to attend more to negative messages than positive ones. They capture more attention, elicit stronger emotions and are more memorable. Some individuals are more sensitive to this ‘negativity bias’ than others and pay higher precautionary costs. They may spend more time worrying or more money on security. Other people are less sensitive to possible threats and pay higher costs when hazards occur.... I have written before about the research showing that while conservatives and liberals hold the same moral ideals, they prioritise them differently. Liberals tend to value fairness while conservatives prioritise tradition and authority.... In this month’s Psychological Science, Daniel Fessler and colleagues at the University of California examine whether individual differences in negativity bias might be associated with voting behaviour."
Grayson Perry: ‘I am nostalgic for a time when art galleries were empty’ - article in The Guardian. "As an artist I have long been interested in the decreasing value of the rebellious stance. The counterculture has always been the perfect R&D lab for capitalism. What starts as a creative revolt soon becomes co-opted as the latest way to make money. As we have seen over the past few years, the hippie free-for-all face of the internet was a mask that soon fell away to reveal a predatory capitalist robot. I would characterise the art establishment’s reaction to challenge as 'Oh! Jolly good! Rebellion! Welcome!' Part of the historic recipe of modern art has been revolution, the overthrow of the old order. But what if the ethos of that rebellion is now mainstream? Punks are now pensioners, tattoos are as dangerous as reading Harry Potter, a Damien Hirst show is a nice day out with the kiddies. The mutinous subcultural pose is now the norm. The only people who call art shocking these days are lazy journalists. One of the most unsettling gestures in recent British art history was [Tracey] Emin saying she voted Tory. The Tories seem very popular these days."
Big stories are complex: here's how we're trying to explain them better - article by Vicky Frost, Nick Haley and Natalie Hanman in The Guardian. "You may have noticed some small blue boxes sitting within articles on the Guardian’s site and app. These are what we have called 'explainer atoms' – ... a user-, digital- and mobile-friendly way to explain and contextualise news events. These distinctive explainers answer questions such as 'Why do migrants and refugees head for the north coast of France?' inside an article about the refugee crisis, or 'Who is Emmanuel Macron?' for people reading about his victory in the first round of the French elections. By answering questions such as these inside an article, we aim to provide a richer, clearer reading experience for those who haven’t followed every cough and spit of a story (or even for those who have, but never quite caught the initial explanations), and to do it in such a way that it isn’t intrusive for readers with more knowledge. That means communicating the maximum amount of information in the minimum number of words. We trialled this approach over the EU referendum last summer, with 100-word explainer atoms considering 'What is article 50?' (the question everyone was asking the morning after the night before), 'How might Brexit affect Ireland?', or 'Why is the referendum happening now?'. The idea was that, whenever you joined in the debate, you could catch up with the important elements of it."
Part-time student numbers collapse by 56% in five years - article by Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian. "The latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that part-time student numbers in England have fallen 56% since 2010.... The Open University, which solely delivers distance learning and relies on older, employed learners, ... as its bread and butter, has been hit especially hard, with its numbers falling by 30% between 2010-11 and 2015-16.... Part-time enrolments in England hit the floor in 2012 when the government raised the cap on part-time fees, doubling or even tripling the cost of many courses. To counter this, the government extended loans for tuition fees to part-timers, who previously hadn’t been eligible to apply. But ... research shows that about two-thirds of would-be part-time students were not eligible for this support, often because they were studying a more bite-size course, or already had a degree."
Raymond Tallis: [My working day] ‘In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’ - article by Raymond Tallis in the series 'My working day' in The Guardian. "My books ...begin in notebooks, emerging by a process akin to crystallisation. Eventually a provisional title announces itself, signalling and reinforcing commitment to a topic, to a line of inquiry. The lineaments of a structure loom through the fog in the form of chapter headings that both provoke ideas and give them a home. Thus the journey from initial tingles – the whoosh of a connection, the micro-illumination of a phrase, the sudden sense of an expanding cognitive space – to a completed work. With successive drafts, writing becomes an increasingly clerical activity – synopses, cross-referencing, footnotes. Paul Valéry spoke of the conflict between the process of thinking and the products of thought. Teasing out an idea is fundamentally different from seeing where it might fit into a publishable book."
Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin: the damage done by Silicon Valley - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The argument of Taplin’s new book: the titans of the digital age frequently behave like spoiled and ignorant brats with far, far more money than sense; and their victims include many of the artists who create things of real value and who can no longer earn a living from doing so. Taplin’s sense of outrage is palpable and his case is often compelling. Unfortunately, the two parts of the argument don’t really hang together. The first claim is hard to dispute – Silicon Valley does increasingly resemble some kind of nightmarish children’s playground, populated by overgrown babies with no idea of the consequences of their actions – but the evidence he marshals is mainly second hand, drawn from newspaper commentary and some well-known histories of the digital revolution. As a result, it feels a little overfamiliar.... He leans too heavily on the assumption that the 1960s and 70s represented an artistic golden age whose like we will never see again. Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde aren’t quite enough to build a case like that. Any era will value its own products, and that will be especially true of the people who helped make them. Imagine a period 30 or 40 years from now when podcasting has been destroyed by some new economic model (though it will probably happen far sooner than that)."
Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things - interview by B.R. Cohen on Public Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "At the moment, I am trying to write a history of the United States from 1492 to the present... I’ve been trying to weave a history of technology into an account of the origins of American political ideas and institutions, which is A) not easy, and B) alarming. ... I do think about things like the Constitution as having a vital relationship with the technologies of writing and printing.... It’s difficult not to be susceptible to technological determinism. We measure the very moments of our lives by computer-driven clocks and calendars that we keep in our pockets. I get why people think this way. Still, it’s a pernicious fallacy. To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible.... I once wrote a piece about the history of the breast pump. I was using a breast pump at the time and every time I hooked myself up to that monstrosity I felt like I was in a Mary Shelley story... So I looked into it. And do you know why we have breast pumps in the United States? Because we don’t have maternity leave. Pumps are a very cheap and crappy substitute." See her website https://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/home.
Sandy Hook father Leonard Pozner on death threats: ‘I never imagined I’d have to fight for my child’s legacy’ - article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "Even in a country all too used to mass shootings, the merciless killing in Newtown, Connecticut of 20 six- and seven-year-olds, along with six of the school’s employees, retains a terrible hold on the US’s imagination, gripping the memory after too many other shootings have faded away. For most, it is too horrible to mention without a shudder. But for a tenacious few, it is too horrible to believe, and soon after Noah was killed, when Pozner thought he had already seen the worst of humanity, he came into contact with the latter group. Just days after the massacre, when the US was still reeling from the tragedy, and Pozner himself was, he says, 'pretty much in a catatonic state', the theories started spreading: Sandy Hook had never happened, it was staged by actors, the children had never existed, it was a ruse by President Obama/the anti-gun movement/the 'New World Order global elitists'. So-called Sandy Hook truthers – Pozner prefers the term hoaxer – pored over photos of the families and children on social media, triumphantly pointing to any visual similarities they could find between the dead children and living ones. The families were harassed by hoaxers, online and off, insisting that they stop their fake grieving. When Pozner roused himself from his catatonic grief to post photos of Noah online, hoaxers would leave comments: 'Fake kid', 'Didn’t die', 'F***ing liar'. "
Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis: one of the greatest political memoirs ever? - review by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice. In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis."
