Futurelearn may not be a going concern

Futurelearn accounts read like the script of a disaster movie. Nearly 10 years I wrote a piece questioning their choice of CEO (he came from BBC Radio), knew nothing about this business and was saying some silly things….

“In three years’ time we hope to be offering a level of online learning that we can’t dream about at the moment” says Simon, “It may sound ridiculous in ambition, but one of my team said to me that in five or 10 years, rather than hanging out on Facebook of an evening, people will feel they can hang around in the Futurelearn product.” 

 

It’s lack of business expertise, led it to hire to many BBC types at inflated salaries. This led to shallow technology, a failure to read actual demand (drift towards vocational) and an obsession with ‘social’ learning and poor technology. It has taken them a long time to hire a new CEO, after the company nearly collapsed, and to be fair, although he knows diddly squat about this industry, and is still bleating on about ‘social’ learning, he does have a solid business background. He’s clearly been brough in to turn it around.

 

But here’s the rub. It is a financial disaster. After ten years, virtually alone in the UK market, it has a whopping £16.1 million loss on £11.3 million revenues. With £15.7 million on salaries, it’s drowning, with its nose and lips are barely above water. After an investment to save it from disaster in only 2019, it needs £15 million to keep it going. The auditors had to send this cannonball over their bows….

 

“a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt about the group’s ability to continue as a going concern”.

 

All of this after the gift that was Covid. I'd be concerned if I were a partner. There are other fish in this ocean, who have managed to explode in revenues and pivot when necessary. Futurelearn, were never the 'future' and failed to 'learn'. They had an open goal back in 2012 but they were hidebound by being stuck in some British BBC time warp, with no real business acumen and no vision. That’s a shame.

How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman-Barrett

This book came highly recommended and I have read Damasio, Panksepp and several other academics, who had looked at emotion in relation to learning, so was looking forward to the read. That hope was misplaced.

It was puzzlingly obtuse. She straight away attacks emotions as some sort of ‘essence’ produced in specific areas in the brain, unconnected to other cognitive processes, claiming they are ‘constructed’. Always a dangerously vague word ‘constructed’. Damasio, Panksepp and others have spent a long time giving us a taxonomy of such emotions, along with physiological evidence for their existence. She claims that there is no evidence for specific areas of the brain being tightly defined as the set of particular emotion but again this is a straw man. There is evidence from human lesions that emotions have identifiable brain structures, her averaging out on meta-studies is odd, and we know that many cognitive processes are widely distributed across the brain. That specific areas are difficult to find is not the ‘nail in the coffin’ argument she claims. Panksepp accuses her of using wide correlation and that the area has solid causal evidence for emotions being identifiable as innate and physiological phenomena.

Language and emotions

Then pops up the weird idea is that emotions need language. This is rather wild, reviving the Sapir-Whorf idea, that language affects cognition and that our perceptions and feelings are all relative to our spoken language. You know the story - Eskimos and snow. Pinker destroyed this idea in The Language Instinct and think about it, do you need the word‘jealousy’ to feel jealous, ‘anger’ to feel angry? Of course not. You can see how this linguistic necessity opens up a space for a theory that puts emotions on the cultural not physiological domain but that would be a caricature of human nature, a return to the sort of blank slate ideas that Pinker and others have been fighting for years. The idea that emotions are partly cues from language and not physiological systems is wrong-headed and common sense tell us so. There’s a reason men are more prone to violence than women, that is evidenced by the vast gender difference in such crimes and the ratio of men to women in our prison populations. There are different hormonal and physiological systems that play a huge part as causes.

The book therefore plays to the postmodern idea that language is all, that we don’t have emotions until we label them and can use words for them… but that is a category mistake. We have such words because we communally have the same or similar emotions, we don’t have emotions because we have the words. This is similar to the common confusion that the meaning of words come from the dictionary. Well no, the meaning of words are only in the dictionary because we all agree that this is what they mean in common usage. It is the other way round. We have common word for emotions because they exist, not because the words for them exist. One can feel jealous when one sees one’s girlfriend responding well when being chatted up by someone else. This is clearly an emotion separate from the use of the adjective ‘jealous’ or noun ‘jealously. We would feel it even when we had a cognitive impairment and forgot these two words. It is to confuse the signified with the signifier.

There is another a sematic trick here, hijacking the word ‘affect’, separating it from ‘emotion’, then using it as a bucket to fend off criticism. This is problematic. These semantic splits were evident in Hume, who wrote a lot on this topic, he describes passions, sentiments and taste, Panksepp has primary, secondary and tertiary emotions, there’s moods, feelings and attitudes – it’s complex, layered and subtle. You don’t have to be a Paul Ekland fanatic to see that his Basic Emotion Theory needed refinement (which is exactly what happened) but this constructional theory of emotion swings the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that it disappears from sight. For Barratt this language argument is the essence of her argument and if it falls, it all falls.

Mammals and emotions

Then there’s the curiously Cartesian idea that mammals don’t have emotions. My dog gets jealous when I pat other dogs and when I last checked he was not a fluent English speaker. There’s a reason we tend to have mammalian pets – they have emotions, something Barratt denies. By now I’m thinking, this is a return to the hideous Cartesian idea that animals have no emotions, as they have no language but read what Descartes did to animals, as a consequence of such ideas - it will make you retch. She relegates animals to the level of simple ‘affect’ producers of pleasure and pain. I wonder if she has a dog… she’d soon change her mind. Emotions clearly have an evolutionary past in higher-order mammals that didn’t just spring into action some tens of thousands of years ago when we acquired language. They are there in tool production, the marks we made half a million years ago, the sculptured objects. Tellingly, the book doesn’t explain how emotions came to be, how they arose in our brains, a point made by Westland (2021). The answer is clearly evolution as a set of advantageous and selected evolutionary traits. The idea that emotions and language came into being at the same time doesn’t have any aetiological, evolutionary explanation and she makes no effort to give one.

