Flipped learning: training got there first with flipcharts!

Flip one’s lid

We’ve all been there. That collaborative event where you’re forced to sit at round tables and asked to select a chair The trainer then poses some questions which you’re expected to answer with the Chairs of each table feeding back to the group as a whole, while someone writes it up on flipchart sheets and pins them on the wall, so that it can be collated and sent out to everyone.

What actually happens is that the extrovert quickly volunteers to be the chair (or becomes chair by default as no one else can be bothered), the table spends too long deciding what the ill-formed question actually means or shoots off on obscure tangents, the question forgotten. The chair then feeds back their own thoughts, ignoring all other contributions. Sure the flip chart pages are pinned up on the wall with bluetac, ruining the paint work, but you never, ever get the feedback sent to you afterwards.

This is what passes for collaboration in training, an tired-old ritual that is generally a waste of time. It’s illusory learning, pretend collaboration and just one of those awful things that only happen on awful training courses. I really do want to flip my proverbial lid when these sessions are suggested.

Flipside

OK, the flipside of flipcharts is that they do have their uses. They’re a bit boring, but big enough to be seen by small audiences and small enough to be used by a presenter and a little more small scale and human than a massive projection. For small group brainstorming and sport’s coaching, they can be useful.

Of course, they don’t require batteries or computer technology, so many trainers see it as a safe bet. Unlike PowerPoint, paper is designed to be written upon, and so you can capture the thoughts of learners. Its popularity among trainers is due in some part to its suitability to small audiences in courses with fixed content.

Some flipchart tips include; writing straight by ruling faint lines before you start, write words or images in faint pencil and amaze learners with your free-flowing sketching skills or write faint notes to keep you on track.

Conclusion

Not much to them really but I do like this spoof entry under Flipcharts in Wikipedia,

“Recently, scientists have developed a digital self-writing flip chart which writes word for word everything it is instructed to record. The disability action group "Armless" has stated that this is a significant step forward for disabilities groups to have conferences with people without disabilities. Also being released into public sale is a flipchart which is self-heightening. This system is known as the POGO system.”

Lecterns: technology of teaching or preaching?

Educational furniture often has the whiff of pomposity and the ‘lectern’ stinks of the stuff. That most visible symbol of that disastrous carry-over from church to university, the lectern, speaks volumes about the pedagogic poverty of the lecture. It’s a phoney pulpit from which teachers play at being priests. What it encourages is the view that knowledge is fixed. The books that lay on the lectern were meant to be read aloud, the fixed scripture of the Bible, Koran or Torah. The lectern says “the book which is laid on this altar is holy and must be believed, or thou shall go to hell, or worse, fail thy exams”.

Lectures

What lecterns do is encourage dry lectures. That padded out, one hour (Babylonians had a 60-based number system) of relentless speech that has far more to do with lazy preparation than pedagogy. Give people who are inexperienced at teaching a prop and they'll use it and use it to literally prop up themselves and poor teaching, whether it be lecture notes or text-ridden Powerpoint.

Stand and deliver

The lectern fixes knowledge but it also fixes the speaker. It roots them to the spot and encourages that insidious practice of reading a lecture from notes or worse, verbatim from sheets of paper, or even more ghastly reading out a published paper. This destroys teaching in Higher Education, and kills conferences stone dead. Generation after generation of students get spoon-fed, or worse bored rigid, by this repetitive reading. When the lecturer lectures from a lectern, profession, practice and pomposity all meet on this one spot.

Speak don’t read

My heart sinks when a speaker stands stock still behind this wooden palisade, scared to come out and show themselves, fearful of the reaction. My heart sinks even deeper when I see the glasses go on and the sheaf of notes appear. I know I’m soon to experience psychological distress as the nodding movement from paper to audience casts the spell of indifference across the entire lecture or conference hall.

