I landed in Tokyo early Saturday morning (20th February) and immediately began the unreliable art of summarising a country and a civilisation on the basis of a few day's visit. I am not alone in doing this. I have watched numerous reports on Japan from journalists who, like me, do not speak Japanese, know little of its history and are unfamiliar with its culture and complexity. Their reports always feature a film from a Shinkansen (bullet train), shots of crowded streets with neon signs, and dark tales of a declining economy, conformity under challenge and so on. I suspect these opinions were not based on observing what was around them, but on repeating what they had heard from other journalists and on what they thought their audience expected to hear.
My superficial impressions differ in being based, where possible, on what I actually saw. I saw a city that is almost entirely made of concrete but is not a jungle. There are none of the obvious signs of personal dereliction found in many European and North American cities. People are remarkably polite and tolerant of strangers. Far from dull conformity, people (especially young people) express their individuality in their clothes and personal style. The City is far from beautiful, but it works as a city. There is a phenomenally efficient public transport system, little sign of public disorder, and the streets are clean. Oh - and there are the best neon signs I have seen anywhere in the world.
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Friday, 12 February 2010
How to stifle innovation
For big commercial organisations, innovation is a requirement and a threat. Innovation is essential because it provides a means of developing products that are more attractive to their consumers than those of rival firms, or at least can be produced at lower cost. A reputation can also be useful in marketing: Apple can announce some re-design of an existing device, cunningly presented to resemble our idea of the modern (sleek, smooth, and shiny). But innovation is also destructive: old product lines are closed and their workers displaced. Whole companies disappear, and the towns that depended on them decline and empty. Few universities have closed, but departments, courses and research teams have. Scientific reputations have been lost, and well-established theories ridiculed and discredited.
There will therefore always be resistance to innovation, and this will be most successful when rival organisations can either be eradicated or (for the time being) ignored. There are several ways to stifle innovation. One is to reward conformity, and promote people regarded as being ‘a safe pair of hands’. By contrast, innovative people should be identified and excluded from promotion or, in more authoritarian societies, from life itself. But heretics are persistent, and other means of stifling their ideas are needed. One that is particularly successful is to regulate every aspect of organisational life in detailed procedures manuals, quality assurance rituals, and the kind of job descriptions that comprise series of bullet-point lists. This method essentially outlaws the kind of local innovation that generates change in organisations and societies. Instead, things can only change when everyone changes. The organisation thereby innovates at the pace of the slowest or, more likely, not at all. The final means of stifling innovation is to generate a culture of smug superiority: this usually involves asserting that potential rivals are inferior without bothering to find out if this is the case. After all, why go through all the fuss and disturbance of innovation when you are already the best there is.
These techniques succeeded in resisting innovation for centuries in the great empires of the past. Egypt, Rome and the later Chinese Empire were technically stagnant, believing themselves to be protected by legions, deserts, seas and great walls from the threat of rivals. These rivals were weaker and more disorderly, and hence less willing to resist innovation. The Roman Empire was eventually destroyed by tribes which had learnt how to use stirrups and hence could ride heavy cavalry horses. The small European states, locked in perpetual warfare with each other, refined the gunpowder technology invented by the Chinese to bring about the destruction of the vast and populous Chinese Empire.
Not just empires lie in ruins. Every day I travel to work, my train passes a large cleared space at Longbridge in Birmingham, where there was once the largest car factory in Europe. On the other side of the City, there once stood the largest motor bike factory in the world. Further North are the remains of yards which a century ago built half the world’s shipping. These empty spaces and ruins are all the products of organisations which successfully resisted innovation. How I wish they had failed to do so.
