There’s a phenomenon in media studies called trickle up, the idea that cultural themes, ideas, creativity, start on a smaller scale and then get adopted by larger and more prominent media outlets and then become mainstream. The tendency possibly happens more nowadays due to more people getting into being creative and sharing their outputs globally. Advertising agencies look at what DIY animators are doing and think “that looks rather good” and copy it, or better yet employ the animators in their campaigns, or film companies see character designs from cartoonists and rip them off, or blogs become well-known and get turned into novels and then films. It’s an important concept I think, because so much of our cultural assumptions are that it happens the other way round, media create ideas, which then become copied by the masses. Trickle up is far more common than trickle down as far as I can see.

This blog post has been prompted by two different conversations I’ve had about two examples. The first came out of a tweet from my friend Sarah Sherman, who at a conference tweeted, “anyone remember the Swap Shop logo?” to which i replied that I was more of a TISWAS person myself. When I was at school there were definitely two camps of people, you were either a TISWAS person or a Swap Shop one. When TISWAS started it was a bit staid, one person, then two people at a desk, which then opened out into a studio of messy kids shouting at each other, phantom flan flingers, cages, grunge. If there was ever an animal segment, the animal would escape and the hosts would have to run round the studio trying to catch it, slipping on bits of flan. It was anarchic, surreal, raucous and a bad influence. Swap Shop on the other hand was quiet, reserved, based around the idea of exchanging material goods. The children were well-behaved and asked the guests serious questions. It was dull, reserved and set out to improve the audience. I could see why either could appeal to an audience, but for me TISWAS was full of the kind of people I wanted to hang out with, Swap Shop was full of the sort of people I resorted to hanging out with.

Where the trickle up example comes in though was that TISWAS started several years before Swap Shop, but on ATV, back in the days when ITV had a lot of regional programming. It was the first of the model of an entire Saturday morning show, but with segments of cartoons etc. The BBC copied the idea, gave it the swapping twist, and made it national. Fair enough. Most TV entails stealing a format, changing it around slightly, then representing it as your own.

Where the trickle up phenomenon becomes less acceptable though, is often the way that the larger media outlets create a revisionist history which pretends the previous versions didn’t exist. In a recent TV celebration, the BBC did a programme called “It all started with Swap Shop” as if the precursor didn’t exist, and as if they could get away with the retcon because not everyone had seen the original. That kind of revisionist history of how things were created underplays the role of the smaller outlets and the less well-know creators in order to take all the credit for itself. It’s this side of it that annoys me; not least because all too often people who aren’t familiar with the origins fall for it and fail to recognise where the true origins lie.

The same has been happening on the BBC with the 50th Dr Who celebrations. Bringing back Dr Who was a difficult process for Russel T Davies I’m sure. There were a lot of people at the BBC who needed to be convinced of its relevance to a modern audience I’m sure, but all the documentaries I’ve seen about it (for example, the Culture Show one last week) make out that they were working from a blank slate, that there was no idea whether it would work if it was brought up to date. And yet there was six years of Dr Who, remodelled for a modern audience, keeping the essential elements but changing the tone and the direction, in the Big Finish audio material, which had been going since 1999. The nu Who exactly matches that direction and timbre, and uses many of the writers (and some of the scripts) so it’s no coincidence. And yet the influential role they’ve had in the 21st century regeneration have been written out of the history. In fact even before the 9th Doctor appeared, there was a TV discussion between a journalist and Sylveste McCoy (oh that dates me, spelling his name without the “r”) where the arrogant twat of a journalist was saying how it couldn’t work, because it was so old-fashioned in its essence, to which SM replied, “well it’s been working fine for years on audio”. Hopefully that segment is still around somewhere because it would be great to see him held up to public ridicule now.

So — I’m actually relieved I didn’t pursue a career in media. I could imagine how galling it could be to have your contribution overlooked and written out of history, and for someone else to take the credit for your innovation. In this job, both the education aspect and the academic aspect, people seem (on the whole) scrupulously fair about attributing ideas. The trickle up thing happens just as much, the larger organisations trawl the practice of teachers in the classroom for idea, or ask for them to be contributed to reports, but always the origin is acknowledged. In fact there was an excellent JISC programme called LEX which focused on drawing ideas from students themselves, and integrating those into practice. Wherever possible those were credited too. If only the media industry had the same ethos.

It’s a strange experience, but I think I have fallen in love with an academic paper. It is this one: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00461520.2013.804395#.UiIooj-_h5J “Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education” The title refers to its debunking of the idea of Student-Led education, but it also totally blows away two other myths I completely object to in education, that of the digital native and that of learning styles. Student-led learning is also at the heart of the idea that teaching adults is so radically different from teaching children that it deserves a different name, one that goes under the putrid buzzword of “androgogy”. The paper opposes the idea that people really know how they need to learn, and that, if they are adults, we should hand over those choices to them. The arguments against the idea of digital natives and learning styles is well-documented, but this summarises them neatly. Any teacher educator everywhere should be made to read this before they stand up in front of a group of trainee teachers.