I’ve seen people step behind a lectern and say, “Good morning, my names is (glance down) Nigel Jobsworth, from the Department of Regurgitation or University of Dullsville, and I want to speak to you today about (glance down) this very exciting subject… (reading from paper). I’ve seen speakers reduced to sweaty, quivering wrecks because their notes have ended up in the wrong order. Without the written word they’re confused mutes. I’ve seen a Russian Professor at a UN conference talk for a full hour (to the minute) in a monotone voice, ignoring even punctuation, from her notes, announcing at the end that she was a Professor of Communication (I kid you not) from the University of Moscow. So hypnotised was I by this act of absurdist theatre that I neither understood nor remembered a single word.

Death of oratory

Academic and political oratory have been dealt a death blow by the steady retreat away from speaking honestly from your own mind, towards speaking literally from notes. In the case of politicians, it is notes written by flunkies, who strip life away leaving nothing but the banal bones of written prose or what they think are soundbites, but sound like the clichés they are. Just as bad are the academics who seem to think that lectern delivery exudes academic seriousness. It doesn’t. Reading is not teaching.

Conclusion

The lectern is only any good for holding a laptop. It’s something to walk away from, to avoid. Think TED and you can’t go far wrong.

Punishers – weird technology of punishment in schools

Technology of punishment in learning? Surely not. Blackboards have long been used as instruments of punishment where pupils are asked to write the same line a set number of times. ‘Lines’ often had to be written in detention, after school. Many claim that linking punishment to writing is a strong demotivator, as future writing talks are likely to be associated with punishment. Others argue that writing practice is both a punishment and useful exercise. The argument around corporeal punishment in schools - useful for discipline or child abuse - has been raging for two millennia.

Roman punishment

From Sparta and Rome to the public schools of England, punishment has been seen as a necessary condition for education, especially of boys. Spartan education was militaristic and punishment (flogging) was common. Indeed stealing was seen as a virtue, only being caught shameful, and the ability to take pain a mark of courage. In Rome schools had a range of technology for beating students including the ferula (birch branches), scotia (leather whip straps) and the hardest leather whip the flagellum.

Dunces hats

The pointed ‘dunces’ hat, sometimes with a ‘D’ on it, was put on the heads of pupils who misbehaved and they were made to stand in the corner, sometimes with their face to the wall. The name comes from the Scottish theologian Duns Scotus, whose followers stubbornly refused to adopt to the new humanities and so ‘Duns’ became a byword for stubbornness and stupidity. The word dunce first appears I the middle of the 17^th century and ‘dunces cap’ first appears in The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. In Europe there was an equivalent, a headdress resembling a donkey’s ears, to indicate ‘stupidity’.

Canes

Spanking buttocks with canes was widespread, especially in English speaking public schools until relatively recently and is quite clearly responsible for what the French call the ‘vice anglais’ or ‘spanking’ on the bare or clothed buttocks. It was widely represented in novels, films, as a key aspect of British schooling. Rattan spanking canes, used for corporeal punishment came into common use in the late 19t century, when it was found they could deliver seething pain, even through clothes. The practice continued, largely in the English speaking public schools, usually by the headmaster but also by prefects, and although banned in most countries, still exists today.

Corporeal punishment was banned in England & Wales in 1999, Scotland 2000 and Northern Ireland in 2004. Although it still lingers and is still commonly used in Iran, many sub-Saharan and African countries, such as Zimbabwe and in Singapore and Malaysia.

Paddles

In the US spanking on the buttocks with a foot long wooden or fibreglass paddle is legal in 19 states, mostly in the mid-west and south; Alabama Arizona Arkansas Colorado Florida Georgia Idaho Indiana Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Mississippi Missouri North Carolina Oklahoma South Carolina Tennessee Texas and Wyoming. Up to 20,000 students a year request medical help after being paddled. Some see it as a distasteful hangover, all too common in ‘black’ states. Others see it as child abuse and there are on-going legal cases.

Leather straps

The ‘strap’ or ‘belt’ was the mainstay of corporeal punishment in Scottish Schools. It was a thick leather strap, forked at the end and applied to the outstretched hands. I can still vividly remember the pain, burst blood vessels on my wrist and injustice for being late for school (it was the bus not me that was late!). The Lochgelly Tawse had the largest share of the market as it had no sharp edges, didn’t wrap round the hand and was lighter and easier to use. As a piece of technology it was exquisitely designed as an instrument of pain and punishment.