There will therefore always be resistance to innovation, and this will be most successful when rival organisations can either be eradicated or (for the time being) ignored. There are several ways to stifle innovation. One is to reward conformity, and promote people regarded as being ‘a safe pair of hands’. By contrast, innovative people should be identified and excluded from promotion or, in more authoritarian societies, from life itself. But heretics are persistent, and other means of stifling their ideas are needed. One that is particularly successful is to regulate every aspect of organisational life in detailed procedures manuals, quality assurance rituals, and the kind of job descriptions that comprise series of bullet-point lists. This method essentially outlaws the kind of local innovation that generates change in organisations and societies. Instead, things can only change when everyone changes. The organisation thereby innovates at the pace of the slowest or, more likely, not at all. The final means of stifling innovation is to generate a culture of smug superiority: this usually involves asserting that potential rivals are inferior without bothering to find out if this is the case. After all, why go through all the fuss and disturbance of innovation when you are already the best there is.
These techniques succeeded in resisting innovation for centuries in the great empires of the past. Egypt, Rome and the later Chinese Empire were technically stagnant, believing themselves to be protected by legions, deserts, seas and great walls from the threat of rivals. These rivals were weaker and more disorderly, and hence less willing to resist innovation. The Roman Empire was eventually destroyed by tribes which had learnt how to use stirrups and hence could ride heavy cavalry horses. The small European states, locked in perpetual warfare with each other, refined the gunpowder technology invented by the Chinese to bring about the destruction of the vast and populous Chinese Empire.
Not just empires lie in ruins. Every day I travel to work, my train passes a large cleared space at Longbridge in Birmingham, where there was once the largest car factory in Europe. On the other side of the City, there once stood the largest motor bike factory in the world. Further North are the remains of yards which a century ago built half the world’s shipping. These empty spaces and ruins are all the products of organisations which successfully resisted innovation. How I wish they had failed to do so.
Saturday, 6 February 2010
The Conservative mood
Conservatism is more a mood or temperament than a philosophy. This is easily recognised. A conservative is generally suspicious at best of innovation, and fearful at worst. He is inclined to think that human life is diverse and varied, and better lived in a predictable routine than subject to incessant diversions. This mood applies to societies as a whole: these are seen as complex networks of obligations and hierarchies, rather than the application of rational design. Opposition to ‘rationalism’ is a key theme in conservative self-justification. Conservatives see life as the exercise of skills that are learnt through performance and habituation, rather than from textbooks and manuals. These beliefs have implications for the conservative view of political and social leadership. Leaders are seen as being drawn best from those who have accumulated expertise through practice and experience, to be acquired in part as a member of a traditional ruling elite, or at least from a background where people are expected to fill positions of leadership in business, the military, or some other field of achievement.
The conservative mood in politics has some appeal, particularly as a counter to management and economic rationalism, which sees all human activity as a means of accumulating wealth and places no monetary value on custom, art, beauty or devotion. The conservative opposition to rationalism also produces an unwillingness to consider large-scale social engineering, intended to coerce people into what reformers regard as a better way of life. Conservatism too can be a basis for tolerance of different cultures and societies: if these are indeed complex and based on tradition, then they will be expected to vary and be self-justified. No true conservative would imagine that other cultures and societies can be remade on a rational basis, nor turned into imitations of our own.
But conservatism has limitations. Conservatives often resist worthy innovations until they become an accepted part of life, which they then feel obliged to defend. Talented people from outside the usual social elites are blocked from advancement in preference to unimaginative dullards with manners, social connections and conventional views. At its worst, conservatism becomes tainted by a fearful xenophobia and the arrogance of the powerful. These have unfortunately been dominant characteristics of conservative political movements in many countries. In some cases, as with Thatcher’s government in the UK, conservative politicians inflict destructive changes to national life as a means of consolidating their own power and the wealth of their supporters.
It is, however, possible to imagine a humane conservatism, without these destructive tendencies. A humane conservatism would involve respect for the customs of the multiple and diverse communities of modern society, and promote families and communities rather than the state as the true basis for effective social action. It would protect people from political excess by establishing the importance of human rights, and would protect the wealth, possessions and occupations of ordinary people as well as of the wealthy. It would not, in other words, have done most of what governments in the UK, both Conservative and ‘New Labour’, have done in the past 30 years.
