Interaction is key to the online experience. With traditional offline media – print, TV, radio, tapes, CDs – we were never anything but passive consumers. Online we are active participants able to hunt down information, learn new skills, transact as buyers and sellers, form relationships, network with our peers and much more – all activities that we once had to carry out face-to-face or using much more primitive media such as the mail or telephone. To underline the importance of interaction, just imagine if our online tools allowed no interaction – we’d get no further than our browser’s home page or an email application full of nothing but spam.

1. To navigate, e.g. to follow links on the World Wide Web, to select from menus in an online application, to move between pages in an e-learning module.
2. To configure, to set up the parameters of a particular decision or action, e.g. setting audio volume, determining how often we wish to receive email updates.
3. To explore, to move around a space such as a map or 3D world, to scroll a document or search within an audio-visual resource.
4. To converse with other humans, whether synchronously (live) or asynchronously (at our own pace), using text, audio or video.
5. To provide information, e.g. a survey or form.
6. To answer questions, in order to demonstrate learning.

• selecting – picking from the options provided
• supplying – coming up with our own responses
• sorting/connecting – matching and sequencing the options provided
• exploring – finding what we want within a space or body of content

I remember two things from a one-day course that I attended  in London on ‘how to create visual aids’, way back in the late 1970s, just weeks after I started as a trainer:

1. Every word on a slide (and by ‘slide’ then we meant 35mm or overhead projector transparencies) is an admission of defeat.
2. Don’t more words on a slide than you would on the front of a T shirt.

Wise words when you’re starting from the assumption that slides are primarily visual aids, although in recent years their purpose has been distorted somewhat by their use as presenters’ prompt cards and as as an alternative format for major consultancy reports. But the primary purpose of slides does remain, as visual aids or, to use another term that has disappeared from common parlance, ’speaker support ’.

The campaign against endless bullet points has gained ground in recent years and we are beginning at last to see a backlash. I have seen more great slide decks in the past year than in the past 10 put together and they have made a positive difference - more engaging, more informative, more memorable. But there’s always a danger that we go too far and regard words as an enemy, when used in moderation they can indeed be a friend.

Helping us to keep a sense of perspective is Olivia Mitchell, who has prepared her 9 reasons why you should put words on your slides. She’s done a fantastic job so, rather than paraphrase her work, I suggest you click on the link and take a look for yourselves.

To wrap up this series of posts on strategies for learning and performance support, here’s a summary of the characteristics of each. To see the original posts, click on the images above or the column headers below.

David Grady’s highly amusing observations on the problems inherent in conference calls definitely grabbed my attention, not only because I can relate them to my experiences of running regular meetings on the phone, but also because of the similar issues that can be faced in online meetings.

Just as David’s meeting is constantly interrupted by new participants entering the conference, so many web conferences are thrown off by late-comers who (1) haven’t had a chance to introduce themselves, (2) are not sure what’s happened so far and (3) want to test that you can hear them. I’m not sure I’ve got a strategy to overcome this. In a face-to-face meeting, people can just sheepishly take a seat and hope no-one notices they’re late, but this doesn’t seem to happen online. Ideas?

By the way, if you’re looking for ways to overcome the conference call difficulties expressed in David’s video, you’ll find a wealth of tips at Michele Martin’s Bamboo Project Blog.

Trainers can be wonderfully inventive when it comes to designing activities, but awfully inhibited when it comes to transferring them online

In yesterday’s posting to share a number of whiteboards with you. Those I created for a variety of different teaching and training strategies. Today I shall continue the theme with some other examples. In subsequent postings I’ll take each of the 5 strategies I mooted yesterday, and I’ll show examples of interactions for each. Today I’ll dwell for just a little while longer on “engagement”.

