Some Personal Development

Just before Christmas, the group of beginner cellists that I have been playing with for over a year, Oxford Cellists, took part in a tango workshop. We played a selection of tangos whilst dancers performed. Below are a couple of photos from that lovely evening. To me dancing the tango seemed a lot harder than playing the cello.

http://www.facebook.com/oxfordcellists

Photo: Julia Diamantis

Photo: Julia Diamantis

In January, I found myself on a coach to London to enrol as a doctoral student at the Institute of London. This is, pehaps, the end of the beginning as Churchill said, of a process that started a year ago with the birth of this blog. One of my first entries was about becoming a 'fully cooked person' and doctoral studies is as much a part of that for me as my cello playing.

"When someone is described as fully cooked I think it means they have experience and knowledge, and they have learnt much. It's sort of the opposite of saying a person is a raw beginner - that they are 'uncooked'. I suppose it's strange to talk about oneself as nearly fully cooked, or almost ready to serve. I don't know why I have always used this term to describe myself and other people, nor do I know where it comes from. The connection to food is a useful one though. Quite often you meet a person for the first time and they appear to you to be an adult, grown up and mature. Then, as you get to know them better, you realise that actually they are not that at all. They are like a pudding taken too early from the oven. It looks cooked on the outside but inside it's still got a way to go before it's ready. This happens the other way round as well, when you meet an incrediby sage young person, who you expected to be inexperienced in life.

I'm not saying it's disappointing to find that people aren't fully cooked. Becoming a cooked person takes a long time for some people, maybe a lifetime." Georgina Dalton, February, 2012

Institute of Education, London

As Objects Move Around the World, They Gain Stories

Today I listened to BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. The castaway was author and ceramicist Edmund de Waal, whom I knew about through his bestseller The Hare with Amber Eyes. The acclaimed book is about his ancestry and, in particular, a series of porcelain figures known as netsuke that he inherited from an uncle who lived in Tokyo.

Beautiful objects - netsuke

It was one of those radio programmes stays in your mind for a while. I think this resonance was for a couple of reasons. First, de Waal is a very personable interviewee and had enjoyed an enviable upbringing from which he pulled some evocative anecdotes. Second, he also had an interesting back story to his adult life in terms of his struggle to achieve success as a potter after he left university, which made one feel sympathetically towards him. Finally, he is an eloquent person with an economical but precise use of words that reveals a clarity of thought, which I find to be quite rare. I think that people usually overdose on information without having the time to organise and reflect on it and are therefore unable to make clear points. De Waal made several clear points, one of which - about the importance of objects or 'things' to people - I found profound.

Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes

The gist of it was this. As things, or objects, move around the world from hand to hand, they gain stories like a "patina". The objects that de Waal refers to are things that someone has made and spent time "thinking it through". The point de Waal makes is that their monetary value is inconsequential (partly because they are not for sale) but mainly because their value is "elsewhere". The value should also include all the patina which are the previous stories and also the story that you yourself are constructing through holding it. So when you pick an object up, you have two things - someone and a material and those two are the beginning of another story that adds to the patina.

De Waal also made another interesting point about the 'pleasures' of persistence and repetition at a craft, which I dwelt on and will try to apply to my cello practice!

However, it is the image of hands holding beautiful objects and somehow imbuing them with a story after story that resonates with me.

Apart from Talking Heads and Philip Glass, I didn't much care for de Waal's Desert Island Discs.

Stories are what make us human. We need to create new containers to tell the stories...

"Stories are what make us human. We need to create new containers to tell the stories." This was said by Dr Ramesh Raskar, a researcher at MIT's Center for Future Story Telling to Stephen Fry in Fry's Planet Word, broadcast in the UK exactly one year ago today as I type this. Dr Raskar was working on a sensory suit that would allow someone to experience the electronically captured movement of another person. Wearing the suit someone would be able to 'relive' the saved experiences of a long-gone grandparent for example - perhaps a relative you never actually knew. So the suit was the new container able to tell someones story to the wearer.

The quote about new containers to tell stories struck me a year ago when I watched the programme and I  have been periodically mulling it over since then. If a sensory suit is a new container, then what forms do the old containers take. Are they redundant and is that why we 'need' new ones?

I suppose that containers could be the oral storytelling tradition around the fire or the written word that replaced it, except that it didn't really replace it. The oral tradition is alive and well. My own city of Oxford is home to the developing Story Museum which focuses on performances, exhibitions and activities to support children's learning through stories. What is teh phenonmenal TED if not stories performed?

Likewise stories in the container of the printed word or books are still being published and sold. My husband alone keeps several bookstores in business.

Husband's book buying habits are out of control

Secondhand sellers now have access to international customers thanks to the Internet. New containers for books could be e-readers, like Kindle, but again they haven't replaced books or magazines yet.

I keep reading on social media that digital storytelling is replacing linear narrative. I'm reading Frank Rose's excellent book The Art of Immersion - how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories. The term immersion describes the way that audiences can become individually and collectively participatory in a narrative using different media, and able to shape and transform the story in a manner that is uniquely afforded by the Internet. For me,  the books sort of builds on Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck - the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, which amazingly was published way back in 1997. Are these (ironically) books both describing new containers for stories - ones that are digital?