Prensky talked about the net generation as if they had a native language, and previous generations could at best only learn to use the tech as a second language. It really caught on for a while, but as more evidence has come in the premise has three big flaws 1) is that you can generalise like that, a lot of the younger generations struggle with technology, or don’t like it, and the older ones don’t 2) that you can generalise about the tech, someone may be a wiz at manipulating images, but totally blow at expressing themselves in twitter, and 3) that it matters. Because even if learners are using the tech in new ways it shouldn’t necessarily lead how you teach them, since this might not be conducive to effective teaching.

I’ve just finished a book bringing together a variety of case studies on student-centred, practical learning. The evidence is that it doesn’t matter if you’re in a middle school in Chicago, a university in Nairobi, or a high school in Chile, activity-led, student-centred learning works better than subject-centred. The difference is that student-centred is not student-led. Often if you give students what they want, you would end up with them sitting there and being spoon-fed information, which isn’t really an effective way to learn. The problem with being customer-driven in education is that educators are handing over the direction of education to people who aren’t experts in how best to learn. We are. Or should be.

The problem with the digital natives idea is  that it’s one of those concepts that makes people feel like they’ve got a handle on changes that are happening, so become very popular. But the reality is both more complicated (people are far more varied than anything that can be put in a box) and simpler (deep down people don’t change that much anyway). The digital natives thing caught on in education because we could see our students working differently than we did (multitasking or rather switch tasking, meshing technologies), so we tried to emulate that in how we taught. The problem is that the assumption that “this is how kids learn now so we should support it” skipped the step of finding out if they actually learnt well doing that. Answer is they don’t. The other problem is that crazy paranoid people like Susan Greenfield made a bit of a career out of warning everyone that our brains are plastic and kids’ brains are being screwed up by being online. Until everyone spotted she’d seriously lost the plot, it got a lot of people worried about it. I think there’s a lot of truth in the idea that we need to keep students motivated because the usual droney text-based abstract approach (nicknamed “mortarboading”) isn’t successful but then, the truth is, that it wasn’t for our generation either. The reality is, our brains evolved over 100s of thousands of years. 15 years of the internet is going to have no impact on how they work.

The danger is that as a researcher, there is a pressure on you to develop models that keep the pigeon-holing going, because they’re the only things that get attention. I’ve done it myself. Extended Activity Theory. Progressive presence. Fourth Places. All buzzwords that oversimplify things. The fact that they haven’t made me rich and famous isn’t through lack of my desire to sell out my principles, it’s just that no-one’s noticed them yet. You need something that can fit on one slide of PowerPoint if you want to make a name for yourself. I suppose you could do it, and cover it with loads of caveats, but as the models get passed on and popularised, the caveats get shed. Look at how people have bastardised the Myers-Briggs stuff over the years.

I’ve set a second blog up to capture all the stuff I wanted to say about things other than work; prompted mainly by all the street art I saw in Brazil. I don’t want to clog up the work-related posts with other things, so thought a secondary blog would be the best route. There will also be other things posted on neither the subject of non-formal art (about which I actually know nothing, I’m just interested) or elearning but they’ll probably be randomly distributed across the two. It’s at markchilds2.wordpress.com

There’s a growing tendency in user interfaces to move to a “design aesthetic” rather than actually having something that actually works for the user. You know the sort of thing I mean. Metro, for example, which has made a pig’s ear of using my Xbox 360, and by most accounts has done the same thing for Windows. More and more functions are added, with the useful stuff buried deeper and deeper and more and more difficult to find. Instead of functionality the interface is replaced with stuff that “looks good”, as if that’s more important than being able to use it. I know why it happens. I went to journalism school for two years, and in that time we were taught a lot of the normative practices of journalism, a few old saws that got passed down from generation to generation. One of these was “people first, events second, ideas third”. This particular pearl of wisdom is why, whenever you see an article about some amazing scientific discovery, the article focuses on the life of the scientist making it. The reasoning is that people won’t be drawn in if you talk about the discovery, only if you talk about the person. This reasoning is why Horizon is far worse than it used to be, because you have a whole swathe of bollocks to sit through before you actually learn anything. There’s also a tendency to make vague generalisations about the subject matter first. I have a rule, that if a documentary hasn’t told me anything new by 7 minutes in, I turn it off. Pretty consistently this seems to work. Seven minutes of waffle, then bam some interesting fact. It’s as if they believe that if they shock us with information too early on it will damage our systems or something.

