Don’t Pull on a Door Marked Push! (Affordance is not the same as affordable!)

Posted: February 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

If you came up to a door that had a handle on it, what would you do, if there were no sign on it?

You’d pull on the handle. Of course you would! It’s only when there’s confusion about doors, we have to label them push or pull. (Okay, some of you are thinking ‘aha, I’d look at the hinges’ and, indeed, some of you would – but most of us would just pull on that handle.)

This is affordance, where “the physical characteristics of an object or environment influence its function” (Universal Principles of Design; Lidwell, Holden and Butler; Revised edition, 2010)

See a door handle? Pull on it. See a door plate – you’ll push it. Ever wonder why Lego blocks don’t come with instructions? Because they only afford a certain set of composition actions – the design of the shape tells you how to use it.

By taking advantage of this property, we can reduce the amount of instruction that we have to give. If the purpose of the object is assisted by its construction and design, in terms of the user, then we will immediately achieve better and more effective use when someone does come to use it. We can even borrow the affordance of an object and use it somewhere else, building on our natural disposition to use it in a certain way. Ever wondered why graphical user interfaces (GUIs – the way that you interact with modern computers and devices) have button images on them? People know how to use real buttons – they stab it with a finger – and this, transplanted to the GUI domain, allows the user to reuse this familiar knowledge and turns what should be something complex (I’d like you to engage any of the pixels in the range (200,100)-(250,15) with your finger and apply light pressure) into ‘stab!’ without having to write one word of explanation.

From a teaching perspective, when we do develop materials to support our teaching, we implicitly use affordance all the time. Those ‘fill in the blanks’ spots we leave? There’s only one place to write and that place has a context inside the knowledge of the current sentence. Have you ever wondered why government forms have ‘do not write in this space’ or ‘for official use only’ in spaces? It’s because when we see spaces – we want to write in them. That’s what spaces are for? If you leave space around your printed lecture notes, you are saying “Please write on me!”

For me, this is why those ‘scratch-off the silver bit’ cards are so easy to use. You want to scratch it off – you’re (pardon the pun) itching to do so. If your rubric simply explains that you have to read the question and scratch off only one, that’s it. No complicated ‘COMPLETELY FILL THE CIRCLE WITH 2B PENCIL’ instructions or ‘tear off this strip after you’ve written down an answer’ – and no handwriting problems.

When we do try to take advantage of affordance, we have to make sure that the students we’re teaching are going to understand what we mean. If we’re using borrowed affordance, like the GUI buttons, we have to make sure that they have the original knowledge. The best way to test that you have the basics right is to give it to a colleague, without instructions, and watch what they do. Your own interpretation of your materials is biassed by your cognition. You know what you’re supposed to do – rather than listening to the material to see what it wants you to do. When your colleague picks up your quiz, looks at it, and starts joining dots on your scatter plot – it may be a sign of lack of coffee or no sleep, or it may be a sign that this is what your work is screaming at people to do.

I’d love to hear from people if they have examples of work that they think really exemplifies this.

Walking the walk: How Mark Guzdial Nearly Created a University of Programmers

Posted: February 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

My apologies to Mark, who reads this periodically, but I’d like to introduce more people to Mark’s blog and I thought I’d frame this in terms of a teaching anecdote. Mark, no doubt, has millions of followers, but for those who have entered the CS Ed blogging community through me, you should know that oranges are not the only fruit. And there is some excellent fruit out there!

Mark has an excellent blog that, at least in part, helped to inspire my blogging activity here. There are many reasons you should read this – basically, I believe we should all be reading the edublogosphere more widely for simple reasons of immediacy and accessibility –  but the main one is that the information and discussion contained therein are well-written, easy to digest and based on a solid, authentic foundation.