Throughout this I felt as if Barrett was jumping around, confusing different dimensions of emotion. First and foremost, their physiological manifestation as something we feel and experience (this is very real), then, layered on top of this, we use language to talk about them (which is something separate), then there are our external behaviours, beyond this how we read emotions in others (something separate again). Barrett wants to demote the former and claims that the latter are dominant. I don’t buy this.

Emotional expressions

Just as I thought things couldn’t get weirder, she claims that we learn to smile from TV and that it is a learnt behaviour not a signifier of emotion. Really? Blind people don’t smile? And yes she claims that smiling is a recent cultural phenomenon. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more depressing scientific idea. Nothing could be further from the truth. Barratt was criticised in Nature for ‘caricaturing’ other researchers’ findings and in the case of facial expressions she does precisely that. Sure, it is a complex area being explored in detail using face recognition software but the Barratt straw man argument surfaces again. Emotions are very real, depression is very real and their expressions, such as laughing and crying at a movie, very real. The idea that variation in emotions and their facial expressions vary does not entail social construction. Just because I can weep when sad and grieving but also when laughing until I cry, does not mean any of this is socially constructed. The rebuttal by Adolphs (2016) explains this well. To reduce them to social agreement, dependent on language, is a form of the essentialism she attacks, merely contemporary essentialism. To be fair she is not saying emotion doesn’t exist, only redefining what ‘real’ means. Her paper Emotions are real (2012) explains this and is worth reading, as the book How Emotions are Made (2017) lacks some of the core arguments. Emotions are biologically real and socially constructed at the same time. But she takes social construction to such as extreme that it becomes laughable. She distorts Searle and plucks out ‘category knowledge’ to build her theory, based in the unconscious, requiring social agreement, conveniently tucking it out of sight and mind. This is where credulity is stretched to breaking point.

Conclusion

The problem here is that it promotes a narrative that emotions are merely social and learned, opening up a space for people to come in with glib solutions, like emotional intelligence, as if all of this lies in the social realm. 

Intriguing ideas I admit but so many babies are thrown out with the bathwater, and the bath, that it becomes quite fantastical. Then there is the superfluous stuff in the book about emotion and the law and the sort of self-help stuff on sleep and diet. 

It is a book of the age, and will of course be eagerly consumed by those who want to believe that all is nurture not nature, and the lazy drift towards cultural, social and linguistic relativism, that everything is socially and linguistically constructed. This is why it’s loved - it is also precisely why it is largely wrong.

Bibliography

Barrett, L.F., 2017. How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Pan Macmillan.

Ekman, P., 1992. An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & emotion, 6(3-4), pp.169-200.

Panksepp J. Neurologizing the psychology of affects: How appraisal-based constructivism and basic emotion theory can coexist. Perspectives in Psychological Science. 2007;2:281–296

Westland, K 2021 https://illis.se/en/constructed-theory-of-emotions/

Adolphs R., 2017. How should neuroscience study emotions? by distinguishing emotion states, concepts, and experiencesSocial Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 12, Issue 1, January 2017, Pages 24–31,

https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/12/1/24/2624554

Tyng, C.M., Amin, H.U., Saad, M.N. and Malik, A.S., 2017. The influences of emotion on learning and memory. Frontiers in psychology, 8, p.1454.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454/full

Pfeffer on Leadership BS

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His interest in human resources, organisational theory and behaviour has led him to reflect on the nature of leadership and leadership training. He has written about evidence-base management in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management (2006) where he dismisses popular business wisdom in; leadership, strategy, change, talent, financial incentives, and work-life balance, often touted by consultants and training companies in favour of hard decision making based on data and facts.

Leadership

In Leadership BS (2015), Pfeffer eschews what he sees as the usual platitudes in Leadership theory and training, for a more realistic view of the world as messy and complex. He exposes what he sees as the nostrums, stories, fictions, anecdotes, promises, glib simplicities, bromides, romanticism and myth-making feel-good nonsense that passes for Leadership training, his solution being realism. The aim is to reject the normative wishes with evidence and the realities of the workplace.

Unequivocally, he claims that the Leadership industry has not only empirically failed, with study after study showing workplace discontent, but also that it contributes to that failure. As the cult of leadership has risen, its perceived effectiveness has fallen. Bullying, stress, discontent are the norm and he presents a huge amount of evidence to show repeated failures in so called ‘leadership’. What he uncovers is an almost wilful avoidance of evidence, measurement and data. Despite the $20-$40 billion spend, the results are depressingly disappointing. He goes as far as suggesting that the very construct of leadership, as presented in much leadership consultancy and training, was invented as a simplification to deliberately obfuscate the real complexity of the workplace. 

Leadership training

His arguments against ‘Leadership training’ are pretty damning. Many who offer leadership consultancy and courses have never led anything and if they have their track record is rarely one of substantial success. In fact, he sees too many compensation consultants and linked to leadership industry and many with a woeful lack of actual expertise & knowledge. This leads to glib advice and recommendations that peddle inspiration not the realities of management. They often rely largely on storytelling and anecdote, and rarely include evaluation as part of the process (apart from primitive happy-sheet course data and self-evaluation). The leadership industry is therefore wholly unaccountable.