'Strong and stable leadership!' Could Theresa May's rhetorical carpet-bombing backfire? - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "'In general, there is evidence that repetition of political frames tends to be effective,' [says political psychologist Aleksandra Cichocka] 'especially when the aim is to reach an audience that is not highly knowledgable about politics.' Repetition, of course, has been a key device in the art of rhetoric for millennia. And there is a view that brute repetition itself can smuggle an idea past the critical faculties to nest in the subconscious. This is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, according to Victor Klemperer, who lived through the era and analysed its rhetoric in his classic book The Language of the Third Reich. Nazism didn’t prevail in Germany because of the individual speeches of Hitler or Goebbels, Klemperer explains. 'Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.' It is instructive to compare this with what Tony Blair’s former director of communications, Lance Price, told the BBC: 'You have to do it over and over again. It doesn’t matter that journalists are sick and tired of hearing it; the point is that voters have to hear it a lot before it sinks into their subconscious and starts to have some resonance.' "
Constructing the Golem - blog post 123 by Ursula K. Le Guin, 21 February 2017. "The legend of the golem varies according to the teller, but I will follow the version that tells how in a time of persecution a rabbi made a mighty giant out of mud, a golem, and wrote a sacred word on its forehead — 'Truth' — that gave it life. With its frightening size and enormous strength, the golem was to defend and safeguard the Jews. But the golem was not rational, not controllable. It was a danger in itself. So the rabbi removed a single letter from the word on its forehead, which then read 'Death,' and the life went out of the giant, leaving only mud.... Looking at the New World from the ancient one I inhabit, I am appalled at the constant, obsessive attention paid to Trump. ... Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. ... Every witty parody, hateful gibe, clever takeoff, etc., merely plays his game, and therefore plays into his hands.... I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way. He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud."
Post Truth by Matthew D’Ancona and Post-Truth by Evan Davis: is this really a new era of politics? - review by John Gray in The Guardian. "Blair’s assertion that the world is fashioned from our beliefs was echoed by an anonymous aide of George W Bush (widely thought to be Karl Rove) when in an interview reported in October 2004 he dismissed the 'reality-based community' – 'people who believe solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality' – as no longer important in politics. 'That’s not the way the world really works any more … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.' If the post-truth era is defined by the conviction that reality is constructed through the exercise of power, this is when it began to shape democratic politics.... While the notion that we entered a new age 12 months ago is far-fetched, D’Ancona’s punchy polemic asks questions that are urgently topical and undeniably important. He is right that the internet and social media have transformed communication, giving disinformation and deception in markets and politics added potency. Davis considers how this has happened, and in a rich and probing analysis of the use and misuse of the media suggests the answer can be found in the economics of information. What seems like an irrational message may contain information of a subtle and tacit kind to which people respond. Even when what is being communicated has little or no cognitive content, there are rational explanations as to why such messages can be so effective. Distinguishing between post-truth, post-fact, nonsense and gibberish, Evans’s ambition seems to be to develop a general theory of bullshit."
Negativity bias: why conservatives are more swayed by threats than liberals - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian Headquarters blog. "There is a widespread psychological bias to attend more to negative messages than positive ones. They capture more attention, elicit stronger emotions and are more memorable. Some individuals are more sensitive to this ‘negativity bias’ than others and pay higher precautionary costs. They may spend more time worrying or more money on security. Other people are less sensitive to possible threats and pay higher costs when hazards occur.... I have written before about the research showing that while conservatives and liberals hold the same moral ideals, they prioritise them differently. Liberals tend to value fairness while conservatives prioritise tradition and authority.... In this month’s Psychological Science, Daniel Fessler and colleagues at the University of California examine whether individual differences in negativity bias might be associated with voting behaviour."
Grayson Perry: ‘I am nostalgic for a time when art galleries were empty’ - article in The Guardian. "As an artist I have long been interested in the decreasing value of the rebellious stance. The counterculture has always been the perfect R&D lab for capitalism. What starts as a creative revolt soon becomes co-opted as the latest way to make money. As we have seen over the past few years, the hippie free-for-all face of the internet was a mask that soon fell away to reveal a predatory capitalist robot. I would characterise the art establishment’s reaction to challenge as 'Oh! Jolly good! Rebellion! Welcome!' Part of the historic recipe of modern art has been revolution, the overthrow of the old order. But what if the ethos of that rebellion is now mainstream? Punks are now pensioners, tattoos are as dangerous as reading Harry Potter, a Damien Hirst show is a nice day out with the kiddies. The mutinous subcultural pose is now the norm. The only people who call art shocking these days are lazy journalists. One of the most unsettling gestures in recent British art history was [Tracey] Emin saying she voted Tory. The Tories seem very popular these days."
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