My last post was about authenticity and, in many ways, I’m a very difficult student because I go along to demonstrations and talks by teaching advocates and educational specialists expecting them to really inspire me and teach me things. I go in with very high expectations and am very demanding in terms of authenticity. Occasionally, if I know the lecture theatre, I will deliberately sit in the worst place, to simulate what students would do. Now, this sounds really harsh, but if someone is going to talk to me about how to improve my teaching – then they have to be able to teach well, reach out to me, wherever I am and stop me from drifting off. (I make myself sound like an ogre – I do give people a lot of time and space to do their thing but, well, if you’ve sat through a bad teaching talk, you know what I’m talking about.)

Here’s the basic rule: If you’re going to talk the talk, you had… well, you know the rest.

I had the good fortune and pleasure of meeting Mark and Barbara the night before both of their talks, over dinner, and it very quickly established that both talks were going to be really interesting because it was quite obvious that the speakers were knowledgable, experienced and authentic. Both Mark and Barbara were talking within the framework of our Festival of Learning and Teaching, with Mark presenting “Introducing Computing with Media, with a Pedagogical Side Tour” and Barbara presenting “The Georgia Computes Outreach program”.

Over the course of his talk, Mark showed examples, played musical instruments, demonstrated software, did small programming exercises and, down the front of a multi-hundred seat lecture theatre filled with people from across a University, drew people in more and more. Sitting down the front, I had the opportunity to observe the crowd who were listening, avidly. Phones were away, laptops were being used for note taking and, even more amazingly, people from completely non-technical disciplines started asking programming questions. Sometimes I can’t get third-year Computer Science students to ask programming questions!

This is, basically, why you may find Mark’s blog interesting. His talk was based on things that had actually been done, or were being done, at Georgia Tech. They were authentic. His teaching techniques had obviously been well-practiced and his resources were well-used, well-prepared and worked. What he did made people think, question and wonder. He held the attention of a crowd of academics, sitting around in an average lecture theatre, from every discipline in the University, over the course of the talk, when everyone had many other things they could or should be doing.

Once again, my apologies to Mark for the semi-hagiographic tone. I had originally written this some time ago, as his talk made me think long and hard about my own teaching path and communicating my thoughts, and then he started following my blog, which meant that I shelved the post out of a combination of embarrassment and self-awareness. But, if you like my blog, Mark’s part of the reason that it’s here and, if you like this blog, I think you’ll really enjoy his.

Design, design everywhere – nor any drop of ink!

Posted: February 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The upcoming week of posts, from Monday (Australian time) onwards is going to talk about interesting principles of design and how I believe they can be applied to teaching. I’m working from a set of books in my design library but the main one is “Universal Principles of Design”‘ Lidwell, Holden and Butler; Revised edition, 2010. I will try to put that in as a reference throughout, as these posts shouldn’t force you to search backwards and forwards, but I may forget so here it is as a basis.

I will be on the road for a while and I may have to load the queue to deal with the fact that WiFi doesn’t reach into the middle of the pacific at 30,000 feet. Yet. This may also slow down my comment response and clearance. Please hang in there, I’ll deal with everything as and when my network access improves.

The final post in the week of opinion is going to be published shortly and it’s more of an encouragement to look at other people who are more experienced in this education area – so go and read their opinions as well!

The title of this post is a reference to a fragment of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

My use of this is supposed to do three things:

  1. Tap into the familiar pattern established by Coleridge with this well-known quotation – because it’s familiar to some of you, you may remember my message more easily. (Don’t make me force you to remember the “1 2 3 4 5, 6 7 8 9 10, 11 12” song from Sesame Street to prove my point about familiarity.)
  2. Identify that design is actually everywhere but that, in many regards, digital design has become the dominant form. The advantage of digital design, for us as teachers, is that we can be producers and distributors of digital design work without having to involve or pay for printers. Modern tools and production facilities allow us to make our good design, and well-designed materials, available anywhere, anytime.
  3. Remind you that, because good design is everywhere, we don’t want our teaching materials to be the worst designed thing that students see on a given day. No, you don’t have to be a professional designer, as I’ve said before, but consideration of basic principles can help to lift the valuable educational message that we’re all trying to give, and put it into a frame that will make it easier to use and actually be valued.

