Talking the same language
Computers can't be as engaging as human beings, but Tim Gibson's zest for life and linguistics has convinced him it's worth making them as co-operative as possible.
By Tim Gibson
Long before I was bitten by the e- and blended learning bug, I spent several years studying linguistics. It’s a brilliant subject because you can come at it from so many different angles – a bit like e-learning. Inevitably dividing lines are drawn: people who know a lot of languages refer to people who know a lot about language as “linguisticians”; conversely people who know a lot about language refer to people who know a lot of languages as “polyglots”. Linguist(ician)s who’re more psychology-oriented tend not to stray too much into the territories occupied by those of us who’re more sociology-oriented and vice versa. All of which is rather a shame.
Nonetheless I’ve often thought that there are worse foundations on which to build an interest in e-learning. Linguistics and education have, in a number of ways, have been bound up with one another for thousands of years. What we now call “instructional design” has been shaped by both but, rather depressingly, it can be argued that the greatest advances in instructional design happened immediately before, during and after various wars. There are also interesting correlations to be drawn between wars, power blocs and language families – but that’s another story. In the early days, computer based teaching was pretty much a send-receive kind of communication. It evolved into more of an exchange, albeit limited, as different kinds of interactivity afforded the learner more control. Now, learning is more participative, negotiated, distributed, multi-party, multi-method. It’s now less about lecturing or broadcasting and more about facilitating series of conversations. Arguably learning is becoming more socio- than psycho- and that’s got to be a good thing (this last paragraph is a slight oversimplification).
In a moment I’ll try a few linguistic ideas and quotes on you to see if any strike an e-learning chord. But let’s start by giving away how old I am and rewinding back to those happy first year University parties where the chat-up lines included “What A levels did you do?” (obligatory), “Do you believe in God?” (optional) and, once your co-conversationalist (good word) learned you were studying linguistics, the inevitable “How many languages do you speak?” The first few times I was asked this last question, I’d make a gallant effort to try to explain the difference between studying language on the one hand and studying languages on the other but realising, several glazed expressions later, that it was getting me nowhere in the romance stakes, I decided it was much easier to answer “53” and quickly turn the focus back onto my interlocutor. It was a naughty answer to an innocent question but it did my street cred no end of good.
Fast forward to more recent times when I am often presented with a few screens of e-learning and asked the innocent but dreaded question “what do you think?” or, worse even, “is it worth the money?”. Now my gallant efforts take the form of a few remarks about usability, instructional design, interactivity, aesthetics, production values, and so on, but really every cell of my body wants to shout “53” Tourette’s-style and change the subject.
I think I now know why this is. Nearly a hundred years ago now, a man called Malinowski came up with the epigrammatic “meaning equals function in context”. He was pretty much the grandfather of what became known as “participant observation”, the idea being that if you really want to know how something works, you need to get up out of your armchair and immerse yourself in the field to really suss it out. In our world, that would translate as You Can’t Know Too Much About Your End-Users. So evaluating an e-learning page turner simply by checking out the screens does have its place but its real value, or meaning, is what it does for people in the real world during real use. You need to know not what it is but what it’s doing and the backdrop has to be the workplace (or wherever) rather than the development laboratory and definitely not the armchair. Otherwise the answer may as well be 53.
Another huge oversimplification: at a time when the prevailing linguistics theories were more around the psycho- (i.e. the focus was more on working out why all languages are in some ways the same, since they’re all made possible by the workings of the human brain), sociolinguists were looking at why things were different within and across groups of people. Another of my favourite quotes is “There are no single style speakers”, from a man called Labov, who also spent a lot of time in the field listening to how people talked with one another and how they consciously and subconsciously encoded into their speech their feelings for one another, their inter-relationships, their identity, their attitude to the subject matter, and so on. What you’re trying to do with language, emotionally and rationally, changes constantly throughout the day – and so too do the styles you adopt. It’s entirely natural and most of the time you don’t even know you’re doing it. This is a little reminder that there are probably no single style learners either. This is not to deny the sterling work done around preferred learning styles (I think I’m an activist, by the way); it’s merely to say that we may have to learn things differently depending on the function and on the context.
The same man, Labov, when he wasn’t travelling up and down escalators in American department stores, investigating how people’s pretensions to “poshness” (my word, not his) affected their pronunciation of “fourth floor”, spent huge amounts of time listening to people tell one another stories. Fieldwork in deprived urban areas of America refined his ideas around “evaluation”, or the linguistic signals people put into their conversations to show why they think their audience should be interested. The formal syntactic minutiae of how evaluation works would be a bit too anorak for this article but its functioning is relevant for e-learning, I think. Labov noticed that the best storytellers try to ward off the “so what?” question in the minds (or mouths!) of their audience. Now I encourage my designer friends to imagine their end-users and recast what they want to say in such a way that it minimises the chances of their users saying “so what?”. Constantly trying to ward off the “so what?” question forces us to make our instructional materials more interesting and relevant and is one way we can improve their effectiveness.
Learning, just like language, is enabled by what we are but motivated by what we want and need to do. Language changes because of the jobs it has to do; learning changes similarly; and both have been massively shaped by technology. Facebook has made a gigantic business out of what linguists call “phatic communion”, a term coined by Malinowski to refer to small talk, or the kind of communication that’s less about information and tasks and more about bonding and the managing of interpersonal distance. It’s small talk but on a very big scale – and it’s getting bigger. Interestingly, Facebook is evolving beyond the phatic into pseudo-transactions, presumably in the attempt to enable more types of communication and gain more of our time: “John Smith has sent you an Easter Egg”; “So what?”, I think, “I can’t eat it”. The main reason so many employers refuse access is because they think establishing and maintaining relationships is less important than getting the day to day job done. Facebook has probably gone too far down the phatic route to have its potential for social or collaborative learning recognised but there are plenty of other sites we can take advantage of. Or, how about FacebookProTM a restricted functionality collaborative learning sub-site? Easter Eggs not allowed. You heard it here first.
Another linguistic idea I’ve always been fascinated by is something called the “co-operative principle” or the hypothesis that human beings will go to inordinate lengths to make sense of spoken or written language, no matter how incoherent it is. You’re doing it now. This is a defining and happy characteristic of what it is to be human: as a species we assume co-operativity and struggle to find meaning and value in any communication that comes our way. We almost never give up; to conclude that something is deliberately meaningless simply doesn’t compute. I mention this because it seems to me that the reverse is true when we communicate with computers: there is an assumed unco-operativity. Human-computer dialogues are unlike human-human dialogues because we expect the computer to be unco-operative, we can’t negotiate, computers can’t know the function of what we’re making input to them, neither do they appreciate the context. Many straightforward e-learning pieces are given up on for precisely these reasons. They don’t speak to us well enough, in other words.
Dr Tim Gibson heads up Manifesto Principled Learning.