An Interview with Greg Barton
“Inter” refers to the interviewer and “Greg” refers to the respondent Greg Barton
INTER:	Greg, you’ve developed three new units for Politics and Policy Studies and Asian Studies this year, can you tell us a little bit about the nature of those three subjects and maybe how you have tried to reflect your scholarly and research interests in regard to the development subjects?
GREG:	Well two of the units are politics units and naturally belong together, the third unit is the odd one out, that it’s a level one Asian Studies unit. So the level one Asian Studies unit is designed to complement a first semester level one Asian Studies unit, as a broad introduction to Asian Studies. It’s unlike lots of Asian Studies units in that it covers the whole of Asia and its focus is entirely contemporary. It’s a paired unit it has some historical background on colonialism and so forth. This is just focusing on the here and now and it’s looking at social and cultural changes. So in terms of content it’s a little unusual . It was made possible or at least easy to put it together because of there being a good textbook which it could be based around. A text written in such a fashion meant, it was relatively straightforward to find extra readings and assemble an online and off campus, as well as an on campus unit that would make that work. Where there’s not such a text, perhaps the content would have had to be more conventional, or more work would have had to be done putting it together. The two politics units are part of an initiative to expand the politics major and put an international element in, one Political Leadership looks at political leaders, mostly heads of government from around the world from Abraham Lincoln through to John Howard and with Mahatma Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi and Winston Churchill and so on in the middle and it’s reasonably conventional, except that it’s got a novel element that it focus on political leadership and does so in a way that hasn’t traditionally been done. The ideas for the most part are familiar ideas, but the concept of moral capital which come from John Kane’s text on that same subject there’s a novel way of interpreting why it is that some leaders can do more with less, than the on paper calculation would suggest was possible and their ability to move people because of moral suasion and their ability to communicate a sense of purpose and sense of character. So it’s obviously all about impressions rather than necessarily, about objective substance it’s a fascinating thing to try and figure out and so it begins with Abraham Lincoln where it’s obvious this concept of moral capital is a perfectly sensible way to interpreting him, but if you come through to the present you can even see with an unlikely candidate like John Howard, there’s some benefit at looking at a moral capital aspect. So that has an international scope and a largely contemporary focus, it does begin in the nineteenth century with Lincoln, although most of the figures are twentieth century figures and it moves chronologically forward to the present. The second unit, Global Islamic Politics also has an international sweep because it’s also looking at Muslim societies and the role of Islam whether as an ideology, or an inspiration towards liberal democratic politics across the world, it’s mostly contemporary it has to look at some developments from early twentieth century but the most important developments affecting Islamism and Islamic politics are products of the twentieth century even from the middle of the twentieth century so it’s largely contemporary in focus. It presupposes that the students have some knowledge of Islam but does introduce some ideas to them. So, it can be picked up by students doing Middle Eastern Politics, or it could be picked up by students that have done nothing in that area before. One distinguishing feature of these three units is that they all have a fairly broad scope and they are all able to fit in with a broad range of student interests and to a certain extent they represent a smorgasbord where students can choose the components that best suit them. So with Asian Studies if they’re doing Chinese language or doing Indonesian language or Arabic then they can tailor what they do to those interests geographically. Similarly with Political Leadership if they have a big interest in American politics, they can make the whole unit focus on that, they can focus on Australia politics too if they're interested, or Asian politics developing societies. With Global Islamic Politics they could give it a middle-eastern focus, or an Asian focus, they could focus on Islam and ideas or they could focus on history of political parties. There’s a lot of scope for students to choose what they do, they have to do, with the each of these three units, they have to do two essays, through the course of the semester. They then have a two hour exam in which they do two essays and they’ve got a choice out of a dozen topics, then what they are going to focus on for the two essays they write during the semester and even for the exam preparation I’ve written the exam where they have the choice of eight questions to answer to and told them they need to study half of the material. It’s up to them to choose which half and that’s deliberate, because that means they can suit these units to other units in other majors their doing and that’s made more possible than it would be otherwise because of digital delivery because the material is all digital. Delivered either online through DSO or from CD Roms. It means that they’ve got a vast amount of reading material from which to choose the items that interest them and if we were to do it in a conventional way in a printed reader then we would need to be offering them fifteen hundred, two thousand pages which is obviously not viable. Because we can offer them one thousand, two thousand pages of readings with material digitalise, it’s then possible to say look you can take the smorgasbord approach.
INTER:	In terms of the curriculum innovation side of it, to what extent did you feel as though you were initiating subjects where you had a passion and an interest, or in a sense rising to the challenge of academic leadership to come up with subjects which fitted some university view of what should be taught and how it should be taught and so on? What was the balance between you and your scholarly research interests in these areas generating the curriculum innovation as opposed to leadership expecting you to somehow innovate with these subjects?
GREG:	Well the nice thing about these three subjects particularly the two politics subjects is that they come out of academic research interests that I’m involved with. So they come out of a certain passion, certain interest. Any units we offer have to fit in with a fairly constrained environment of twelve point majors and a desire to limit the number of units on offer. I think in many wealthy American universities you can pretty much devise whatever you like and get it approved and you can pretty much teach what you want, but it isn’t the environment we find ourselves in and often you are dealing with hand me down units that have to be stitched up and repaired and you’re sort of basically obliged to work with stuff that is not your, that is not your first passion. With the two politics units that largely wasn’t the case there were things I could do that I wanted to do. It was suggested to me that the Political Leadership unit would be a good one to add to the major and I had some interest in it having written a political biography and the Global Islamic Politics unit was very much the sort of thing that I’ve been doing research on it in any case. The Asian Studies unit is less so but it draws on a lot of my research experiences. So there were units where I could, very much follow my own passions and package something up it obviously had to be packaged up with students’ interests in mind. Package something up that was a little different then what we would normally do.