My secret final aim is to interest you all in running off to read Coleridge, because the language is beautiful and he’s one heck of a poet. It’s ok, I’ll still be here when you get back.

James Frey’s Legacy: Authenticity needs to be authentic!

Posted: February 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

James Frey is an American author who has been in the news on and off over the last few years. He published a book called A Million Little Pieces, which purported to be memoirs of his struggle with addiction, association with criminals and time in jail. On the strength of this account of his fall and rise, and his defeat of his demons, he sold a lot of books, went on Oprah and probably got to dive, Scrooge McDuck-like, into a giant pool filled with money.

There’s only one problem. Despite being billed as autobiographical, it turned out that his claims that, minor details aside, it was all true were false. It was sold as a memoir, an account of the life of the subject, and it was not an account of his life, but that of, in his own words, “about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.”

Many people claimed to find inspiration in James Frey’s work, including Oprah, and the backlash against the book was severe. Once it was established that the path to redemption outlined in the book didn’t start from a sufficiently dark place, or wasn’t really based on fact, questioning arose over what could be learned or derived from a semi-fictional work, rather that a true memoir.

The question here is one of authenticity. If you, as a recovering addict, tell me that the way to beat addiction is to dance the Lambada (the forbidden dance) 7 times a day because that’s the only thing that stops the cravings and I act on this, then I am depending upon your representation of how you beat your demons as being accurate. This assumes that you were actually a drug addict in the first place. That you did dance the Lambada. That it did, to the best of your knowledge, deal with your problems. If you were never an addict in the first place, your undisputed credibility is now disputed and you have no authenticity.

James Frey is a writer. Not one that I enjoy, being frank, but there is no doubt that he can write and produce a book. If he wrote a book entitled “A Million Giant Suckers: How I Turned a Nation’s Obsession with Suffering and Redemption Into Cold, Hard Cash“, I would probably buy it because his credibility is beyond doubt in this regard! (I really want that swimming pool full of paper money, too. Note: never dive into gold, it’s not that soft.)

So how does this apply to teaching? There are two important aspects of authenticity in terms of teaching, for me. Firstly, that when we talk about something from ‘the real world’ outside of academia, that we have either directly experienced it or we have trustworthy accounts of it being in use. (And, in the case of reportage, we clearly state that it is reportage.) Secondly, when we present students with ‘real-world challenges’ that are experiences that will prepare them for the world outside!

To me, this means that when I quote statistics in support of arguments – they are real statistics, with credible sources, in the correct context. This means that I try and get industry involved where possible, if I don’t have the experience myself, and talk to people to get informed. I used to work in industry but that was over 10 years ago and industry has changed a lot in that time. Yes, I’m still a sys admin and network admin at heart, but I’ve never had to implement BGP or MPLS or run a Lion server cluster, and that means that I need to keep reading and talking to other people to maintain my credibility.

For me, though, I have to careful what I claim. I’m the first to admit that, while I have a good skill basis, I’m now rusty at systems because I’ve spent all my time polishing my research, teaching and admin. I’m comfortable talking here, because I feel have sufficient credibility to discuss these matters, but you wouldn’t find me holding forth on the administration of Linux boxes any time soon.

I don’t want my students to learn a good lesson if I’m presenting bad information to them – that, to me, has always been the cold comfort of scoundrels, that someone learnt a valuable life lesson from their dastardly deeds. I don’t think James Frey ever set out to go as far as he did, I doubt he’s that calculating, but taking an unsuccessful novel and turning it into a successful memoir may make good business sense… but it’s a terrible, terrible lesson on the value of authenticity.

Juggling the load – some free advice without the $4 words.

Posted: February 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I have a list of things written on my wall, which I copied from “How to get things done” – one of my favourite ‘do something’ books. My favourite is:

Renegotiation: How can I achieve something AND make it awesome?