In the content he finds stories and anecdotes (as opposed to evidence) that are exaggerated, even fabricated. They also conveniently ignore actual successful leaders that don’t fit their neat model. These myths are counter-productive as they produce cynicism in employees. The rhetoric is not matched by actual action and behaviour. Worse, those who don’t conform to the out-dated leadership model don’t get promoted and may even get fired. Others, such as women and certain cultural minorities, that value modesty and collaboration, can also suffer. 

Leadership traits

A further critique centres around precise leadership qualities or. They are, he thinks, wrong-headed, as they focus on attributes not action and decision making. Given that the book was published in 2015, he was prescient in identifying Trump as a typical product of the charismatic leader cult. He played the leadership game and won. Pfeffer therefore punctures the idea that ‘modesty’ is an admired and effective leadership trait. He draws on Maccoby’s book The Productive Narcissist (2003), and his own evidence, to show that modesty, far from being a virtue, stops managers from thinking for themselves and being resilient in the face of adversity. It is energy, confidence and dominance that gets them where they are, not modesty. The Leadership industry may be holding back women and other potential managers by promoting false promises, such as modesty. He also accuses HR and talent management companies of being dishonest here in training for these qualities then recruiting the very opposite.

He also question that staple of leadership courses - authenticity - as a quality for leadership. He flips this to show that good managers need to do what people need them to do, not what they as managers simply want to do, not pander to their own views of themselves. Flight attendants, shop assistants, sales people and many others don’t operate by being totally ‘authentic’, neither do managers and leaders. He describes the “delicious irony” of leadership trainers who “train” people to be “authentic”, as if it is a trait that can be acquired in a classroom. Being authentic, is for Pfeffer, pretty much the opposite of what leaders need to be.

Much as trust would seem to be desirable in leadership, it may not be that simple. Bernie Madoff inspired ‘trust’. Trust, like faith, can lead one into real trouble. It may be desirable not to trust lawyers, competitors and politicking managers. True objectivity and realism may only be the result of not trusting everyone to tell the truth within an organisation, as you will be misled, even duped. You need to be on the mark, alert to deception, moves, protecting the organisation and that means distrusting some people.

Counterexamples

Rich in real examples of leaders who were less than ideal, he shows how leadership training misses the mark most of the time – especially with the titans of tech; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. Political, sports and other leaders get a similar treatment. Most of the positive examples turn out to have serious flaws. So, when we look at what are called successful leaders, they turn out to be very different from what the leadership industry tells us. His recommendation is to get serious on the research, mainly what is effective, then hold so-called 'leaders' to account - not with happy-sheet nostrums but real accountability. It is not that he promotes immodesty, being inauthentic and telling lies, only to recognise that leaders and employees are people and that human nature always wins out. The remedy is to identify what you need from proposed leaders and then to make sure that they perform to those measures. This is where HR and remuneration committees fail. They pretend to be doing this when what they actually do is pander to an outdated cult of leadership, based on outdated concepts of the nature and value of leadership.

Complexity

Pfeffer’s challenge is to recognise reality and accept that the workplace and people are much more complex than the feel-good training courses suggest. In reality, leaders’ behaviours are often at odds with those of the organisation. Their interests in terms of rewards, promotion and progress are often at odds with those they manage and even the organisations they lead. There is a lack of definition, theory and practice around the concept and it often distracts from the real needs in workplace learning.

He recommends that you:

·      Build your power base relentlessly (and sometimes shamelessly)

·      Embrace ambiguity . . .

·      When the situation demands change—adapt

·       Master the science of influence

It is not that leadership training is wrong, just that getting things done requires trade-offs and tough decisions. The danger is that organisations handicap themselves by training leaders to embrace utopian behaviours and avoid bold decisions, innovation and the realities or organisational growth. 

Conclusion

The fundamental problem outlined in Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature (2016) is to confuse ‘ought’ with ‘is’. Just because you think something ought to be the case doesn’t mean it is. In fact, conformation bias tends to produce the wrong solutions in this area, driven by moral and not organisational imperatives. The division of leadership into good and bad traits is a mistake, as it uses a problematic approach to human nature and ignores context. Quoting Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), he says it is sometimes necessary to do bad things to achieve good results. Leaders need to be pragmatists.

Bibliography

Machiavelli, N., 2008. Machiavelli's the Prince: Bold-Faced Principles on Tactics, Power, and Politics. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc..

Maccoby, M., 2003. The productive narcissist: The promise and peril of visionary leadership. Broadway.

Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R.I., 2006. Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense: Profiting from evidence-based management. Harvard Business Press.

Pfeffer, J., 2016. Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature. McKinsey Quarterly, 1, pp.90-95

Pfeffer, J., 2015. Leadership BS. HarperCollins.

Kellerman - The End of Leadership?

Barbara Kellerman is a Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Long a critic of most approaches to leadership theory and training, she focuses rather on what leadership is not, with more of a focus on what she calls ‘followership’. She has written many books on the topic, from Bad Leadership (2004) to The End of Leadership (2012), has won many awards and is an accomplished and prolific, international speaker.

History of leadership

Critical of the recent 40 year focus on leadership, she is critical of those who ignore the history of leadership, from Plato onwards. She points to his view that someone should only become a leader at 50 or above, as lived experience is often critical. Calling on Machiavelli, Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Marx and others, she is surprised that this rich set of reflective views from history are ignored in modern leadership scholarship. In particular, she is critical of the ideas that leaders in themselves are critical, the ‘Great Man (usually)’ theories of leadership that focus on qualities and traits, as if there was an essence of leadership that can be distilled and used as a potion or remedy. Hitler, she claims, did not kill 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. In fact, he killed not a single Jew, so reading history just in terms of biographies is a mistake. 