The conservative mood in politics has some appeal, particularly as a counter to management and economic rationalism, which sees all human activity as a means of accumulating wealth and places no monetary value on custom, art, beauty or devotion. The conservative opposition to rationalism also produces an unwillingness to consider large-scale social engineering, intended to coerce people into what reformers regard as a better way of life. Conservatism too can be a basis for tolerance of different cultures and societies: if these are indeed complex and based on tradition, then they will be expected to vary and be self-justified. No true conservative would imagine that other cultures and societies can be remade on a rational basis, nor turned into imitations of our own.
But conservatism has limitations. Conservatives often resist worthy innovations until they become an accepted part of life, which they then feel obliged to defend. Talented people from outside the usual social elites are blocked from advancement in preference to unimaginative dullards with manners, social connections and conventional views. At its worst, conservatism becomes tainted by a fearful xenophobia and the arrogance of the powerful. These have unfortunately been dominant characteristics of conservative political movements in many countries. In some cases, as with Thatcher’s government in the UK, conservative politicians inflict destructive changes to national life as a means of consolidating their own power and the wealth of their supporters.
It is, however, possible to imagine a humane conservatism, without these destructive tendencies. A humane conservatism would involve respect for the customs of the multiple and diverse communities of modern society, and promote families and communities rather than the state as the true basis for effective social action. It would protect people from political excess by establishing the importance of human rights, and would protect the wealth, possessions and occupations of ordinary people as well as of the wealthy. It would not, in other words, have done most of what governments in the UK, both Conservative and ‘New Labour’, have done in the past 30 years.
Friday, 29 January 2010
Challenging the one-hour university lecture
We do many things in life because we have always done them that way. This applies even when we know that what we do does not work and is unrewarding. An example is the one-hour lecture at universities, which we go on delivering despite all the evidence that it exceeds the attention span of most students, and is usually less effective in delivering information and stimulating learning than almost any other method.
I became an academic in a rather unexpected change of career in 1990. My first teaching experience was on a new masters’ programme in intellectual disability, which was set up by a colleague Dr Beryl Smith. Our students were experienced professionals working in health and social care, and studied part-time. It was difficult for them to get time for studying, and the course was therefore taught for one three-hour session each week. This presented the problem of how on earth we could maintain student learning over such an extended session.
Fortunately, Beryl has great expertise in teaching, and we used her idea of cutting each session into a learning sequence of different elements. This would usually start with an introduction to assess how much the students already knew about the subject, and their experiences of it. This was essential because the students came from different professions, which meant that their knowledge of different subjects was varied and unpredictable. This also gave students an opportunity to reflect on their experience. We would follow this by an introductory lecture of about half and hour, to set out the field of study. Students were then allocated into groups of four or five each, and set a problem to solve. The ‘problem’ might be an analysis of a research paper, discussion of a case study, or the preparation of a draft policy. Each group would then present their response in a plenary session, and this would be followed by a discussion. There could be three or more cycles of this kind in each three-hour session.
On a masters programme, students rightly expect to be taught by topic experts. Beryl and I did not count ourselves experts across the entire field of intellectual disability, and so we invited outside speakers for several sessions. This had the advantage of exposing students to different outlooks, and so stimulated awareness of the difficult policy and ethical dilemmas that frequently arise in working with people with intellectual disabilities.
Looking back on this experience, I realise that we used so many different teaching methods (orienting lecture, reflection, case studies, group problem-solving etc) because Beryl understood that people learn in different ways. Traditional lectures, by contrast, are based on the assumption that there is only one way to learn: by remembering what the teacher says.