I also really like Frank Rose's blog Deep Media - on narrative in the digital age. Deep media is opposite of mass media. Rose has just written his account of a recent New York conference Future of Storytelling - reinventing the way stories are told (clip about FOST below).





In his review of the conference Rose describes an  initiative where data dumps, such as real estate or sports statistics, are automatically transformed into stories by software apps (or bots). The stories render the data much more understandable to readers trying to comprehend performance and trends. So maybe our stories are destined to come from bots and not brains via books in the near future. Strange to think that the quote at the beginning 'stories are what makes us human' can lead to a scenario where ro(bots) are creating the stories.

Finally, I am looking forward to reading Jonathan Gottschall's book - The Storytelling Animal - How Stories Make Us Human which seeks to explain how stories change our behaviour.

PowerPoint used to tell a story

There's been so much PowerPoint bashing over the years (see my earlier post on this), with Edward Tufte and many others criticising the use of the software in business and education. PowerPoint is often accused of creating a focus on format rather than content, encouraging 'lazy' presentations and even being so boring as to cause death (by PowerPoint)!

However, I have just finished a novel in which one chapter is written using only PP slides. The idea of using PP software in storytelling almost seems to contradict the arguments levelled at its use in business and education.

Having an interest in the role of narrative in the lecture, I was really looking forward to reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, and seeing how she used PP in fictional literature.

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

I read the paperback version of the book but apparently in the Kindle version the PP actually launches and you read the chapter as an actual presentation of the slides rather than a series of pages, as you do in the book version (see photo below). The chapter is written from the perspective of Alison Blake, a young American pre-teen, who expresses herself in the graphs and SmartArt of PP rather than traditional prose. Part of the narrative involves Alison's take on her brother Lincoln's actions and communication with other members of the family.

A page from the PowerPoint chapter

I really enjoyed the book, which has been a tremendous success for Egan, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It employs quite a loose narrative structure where a series of short stories are linked through a shared character in each sucessive story, with an arc that comes back to first story.

The use of PP works very well for a single chapter but I'm not sure it could have been sustained for the whole, or the majority, of the book. It works so well because PP forces a different pace of narrative compared with the other chapters. It manages this by focusing on a set of significant moments, rather than the links between events. Egan, herself has said that she found PP very good for inserting visual pauses into the story, which is not something that can be done in traditional prose.

Anyway, Egan is a PP novelist having created PP fiction and has written a blog giving advice on how to tell stories using PP.

University's Quality Assurance Agency against PowerPoint Lectures (Apparently)!

Whist looking for something else I came across this article in the higher education section of The Australian, a daily broadsheet owned by News Corporation.

The title of the article, from 24 April 2012, is UK watchdog is against "power point" tuition. It made me think I must have missed something about the Quality Assurance Agency in the UK press earlier this year. Being interested in the role of the lecture in higher education and the impact of PowerPoint, I felt sure I should have seen this earlier. The original article from which The Australian version was adapted was published on 20 April 2012 in The Times and was written by Greg Hurst, who is their education editor. 

Interestingly the title of the article in The Times is Students must get more for their money, says watchdog, which is not quite as sensational as the anti PowerPoint title of The Australian.

Hurst's article actually reports the response of the QAA's Chief Executive, Anthony McClaran, to the results of research carried out by The Times, which looked at the experience of current first year students in a sample of UK universities. The research covered issues such as contact time, the type of teaching experience during that contact time and the length of time taken to return marked assignments.

The reference to PowerPoint comes in the first line of the article "Students should not tolerate “PowerPoint lectures”, the head of the universities standards body has warned". However, McClaran goes on to explain that what this means is where the lecturer simply reads from the presentation slides in class. He states what students want most is to be able to interact with staff and with other students. This then is quite a long way from stating that the QAA is against PowerPoint tuition per se.

What seems to be the main issue is the largely passive learning experience of a poorly delivered presentation. The challenge to the traditional lecture is to overcome its information-transmission-only heritage that arguably PowerPoint has helped perpetuate.

Universities need to take heed of the extra emphasis of the QAA on the effectiveness and quality of the bread and butter teaching tool in higher education and support staff in their development of different effective teaching techniques.

Donald Bligh's What the Use of Lectures? needs revisiting in the 21st century.

What's Still Good About Lectures?

Have you ever noticed that once you focus on something, you start seeing noticing it more? In the past few weeks I've come across two online discussions about what's good about lectures or what makes a good lecturer. These have been interesting to me as a counterpoint to all the literature which generally focuses on what's not good about lectures.

The first of these sources I found very illuminating. It's an abridged transcript of an online discussion from March 2012 amongst academics on the theme What's Still Good About Lectures. It didn't set out to be a discussion on the importance of stories, storytelling or narrative as an ingredient for a successful lecture but it surprised me how much the discussion kept coming back to it. Here are some quotes from the discussion to illustrate this point:

"Lecturing is all about telling a good story".