For Kellerman, the Pollyanna world of leadership literature and training is unreal. Power, authority and influence are real. Leaders pay themselves more and more, are glad to reduce costs and numbers of employees, shift to cheaper manufacturing and services abroad. Often referring to Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan and Trump as examples of leadership as the exercise of power. Never have we had so much attention, books, money spent and training on leadership – and so little of it. We must therefore look, like good historians, at context.

Leadership industry

She sees the ‘Leadership industry’ as a 40 year aberration, an industry that has dominated management training, to its detriment. In general, she is dissatisfied with the fixation on leadership and the focus on traits of leaders and leadership. Look around, she asks, and see if leadership has improved after 40 years of this focus on leadership and leadership training? The scholarly evidence for success is scant. Leadership, she thinks, needs to be seen as a system not a person, which is why she is sceptical about the leadership industry and its Pollyanna recommendations. It has become a money making proposition, a leadership-industrial complex. But it is complex in another sense, in that it cannot be taught easily and quickly.

Leadership ‘attribution error’

Critical of the leadership industry, countless courses, centres, workshops, books and rhetoric devoted to Leadership, she puts most of it down to an ‘attribution error’; the tendency to attributes all success and failures to leaders and leadership. This, she regards as a basic and naïve mistake but one that drives untold amounts of unnecessary spend in organisations on consultancy and training.

In fact, most of the sophisticated political developments have been about the devolution of power away from leaders to others. From the end of the 20^th C into the 21^st C this has continued with the devolution of power. Cultural change and therefore context, have rendered leaders less important.

Most of the books and research focus on good on traits for leaders and fail to focus on bad leadership. She proposes seven types of bad leader in Bad Leadership (2004): 

1.     Ineffective

2.     Rigid

3.     Intemperate

4.     Insular

5.     Corrupt

6.     Callous

7.     Evil

What we have to recognise is that things are often volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, globalised and driven by technological change. These contexts are complex, so rather than focus on traits, look at the complexity of context as it is plural, proximate, distal and temporal. This is not about you, it is about change. 

Followers

We have become fixated and obsessed by leaders at the expense of followers and the common good. As we overestimate the power of leader, where we think lies power, authority and influence lies, we correspondingly underestimate the power and influence of followers. Yet there is no leader without a follower, leaders do not exist without followers. The focus is therefore on the wrong end of the problem. We have too many leaders, which is the cult of individualism not community, when what really matters is to be realistic about followers, again a complex issue, which she classifies into:

Isolates

Bystanders

Participants

Activists

Diehards

Leadership and followership are intertwined. In understanding the idea and varieties of followership, one therefore understands leadership. The idea that everyone is a leader is, for her, ridiculous, as they are in practice, mostly various types of follower. The Western trajectory, since the Enlightenment, has seen power and influence wane and become increasingly devolved, so we have a very different context, one where followership is dominant.

Influence

Interest in Kellerman’s ideas have grown in the light of recent political events, especially in the US. She saw a turning point with Nixon and Monica Lewinsky in 1998, which degraded attitudes towards leadership. Will we continue with these more recent political divides? Avoid the regression to autocracy? We are seeing serious cleavages in countries, as followers have had enough of their leaders, now seen as the elite and out of touch. We have seen this in the US, France, UK and many other countries. A big mistake in business schools is to see that leadership courses focus on the organisation not the common good. We need to move away from this fixation on leadership.

Conclusion

It is unfortunate that serious scholars, such as Kellerman and Pfeffer, are often ignored by scholars, consultants and trainers in leadership, as they offer a more sophisticated interpretation of the complexity of the issues, rather than the delivery of simple platitudes.

Along with Pfeffer at Stanford, Kellerman provides a refreshing and more sophisticated theory of leadership and followership that escapes the normal focus on traits. Leaders are much more weakly positioned than they used to be. Influence matters more. Hierarchies are more horizontal.

Bibliography

Kellerman, B., 2012. The End of Leadership. New York, NY: Harper Business.

Kellerman, B., 2008. How followers are creating change and changing leaders. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School.

Kellerman, B., 2004. Bad leadership: What it is, how it happens, why it matters. Harvard Business Press.

Kellerman, B., 1999. Reinventing leadership: Making the connection between politics and business. SUNY Press.

Kellerman, B., 1984. The political presidency: Practice of leadership. Oxford University Press, USA.

Story Machines, well worth a read by two experts in the field

Can software create stories? In answering this question, two experts in the field unpack the history and issues around this idea. Good to read something on AI and creativity that is not the usual naïve, anthropomorphic, and dystopian utterances of people who do not have the background and balance to come at the subject objectively. That both authors have been involved in this domain for decades helps, as most see it as something that has just popped out of nowhere. 

Delighted to see that they both worked with Margaret Boden, who I mention in my book AI for Learning. She explored in depth the deep relationship between cognition and technology. Mike and Rafael then get down to business with a few precursors. Great to see them also mention the wonderful John Clark and his Eureka machine for producing readable, but mostly nonsense[, Latin verse. We have largely forgotten that the machine age produced creative and learning machines throughout the 19^th C leading to serious products by Pressy and Skinner in the early 20^th century .They uncover the wonderful and forgotten history of storytelling machines well and in detail.