A few years later, our masters programme in intellectual disability was converted to distance teaching on the Open University model. By that time, Beryl Smith had retired. Another colleague and I developed distance texts corresponding to each session on the programme. Individual texts still followed the concept of a learning sequence, but self-completion activities replaced group discussions. We ended up with rather more texts than is usual for distance programmes, but students on the programme tell us that they find our texts stimulating and easy to follow.
Moving to distance education had a disadvantage for me. I enjoyed face-to-face teaching, and now I was doing a lot less of it. I eventually moved more into undergraduate medical education. This was a very different world. Teaching was organised into one-hour lectures to 300+ students, plus one-hour tutorials for small groups. As the number of medical students in the University expanded, the ‘small groups’ did too, and eventually we had 22 ‘small groups’, each with about 17 students. Small group tutorials at that time were usually chaired by a staff member and seemed to follow a defined procedure with a clearly-specified set of correct answers which each ‘small group’ was led to discover. However, it has become difficult in some subject areas to find sufficient academic staff to chair all the ‘small groups’, and this has led to greater creativity, with some staff developing self-directed ‘small groups’ in which students are set a problem, and produce a written response which is loaded on WebCT.
For the last three years, I have helped run a module on health services and disability for second-year undergraduate medical students. This comprises ten four-hour sessions, each on a Monday morning. Working with my colleagues Andy Shanks and Dr Qulsom Fazil, we gave each four-hour session a common theme (‘learning disability’, ‘care and carers’, ‘international health’ etc), and divided responsibility for individual sessions between us. Most of these sessions were scheduled to begin with two hours of lectures, followed by two hours of small group teaching. Weighed down by tradition, I initially planned the first two hours as two one-hour lectures. These evoked the usual polite but uninspiring response from students. So I cursed myself for conforming, returned to my experience in masters education, and renewed the idea of teaching using a learning sequence.
I therefore used the first two hours in each session for a sequence of short (half-hour) lectures from a range of presenters, interspersed with short films and question and answer sessions. I have tried to begin these with a film or a personal account which introduces the students to the reality of disability or being a carer, as the case may be. This is followed by a short orienting lecture to clarify terminology and numbers, and present key issues. Further films and short lectures build on this. I have used outside expert speakers to cover more specialist issues. This ‘blended sequence’ approach has been successful, and I will try and improve it further.
I also changed small group teaching on the module, by introducing tutorials led by individual people with an intellectual disability. These were recruited from groups that train and support disabled people in teaching and public presentations. These sessions were much appreciated by students, and helped them develop empathy for living with a disability. However, they were cancelled for this academic year because no budget had been identified to meet the cost of transport and sessional payment. Yet it is surely probable that the University will reinstate this form of teaching, given increasing national concern about the standard of healthcare received by people with an intellectual disability.
I am now quite close to retirement, and so other people will soon become responsible for teaching intellectual disability to medical students in my university. I am encouraged that my colleagues responsible for the medical degree have a firm commitment to innovative and effective education. I hope that in some way I have provided stimulating company for them.
I became an academic in a rather unexpected change of career in 1990. My first teaching experience was on a new masters’ programme in intellectual disability, which was set up by a colleague Dr Beryl Smith. Our students were experienced professionals working in health and social care, and studied part-time. It was difficult for them to get time for studying, and the course was therefore taught for one three-hour session each week. This presented the problem of how on earth we could maintain student learning over such an extended session.
Fortunately, Beryl has great expertise in teaching, and we used her idea of cutting each session into a learning sequence of different elements. This would usually start with an introduction to assess how much the students already knew about the subject, and their experiences of it. This was essential because the students came from different professions, which meant that their knowledge of different subjects was varied and unpredictable. This also gave students an opportunity to reflect on their experience. We would follow this by an introductory lecture of about half and hour, to set out the field of study. Students were then allocated into groups of four or five each, and set a problem to solve. The ‘problem’ might be an analysis of a research paper, discussion of a case study, or the preparation of a draft policy. Each group would then present their response in a plenary session, and this would be followed by a discussion. There could be three or more cycles of this kind in each three-hour session.
