We pause in the narrative of wonderful Wellsian things for a brain shift: a class from Oxford University Deapartment for Continuing Education offered by the British Society for the History of Mathematics. I had been to a similar class of theirs last year, in the same location at Rewley House, and really enjoyed it. Although somewhat like American extension classes, these are at a higher level, more like a conference. The room is full of Society members, mathematicians, and historians (note use of Oxford comma there). Last year I met the curator of the History of Science museum, for example.
The topic/title was “Picturing Mathematics”, but of course it’s really about history, so all papers were presented in chronological order. The class began with some issues (no coffee, no soap in the ladies’, computer problems) but really was fine. Some Notes, Part I:
Professor Jeanne Peiffer: The painter’s eyes in Albrecht Dürer’s geometrical diagram
An analysis of Dürer’s diagrams and methods from his Manual of Measurement (1525), focusing on the combination of practical use (for artists and craftsmen) and mathematics. For me, the most interesting aspect was that the book as “written for the young and for those who lack a devoted instructor”, those who have nobody to train them. Dürer said you didn’t even need his book if you already knew Euclid. Although not a theme of the conference, I would notice throughout the day how many marvelous diagrams and images have been created in order to teach them to students.
As part of his textbook (it really is a textbook) Dürer wanted the images in juxtaposition to explanatory text. This I have previously blogged about as being terribly important in online learning – proximity of image to text is crucial. In his introduction, Dürer wrote that the text and images must correspond because “the inner understanding is demonstrated by external exposition”. He wrote, “[a]nd for this reason I shall draw all things described in this book next to their explanations…” Nice to be in agreement with an artist and scholar from the 16th century. It’s the historian’s creed: Nothing is New.
Professor Hugh Small: Florence Nightingale’s statistical diagrams
This was the topic that first attracted me to the class, since I have a strong interest in the history of medicine during the Victorian era (and am considering writing a mystery novel based on that interest). Professor Small’s book is now on my must-buy list. A primary focus was on the development and use of this graphic, which Florence Nightingale created in her push for sanitation reform:
The first fascinating thing about the chart is that today we interpret it wrongly. Although it certainly shows that the amount of deaths due to disease during the Crimean War vastly exceeded the number of deaths due to war wounds, this was not the point Nightingale was trying to make. No Victorians, apparently, would have been surprised by this — death by disease in war-time had always exceeded deaths in battle.
Now that I know Professor Small is also trained in psychology, I understand how he was able to so clearly explain how graphics are interpreted: we see what surprises us. This is apparently because our visual acumen has developed for much longer in humans than our verbal acumen. When we hear something, we tend to listen for what we expect, but visually we are trained to look for things that are out of place.
So what Nightingale was trying to do, and what Victorian people would have seen, was the decline in death by disease when comparing the first (larger image) and second years of the war. What she was showing was that disease could be reduced and prevented. This was important because the elite medical community, which dominated policy in the Privy Council, had been demanding more public support to make scientific discoveries, while the trend toward public sanitation (championed by Edwin Chadwick in the 1840s) had gone out of fashion (the main board for public health had been dismantled in the 1850s). Nightingale, for example, campaigned for landlords to have to pay to hook up all houses to the new sewer systems in London.
The design of the chart is important . The statistics could just have been listed, but the spiral makes you focus differently on the information. Here it is as a bar chart:
Professor Small pointed out that it’s hard to see the difference in years, and the blue deaths are overemphasized – it looks like a chart showing things were bad that first winter (which they were, but that wasn’t her point).
She was good at this. Another of her charts he sees as “poetic” (and possible written by a poet), repeating information to get the point across that so many soldiers were dying of preventable diseases right there in the UK due to poor conditions in the barracks:
The deaths are divided by age for no particular reason – the percentage is about the same in each. But the comparison of deaths of “Englishmen” in general to “English Soldiers”, repeated over and over, hammers home the point.
In 1867, the Reform Act would vastly expand the franchise, and would end the domination of landed interests and the elite medical community, making many of her goals possible.
But the volumes were wonderful, and show why it’s a bad idea to use online translations to examine books. I have a Project Gutenburg version of these books, but they gave me no sense of scale. The books are wonderfully small – they can be carried in a jacket pocket or bag. Also, the illustrations fold out, which you cannot tell online. Plus, unlike online versions, all the ads are in the back of the actual book – wonderful ads for the University Correspondence College, which I’d mentioned to Sue on the phone I was hoping would be there. I was so enchanted that I completely missed something. See it at the top of my photo above?