But it all springs into life when computing arrives. There are a few misfires but the wonderful David Cope is mentioned, more famous perhaps for his computer-generated music, but the story of story grammars and their limitations is interesting, then into GPT-2 and GPT-3. I’ve used both and they are, as they say, mind-blowing. They are also limited in what they can do, on word length, consistency of meaning and rational plots, so their impact is more likely to be felt in non-fiction , where the creation of content, summarisation, along with cheating in assignments, essays and assessments is already rife.

The book then deals with storytelling games. The possibilities within the Metaverse flooded into my mind, especially when combined with image generation, which will be possible with future generations of DALL-E and other text to image transformers . Video, however requires immense amounts of computing power. They are also spot on in unpacking the role of AI as Augmented Intelligence, where writers are in a dialectical relationship with the technology. We all have predictive text, spellcheckers, grammar checkers and so on, so the technology is already deeply embedded in the practice of almost all forms of writing. They even present their own Engagement-Reflection model and their own story generator. It had echoes of Skinner’s rather wonderful disc-based Teaching Machine.

One problem I have with the ‘storytelling’ debate is the lack of focus on what storytelling is. Some see it as some sort of universal grammar, present in all forms of language, which is ridiculous, others see it still fine grained at the level of linguistic features, such as the use of metaphors, some as short, stored narratives that we recall or tell to ourselves, others as full blown produced narratives with complex structures. So it was heartening to see Roger Schank’s ‘script’ theory mentioned up front . I don’t buy the idea that all language emerged from storytelling  but it is clearly a universal and deep dimension of cognition and at a more general level, present all cultures.

I should add that I am not an uncritical fan of the cult of ‘storytelling’. I agree with Jonathon Gottschall in The Story Paradox that the most urgent question we can ask ourselves now is not ‘How can we change the world through stories?’ It may be ‘How can we save the world from stories?’ It is a given that stories are a force for good. That’s the orthodoxy. But what if the truth is that they are now a force for bad? Are we being drowned in a tsunami of stories from TED Talks, YouTube, TV, Movies, Netflix, Prime, Disney, Social Media? Could it be that they distract us from and distort reality? We love stories but only the stories that confirm our own convictions and we seek out those narratives that tell us what we already believe, retell and reinforce them, time and time again. And maybe the most subversive story, is the one we tell ourselves, over and over again, that we are right and those other storytellers and stories are wrong.

I was struck by the story about a story that came out recently in Human Kind by Rutger Bregman, who uncovered a real Lord of the Flies story about a group of boys actually marooned on an island for more than a year. Golding’s novel has been a staple in the school curriculum for decades but the real boys got on rather well and constructed a reasonable set of rules and society, until they were rescued.

Technology has given storytelling an immense boost. Box sets are consumed in a series of 6-13 episodes, then subsequent series released. Streaming services have exploded with Netflix, Prime, Disney, HBO and many others. They have huge amounts of archived content and release more than any individual could consume. We live in a blizzard of storytelling. The danger could be that machines will reinforce this pattern. They may, on the other hand, free us from our all-too-human prejudices embodied in much storytelling. Plato may have been right all along! 

I liked their final words, on using a combination of AI tools to create stories and the idea that there is also something possible beyond human stories, stories that genuinely come from the space of the machine. We saw this recently with a Google researcher who was convinced that the transformer was sentient. 

Hugely enjoyed this book as Mike and Rafael have opened the door wide for such a debate.

Rossett 

Allison Rossett was Professor of Educational Technology at San Diego University for 36 years from 1977 to 2013. From the 1980s onwards she was a pioneer in seeing performance, performance support and job aids as fundamental in the workplace. With a constant eye on the psychology of learning, especially transfer, she saw the need for performance support that was proximate to what people actually did at work. Rossett was as much interested in applying her ideas to education as organisational learning. 

Performance technology

It was over 30 years ago (1990) that Rossett was looking at performance technology, as opposed to instructional technology. She saw, in both education and organisational training, the need to see learning as a process that requires up-front analysis to determine how to meet learner needs. This meant reimagining what had to be done to meet those needs. These ideas were expanded in the Handbook of Human Performance Technology (1992) in which early performance theorists such as Rummler, Ruth and Richard Clark had papers, hers focusing on analysis and evaluation, which she saw as being intimately connected. It was her recognition that technology was and would continue to be the enabler of performance support that made her work relevant at the time and prophetic. 

Job aids

As early as 1991, in her Job aids in a performance technology world, she was recommending Job Aids in learning, including the now fashionable checklists, decision aids, step-by-step aids, all with the aim of improving performance on the job. What marks her out here is that she grounded these recommendations in cognitive psychology, especially transfer. Rossett was always keen to see performance technology as playing a role in technology based learning but was keen to flesh out the necessary analysis, especially of performance problems, along with issues around implementation. Innovation in performance technology is easy, implementation is hard and so this included the motivational issues around making job aids noticeable and engaging (1993). But it was in Job aids and performance support (2007) that she laid out her theories, along with many useful examples where job aids “match needs of the task to the performer”. She introduced two different forms of performance support:

    1. Planners
    2. Sidekicks

Planners prepare for longer-term decisions, sidekicks immediate problems. She also anticipated nudge learning, with captology (Computer As Persuasive Technology). In relating performance support back to memory, she acknowledges the work of Ruth Clark and what she calls the ‘father of Performance Support’, Tom Gilbert and the father of Job Aids, Joe Harless, and, of course, Gloria Gery. 
What also matters is her identification of the situations where performance support is not suitable, such as fluency, novel problems, workers with low literacy and demotivated employees. They work well with procedures and information, where there can be a convergence of work with learning and as new technology, such as mobiles, came along, she also kept a keen eye on whether they were actually being used or not, wary of the hype. She also explored the role of performance support in everyday life (2008), showing her breadth of thought. 