I’d like to make the point that one should not be constrained to do everything within the glass window that is the computer screen. This is true whether we are working live online or through packaged tutorials. I almost always suggest at the start that participants bring along some paper and a pen or pencil. I run face-to-face and online courses which are supported by comprehensive notes and handouts. Nevertheless many learners prefer to write their own contemporaneous notes as it helps them to internalise and embed what they are learning. I always encourage this, and allow time for it to happen. Often, at the end of a busy three-day course, I will encourage participants to express all they have learned and their plans to implement it in no more than 50 words; then I ask them to reduce it to 20 words. It is a contrived exercise, I accept, but it does focus the mind on the absolute key learning points. Another cheap trick is to ask a group at the end of a session each to write a letter to themselves along the lines of, “You remember those days we spent together and all your good intentions on the day; well how have you been getting on? Have you managed to …? Did you …?”

Of course you can do all of this online; all virtual classrooms have some facility to type text. When you use them in combination with asynchronous tools, you can anchor the participant’s learning and build in support from self, peers and trainer, using words from plans, goals and affirmations that have been generated within the virtual classroom session.

In all circumstances, handwriting is good because it is essentially personal. Type is good in that you can harvest words from it by copying and pasting through your computer’s clipboard. Adobe Connect and Elluminate for example will accommodate this. You can ignore duplicates and pick out the best ideas from a stream of text to reconfigure into a consolidated document.  That document may be held within the whiteboard itself or it may be shared as a desktop-share or application-share.  WebEx has a dedicated notes panel, but it does not allow other participants to view or add to it. It is still a very useful facility since it is kept apart from the instant message/chat facility which acts as a running commentary of cross-fired thoughts, that which is generally referred to as the “back channel.” Elluminate has a very elegant widget that lets you open one or more text panels in a whiteboard and then type or paste words into it.

You can position and scale the panels so that they conform to good practice for screen layout.

If text fills the box then scroll bars appear and I’ve not yet been able to exceed the limit for number of words.

This serves very well for group work where each group has its own screen area just as it might have its own flipchart in a classroom, and you can copy and paste across from one to another. This may save time and give the rainer more control than using breakout rooms – another facility that I’ll comment on later.

Returning to the idea of hand-written text; in the first posting in this series I mentioned the “how to say hello in other languages” exercise. I showed you a couple of different scripts for trainers. I also suggested that the way you present it and the interaction you require from your audience may be affected by the tool you’re using. I stated that there is always a workaround. Good old pen and paper often provides the answer. Taking the same exercise as yesterday, here is an alternative low-tech approach to it while still working live online.

Trainer says:

How would you like a little challenge to get you warmed up and put your brains in gear?
You’ll need to write your answers on paper.
I’m going to name 15 countries quite quickly, and I’ll show you their flags.
So get ready now – write the numbers 1 to 15 on your paper.
When you’ve done that, raise your hand so I can see who’s ready.

All hands are raised (if some hands are not raised the trainer acknowledges it and the co-presenter as host deals with any obstacles in the background).

Trainer says:

Just to make certain everybody knows what to do, let’s do the first one together.
Here’s the flag of Germany.
We need to write on our lists the word for hello in German.
I’ll show you the other 14 flags, name the country and you make your list to show how to greet them with “hello” in their own language.
Does anyone know it – raise a hand or type it into “chat” if you do.
(Give a well done if anyone has the answer)
The word is wellkomm , and you can write that next to number 1 just as I’m doing here on my  screen, only you do it on your paper.
Well now we know everybody gets at least one mark in this test!
But from here you are on your own.

…and so on. Now for an adult audience you may feel that the script is pedantic or patronising and offers too much help. It’s really a judgement call; in my experience things that seem to the trainer to take a long time may actually pass very quickly for the learner who is not yet used to taking instructions online in this way. Put it another way, my golden rule is that there is no such thing as “obvious”. When instructional designers worth their salt design activities in tutorial-based e-learning, they always make sure the rubric is clear. The same discipline should apply to the design of synchronous online learning.

No matter what types of interaction you plan to use, it is very important to get everybody actively engaged before you move on, and you must leave them feeling confident about how to interact with you during the lesson ahead.

