Stop, Look & Listen - the Modality Principle for verbal and visual information

A few weeks ago, I agreed to be interviewed for an MSc project (on 'playfulness in adults'). The researcher conducted the interviews using Google Talk, part of the Google Mail tool.


It was an interesting experience for me, as I'd never taken part in an interview using instant messaging in this way. On the positive side, the nature of the tool meant that I had plenty of time to consider, spell and construct my responses. And of course there was a complete transcript available for the researcher at the end of it (screengrab above). But on the negative side it was a truly strange experience, because I got no visual feedback at all from the interviewer. She intentionally asked very open questions, and then left me to type...whenever I asked her if I was answering the way she expected she said I could answer however I liked, and with no encouraging nods or smiles I have no idea whether I was on the right track at all! I found myself looking at her little icon on the chat screen as that was all I had to go on. In fact the interview took 2 hours rather than the 45 mins she had anticipated.

I spoke to my colleagues about this, and when I mentioned the lack of feedback Adam told me about The Modality Principle. It basically says that:

"items presented both visually and verbally are better remembered"

I think this holds true even for an interview. I needed those visual clues to help the verbal stuff flow. We've seen the same thing with academic podcasts - when converted to video with a talking head it makes the material so much more engaging than pure audio.

Of course you may have valid reasons for wanting your interviewee to feel uncomfortable and have no guidance...in which case stick with the IM!

Learning through Stories - pick and mix!

I spent this afternoon at a "Learning through Stories" workshop, organised by our Centre for Learning and Teaching. The idea was that anyone across the university could share their experience in using stories - in whatever context. As a result, we got a really interesting mix of 6 different sessions (mini write-ups below). The audience was mixed too (academics from the Business School, Education, Media and Nursing and staff involved in staff development, student support etc).

The afternoon was successful - for those of you at Brighton you can continue the conversation on the community. There is likely to be another event where we can see more examples, and also follow up on some of the below by co-coaching each other to share our experiences.
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Gina Wisker (Centre for Learning and Teaching) – Encouraging reflective professional practice through storytelling
Gina talked about storytelling as a technique to help students reflect, to engage and to anticipate problems. This works in teaching as well as for professional development. By talking through what has happened as a story you can retell it with different endings - 'what if?' to try and find a resolution.

Gilly Smith (Journalism/Broadcast Media) - The constraints of professional language on business and academia.
Gilly talked about the importance of "I" in journalism, and how the constraints of academic writing mean however passionate you are about your work you remove yourself from it in the write-up. She observed that academics are untrained in telling stories and to recognise who they themselves are within a story.

She talked about the power of encapsulating an idea (e.g. an abstract) in 60 words - a good exercise to do to show you really know what the work is about. She reminded us to use: Who, what, where, when, why, how and so what? as questions to ask in our writing.

We digressed onto twitter and the skill of encapsulating what you want to say in 160 characters, but also recognised the importance of the richness of detail in some contexts.

Angela Rogers (Creativity Researcher) - Methods that use imagery to generate stories and elicit personal narratives
Angela gave us three image based strategies to trigger, support and generate stories. The first was to look at challenging images (like this):

..and try and find a who, what, where, when and why. (It turns out this is a tradition in Spain for the jumping 'devil' to protect these children from hernias...).

The second example involved ordering a series of photos into a storyline, where there was no correct answer. We all tried to make vaguely real and sensible stories, but Angela reminded us we can fill in the gap between one photo and the next with whatever we wanted - murder, aliens etc.

The last technique was a minimal pre-prepared storyboard. Her example was for students about to go on their first teaching placement. The students got to annotate and detail the storyboard to work through their feelings of what they were to embark on the next day.

Katie Piatt (Academic Computing) - Games based learning, and using stories to increase engagement.
Yes, this was me talking about Alternate Reality Games - regular readers have already read plenty about that topic ;-}

Laetitia Zeeman (Nursing) - Examples (from practice) of how to use stories in a healing context i.e. narrative therapy.
Laetitia gave us a series of questions that can be used in one to one therapy conversations to help people build up a rich affirmative story of events in their lives. The therapist can help co-construct an alternative account by following different conversational paths.

David Simpson (Education) - Discussion on connections between drama and writing in all genres
David got us doing some role exercises, using a teacher-in-role technique to get students comfortably talking about complex topics. By taking centre stage in the role play himself it put the students (us!) more at ease. The effort is on the part of the lecturer to prepare the situation and the roles in order to not simplify a discussion to 'for and against' but to allow the conversation to include a full spectrum of shades, then when the students come to writing they have much more to draw on.

The Secret of eAnything

This was going to be called the Secret of eLearning, but upon reflection (and replies from my lovely crowd of twitter followers) I realise it applies to all tech stuff, hence eAnything.

And yes, it's sort of stating the obvious, but it's such a key bit of obvious I wanted to talk about it.

"in every service we build online, good communication & engagement is so much more important than the tech"
twitter

I'm coming round to believe that the choice of platform (be it eLearning, Intranet, Social web or whatever) although important (in terms of the choice of tools you have open to you), the really important factors in terms of success of a service, are:

1. how well you communicate with users about what the service is for and how they can use it

and

2. how easy and rewarding you make it for them to engage with the service

I think the clearest examples are thinking about the reasons why people love facebook and hate their corporate intranet. It explains why despite everything you do students always complain about not being able to find things and disliking your learning environment. To start to fix it, we need to improve our communication (both ways of course, listening is under-rated!) so they know how it works and why we're doing what we're doing the way that we're doing it.

Of course it's better if you think about 1 and 2 before you release the service rather than after. If you want some ideas on how to achieve number 2, then I'll point you at my Fun Engineer post.