On a masters programme, students rightly expect to be taught by topic experts. Beryl and I did not count ourselves experts across the entire field of intellectual disability, and so we invited outside speakers for several sessions. This had the advantage of exposing students to different outlooks, and so stimulated awareness of the difficult policy and ethical dilemmas that frequently arise in working with people with intellectual disabilities.
Looking back on this experience, I realise that we used so many different teaching methods (orienting lecture, reflection, case studies, group problem-solving etc) because Beryl understood that people learn in different ways. Traditional lectures, by contrast, are based on the assumption that there is only one way to learn: by remembering what the teacher says.
A few years later, our masters programme in intellectual disability was converted to distance teaching on the Open University model. By that time, Beryl Smith had retired. Another colleague and I developed distance texts corresponding to each session on the programme. Individual texts still followed the concept of a learning sequence, but self-completion activities replaced group discussions. We ended up with rather more texts than is usual for distance programmes, but students on the programme tell us that they find our texts stimulating and easy to follow.
Moving to distance education had a disadvantage for me. I enjoyed face-to-face teaching, and now I was doing a lot less of it. I eventually moved more into undergraduate medical education. This was a very different world. Teaching was organised into one-hour lectures to 300+ students, plus one-hour tutorials for small groups. As the number of medical students in the University expanded, the ‘small groups’ did too, and eventually we had 22 ‘small groups’, each with about 17 students. Small group tutorials at that time were usually chaired by a staff member and seemed to follow a defined procedure with a clearly-specified set of correct answers which each ‘small group’ was led to discover. However, it has become difficult in some subject areas to find sufficient academic staff to chair all the ‘small groups’, and this has led to greater creativity, with some staff developing self-directed ‘small groups’ in which students are set a problem, and produce a written response which is loaded on WebCT.
For the last three years, I have helped run a module on health services and disability for second-year undergraduate medical students. This comprises ten four-hour sessions, each on a Monday morning. Working with my colleagues Andy Shanks and Dr Qulsom Fazil, we gave each four-hour session a common theme (‘learning disability’, ‘care and carers’, ‘international health’ etc), and divided responsibility for individual sessions between us. Most of these sessions were scheduled to begin with two hours of lectures, followed by two hours of small group teaching. Weighed down by tradition, I initially planned the first two hours as two one-hour lectures. These evoked the usual polite but uninspiring response from students. So I cursed myself for conforming, returned to my experience in masters education, and renewed the idea of teaching using a learning sequence.
I therefore used the first two hours in each session for a sequence of short (half-hour) lectures from a range of presenters, interspersed with short films and question and answer sessions. I have tried to begin these with a film or a personal account which introduces the students to the reality of disability or being a carer, as the case may be. This is followed by a short orienting lecture to clarify terminology and numbers, and present key issues. Further films and short lectures build on this. I have used outside expert speakers to cover more specialist issues. This ‘blended sequence’ approach has been successful, and I will try and improve it further.
I also changed small group teaching on the module, by introducing tutorials led by individual people with an intellectual disability. These were recruited from groups that train and support disabled people in teaching and public presentations. These sessions were much appreciated by students, and helped them develop empathy for living with a disability. However, they were cancelled for this academic year because no budget had been identified to meet the cost of transport and sessional payment. Yet it is surely probable that the University will reinstate this form of teaching, given increasing national concern about the standard of healthcare received by people with an intellectual disability.
I am now quite close to retirement, and so other people will soon become responsible for teaching intellectual disability to medical students in my university. I am encouraged that my colleagues responsible for the medical degree have a firm commitment to innovative and effective education. I hope that in some way I have provided stimulating company for them.