The murals are actually very much darkened, but the ceiling is wonderful, because William Morris did it wrong the first time and had to re-do it. However, they had asked that I not photograph (oops, didn’t mean to), so here is someone else’s photo off Pinterest… ->
As a result the photos are much better than the Bromley scans, so for duplicate items I re-photographed. Plus, these were the whole volumes, so after photographing the articles I had on my list, I could browse through other entries and advertisements. This was particularly useful for Volume I of the University Correspondent, since it had the usual “why we’re publishing this journal” information, no doubt written by William Briggs. One of these mentioned that an interview with him had just been published in the September 1890 issue of Educational Times.
I’d had to catch a bus from Midhurst to Pulborough, then the train was late from Pulborough to East Croydon. This was past Gatwick Airport, so many people on the platform were grumbling. But apparently there were signal problems. I then caught the bus from East Croydon to Bromley, and arrived a little late. I then walked up the High Street, and found the entrance to the library, and apologized for being late.
But the archivists were so kind. I’d asked in advance if I could bring my luggage in (always an issue with today’s increased security) and they had said yes and they’d stash it behind the desk so long as I didn’t need it locked up. Unlike many archives, they let me use my laptop, and not wear gloves. Since I was done so quickly, I looked at my list. I knew that Bromley had other articles, ones I had been planning to request at the Bodleian in Oxford. So I asked for one, whether it was possible for them to bring it out even though I hadn’t requested in advance. And they did. Then I asked for another, and they did. So I asked for the rest from that journal, the University Correspondent. They got me everything they had.
Then you’re allowed into the inner sanctum, which featured a hugely long line of desks, each marked “maps” and “documents” and such, but no one was at them. At the end of the row was a single desk with a helpful woman who had a “supervisor” sign on her desk, and she apologized for no one manning the other desks. Since I had come, as she explained, “specially to see this one thing” (the Scheme from the school), she had them hurry and get it for me. A mission I thought would take all afternoon (I’d been nervous about spending the morning in Midhurst) took less than an hour. The booklet, like most archival material one is discovering, was useful in an entirely different way than I expected. I was looking for mention of the grants or ushers or student assistants. None of these were in the document, which was more concerned with setting up the Governors’ Board and delineating financial responsibilities. But it did make clear that the Head Master (which I think they knew was already Horace Byatt) was completely in charge of hiring Assistant Masters, determining all books, establishing teaching methods, setting class times, and generally running the internal affairs of the school. It also made clear that the Head Master could have no one but family members living with him at the school, which reveals yet another reason that Wells couldn’t lodge at the school when he returned.
Returning to Midhurst, I made a point of eating a sandwich at the Olive and Vine, which is too expensive for dinner. As mentioned, this was the old sweet shop where Mrs. Walton had given Wells his first good meals, and where he had lodged upstairs of the shop. Copies of Wells’ fiction were on display near the newspaper buffet at the bar. I wondered whether the Tudor beams had been visible and painted during Wells’ time. I know the Victorians loved old stuff. Of course, they also loved new stuff. Really, they just loved stuff.
Wells was tutored in the evenings by Horace Byatt, headmaster of Midhurst Grammar school, to learn Latin, in which he was deficient. This apprenticeship also didn’t work out, so Sarah enrolled him early that year at Midhurst Grammar School, likely so he could board with the Byatts at South Pond (I cannot find the house) while the school, which had burned down, was still being rebuilt.
s to things like “L1” so you can squeeze the column smaller in the gradebook.
, and has been implemented fiercely. I have already spoken with faculty who have been told that the materials they set up for sound pedagogical reasons will not do — they must be changed to provide students simpler, clearer pathways and simple downloadable materials. The intent is clearly to reduce the complexity of all online classes in order for them to be seen as “excellent” by OEI.
The implication is that any depth must exist within the instructional materials accessed through the system. At the top level, the environment in which the student must work, the danger of cognitive overload is mitigated by providing as few options as possible. It is a clear return to 4th grade “computerized learning”, the kind that takes place in a lab. Pupils sit at stations, and the software guides them step-by-step by pressing as few buttons as possible. With visual and touch-screen interfaces, this is now even easier. Complete a small task, get instant feedback, press ‘Next’.
Although at first there had been plans to teach information literacy as a school requirement, this trend has tapered off because of such ease of use. In many places, information literacy is still articulated as a goal, but is not implemented in any meaningful way. The result has been students who have no idea what to type into Google when asked to find, for example, information about American imperialism in the late 19th century. We already are aware of the challenges of distinguishing between good and bad sources of information, and want students to distinguish between a scholarly source and a pop culture source. But instead of increasing skills, the fear of bad websites has led to banning certain things, through filters in grade schools and syllabus dictates in college. (When I encouraged my student to use Wikipedia to find primary sources, she was aghast, telling me it had been drilled into her head for years never to use Wikipedia for school.)