"My history teacher was great. He didn't 'lecture', he told stories". 

"The best lecturers I have learned from are good story tellers. They knew how to factor in their personal experiences into the content material".

"Good lectures take you on a narrative journey through the material with the message/lesson the lecturer has crafted".

"I enjoy lectures that I relate to in some way... interesting story or illustration that makes the point".

The lecturers here are clearly reflecting back on their own experiences of good lectures and lecturers which shows what a powerful impact narrative and storytelling has and how stories resonate with listeners because they personally relate to them in some way. The discussion could easily just have promoted what contributors themselves do in lectures that makes them 'good'. 

This is sort of what seems to have happened in some of the second discussion on What Makes a Good Lecturer that I came across (and I think I actually participated in at one point) The comments are at The Guardian Higher Education Network May 2012. Here the discussion was less focused (probably because with so many contributors it was difficult to follow the thread) but still one point caught my eye because it came up again and again. This was the role of performance in face-to-face lecturing. I mentioned this in a previous post as I believe the performance element of lecturing has been somewhat lost with the rise in the use of PowerPoint. Here are some quotes that relate to this point:

"Yes there is something very particular and special about the embodied aspect of lecturing. about the nature of speech, and its performance. in a world of increasingly disembodied information, I think this is all the more important, and indeed, all the more attractive for students - if they can drag themselves there".

"A good teacher can take a lecture and use it to encourage reflection, debate and participation. Your post really resonates with my own interest in teacher as performer. If you love lecturing I am sure this must be the best starting point for a great lecture for your students".

But not everyone agrees with the idea of performance and lecturing, seeing it as less important than other factors:

"I would have to respectfully disagree with any equation of good teaching in HE with "theatrical skills". Far more important are rapport with students, congruence (genuineness), caring for students, intrinsic interest in your subject, in-depth subject knowledge. Theatrical skills are not essential, but are very common characteristics of good teachers. During my research one interviewee described "showmanship is like fast-food". This interviewee also recounted stories of a very calm, yet wonderfully inspiring teacher who used subtle humour to great effect, but could not really be described as an "entertaining" lecturer".

I've seen - predominantly American - lecturers engage with their students and throw them regular questions during the lecture, creating a much more interactive environment than the standard British rhetorical performance - beloved as that might be... I think lecturers who went through the British system are often uncomfortable with the idea as it seems too "school" like (and they don't like to have their performance interrupted)".

So what to conclude from this? Well, much, but I'd like to end with another point that came up in the discussions - TED! "Aren't TED talks really lectures?" TED talks certainly employ storytelling and definitely involve performance - are they lectures? 

The following Vimeo clip illustrates the power of stories I think for a business marketing view but the point applies just as much to HE.

Reflections of Japan

I recently enjoyed my first trip to Japan, where I spent four days in and around Tokyo (en route to Australia for a longer holiday). I have wanted to visit Japan for a such long time and was so pleased that the reality exceeded my expectations. Despite being there only a short time, there were a number of things that struck me about Japanese culture that I have been reflecting on.

The first thing is the level of respect and courtesy that the Japanese have for others. I saw this in the unfailing politeness of hotel staff and the smiling faces, greetings and bows of shop staff and transport workers (one of whom pointed out, with great care, that I had a mosquito on my cheek... is that great service or what?). Most of all I was taken with the care and respect that the Japanese show for their dead.

There seemed to be many small cemeteries in Tokyo and they were all impeccably maintained. Near the entrance to each cemetery was a cleaning area, with water, wooden ladles and wash rags, all neatly hung out to dry. It seems that there is regular visiting of family graves involving burning incense, washing and carefully arranging flowers or gifts for the deceased.

Beautifully maintained cemetery with wooden 'sotoba' name sticks

Space is at a premium in Japan even in cemeteries, with the ashes of many generations added and the graves butting up against each other, giving quite a crowded neighbourhood feel, which contrasts strongly with neglected equivalents in other countries. In Japan, a deceased person is given a new Buddhist name during the funeral ceremony and this is written on a wooden stick called 'sotoba', which can been seen in the picture.

The second thing I have been reflecting on is the excess of consumer goods and services on offer. Shops are almost like neon temples to be worshipped at - shrines of immaculate consumption. The ubiquitous Hello Kitty has whole shops devoted to selling her products. This kind of an excess is a feast for the eyes and part of popular culture in Japan.

Hello Kitty and her crystal encrusted pink bicycle

My final reflection is on the crowds of people in Tokyo. I went to the famous Shibuya crossroads, which features in the film ‘Lost in Translation’. The video shows what happens when the lights turn red and the people start walking. The fact that this can happen without incident every few minutes, day and night, is a testament to the planning, thought and attention to detail reflected throughout Japanese culture.

 
There were so many other things that delighted me on my first trip. When I got back, a colleague remarked ‘They say when you go to Japan, you see the future’. I’m not sure I’ve seen it but if I have then I definitely want to go back to the future. I’m a Japan fan.