As I sit in my hotel room, at 10:48pm, after a fairly long day spent on planes and in talks, I have a chance to reflect on how I’m managing things. I’ve talked before about OmniFocus, mailboxes and to-do lists but, as always, there’s something else. Fortunately, I have no wish to get you to send me $1000 for the secret and I’m tired, so I’ll keep it short.

I realised that I’m handling things in a very ‘thought into action’ way. I have now assembled my tools, my iPad, my laptop and my phone, so that I can spring into action when I need to with the minimum of fuss. It doesn’t take me 15 minutes to locate something because it’s either in a paper folder or I can find it by searching electronically. This is not just liberating (because I am not bound to my office) but it allows for an immediacy of action. If I need it, I know where it is or I can find it easily. This reduces most problems down to read, think, decide, act, store. Once you take out ‘scrabble around on desk’ or ‘try to remember if you took this home’ or (worse) ‘become immobile because searching is now infeasible’, a lot of things start to look more possible.

It’s much like I imagine zen archery. The arrow is plucked from where the arrow must be, the arrow is set, the bow is drawn, the arrow is released and it flies through the air, inevitably striking the target. If there is another target, I already have my next arrow waiting. One motion, no hesitation.

Fluid. Efficient.

It has taken me weeks… possibly months… to get to a point where things are working smoothly but it has been worth it. A year ago I would have crumbled under this, especially with the teaching about to start again. Currently, things are working.

If I’m being perfectly honest, and I try to asymptotically (*ding* $4) approach this, sometimes I still miss the odd thing but it’s most likely to be a conscious choice. I can see it coming and I have to work out if I can do it or if I have to push that load off somewhere else. There’s still room for improvement, which is always good.

Looking back at what started this post, I’m now achieving things and, with luck, I can increase the overall level of awesomeness as well.

Awesome! 🙂

If you’re going to put the disadvantaged into a box, why not just nail it shut?

Posted: February 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

I’m currently attending a set of talks on preparedness for teaching first-year mathematics (if you’re at IISME, hi!) and the ‘pre’ talk was by Professor Celia Hoyles, from the UK, talking about her experiences in trying to get mathematics out of the doldrums in the UK.

Three things struck me about her talk.

  1. She had put a vast amount of effort into local and national initiatives, but there was no certainty in the future funding because of budget cuts.
  2. Too many students were exposed to mathematically-underqualified teachers. These teachers did not have sufficient mathematical training to actually be mathematicians and, in many cases, had no higher mathematics at all yet were teaching into that space.
  3. Even where funding was put into developing teachers, professional development was the first thing to be cut and the government-supplied teacher training scholarships, originally paid at a  flat rate, was being awarded based on performance in the teaching degree.

The first fact is demoralising but it is the world we live in.

The second is terrible, because the vast majority of students in disadvantaged areas would never see a mathematics specialist, or someone who had seen any mathematics at all beyond that which they learned at 16 – certainly not at University.

The third fact caps it all off by saying that programs are doomed to be cut unless people put a priority on these programs! The kicker in the statement about training scholarships is that student teachers who completed a teaching and mathematics program at university would receive 20,000 pounds for a 1st Class degree, 15K for 2:1, 9K for 2:1 and nothing for a 3rd class degree. Now, for those unfamiliar with the UK system, 3rd class is not just a pass – it’s a little (not much) more than a pass. So you have passed your exams but we will pay you nothing for it. If that’s what you were depending upon – tough. Go and do something else. Even though you passed.

Would a University qualified mathematics teacher, whatever the degree, be more likely to have better mathematical knowledge than someone who didn’t study it all the way to the end of school?  If the answer isn’t ‘yes’, then some serious introspection is required at certain higher educational institutions!

Fact 1 leads to Fact 3 – budget cuts lead to reduced expenditure and the most likely way to do that is to allocate money so that a reduced bucket goes to the ‘more deserving’. This is a tragedy in the context of Fact 2, because Fact 3 now means that a number of perfectly reasonable teachers may end up having to leave their degree because their funding dries up. Which means that the money expended is now wasted. So Fact 1 gets worse and Fact 2 gets worse.