You may be interested to know that I use the font Bradley Hand ITC or Kristen ITC to achieve the hand-written effect in whiteboards. In the example shown, I’m working in Elluminate which lets me create my overlay text as an object in PowerPoint. I start with a background image made in PowerPoint and then loaded into the whiteboard.

Then I create simple text boxes which I tilt in PowerPoint to fit the perspective in the whiteboard image.

Then I scale it and paste it into the whiteboard.

All of this fiddly work can be done in advance and so when I say I have built a library of whiteboards, they are not all flat images, but rather compilations of objects. This is the end result. I can reuse images like this by simply replacing the text with anything I like from a store of prepared items or I can build them “on the fly”.

My preferred tool for this is Elluminate for its versatility in letting me place, hide, reveal and reposition objects dynamically live online. I can also pass control so members of my audience can do the same. Using this simple technique it is possible to personalise images very quickly and to good effect. The t-shirt image below is one that I plundered from my friend Barry’s presentation. Using a black box as a mask I can replace the text with an infinite number of messages or I can use it as a creative exercise as below.

Script for t-shirt exercise

Display t-shirt whiteboard with specimen text on view.
Trainer says:
“t-shirts can carry all kind of messages. Here’s one”
Remove the text, leaving a blank text box on the t-shirt front.
Trainer says:
“Let’s think up a slogan of our own to convey the message we need to get across today.
You must come up with as few words as possible to get your message across.
You’ll work in groups of 4 in breakout rooms.
Use your whiteboard and text chat to try out ideas.
You have 5 minutes to come up with your slogan.
I’ll warn you when there is a minute left and I’ll call you back into the main room to share ideas and vote for the one you like best.

I’d be using the exercise to reinforce whatever the topic of the virtual classroom happens to be for example “do you need that light on?” or “loose lips sink ships” or “smile before you dial” or whatever else is appropriate to the content of the lesson. I’m not holding up this exercise as a paragon of novelty and creativity. It is the sort of thing that happens in real classrooms day by day. However I am certain that many trainers feel inhibited about trying the same sort of thing live online. Please have courage – the truth is that with a little practice you can do this sort of thing more effectively than face-to-face, you can preserve the process as well as the result by recording it and you do not waste time or shoe leather pounding along corridors looking for syndicate groups that failed to return on time.

Sharing

Next week, in part 3 of this series I’ll move on from engagement to the concept of sharing as I defined it yesterday. I’ll illustrate the points with images and scripting from a variety of interactive exercises I’ve tried and tested in various virtual classroom systems.

There are only three questions I want to ask when I’m thinking about a virtual classroom system:

1. Is it easy to use?
2. How does it perform?
3. What can I do with it?

In the past few months I’ve been using a range of different tools which include Adobe Connect, DimDim, Elluminate, Saba-Centra and WebEx. As I’ve used them in earnest, I have developed a good number of interactive exercises and activities. I think of these now as my litmus test for virtual classrooms. In this post I’ll show you some of those exercises, explain how they work, which VC software gets the best out of them, and how they relate to instructional strategies – which is my own principal interest. The questions about ease of use and performance are of high importance. I need to be able to prepare and test a sesson in advance. My audience must be effortlessy enrolled and able to hear, speak and contribute through markup and chat. Naturally I need to feel confident that the quality of experience will be a good one and that there will be no sound glitches, time lags or inconvenient interruptions. I want to be sure that if I’ve set the system to record, I’ll be able to access a complete and competent recording after the event. Important though they may be, I’m not going to deal with those issues in this blog. They can wait for another time. What I am going to ask today about the virtual classroom is “What can I do with it?”

When I first set foot on the primrose path towards teaching and learning live online, I built a basic list of things I regularly do in classrooms. Then I asked myself not “whether” but “how” might I achieve the same online. I’m going to tell you about that list of instructional strategies in some detail, with images of how they have been accomplished through virtual classroom systems.

At the highest level there are just 5 things I want to do, and they are engage, share, evaluate, organise, synthesise and query.

Engaging

To engage is a straightforward matter. It needs no debate. The cliché that is used in sales training and in train-the-trainer is “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression”.