Saturday, 23 January 2010
February Fill Dyke
There are paintings you admire and paintings you want to hang on your wall at home. February Fill Dyke by Benjamin Williams Leader falls in the first group. This is a painting of the utmost realism. No other picture or photograph depicts with such accuracy the damp cold misery of the English winter. This is not the bright sunny cold of the Alps or North America, but the damp clammy cold that creeps into your bones, that is with you even after you have gone indoors, and which can only be driven away by a hot bath. February Fill Dyke also shows the mud and the darkness of winter, when days on end are spent without sunshine or hardly any light, and when the sun has set at four o’clock in the afternoon. What makes this picture particularly important for me, however, is that it may be of my own village. Leader came from Worcester and specialised in local landscapes. The square church tower and the scattered houses of the village could all be Martley in the late 19th Century.
February Fill Dyke is probably the most famous painting by Leader, but it is not widely-known or particularly popular. This is because it does not fall into the second group of pictures, that you hang on your wall at home. Leader does not show a chocolate-box fantasy of rural England, all village green, neat thatched cottages and duckponds. Nor is it the Christmas card cliché of snow, stagecoaches, and quality street. How much better to put on your wall pictures of poppy fields in summer, sunflowers, dancers near the Seine, and so on. The impressionists were no better painters than Leader, but they were better at judging the market.
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Is Fox News a Zombie Death Cult?
If you have never been to the USA, you still know what to expect from films and television. The East Coast comprises New York (full of young people leading entertaining lives in Manhattan apartments) and Baltimore (corrupt police and gruesome crimes). The West Coast consists of Los Angeles (film stars and more crime), and San Francisco (gays and more crime). Things are different in the South: long dusty roads, prison gangs and everybody drenched in sweat (apart from New Orleans, which is inhabited by vampires). In the middle of the USA, most of the small towns have been taken over by zombies. These stumble around looking to bite as many people as possible and hence increase the zombie population. Zombies don’t appear too cunning, but are effective because they are driven by an overwhelming and irrational anger.
After you visit the USA, you realise that the films and television programmes are not very accurate, apart from the zombies that is. In the real USA, zombies do not stumble around in blood-soaked rags: they work as radio and television commentators, most of all on Fox News. Here, they can infect people through the airwaves, massively increasing the zombie population. Despite their more normal appearance, Fox News zombies are easy to spot - driven by the same overwhelming and irrational anger, they emit rage at normal people (who in zombietalk are known as ‘liberals’), and worship death. Death-worship takes many forms: there is an urgent desire to spread death among foreign lands; to execute criminals in large numbers; and, most of all, there is adoration of the bringers of death - of guns and weapons of all kinds. Zombies wish that all should carry guns and become death-bringers.
In the films, zombies can only be destroyed, if at all, by extreme violence. Fortunately, real world zombies can easily be tamed. Just change channels, and they will not infect you. If enough people do this, the zombie death cult will disappear.
After you visit the USA, you realise that the films and television programmes are not very accurate, apart from the zombies that is. In the real USA, zombies do not stumble around in blood-soaked rags: they work as radio and television commentators, most of all on Fox News. Here, they can infect people through the airwaves, massively increasing the zombie population. Despite their more normal appearance, Fox News zombies are easy to spot - driven by the same overwhelming and irrational anger, they emit rage at normal people (who in zombietalk are known as ‘liberals’), and worship death. Death-worship takes many forms: there is an urgent desire to spread death among foreign lands; to execute criminals in large numbers; and, most of all, there is adoration of the bringers of death - of guns and weapons of all kinds. Zombies wish that all should carry guns and become death-bringers.
In the films, zombies can only be destroyed, if at all, by extreme violence. Fortunately, real world zombies can easily be tamed. Just change channels, and they will not infect you. If enough people do this, the zombie death cult will disappear.