Whips

Whips have been used for centuries in schools. A worrying trend, however, is its routine contemporary use in Koranic schools, not just for bad behaviour but for failing on simple recitations, reading and writing tasks. Punishment in this context is largely around routine, rote memorisation tasks.

Technology twist

In an interesting technology twist, mobiles in classrooms have exposed some of the excessive brutality inflicted by teachers in some countries and have led to prosecutions and changes in government policy. Take these horrific examples from Thailand and South Korea. There are many others.

Pedagogy of punishment

Even in Roman times, the debate raged over the corporeal punishment of children. Quintilian (35-95 AD, was "entirely against corporal punishment in education... it is disgusting and slavish…the pupil whose mind is too coarse to be improved by censure will become as indifferent to blows. Finally, these chastisements would be entirely unnecessary if the teachers were patient and helpful…..And consider how shameful, how dangerous to modesty are the effects produced by the pain or fear of the victims. This feeling of shame cripples and unmans the spirit, making it flee from and detest the light of day."

Quintilian addresses the main issues, 1) it’s degrading; 2) victims become indifferent; 3) teachers need to find better methods; 4) demotivates and cripples the mind. Other arguments against include the possibility of showing that hitting others is acceptable, increasing aggression in children and possible trauma. These arguments were to eventually win the day and corporeal punishment is now banned in many developed countries.

The technology of punishment, based on the pedagogy of retribution and deterrence has long been part of education systems around the world. It was long believed to be an effective tool, especially for bad behaviour among boys. Interestingly, corporeal punishment is highly selective on gender. It has also been used to punish failure and at its most extreme to instil fear and push rote learning of set texts.

Conclusion

The argument for corporeal punishment in schools still rages, however, the practice has been banned in many countries and the general move is towards its eradication. It’s useful to remind ourselves that technology in schools is used for a very wide range of practices, some less palatable than others.

Manuscripts and the collapse of learning

This is St Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, and it speaks volumes about the medieval, monastic scribe. Note the lined parchment, where a plumb line was used to draw parallel lines. The codex is on a lectern, at an angle to control the flow of ink, and the curtain is drawn back to give more light. In his hands are a quill pen and a knife for scraping away errors and sharpening eth quill. Paper only became common in the 1400s and at three to four pages per day even the best scribe made a mistake per page (erased by scraping with knife or pumice stone). This was painstaking work but it’s the illuminations that took the real artistry, time and effort.

Manuscripts and learning

Widely admired, these illustrated manuscripts are much admired by book lovers. But what effect did they have on the dissemination of knowledge and learning?

Manuscript literally means written by hand but this meant that books were scarce and existed in a culture of fixed knowledge and deference. At the end of the Roman era literacy plummeted and for over a thousand years civilisation, especially the culture of writing and reading, was reduced to a small number of scribes and a medium available largely to elites. Illustrated manuscripts are the luxury goods of religion and royalty. Their scarcity was their strength.

We must remember that books like this were rare. Incredibly expensive to produce, they were owned and treasured by the elite. Indeed, the manuscripts are overwhelmingly about the two great institutions of the state - Church and Monarchy. Print is power and politics, so a manuscripts is never just a manuscript, it is a device for religious certainty, conviction, conversion, dogma, flattery, preferment, a claim to legitimacy, a contract, a confirmation of status. This has little to do with learning.

However, what manuscript culture gave us was the shift from reading ‘aloud’ to devotional ‘silent’ reading. This led to the development of spaces between words, punctuation, paragraphs, capitalisation, page numbers, contents pages and indexes. This demand for books was to lead to technological advances that were to free texts from the the age of the manuscript.