One thing that is obvious is that people need to know how to take part and that may involve a little time for induction, orientation and practice. Onlignment’s eBooks do not generally recommend doing this within an actual session. It is best to set it up as a “prequel” by opening a session 20-30 minutes early for inexperienced participants. Otherwise run a separate “sandbox” session or send out a newcomer’s guide. Many of the mainstream system providers have produced this kind of material so you don’t have to. WebEx for example has its “University” and almost all of the others provide some form of hands-on rehearsal free of charge.

Elluminate navigation slide

Here as an example is a single image taken from a helpful user guide about Elluminate.

If you do a Google search for Keller’s ARCs, you’ll find lots of creative suggestions for how to capture the attention of an audience of learners, and then hold it. In the virtual classroom, some of the most obvious methods have now become rather hackneyed. For example if you have attended one or two online sessons, it is quite likely that you will have met some kind of “map exercise” such as this one in which the participant is asked to use a pointer or a markup device to show where they are right now.

Where are you right now?

Another variation of the same is to show a wider map and ask users to mark the place where they would most like to be on holiday.

Where would you like to go on holiday?

In their defence, these are easy to mount in any of the systems I listed at the start, and even those who’ve done it before can take some interest from the responses of others. The important thing is to engineer some reason for an audience of learners to respond early in a session, rather than sit back and wait for “things to be done to them”.

Because it knows no physical boundaries, the virtual classroom may well bring together people who come from backgrounds far beyond the UK. When I’m working with international audiences an icebreaker exercise offers the chance to connect with them, who they are and what they bring. I put together a simple activity that offers a greeting in a number of different world languages. I did a little plundering by asking Google “How do you say hello in…” Try it and you too will soon be able to greet others in 775 different languages. Once I had the words, I developed a series of 30 or so screens in PowerPoint. Here is an example.

Welcome in Luxemburgish

Working in Adobe Connect gave me an advantage because I could cover the answer with a filled in box, and then lift off the box during the sesson to reveal the answer. This was even easier in Elluminate, as shown in the screen grab, where I could prepare in advance all of my whiteboards and save them to a file together with the masks (such as the box filled-in with background colour) and other trickery I needed. I’ll come back to this technique of conceal – reveal later, as it serves a number of different strategies for learning and teaching.

If I scripted it in a story-board the activity might read like this:

Show the first slide.
The national flag and name of the country is concealed by an ‘invisible’ box.
Say, “Suppose I say to you ‘Wellkomm’, where might we be?
“Type your answer into ‘chat’.
Await correct answer. If no correct answer give prompt such as “it is a very small country close to Switzerland, Austria and Germany”.
Acknowledge correct answer or if none is offered, say something encouraging such as “well that was quite a tough one. Let’s try another.”
Remove invisible box to reveal correct answer.

The very same whiteboard could be used in many different ways, and often it is the software of the virtual classroom that dictates which approach you use. Here is an alternative:

Show the first slide. The word “Wellkomm” is concealed by an ‘invisible’ box.
Say, “Here you can see the national flag of Luxembourg. Who knows how to say ‘hello’ in Luxemburgish?”
Raise your hand if you know the answer.
Await raised hand. If no correct answer give prompt such as “it does sound rather like the English word but with a different accent, rather Germanic”.
Invite first raised hand to open microphone and speak. Acknowledge correct answer or if noneis offered, say something encouraging such as “well that was qite a tough one. Maybe we’ll get something a little easier next time like France, Germany, Spain or Italy. Let’s try another.”
Remove invisible box to reveal correct answer.

One or two features of virtual classrooms that help this process are the numbering of hands in the order in which they were raised, and the facility to mute and unmute microphones selectively.

Returning to the goal of “engaging” participants, you might know many other ways of doing this in face-to-face situations. For example you might use quotations, tell a story, show impressive statistics, ask a question, offer an activity, show or say something intriguing or mysterious, set a challenge or some kind of surprise. I have found ways of doing all of these in a virtual classroom. Often the added value that mark-up tools, polls, chat and a shared workspace bring makes it an even richer and more satisfying experience than doing it face-to-face. Still I’ll let you decide. I’ve got many examples that I am going to show you. We’ve not yet scratched the surface beyond saying “hello” to participants and getting them ready to start work.