The thing is, there is no evidence for this as a rule. In fact, if you ask anyone in the audience they would put the relative importance of people, events, ideas in the reverse order. It is just that someone once made this up, and in a profession where people are desperate for a clue about how to do it well, people cling to it as a fact. It’s also why we have  the concept of “learning styles” in education and “digital natives” in elearning.

Designers seem to work from a similar set of principles that have just been pulled out of  <edit> thin air. </edit>. Resistance to the introduction of the newer interface, which is “cleaner” or “more aesthetic” or “gui driven” is just dismissed as the user not liking change. Well, to some extent, sticking with what exists is important. The whole point of interfaces is that they become transparent through frequent use, and this supports a sense of immersion. You mess with them and suddenly they become visible again and therefore less usable. You have to be really sure something is an improvement before you mess with it.

What is tricky too is showing why the new one is worse, because so often the upgrade is done without any foreknowledge, so it’s not possible to make a comparison. However, the BBC iplayer has had both the new version and the old version side-by-side for a while, so it’s possible to screen grab both and demonstrate why the new one is so poor. So here goes.

This is the landing page for the old iplayer.

You can see immediately several radio programmes to listen to, in a variety of categories. If you see one you like you can click on it, and within a few seconds are listening to something. So for me, the Unbelievable Truth would do it if I hadn’t already heard it. so … click on that and done.

If you don’t see something, you can click on Favourites and see things you’ve previously tagged as things you’re interested in. It looks like this:

Ah OK — heard all of those so go deeper into the website, which you can do by scrolling down. In theory people don’t like doing this, but where is the evidence?

What’s great about this is that you can see the top selections from a variety of categories, which might lead you in a direction you hadn’t otherwise considered. Nothing there takes my fancy so I’ll head onto comedy and select that.

Well that should be enough choice. Round the Horne is pretty bona. However, if not then click on show all comedy and you have the entire list in alphabetical order.

So there you have it. Nice, straightforward and fast.

Here’s the landing page of the new interface:

You can immediately see the problem. Someone with a “design aesthetic” has been let loose. There is a lot of empty space which contains no information, and seems to be there just to look good. There are no links to actual programmes. We are forced to select a search strategy to find a programme two of which are meaningless. I mean who cares what station or what time of day it’s on?

So after a completely pointless and confusing click on “categories” we get to this :

And as you can see STILL NO LINKS TO PROGRAMMES. It’s another superfluous click on comedy to get to:

We can scroll down to see programmes but they’re not in any type of order. The only real advantage of the new interface is that it enables filtering by sub-genre. It needs one more click to get the alphabetical list:

Which also for some reason includes programmes which aren’t available. Is anyone actually thinking through this at all?

And yet with all the extra clicks, this is meant to be “simpler” … the assumptions seem to be that we are children who like big clear pictures with plenty of colour and not too much information at once. Reading is too hard for us. We know exactly what we want to search for (the opportunities for serendipitously discovering stuff are eliminated) and we have time to randomly click on things to discover content. None of these things are true and I resent the implication.

For the moment both are running side by side and this is fine. Maybe some people prefer the new version. But anyone who has let the designers loose on their interface ought to give people the option. For example the latest version of Firestorm (a virtual worlds viewer) has the option to switch between Firestorm (a gui-driven interface) and Phoenix (a text driven one). Not all of us rate aesthetics above speed of access to information and not everyone needs bright colours, or curved edges, or little animations in their interfaces. In fact, they’re distracting and annoying.

Why the rant? I suspect you’re wondering. It’s because I can see the online world becoming less and less usable as a result of designers being let loose on things, and either not consulting, or deliberately ignoring the user feedback, as if we’re too uneducated in “design” to know what we want. I had a huge argument with a colleague who said that a change had been made to something he’d been working on because people prefer GUI to text. “No they don’t” I replied. He just said that “yes they do”. My response: “Maybe most people prefer it, but by saying ‘people’ you’re implying that all do, and I know that’s not true because I don’t”. The result? He completely ignored the point I was making, possibly because I wasn’t a designer and so therefore wasn’t capable of making a proper judgment about what I liked. Unfortunately if no-one creating interfaces listens, the online world will become less usable. I no longer access videos on my xbox, because the user interface is messed up. I use Twitter much less because the interface is unwieldy. wordpress is another good example. WTF does that w in a circle mean really? Could they not put “menu” there or something? I was using WordPress for months before i realised I could access my Reader or Freshly Pressed by clicking on it. Bit by bit I can see the gradual disenfranchisement of the user as control over how the online world is accessed is ceded to “designers” and I’d quite like it to stop.