Religious censorship

As writing became the medium of religion, Buddhism in China and Asia, Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Middle East and Europe, so manuscripts became, not objects of open learning, but texts to be read aloud, memorised by rote learning and believed. Beautiful as they were, they were the instruments of fixed thought, orthodoxy and control.

Islam – stuck in manuscript age

We have an interesting example in the history of written culture with Islam. Islam was a conduit for many ancient texts but remained stubbornly fixated with 'written' and copied texts, so remained in the manuscript ‘written by hand’ age well into the 19^th century. The Ottoman Sultan Bayazid banned printing completely across the entire empire in 1485. It wasn’t until 1727 that this law was repealed, even then only for secular books. This eventually had a devastating effect on the Islamic world’s contribution to knowledge, science and learning. It wasn’t until the second half of the 19^th century that printing became commonplace.

Koran means ‘recitation’. It was meant to be read aloud and endless recitation and memorising of the book, through repeated spoken readings, has always been highly prized in the Islamic world. But this comes at a price. This repeated repetition is massively effective in learning and results in the deep processing and retention of the text, and the dogmatic convictions that come with deeply held knowledge and belief.

Catholic censorship

Manuscripts were largely objects of religious dogma and therefore the enemy of learning in the sense of new ideas and critical analysis. Remember that the Catholic Church still had a prohibited books list until 1966. To be clear, the list included; Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Locke, Galileo Galileo and Blaise Pascal. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his writings. So religious control really meant control and censorship.

Spanish conquerors burnt one civilisation’s entire literary output. Writing had been invented, independently, in Mesoamerica and there was a rich tradition of religious, astronomical and other literature, yet Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the collection and destruction of all Mayan manuscripts. Only four survived.

Royal censorship

It was not just religious groups who were suspicious of manuscripts. Henry VIII was a censor who tried to ban reading, even of the Bible, by apprentices and women. Elizabeth I did the same through The Stationer’s Company. So Royalty, far from being bibliophiles promoting reading and writing, were narcissistic owners and censors. fGutenberg, and Caxton, did truly revolutionised the replication and scalability of the writing and reading of books.

Conclusion

Magnificent manuscripts give us a direct causal link with the past. The Book of Kells is a masterpiece. There’s even annotations in Henry VIIIs own hand in the margins. The Mathew Paris 13^th C journey to the Holy Land is an intriguing strip map, as he certainly never did the journey himself. You can wallow in the few books that did exist over these many centuries but don’t fall for this being in any way a golden age for books and learning. Manuscript culture was in many ways the enemy of learning. It fixed learning in a pattern of endless copying and repetition. Manuscripts fossilised knowledge and kept it in the hands of church and rulers.

From stone axe to mobile: hand-held learning

One of my most prized objects is a Neolithic handaxe, picked up on the Downs close to where I live. For me, it's similar, but more exciting, to hold than an iPhone, as to handle this object is to touch the mind of someone who lived tens, even hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s not only an object you can learn from but a lesson in learning. To watch an axe being made with a hammerstone, then antler or soft hammer for edging, is to see a masterclass in manufacture. But what have we to learn about the minds of our ancestors and how these skills were taught and learnt?

Tools as technology

James Hutton and Charles Lyle had opened up the vastness of the past, through geological fieldwork with the concept of deep time. The history of the earth was pushed back from thousands to millions then billions of years. Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection (1859) supported the idea that the evolution of life had to be seen in this context of deep time.

Part of the re-evaluation of the origins and evolution of life was the re-evaluation of our own species. Almost immediately Prehistoric Times (1865) by John Lubbock defined and split the Stone Age into Palaeolithic and Neolithic. The Palaeolithic was characterised by flaked stone artefacts and the Neolithic by polished stone axes. Technology, hand axes, were already defining the epochs of human evolution.

Axes and pedagogy

Hand axes are the primary evidence for learning in prehistory. Stone tools show intent and are a window into the minds of our ancestors and their ability to learn. We have been making these axes for one and a half million years. What is astounding is how similar they are over such a huge geographical area (three continents) and over a million and a half years, the same teardrop shape and cutting edge.