Friday, 15 January 2010
The Great PowerPoint Disaster
One of the frequent complaints about academics is that they are only interested in their research and neglect their responsibilities to their students. Academics of this kind undoubtably exist, and I have no problem with them. Universities would be a lot more efficient if staff were allowed to specialise in what they do best (or, more precisely, in areas where they have a comparative advantage). There is no point in getting top class researchers to run courses or carry heavy teaching loads. They do, however, have a responsibility to tell the rest of us what they are up to. The best way to do this is to a plenary lecture once a term on new developments in their field. Other academics should be allowed to specialise in teaching if this is what they do best. Teaching, rather than the commercialisation of research, is the most important form of ‘knowledge transfer’ in higher education: without effective teaching in universities, the quality of professional skills in society will decline generation upon generation. We will have wonderful technologies, but no-one able to use them.
Whether academics are more effective in research or teaching is in part a matter of personality. Research usually involves long hours of solitary work and therefore tends to attract more introverted people. Teaching, on the other hand, appeals more to extroverts and the best lectures are a sort of performance art. Extrovert or not, it requires great skill and commitment to lead students into a complex field so that they understand not only its complexity but also the areas in which knowledge is still uncertain. There have traditionally been several ways in which good teachers have achieved this. One is to start by posing a question, and then to look at alternative explanations, their strengths and weaknesses. Others may use a narrative approach, or start by presenting a simple overview of the topic and then progressively adding more complexity.
However, despite the best efforts of academic staff, I have an impression that our lectures have deteriorated in the last decade. I think this is because they have become dominated by PowerPoint technology. No other single invention has done as much to destroy learning as this accursed programme. Instead of analyses and systemic explanations, lectures with PowerPoint have become lists of bullet-points read from a screen. Some teachers enliven their slides by inserting pictures and animations, but PowerPoint has produced a generation of graduates who think knowledge comprises lists of facts. I can see the impact of this in the various government reports I read in my area of study. Where there was once coherent analysis and argument (in sentences and paragraphs), there are now repetitive bullet-point lists. For instance, the most recent Government policy report on intellectual disability (called ‘Valuing People Now’) includes nine bullet-point lists in its Executive Summary and 70 in the main text, all in 136 pages. Bullet-points are interspersed with pictures, personal stories, and examples of good practice. These are all entertaining, but the report glosses over the problems involved in living with a severe disability, and the dilemmas experienced by those who support disabled people on a daily basis. Bullet-points, however neat they look on screen and page, provide a weak basis for effective government action.
Whether academics are more effective in research or teaching is in part a matter of personality. Research usually involves long hours of solitary work and therefore tends to attract more introverted people. Teaching, on the other hand, appeals more to extroverts and the best lectures are a sort of performance art. Extrovert or not, it requires great skill and commitment to lead students into a complex field so that they understand not only its complexity but also the areas in which knowledge is still uncertain. There have traditionally been several ways in which good teachers have achieved this. One is to start by posing a question, and then to look at alternative explanations, their strengths and weaknesses. Others may use a narrative approach, or start by presenting a simple overview of the topic and then progressively adding more complexity.
However, despite the best efforts of academic staff, I have an impression that our lectures have deteriorated in the last decade. I think this is because they have become dominated by PowerPoint technology. No other single invention has done as much to destroy learning as this accursed programme. Instead of analyses and systemic explanations, lectures with PowerPoint have become lists of bullet-points read from a screen. Some teachers enliven their slides by inserting pictures and animations, but PowerPoint has produced a generation of graduates who think knowledge comprises lists of facts. I can see the impact of this in the various government reports I read in my area of study. Where there was once coherent analysis and argument (in sentences and paragraphs), there are now repetitive bullet-point lists. For instance, the most recent Government policy report on intellectual disability (called ‘Valuing People Now’) includes nine bullet-point lists in its Executive Summary and 70 in the main text, all in 136 pages. Bullet-points are interspersed with pictures, personal stories, and examples of good practice. These are all entertaining, but the report glosses over the problems involved in living with a severe disability, and the dilemmas experienced by those who support disabled people on a daily basis. Bullet-points, however neat they look on screen and page, provide a weak basis for effective government action.
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