I’d like to return to my 5 strategies of engage, share, evaluate, organise, synthesis and query.  I’ll open each one up and, over a succession of short blogs, I’ll show you examples of how each has been done through popular virtual classrooms.

Sharing

By my classification, sharing includes a number of different of different activities. It often requires some form of collaboration and may involve experiential learning, exchange of information and ideas, passing and receiving items to and from others, demonstrations, and presentations. In a virtual classroom the channels for these are words and pictures, media, weblinks, documents, slides and diagrams. You will see from the examples I show you how it is possible to combine and configure these to provide an engaging and constructivist learning opportunity that goes fay beyond mere tell-or-show-and-test. Conversation, direction, instruction, debriefing, comparing and giving pause for reflection are other examples of the “sharing” that I see well-supportable in live virtual classrooms.

Evaluation

In this part I’ll show you images and scripts for whiteboards for visualisation expressed through imagination and described through drawing, speech or text. Evaluation will also cover examples of query using Q&A, and decision-making by prioritising, ranking and resolving individually and in groups. Considering and selecting are important elements of these mental processes and I’ll show you examples of how they were supported using the virtual classroom’s strengths in highlighting and marking.

Organisation

Organisation has three sub-sets: classify, locate and isolate. This means labelling and linking, associating and numbering items that are presented as images, symbols or text. You’ll see how activities call upon users to find and reveal objects from a ground, and then to sort, highlight, group, remove or conceal them.

Synthesis

This is about constructing sense out of unorganised ideas and images. It needs the learner to have the facility to position and reposition, sequence, group and regroup. Typically in the virtual classroom that means drag and drop, cut and copy and paste, undo and redo. This is where you begin to notice the fundamental differences amongst the different VC systems; not all of them offer this level of functionality and so it becomes necessary to flex the creative muscle and invent a workaround. There is, in my experience, always a workaround; it’s just a matter of keeping focus on the stategy and then inventing a way of delivering it within the constraints.

Query

This is my fifth strategy. It may entail assessment in its many forms and for a variety of purposes. That may need the use of polls and surveys, guesses and estimates, self-checks, question-design tools and response analysis.

Currently that are 70 whiteboards in the collection I’ve reserved to illustrate all 5 of the techniques in this blog series. I’m hoping they will inspire some people to tip in ideas of their own, or provoke the real experts out there to say, “Ah but if you only knew how, you’d be doing it like this…”

As the poet said,

“What is this life if full of care, we have no time to stop and stare?”

So rather than fill my blog spot this week with some worthy words about the psychology of motivation to learn, I’d like to share with you instead these words I wrote a few months ago following an amazing and inspirational journey. The experience had such a deep effect that I wrote it all down as soon as I could find desk space and a little time away from the daily grind. It’s a true and unvarnished account of a real experience. I did not originally write the words for publication but I hope that in sharing them you will see the important moral of the story.

It began as just another boring journey on an overcrowded train; but then I was drawn into an extraordinary voyage of discovery and delight. I can still hear that broad South Yorkshire accent; see that blonde head above the red football shirt bearing the legend Rooney and the number 9. Its owner gazed intently through the window, keeping up her monologue as the train clattered through Hertfordshire on its way to St Pancras.

Mother sat alongside and tried to focus on her Daily Mail.

“Aye, that’ll be Wembley”,

her offspring exclaimed to no-one in particular. One or two passengers looked up above their Blackberries and iPhones. It was indeed Wembley Stadium.  The man opposite in a Crombie coat checked his watch for the umpteenth time, as if to hasten the end of another dull and boring journey.

“Did you know”,

continued our mini-commentator,

”that’s where Wayne Rooney plays when ‘es playing for Hingland? Fink they builded it in Australia.”