First, they are difficult to make. It requires knowledge, decision making and sophisticated skills that take time to learn and, importantly, skills that must have been taught. Defined as learning objectives, we can first assume hand-eye co-ordination, the ability to imagine a future three dimensional shape and the ability to conceive the tool as having a purpose.

Suitable local material had to be found and the right shaped nodules selected. Then there’s the fiendishly, difficult knapping skills. This involves the use of tools to make tools, as later axes required hard hammers and soft hammers for edging.  As one knapps, constant adaption and problem solving is needed, as it is not just a matter of applying a set of fixed rules. Over and above these skills is the mathematical skill of transformation. Gowlett (1993) has inferred, from the fact that they were able to make axes of the same shape at different sizes, the mathematical ability to scale. These are complex cognitive abilities and acquired skills. Few people, even today, master the skills of prehistoric knappers.

Wynne (1979) has used the idea that early human cognitive development reflects what we know about child development and so placed axe manufacture into a Piagian development model. He argued that the earliest axes use the simple the cognitive skill of striking a blow next to the fracture left by the first blow. This only demands a ‘one thing at a time’ skill, a pre-operational intelligence. Later axes show the ability to imagine a three dimensional shape and work towards symmetry, an operational intelligence. However, Piaget’s stages have not withstood the test of time and the earliest axes seem to show more skill than the pre-operative concept allows. It would seem that considerable knowledge and skills are required for even the earliest forms of axe production and that these skills are likely to have been taught by skilled experts.

Prehistoric teaching

Imitation must surely have been the way learning took place but is there evidence for teaching? Boesch (1991) has observed occasional episodes of chimps being stimulated, facilitated and actively taught in the wild, where for example, an adult chimp repositioned a nut on a natural anvil for a younger chimp and rotated a stone hammer in the hand of a younger chimp to crack nuts. However, tool making and teaching by adult animals is almost non-existent in the wild. Assuming that early humans were cognitively superior to chimps, Kohn (1999) argues that axe production was a skill most likely taught by mothers to sons. Experiments have shown that it is not easy to teach by demonstration alone and that language, in the sense of the ability to teach, is also likely to have been used.
Utility
As homo sapiens emerged from Africa, we see the development of tool manufacture away from the one ax from one stone culture towards the production of blades, points and scrapers. This is often in response to the changing food sources, namely smaller animals in drier conditions. When large, obvious and plentiful sources of protein become depleted, smaller animals must be hunted and that requires more guile and smarter tools, especially projectiles.

Skills and selection

What remains a puzzle is the fact that many handaxes show manufacture beyond utility. The Boxgrove axes, just a short drive from my home, were manufactured on the spot for butchery and left there but huge hand axes, such as the Furze Platt Giant and many other finely worked examples seem to show axes for ‘show’. Kohn argues that symmetry reflects fitness and that sexual selection is at work here. Some evolutionary psychologists suggest that sexual selection in combination with imitation and teaching is needed to explain the reach and longevity of axe production. It would seem, however, that axe production went well beyond utility into cultural and social significance. The very act of acquiring the skill to make an axe may well have been a mark of fitness and social status.

Conclusion

We can fooolow the evolution oh hominoids as much by the trail of stone tools they left behind, as the rare fossil bones. When we link the fossil evidence with the stone tool evidence, we see a cognitive progression present in the toolsets, which become smaller, more sophisticated and more differentiated in use, a bit like mobile technology in the modern world.
Early humans developed a technical intelligence in the working of stone that is rarely matched, even today. Stone axe production was profligate and shows that we developed, not only the ability to use the technology of tools, but also the ability to teach and learn a wide range of high level cognitive and motor skills. There is also evidence that this technology was more than just practical tool production. Its role in social and cultural life was considerable. We, as a species, could be said to be defined by our teaching and learning skills. Although the stone axe is only obliquely a learning tool, it set our species on the road to massive advances in the use of tools and technology. From the stone axe to mobiles, hand-held tools have a long pedigree in learning and teaching; the brushes used in cave paintings, reed pens, clay tablets, books, pencils, chalk, cameras, calculators and mobiles have all been used to enhance and accelerate our ability to teach and learn. Above all, they put learning literally into the hands, and therefore minds, of the learner. 