Professor Hoyles started her talk by stating that her fundamental principle was that every student who wanted to study mathematics should be able to study mathematics, but 1, 2 and 3 conspire against this and restrict knowledge in a way that create a pit from which very few students will crawl out.

She mentioned a couple of reports, in outline, that I refer to here:

Report: The Schools White Paper – The Importance of Teaching
Report: “A World-Class Mathematics Education For All:…” Carol Vorderman (Chair) Aug 2011. Nuffield Foundation 2010.
 I have no answers here, just food for thought.

Why I wouldn’t let Steve Jobs teach my class.

Posted: February 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | 6 Comments

There is no doubt that Steve Jobs has had an incredible impact on the world in general – let alone the computing industry. Unfortunately, everything I’ve heard and read about the man has convinced me of one thing: he is probably the last person I’d want teaching people who are not exemplary. By construction, my classes contain a range of students and most of my job is working out how to educate all of them without boring the faster and killing the slower – Apple is not such an environment so it’s unsurprising that what worked for Steve would be anathema to my classroom.

Now, my apologies to Steve, whom I will now never meet, but his passion for doing things well and doing things ‘right’ appears to have come with an equally passionate lack of tolerance for failure, or not meeting his exacting standards in some way. And, like any educator, I don’t necessarily have that luxury. Yes, some standards are non-negotiable, but to nowhere near the same degree!

My class is full of passers. Scrapers. “Getters-by”. People who do dumb things and fail. I can’t yell at them for hours. I can’t get into a lift with 8 students and get out with 7, having un-enrolled and failed one between floors 4 and 5.

Now, before you think I’m having too much of a go here, I can understand places where the level of training and expertise is so high that my techniques are not valid. Education comes in many forms. I don’t have to worry about people wetting themselves and early primary educators don’t have to teach calculus – it all balances but it’s not all uniform.

But let’s talk about the places where things just have to be right. Airline pilots spring to mind. Years of training. Lots of mentoring.

Near enough is not good enough!

There is no ‘conceded pass’ or supplementary examination for landing a plane. It is either landed correctly or it is not, and you’re unlikely to get a second chance. I can see there being different standards of conduct and examination at this point because of the professional standards required.

What about my students? While they’re with me, we’re in the soft landing zone – the ‘try again’ zone. I can offer opportunities for redemption because nobody has died or was in danger.

But my students may control nuclear reactors, tank weaponry or aeroplane navigation systems. When they’re in the workforce, I can completely understand someone demanding their best, all the time, and to a given standard.

My point, hidden in all of this, is that I can see why Steve Jobs did what he did with his business, but I’m not sure that my students are ready for that yet. When they graduate? I hope they’d be up to the technical level required (I certainly will aim to do that) but I’m still not sure if they’d be all the way up to that level of perfection. Until that point? No way is he getting near my class – he would have killed them!

It’s an interesting thing to think about.

 

It’s getting more opinionated!

Posted: February 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

The next few posts will feature some more opinion, some of which border on the implications of reducing government teacher funding. Some of you, politically, may find that distasteful but it is pretty mild.

I try to keep my politics out of this blog however, much as Wikipedia took steps to address something that it saw as a threat to its existence, I’m not sure there’s anything overtly political about opposing measures that would destroy the future of education or my career.

Either way, now you know.

To give you a constructive reason for reading this post, I’m currently reading ‘Visualise This’ by Nathan Yau – the definitive ‘how-to’ guide for data scientists who want to take the noisy, difficult-to-work-with numbers that they have and turn them into convincing and accurate visualisations. Be warned! Once you start going down this path, you may learn R, or python. Worse, you may enjoy it!

If you’re a teacher and you’re looking for something to keep the advanced kids busy, get them to take an area of public record data and turn it into visualisations that they then present to the class to see if everyone can work out what they’re talking about. It’s a good lesson that context is not always transferable and can really help guide people in how they communicate with other people. You can get all of the software that you need for free, for whatever platform – why not give it a try?

Give me a coffee, I’m about to teach something boring.