Crombie Coat looked up for a brief moment and smiled patiently, then returned to his time-keeping.

“Don’t be so bloody daft,”

said Mum,

“Ow could they build Wembley Stadium in Australia? They must ‘ave used Aussie navvies. Brought ‘em over ‘ere. Don’t you get them feet on that f*ing seat. Mind that mester’s suit”

“They got kangroos in Australia,”

the little girl responded.

“Kangroos have a special place called a pouch where they feed their babies and keep ‘em warm and safe.”

She reached for her drink and sucked deeply on the straw.

“You can call ‘em marsupials”

she offered.

“Some folk say marsupials is the best mam’s in the ‘ol animal kingdom.”

Then she added thoughtfully,

‘Cept you Mam; you’re my best. We’re animals an all you know – mammals, same as whales and dolphins and that, us ‘umans. Omo sexuals, they call us an all. Scientists, that is”.

“Did them Australian navvies ‘ave to bring their own animals with them”,

the girl speculated.

“That’d be grand wouldn’t it – all them kangroos and bush babies and wannabies and stuff running all over while ‘t builders done their work. I’ll bet it’s too cold for kangroos. That’s why we don’t see ‘em ‘ere.”

She paused.

“Except in’t zoo. Do you fink kangroos can live in cold countries, Mam? What about zoos? ‘Ow do they keep em warm in zoos. Must have special ‘eaters.”

“I don’t know,”

responded her mother.

“Stop asking so many bleeding questions”.

She was thinking about kangaroos and zoos and marsupials. The rest of us were thinking about Oyster cards and black cabs. “Mam” lowered her paper.

“Get them shoes on yer feet; we’re gettin’ off soon”

“Somebody’s wrote on them walls. That’s what you call doin’ graffiti”

was the child’s response, as we passed though a North London decorated by unseen, unauthorised hands.

The train ran alongside the M1 where traffic was queuing up to the North Circular Road.

“Now why do they call it a motorway”

she exclaimed to her mother.

“When no bugger’s motrin’!”

It seemed a like a fair question.

“Know what I like?”

“No”,

sighed her mother,

“Go on, surprise us; tell me what you like.”

I waited keenly for the answer I thought her mother should already  know.

“Blue”,

she said,

“What I like is blue. They put loads of blue in that graffiti. Sky’s blue, and them lickle birds there.

She gestured with excitement towards a small family of woodland birds fluttering around a tree.

“I’ll ‘ave to just warn you Mam, that I might say summat and it sounds like swearin’.” It’s them birds you see, they got a bad name. Tits. I’m not proper swearin’ Mam, honest. That’s what you ‘ave to call ‘em – tits. That’s their name. You can ‘ave great tits and coal tits and them; them are blue tits. They got beautiful colours on em an’ all. I like blue, me. Just look at fevvers on ‘im. Boys ‘ave best fevvers in birds you know. That’s so’s they can attract the ladies and shag ‘em and then they can lay eggs”.

As an afterthought she added,

“Can’t see no nests in that tree. The eggs’ll be blue.”

We had passed the graffiti and passed the scene of the birds’ less-than romantic trysts.

The train rattled on.

“To Let,”

she called out, reading a sign.

“Danger. Do not enter”.

And then,

“What does it mean if you get prosticuted, mam?”

Mother coloured slightly and turned a deaf ear to the question. Fellow travellers took care not to make eye contact.

Was I the only other to have noticed the sign which read,

“Trespassers will be prosecuted”?

I felt a special bond with the tough little tyke in the window seat.

Swiftly the landscape changed from open fields to the backs of houses on the outskirts of town.

“Rats!”

she exclaimed.

“Yer never more’n 5 foot away from a rat in London”. There’ll be rats in them buildings, shouldn’t wonder. Let’s ‘ave a sken – see if ought else lives in them fact’ries.”

She raised herself in her seat to get a better view.

“Probably got a troll under here”,

she speculated to herself as we crossed a bridge.

She wasn’t being objectionable; it’s just that she was seeing things that others couldn’t see.