Blended learning 

As blended learning emerged she provided some useful guidance on how to implement the idea without the fatuous default to cookbook metaphors. Blended learning, was for Rossett (2006) something obvious that needed to replace the one-size-fits-all training paradigm. It also had to accept that performance and performance support was likely to be part of most blends. 

Influence 

She was committed to working with her graduate students on campus, online and in their field placements. Like many others at that time, Rossett saw that technology should not be restricted to the production of ‘courses’. Her interest in performance led her to use the phrase ‘learning in the workflow’ years before more recent consultants pretended they had invented the term. This led her to see Job Aids as essential, efficient and timely, as transfer of knowledge and skills could more be more readily realised. It is to her credit that she stuck firmly to this view, even when the technology was difficult to implement, before the advent of the internet and all of the learning in the workflow theorists around now are in debt to her foresight. 

Bibliography 

Rossett, A., 1990. Performance technology and academic programs in instructional design and technology: Must we change?. Educational Technology, 30 (pp.48-51. Stolovitch, H.D., Keeps, E.J. and Finnegan, G., 2000. Handbook of human performance technology: Improving individual and organizational performance worldwide. Rossett, A., 1991. Job Aids in a Performance Technology World. Performance and Instruction, 30(5), pp.1-6. Rossett, A., 1992. Performance Technology for Instructional Technologists: Comparisons and Possibilities. Performance and instruction, 31(10), pp.6-10. Tilaro, A. and Rossett, A., 1993. Creating Motivating Job Aids. Performance and Instruction, 32(9), pp.13-20. Rossett, A. and Schafer, L., 2007. Job aids and performance support: Moving from knowledge in the classroom to knowledge everywhere. John Wiley & Sons. Paino, M. and Rossett, A., 2008. Performance support that adds value to everyday lives. Performance Improvement, 47(1), pp.37-44.

Is the Ukraine Russia's Vietnam?

Many moons ago, Gil and I went to Vietnam on a whim. It wasn’t long after the end of the Vietnam war. We saw people cooking pho in GI helmets on the street, purple hearts were on sale in junk shops, crashed helicopters in gardens, the signs and wreckage of war were everywhere. Some images from Ukraine reminded me of this. The folly of thinking that full armoured divisions and helicopters will defeat a more determined army.

The Ukraine is, indeed, starting to look like Russia’s Vietnam. As the war continues, a highly motivated, agile, local army continues to out-think and ambush the invader at every opportunity, not with heavy armour but local support and surprise. The body bags keep piling up, angering folk back home and an increasing use of conscripts is being used as casualties (circa 20,000) continue to rise. This is a much faster casualty rate than either Vietnam for the Americans or Afghanistan for the Russians. It will take its toll.

Putin is even starting to look like Nixon, lost in his own peculiar Alice in Wonderland fantasy world of uber-long tables, sitting in big Baroque chairs (dictators adore these) in big white rooms, having Mad Hatter tea parties with expressionless guys in big brown and red military hats and epaulets. What worries me is the possibility that he turns into Kurtz, who takes that Marxist historicist, dialectical materialist BS and turns his thesis and anti-thesis, into the final nuclear synthesis. Historicism has a bad habit of becoming deterministic, driven by what he, and Marx, perceived as destiny. I thought that shit had died in 1975 with Pol Pot. It hadn't, the flame still kept alive by mad dictators and hapless academics.

For the present, however, despite his delusional bombast, Russia lost the Battle of Kiev, lost their flagship Naval vessel, a week later they have made no progress on their new fronts, are fighting clearly subversive fires on Russian territory and, unbelievably, Mariupal is still not completely conquered. Like the US in Vietnam, they have responded by simply bombing the hell out of the place. That’s desperate, it’s also morally despicable.

In truth, like the US, they had lost the war the minute they invaded, as the damage they inflicted in trying to win was sure to destroy most of the country. The means had become worse than the end. Their troops are most likely exhausted, demotivated, poorly supplied and want this to end as quickly as possible, just like the GIs at the time. 

The sad truth is that this whole exercise, like Vietnam, seems ‘doomed to succeed’ in that Putin, once he had started, couldn’t back down, even though he has unleashed forces - militarily, economic and political - way beyond his expectations. They’re now stuck in a global quagmire, having made more enemies than friends. The US had the economic clout to pay for Vietnam and recover, Putin may, single-handedly, have created a second Soviet Union collapse, similar to that of the 90s. Lloyd Austin said as much yesterday “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. It has already lost a lot of military capability… we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

The similarity doesn’t end there. Within two years Kennedy was dead (we tend to forget that it was a very popular President Kennedy, who escalated that war but that’s another story), LBJ rumbled on and Nixon was eventually kicked out as the country turned against him. War does funny things to so-called leaders - both good and bad.

The Drone War: Ukraine

I've been droning on about drones for some time. In 2018 I was in Rwanda, where I got to meet a number of drone companies, delivering blood, doing crop mapping and so on. I came back, wrote a lot about this technology, bought one, gave talks at conferences on the topic and on 27 March had a punt here on Facebook, saying that “Ukraine is a drone war. Ukraine may be the first ever drone war.”

I have a consumer drone. The DJI Mavic 2 Pro can fly up to 8 km (4.3 miles) and will return to your feet with the press of a button. You can see what it sees on your smartphone and the stills and video quality are superb. When you use one, it is not difficult to see its potential in war.