Posted: February 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I think that you always know when you’ve delivered a good lecture. I mentioned fiero a while ago – that feeling of joyful success that makes you want to punch the air. When you get that from a lecture, because you nailed the explanations or everyone participated or a difficult demo came off, you feel good. You feel great.

After a bit of teaching, I came to know the feeling that I associated with a good lecture even in the preparatory stage – I would sometimes be nervous because I wanted the lecture to go well but I was never bored, or dreading the lecture, or grabbing a strong coffee to keep my edge. But I also came to know the opposite feeling. When I’d been dropped in to teach someone else’s material, which I didn’t know so well and that wasn’t in my style. When I hadn’t had a chance to tidy up my own notes from last year or this was the lecture that I’d always planned to rewrite.

That’s when I’d grab a coffee. Because it would keep me awake and stop me yawning while I managed to put myself to sleep. And not really want to be there. And try to get out as soon as possible.

Now, if I’m going to sleep, what is happening in every row behind the first three, where the keen and mature age students sit. Behind the wall of keen, it’s tumbleweed city. Wait long enough and someone will go sufficiently deeply to sleep that they’ll fall off their chair. How could they not? You’re boring yourself, or you don’t believe in it, so you’ve picked up some liquid edge to keep yourself going! The last thing you want to do is to give the caffeine-addicted, energy drink consuming student body even MORE of an excuse to drink caffeinated energy drink – one day, someone is going to explode.

My body was, of course, trying to tell me something important.

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO DO IS GOING TO EITHER SUCK OR BE BORING. OR BOTH.

(My body speaks in capitals.)

After a while, I got to the level where I could think about a course and read my gut. I’d get that feeling early, that yawny, “I need a coffee” feeling to mask the fact that the content or delivery was boring me. That’s why I spend so much time fixing things up, because I’ve found it far easier to teach a good course that makes me feel good, than teaching a bad course that makes me feel bad. The time spent, which is often non-trivial, comes back to me in nights spent sleeping deeply, rewarding student engagement, and lack of terror. 🙂

We don’t always have the luxury of doing this – we don’t always have the access, time or resources. But, by seizing control when we can and leaving ourselves open to fiero and delight, instead of fear and dread, we do end up making our jobs easier, our teaching better, our students happier and our caffeine levels down.

Well, no more than a few a day. I still like coffee, I prefer to have it as a choice, rather than as an anti-boredom device!

 

It’s okay to Karaoke (but why don’t you sing, instead?)

Posted: February 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

Today’s post focuses on the difference between memorising information and gaining knowledge. I don’t normally lead off with a descriptive sentence but I have to in this case because I’m going to talk about my previous life as a karaoke singer. I don’t want you to think I’ve accidentally posted on the wrong blog.

I quite enjoy singing and I have a reasonable karaoke voice – you’d never pay to hear me sing but you probably wouldn’t pay me to stop. When we used to sing in bars, when the machines first hit, you’d sing, people would listen, sometimes they’d clap and the assessment of the whole activity was based on how much you enjoyed it and, if you decided to compete, which of the dud t-shirts you won. For the record, my best placing was third place, a Yellow Cutty Sark t-shirt that made me look both jaundiced and leprous (a clever trick). I loved that t-shirt because, although third place was the best I ever achieved, but it was based on what the crowd felt and it was honestly earned. (I sang Prince’s Kiss in the style of Tom Jones, to complete this confession, so you may weigh the honesty for yourself.)

Of course, the fact that I can retrieve this fact, some 20 years down the track and well after the t-shirt was consigned to the rag pile, tells you a lot about the impression that this feedback had on me. However, the point of this anecdote is not that successful reinforcement is memorable (although that’s a good point) but that I wasn’t performing for points into a karaoke machine, I was using the technology to sing to subjective, analogue measuring devices – people, in other words. Now, the whole time I was singing, I had my own auditory feedback and (potentially) some crowd-based feedback but, being realistic, the only feedback I had was at the end if I won a t-shirt or if my friends either said ‘Yeah!’ or passed me a drink with a supportive expression. (Don’t judge me until you’ve attempted “Take On Me” by A-ha in a public space.)