Bibliography

Mithen, S. J. (1996).The prehistory of the mind: A search for the origins of art, religion, and science. London: Thames and Hudson.

Rudgley, R. (1998).Lost civilisations of the Stone Age. London: Century.

Kohn M. (1999) As We Know It: Coming to terms with the evolved mind. Granta.

Boesch, Christophe (1991) Teaching among wild chimpanzees.Animal Behaviour, Vol 41(3), Mar 1991, 530-532.

Wynn, J. (1979) The Intelligence of later Ascheulian Hominids. Man 14, 371-91.

Gowlett, J. (1993). Ascent to civilization: The archaeology of early humans. New York: McGraw-Hill.

IDI – 7 reasons why online degree students outperform University campus-based students

The Interactive Design Institute was a revelation when I visited. These guys deliver degree courses, accredited by an English University, to both UK and foreign students (full and part-time). The fact that you can deliver a real academic course with strong vocational ‘learn by doing’ components, online, is interesting, but the real story here is the fact that their students outperform the campus-based students doing the same course. Why?

I spent some time going through a learner journey and this, I think, is why they do so well.

1. Multiple intakes. IDI does three intakes a year, giving more flexibility to students and earnings to tutors in the academic ‘off-season’. This breaks the back of the archaic one intake a year model and makes teaching and learning a year-round activity. Not radical but necessary.

2. Superior feedback. Considered, detailed and constructive feedback is the pedagogic potion that makes them special. They really do follow the advice of Black and William through clear, point-by-point feedback designed to take the student forward. I’ve worked through their tutor feedback, which is brilliant and thorough. Nothing like the cursory, general, not written and recorded and therefore often forgotten advice in many face-to-face sessions.

3. Asynchronous feedback. ALL feedback is asynchronous. This is interesting. They have abandoned Skype, webcasts, videoconferencing and other synchronous, real-time forms of feedback in favour of asynchronous feedback, which they regard as superior. First, it takes away the awkwardness of academic/student face-to-face interactions. Second, it’s archived, giving the student and tutor a good audit trail to check, read, re-read and respond to. This is important, as the feedback si very detailed and needs a point-by-point detailed response. Verbal feedback is too transitory.

4. Exemplary content. Good course material, software tutorials, exemplars and other forms of useful content lie at the heart of the course, allowing the student to proceed at their own pace and get relevant teaching and help, whenever needed. Far too may University courses rely on thin, out of date content delivered in lecture series. The content is also kept bang up to date by dedicated ‘content update’ staff. Give the students access to good content, with strong tutor support and feedback, and they will learn.

5. Quality tutors. Given the quality of the content, the tutors can focus on what they do best – teach. Free from the constraints of lecturing, designing content and departmental politics, they can focus on feedback. It’s that simple.

6. Student support. Students need to be encouraged, helped and even rescued during a long course. IDI have a dedicated person, who really gets to know the students and cares about keeping them on track. She’s proactive, looking for signs and symptoms of fatigue or worry. It’s a vital safety net.

7. Lower costs. What’s surprising is how small their premises are, no sprawling campus, no lecture theatres, no monument building, just minimal administration and year round use. Given the low occupancy rates of most University buildings the savings are ENORMOUS.

Conclusion

What impressed me most about the IDI was the dedication of the staff to their students. This is a private sector organisation with the best of public sector values (they mostly came from that background). What they deliver is superior in many ways to the traditional campus degree, with real scalability, in several senses. First, it allows access to foreign students to complete courses with UK accreditation, free from VISA restrictions. Second, it copes with year round intakes. Third, it provides more flexibility for students. Fourth, it has much lower basic costs, where the money goes towards good teaching, not capital expenditure and the upkeep of expensive real-estate. Every University that has a design degree should consider using them. Given the demand and high costs of HE, this is surely the way forward.