Drones are being used in the Ukraine for several purposes

1. Reconnaissance

2. Payload delivery

3. Distraction 

4. PR

The Ukrainians have employed small autonomous teams, armed with drones, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and beaten off the supposed might of Red Army. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and the US-made Switchblade are attack drones that have been hugely effective. Swicgtblades are small, less than 2 foot, collapsable drones that fit in a rucksack, and are armoured. There's a larger 50 pound version. These are being sent in the hundreds to Ukraine.

My friend Peter O’Shea sent me a military article explaining why ‘finding is better than flanking’. Find and destroy, by drones, negated the need to risk flanking as it has the immediacy of surprise. A whole range of drones with lethal payloads have been used to good effect. They have even been used as distractors. The pride of the Russian Navy was sunk after being distracted by drones while a Neptune missile was launched.

A feature of drone tech often missed is its propaganda value. We are watching this war through the eyes of drones. Drone tech is tech that has changed the world without us realising it. We are barely aware of those thousands of drone shots we watch in films and box sets. Spectacular and cheap, it has changed the whole aesthetic of film. Those shots of Mariupol and tanks being taken out are often from the sky, recoded directly and downloadable from a smartphone. We see tank turrets fly, Russian soldiers running in fire. This war is Baudriallardian in that we see it from the sky. We’re there. There is nowhere to hide. All of that video is, of course carefully curated and released. Ultimately, wars are won by hearts not heads. The Ukrainians have won our hearts, hands down.

What we now see is a clapped out Red army, fighting an imaginary war from some old World War II manual. Their Putinesque centralised, command and control structure has been out manoeuvred by small teams with little drones, backed up with payload drones and a population with smartphones that pinpoints the position of every one of their clumsy tanks and trucks. All they’re left with is artillery. Even Mariupol has not yet fallen, with a small group holding on for weeks against the supposed might of the Red army. It’s prized naval ship was sunk after being distracted by a drone! 

This clapped-out, old bandwagon has caused chaos simply because of its size but it is being wiped out, vehicle by vehicle. It’s a short drive from the Belarus border to Kiev, less than London to Birmingham and they still couldn’t get near the city, never mind take it. They have depleted their army, embarrassed themselves, turned Europe against them, strengthened NATO, lost their largest export market and will go through a second economic collapse, shunned by decent democracies.

Russia has already lost this war. Its army is being decimated. Its reputation is in the toilet. It has lost all of its bordering states and will lose more. More than this, it has strengthened the West. The only two countries left in Europe that are pro-Putin are Serbia and Cyprus, which is basically a Russian bank.

So where next? The same direction of travel. The EU needs to get its 27 fingers out of their bumholes and contribute to the defence of their people with a 2% of GDP commitment. They need to wash the dirty money out of the system and continue with strict sanctions until Putin and his cronies go. 

Oh... and invest in drones. We don't know the half of it in drone world. Truss talked about Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems, which are armed drones. They are designed for open, flat country, so perfect on the new Eastern front. Phoenix Ghost is a low-cost, single-use suicide drone that behaves like a loitering munition — flying around an airspace before ramming itself into a target. My own view is that long distance, bird-like drones are already being used with incendiary payloads to start fires in key buildings. Insect size drones for surveillance also in action. I suspect these have already been in use and that drones will continue to play their key role, if not winning role, in this war.

Galton - Nature v nurture and eugenics

Sir Francis Galton  (1822-1911), the English polymath, was Darwin’s half cousin, and was enormously influenced by both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, especially the chapter in former on Variation under Domestication. This was to lead to his later work on ‘eugenics’, a term he coined. As a child prodigy, who left school at 16 as he found the curriculum too dull and narrowly classical, he was a mind of individual spirit, developing the modern fingerprint identification system and weather maps. He was a brilliant statistician and it was his aim to identify and quantify the nature of human intelligence. The phrase ‘Nature versus nurture’ came from Galton. 

Experimental psychology 

As an example of his approach to science, in meteorology, he gathered data at different locations, three times a day and invented weather maps based on htat data, with the arrows and symbols we see today. As one of the first experimental psychologists, he used his analytic skills, along with data, to create what is called Differential Psychology, the attempt to identify differences between people, rather than their common abilities and traits. He used many of the statistical ideas and techniques we take for granted today, including: correlation (which he used but did not invent) and observed, rather than applied, regression to the mean in his observations of breeding sweet peas. He also used natural distribution curves to analyse the data. 

This developed into a more specific inquiry into the nature of our species. He started with large data sets on physical characteristics such as height and facial shapes. This led to him developing fingerprints as a unique identifier. This was presented in Hereditary Genius (1869). 

This led to his work on specific traits that could be measured to determine cognitive abilities. This included the mental representation and imagination of numbers, including synesthesia, visualisation, word association, unconscious events, social traits, moral instincts and reaction times. But it was his work on character and personality, along with heritability that marks him out as an experimental psychologist of some note. Experimentally, and well ahead of his time in psychology, he used twin studies, both identical and fraternal, along with adopted twins, all in an attempt to separate nature from nurture. 

Eugenics 

Unfortunately, this led to his obsession with ‘eugenics’, a term he invented, to promote the marriage and breeding of traits, as Darwin had explained in The Origin of Species. It led to his belief that improvements should be sought, not by allowing hereditary wealth but by showing your personal worth, marriage among equals encouraged and the “better sort of emigrants and refugees from other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants naturalised.” One should note that he believed in not allowing what hesawas inferior humans to breed, encouraging them to be monastic and celibate and at times his views bordered on the recommendation of genocide. He was the founding president of the British Eugenics Society. 