“I won’t tell you again.”

Mother hissed through clenched teeth,

“Keep your feet off that mester’s suit”.

I was the mester in question.

“You can forget about getting apples off them trees”

the girl announced, noticing a crop of sorry-looking sycamores alongside the track.

“Still, must be millions o’ birds and insects lives in there.”

Then she looked me full in the face and confided,

“One time, p’raps about ‘undred million years ago, all this were covered in trees. There were now’t else. Prob’ly ‘ad dinosaurs running about an’ all”

Before I had time to reply I was rescued by the train manager’s voice coming through the public address system.

“We are now approaching London, St Pancras. London St Pancras is our last station stop. Passengers are reminded to please take all your belongings!”

Uncertain of the most appropriate reply to the remark about dinosaurs, I was glad the moment had passed and so I smiled benevolently at the child instead. But by now she had turned her relentless attention upon some people who’d risen from a nearby table. They were assembling their laptops and bags and coats. Unabashed the girl addressed a woman in an expensive-looking tweed coat.

“Tha’s best tek them newspapers, Missus, or e’ll ‘ave a fit, that guard. Tek all yer belongings, same as ‘e said.”

The woman failed to respond to this sincerely helpful suggestion.

And then we’d arrived. For us it had been just another boring journey on the Midland mainline. For her it had been a voyage of wonderment and discovery.

“This is St Pancras where the train terminates”,

the train manager reaffirmed.

The girl turned to her mother.

“Do you know, they call their babies Joeys?”

Without waiting for a reply she continued,

“If I could jump as ‘igh as an ant, I could jump right over this whole station roof!”

On leaving the train, I gazed thoughtfully at the magnificent arching roof of St Pancras station. Looking down I could see mother and daughter ahead of me. There was the red football shirt with the number 9 and Rooney on the back. The blonde hair was rising and falling as the child skipped lightly through the station hall. I unholstered my iPad and flexed my fingers thinking maybe I’d make a note to check for blue and for nests and maybe for baby kangaroos the next time I passed those trees, those birds, those buildings. In my notes I typed the words,

“Next time look out for the troll”.

I’ve always known I was a truly great writer. All I lacked was a little public recognition, maybe a Whitbread prize, or The Booker. So when my good pal Barry sent me the link, he knew I’d be unable to resist. Jane Austen? Charles Dickens? James Joyce? Which great writer would be revealed as my Muse? Whose style was closest to my own purple prose? Tremulous with excitement I typed into my browser http://iwl.me/ and so arrived at the website “I write like”.

“Check which writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool” it proclaimed. It went on to explain the science by which it would analyse my word choice and writing style and compare them with those of famous authors.

I revisited the text of an earlier blog I’d written, and copied and pasted it into the tool.

What joy! What kudos! What distinction! I discovered, as I must always have known, that my writing was in the style of Arthur Clarke. Not a bad result; I’d have been proud to have written Childhood’s End, and let’s face it, he must have made a shed-load of dosh from his most popular writing.

Inspired, I hummed to myself the opening bars of Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Also sprach Zarathrustra”, you know that dramatic sunrise music which made the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey as memorable as Clarke’s book. The rising C-G-C brought a fresh thought to my mind. Perhaps April’s blog had not been the very best example of my art. If I clipped a few paragraphs from my more recent work, perhaps I’d ascend to the pantheon of 20th Century writers. Julian Barnes? Rushdie? Kafka, Nabokov, Virginia Wolf? The answer came back H P Lovecraft. Now I’ve heard of HP sauce, and I use HP printers and only genuine consumables, but Mr Lovecraft had, until that moment, escaped my notice. It seems he was another writer of science fiction (that figured). Critics described his work as gothic and weird. He was an American. I was not sure I was terribly flattered to have been found to match his style of writing.

There was only one escape route from this challenge to my literary standing. I’d have to discredit the tool, and pretty damn quick. So I borrowed a few words from Emily Bronte. As the website instructed, just a few paragraphs should do. I was intrigued to learn that Miss Bronte almost perfectly mirrored the style of that great writer Chuck Palahniuk.