Fast forward to today and you can have a karaoke machine in your home for the price of a PS2, PS3, X-Box or Wii. SingStar, Guitar Hero and Rock Band all provide you with the ability to play like a star and be adulated, and win awards, in the comfort of your own living room. Don’t like to rock out with pants on? Your lounge room – your rock and rules, baby! How, in this context, do we provide guidance that what you’re doing matches the song on screen? How do I award you a yellow Cutty Sark t-shirt?

In most cases, there is a ‘correct’ interpretation of the musical line – based on tone for singing and choice of input pad and timing for the other instruments in rock band. If you perform the right action (with varying degrees of tolerance) at the right time (again, with tolerance) you are recorded as having done the right thing. Based on this you get points, awards, more opportunities. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this – this is a valid feedback mechanism. The problem arises when you don’t regard the score as assessing the activity, but the activity as a means for maximising the score.

I was slightly surprised the first time I saw Rock Band being played by a group and the singer, instead of singing, mumbled the tones into the microphone, at a volume I could barely hear, in order to exactly match what was going across his screen without the risk of missing the note or stumbling by getting a word wrong. Sure enough, excellent score. I’ve seen people ace SingStar while singing out of tune because they completely repeated every phrasing, every tonal movement and every pause, but stayed within the tolerance, despite it being nearly painful to the human ear. Why were they still singing? Look at the score! I’m doing it right! I bet I can make a higher score if I sing the same song another 10,000 times!

At the same time, I’ve seen professional singers get canned by SingStar and given terrible scores, despite putting together a beautiful performance of the song. What’s going on?

Anyone who’s played any of these games probably knows why this is: SingStar (and RockBand to a great extent) reward memorisation and recall, not interpretation. It’s the degree to which you can recite the song that matters, not your knowledge of how the song is constructed and how it can be rearranged, while still being that song – or better.

Musically speaking, it takes a reasonable amount of experience and knowledge to be able to start interpreting songs in a way that sounds good. Anyone can hit vibrato and wave around the song like a 90s boy band on a roller-coaster – it takes talent to harmonise, built, manipulate cadence and involve the audience in something that makes them breathless. It takes even more talent to know that you don’t do that all the time but in the right place and at the right time. SingStar has no easy way to assess anything outside of the norm so it will reward you if you hit note X at time Y within tolerance Delta. If you decide to mess with the cadence or add some colour, which are both demonstrations of a sound knowledge of the underlying work and the techniques that are valid for manipulating it, you won’t do well. This makes sense from an electronic game designer’s perspective – you can’t encode all of musical theory into the game but you can easily check for conformity.

(To its credit, Rock Band does allow some room for free-styling on certain instruments and at certain times. However, I think it’s probably good that Keith Moon is dead or he would have personally picked up every kit and eaten it after his first encounter with that particular game.)

It should come as no surprise that I believe that we often fall into the trap of requiring memorisation and recitation, effectively in lieu of demonstration of knowledge. Recited answers are easy to mark, manually and automatically. Knowledge requires the marker to be knowledgeable – subtleties abound and there are fewer templates. Electronic systems often lean in this direction for exactly the same reason as SingStar. A simple script to check the output of something is far easier to write than a detailed analyser with all human knowledge in this area.

Knowledge has to be built upon a strong foundation of information – there have to be core facts to provide a basis for your learning (such as the multiplication tables or the names of human anatomy, as two obvious examples). But at the higher level, at the 2nd and 3rd year level of University, we shouldn’t be rewarding people purely for mumbling our own words back to us in the microphone. We’re after knowledge and the demonstration of knowledge and that means more than training parrots.

A bit of karaoke never hurt anyone, but we in higher ed should be training our students to interpret to the fullest, to learn everything and to be able to show us what they know in ways that surprise, delight and, yes, challenge us.

They should be singing.

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