Criticism 

He was often so eager to prove his hypotheses, such as the inferiority of Africans, that he refused to accept the evidence that their fingerprints were in fact not less complex than those of other races. His hereditary traits evidence often did not show up in the data, but were promoted as true. The nature-nurture debate had continued with the trend being towards it being much more complex than we mav imagined. Behavioural genetics is now a complex field, the genome has been decoded and much progress is being made to identify and solve problems using knowledge of genetics. 

Influence

Eugenics took a terrible toll across the world, with involuntary sterilisation in the US and even in Sweden until as recently as 1976 and in Japan until 1996. It has influenced immigration policies, the repression of bropups within countries and, of courses, genocides, suchas the Holocaust. Galton is now seen as a racist, eugenicist, which he clearly was. Galton was well travelled and with the spread of the British Empire in the Victorian era, he had enormous influence on attitudes towards how people were seen at home in Britain and abroad. This was to influence many aspects of intellectual and public life, not least in education, where it directly influenced Cyril Burt, who then applied this to UK policy in education, aspects of which have survived to this day. At UCL the Galton Chair of Genetics was actually renamed from the Galton Chair of Eugenics and the word Galton only changed in 2019. Yet his encouragement of statistical techniques and experimental methods to maintain objectivity have had a lasting influence in psychology. 

Bibliography

Galton, F., 1869. Hereditary genius. Macmillan and Company. 

Galton, F., 1892. Finger prints. Macmillan and Company. 

Galton, F., 1889. Natural inheritance. Macmillan and Company. 

Galton, F., 1889. I. Co-relations and their measurement, chiefly from anthropometric data. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 45(273-279), pp.135-145.

Exemplar of successful implementation of tech in schools

Not often you see schools having resolved the ‘technology’ issue. It is usually a contentious issue, often tribal, defensive, even hostile. Despite the endless claims on workload, the refusal to do what every other area of human endeavour does, use technology to reduce it, education often seems to wilfully avoid the issue. Schools have, in the past, been quite independent, creating their own websites, buying and building their own technology, reducing much of it to a cottage industry. It was impressive to find a school network that took technology as seriously as Curro, in South Africa. They had invited me to give a keynote on AI for Learning, based on my book and experience but I hung around as the teacher sessions were so damn good. This is what I learnt, as I think it is a recipe for success.

Centralised service

Curro technology was a centralised service that provided CPD for all teachers, as well as procuring and implementing ALL technology across the entire network of schools. This is NOT simply centralised procurement, it is a group with the deep expertise needed to tackle the change management, training, trials and implementation of a range of activities. They had already implemented a wide range of technologies across the network, accessible through a single point of entry. This, I think is a necessary condition for success, single door, single sign-in. Everything from administration to advanced AI and adaptive learning systems were distributed from this point. Teachers, in particular, appreciated the simplicity of this one-stop-shop approach. It was clear that the service also had real and trusted expertise from which the whole school could draw, rather than distributing responsibility out to all teachers.

Ecosystem of technology

There was a real sense of technology as a force for good in teaching and learning. With champions out in the schools, supported by expertise at the centre, they understood the balance between innovation and implementation. This allows experimentation and constructive feedback. I got none of the tired scepticism I’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than plump for one system, they have built an ecosystem of technologies accepted by everyone. Careful choices, careful implementation and the sense that different tech meets different needs.

Emphasis on CPD

Webinars and other training is distributed, a term in advance, with practical training in hte technology, news on what’s new and other relevant services for teachers. It is clearly a dynamic service designed to bring teachers with them in the change management process. I was giving a talk as part of that process. The day’s activities were under the banner of ‘Imagining 2022’. It’s hard enough to Imagine what any year will bring these days but it was clear that this was a learning organisation, willing to learn from their mistakes and make the effort to plan forward. It was CPD organised by teachers for teachers and not scared of introducing outside ideas and speakers. There was no sense of being a protected, inward-looking process. You got that sense of CPD being in the hands of the teachers themselves, not something done TO teachers.

Content curation

The teachers were full of praise for the provision of content that they could use themselves or for students. There was no sense of the schools hanging on to the idea that ALL content has to be created and delivered internally by the existing teachers. So what of it wasn’t invented here. It was refreshing to find a sense of openness to curated content from outside sources.

Adaptive learning

This was the big surprise. There were glowing testimonials from teachers about the power of adaptive learning, using AI, to personalise learning for students. It was described as a ‘gamechanger’ by the teacher who presented, with clear targeting, so that efficient and relevant, individual interventions could be made for students. It was clear that they knew why they wanted this technology, had implemented it well and were using teacher feedback to spread the word internally.

Content, slides and short videos, along with digital worksheets, were used in class with regular assessments. A big win was saving time on marking and correction, which was automated and done instantly, even alternative question provision. This, I feel, is an argument that is massively underappreciated in schools. Diagnostic questions, provided by the system were found to be particularly useful, for identifying individual learners’ strengths and weaknesses. This meant that teachers didn’t have to wait for an assessment before making an intervention. There was also openness to including parents in the process, using the tech to allow access to their progress, lessening the need for teachers to respond to parent requests. Learners at home can also be held accountable for work in class or at home in realtime. This use of technology to extend teaching and learning was exactly what I had presented in my Keynote, using Artificial Intelligence as ‘Augmented’ Intelligence.

Conclusion

Far from being reactive to innovation they were on the front foot, seeking out the best of breed technologies. By creating a separate entity that centralised these efforts they could keep delivery safe and simple, as well as think about how to bring staff with them. The fact that I was brought in, someone 5,500 miles away, to give a talk, was a testament to their ambition and openness. I learnt more from them as they did from me. That’s as it should be.