I’ll let you be the judge. Here are just a few words from chapter 8 of Wuthering Heights:

Poor soul! Till within a week of her death that gay heart never failed her; and her husband persisted doggedly, nay, furiously, in affirming her health improved every day. When Kenneth warned him that his medicines were useless at that stage of the malady, and he needn’t put him to further expense by attending her, he retorted, ‘I know you need not – she’s well – she does not want any more attendance from you! She never was in a consumption. It was a fever; and it is gone: her pulse is as slow as mine now, and her cheek as cool.’

And here is an extract from Mr Palahniuk’s masterpiece Choke:

It’s dark and starting to rain when I get to the church, and Nico’s waiting for somebody to unlock the side door, hugging herself in the cold.
‘Hold on to these for me,’ she says and hands me a warm fistful of silk.
‘Just for a couple hours,’ she says. ‘I don’t have any pockets.’ She’s wearing a jacket made of some fake orange suede with a bright orange fur collar. The skirt of her flower-print dress shows hanging out. No pantyhose. She climbs up the steps to the church door, her feet careful and turned sideways in black spike heels. What she hands me is warm and damp. It’s her panties. And she smiles.

Now maybe it’s due to the dullness of my critical faculties, but I’m finding it hard to see tne similarities between these two pieces of writing. And so to my point. Be careful of what you find on the Web. There are a number of tools, algorithms and formulae that claim to analyse style and classify it. Readability tests such as the Fog Index are an example. Treat them with suspicion, or at the very least with caution.

I often meet the argument that plain language talks down to people of high intellect such as lawyers, doctors and Chief Officers. My reply usually contains 9 words of one syllable, and 1 word of two syllables. These simple words convey a complexity of thought and a depth of emotional turmoil none can better. And the words are found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1 Line 56. Now enter Hamlet….

In this, the fourth in a series of four posts, we manage the seemingly impossible – we both break the mould and then find we have come full circle. The former is true because exploration, the fourth strategy, is by far the most learner-centred and the only strategy that concentrates on ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ (more on this in a minute). It also represents the closing of the circle, because as with exposition, the first strategy we looked at, the learning design is both simple and relatively unstructured, in stark contrast to instruction and guided discovery.

With the exploration strategy, each learner determines their own learning process, taking advantage of resources provided not only by teachers/trainers but also by peers. What they take out of this process is entirely individual and largely unpredictable. As such, exploration may seem a relatively informal strategy, but no less useful for that. In fact it’s probably the way that a great deal of learning takes place.

With exposition, instruction and even guided discovery, learning activities and resources are ’pushed’ at the learner by the teacher/trainer. With the exploration strategy, activities and resources are ‘pulled’ by the learner according to need. Exploration may play a small part in a formal course, perhaps a list of books or links which learners can choose to dip into if they wish; but it could just as easily constitute the central plank in the provision of, say, just-in-time performance support in the workplace.

There’s no reason why exploration should stop at content. The same principles could be applied to live events such as unconferences, where participants determine what is delivered and by whom. It could also apply in an asynchronous context, in which learners collaborate with peers using social networks, social bookmarking or blogging.

The role of the teacher/trainer is clearly very different to the three previous strategies. With exploration, the emphasis shifts ‘from courses to resources’, so what is needed is no longer a lecturer, instructor or facilitator, more a librarian. What’s important here is to smooth the way for learners to find resources and to locate like-minded peers; that means providing repositories, search engines and all manner of social media tools.

Exploration is not a universal strategy by any means. Novices and dependent learners will struggle with so little structure and direction. Important top-down initiatives can not rely on such woolly and inconsistent outcomes. But there’s no doubt that the trend is towards more learner-centred approaches: more pull less push, more just-in-time than just-in-case, more flexibility and less structure. The key, as ever, is not in following the fashion, but knowing when the time is right to use each of these strategies appropriately.

Posture

Scanning

SHAPE = Slow + Hands + Audience + Posture + Eyes