INTER:	You mentioned the packaging up of the digital resources and there was audio and video and video documentary material and a lot of e-reading material. Just going through some of the audio, for example, you interviewed the author of the prescribed textbook of Political Leadership. How do you see the value of that from a student learning perspective? The idea of audio interviews with you know the author of the textbook or interviewing your colleagues in the Faculty and so on? What do you think that brought to the learning experience?
GREG:	Well 2004 were the first time these three units were taught and they were developed in a reasonable hurry, so it wasn’t that there was a long timeline for the development. I mean if you go back to like I’ll be certainly, go back to the 1990’s at Deakin you could sometimes spend a year or two fiddling around and developing a unit but it wasn’t the case this time. So I followed my intuition and thought that I had a lot of good expert material in terms of academic colleagues and others that could be drawn upon and used that I thought would benefit students and I did it fairly quickly because of the circumstances, and I thought it would be a good idea but I couldn’t be certain until you actually teach it and see how the students respond. But my impressions of the students from the student responses is that they very much liked it. You would think that given, that different people have different learning approaches, different preferences in learning that for some students having the lectures audio streamed, having audio interviews, having video material would really add something. But you don’t know till you have tried. But it certainly does seem to me that the students very much liked the extra interviews, liked the fact that it was audio material, they liked the fact that they had video material packaged in there as well. They liked the fact there was a diversity of material. I suspect if we did a thorough study we would find just as in terms of content, not all of the students are using all of the material, but the point is that there are points of contact for a diverse range of students. So I think most students most of the time found something that was helpful to them and I think that, that’s a probably useful thing to bear in mind, but we can’t ever be certain of students’ strengths, student learning styles ahead of a particular class taking a unit and so if we can make the unit broadly accessible and that means a certain level of redundancy that, that you put in more material perhaps than any one student is going to use then there will be something for everyone. I think it certainly got students’ interest up and these were interesting topics any way but the fact that they could listen to somebody talking about it and they could hear somebody who had some life experience connection, I think piqued their interests all the more.
INTER:	I think in the Global Islamic Politics unit you actually included images, photos of buildings that you took in Turkey as part of the CD Rom package for that unit. Could you just explain what you did, and why you did it, and how you actually worked with the images in the lecture situation?
GREG:	Well I think the whole, the whole sort of philosophy, if it could be called a philosophy of putting the units together was one shaped by the famous eighty twenty rule where you get eighty percent of your benefit from the first twenty percent of time invested in the task. Now obviously if you were working at NASA that final twenty percent can be quite important if you want your astronauts to come home, but for this sort of thing given that there were limited time constraints I thought it was important to get as much into it as can be done quickly and so with the still photographs it would be possible to devise some sort of narrative sequence and hypertext links and so on. I didn’t do any of that, I just made the still photographs available and talked about them in the class. But I think in terms of students get some benefit from that it was probably sufficient, I mean more can be done with more time but at a certain point you would face diminishing returns on investing a lot of time. It would be nice to look at an integrating still images and perhaps sound and hypertext but it would take a lot of time to do it and I think perhaps the best way to think about these units is that because the material is digital it’s not sitting in a warehouse from year to year. So you really can start each new year not afresh but you can add and subtract and develop and evolve with the units because you don’t have a hundred printed readers, or texts that have to be thrown away. So I’d imagine over the life span of these units they could steadily evolve and you could do more and more with them.
INTER:	None of these units are wholly online units so they are a blended teaching and learning environment with the digital, the online and the classroom teaching. What were you trying to do in terms of the classroom teaching part of it, in lectures and tutorials to complement the digital package and things that could happen online?
GREG:	My personal view of the way we teach we don’t have large contact hours it’s partly a question of finances that we just, we operate in a fairly lean mean sort of pattern. So the students have an hour of lecture and hour of tutorial which is pretty much the bare minimum. So it’s difficult to transmit a lot of new information in a space of a one-hour lecture. It is fairly easy however to include reading material and other material and good textbooks that transmits a lot of that data. So I think the lecture should be partly about transmitting data but in the first instance engaging in minds, piquing their curiosity, getting them to think through the issues challenging them and perhaps some of the things they have been reading or going through and inspiring them and directing them in their reading and the thinking through of the material and the preparation for essays. So its partly straightforward teaching, in that you can convey ideas and information, it’s more importantly about getting them to think about the material that they are interacting with.
INTER:	I had the pleasure of listening to a number of your audio streamed lectures particularly in the Political Leadership unit and there was a sense of you telling a story of the political leaders and it seemed to be slightly different to the way the leaders were presented in the audio and video interviews which were mainly more analytical but there was a strong sense of the story teller coming out in your lecturing style particularly in that unit dealing with those people. How did you feel about your style of lecturing in that type of unit? A storyteller!
GREG:	I think that any sort of good communication, I can’t think of any exceptions, any efficient and enduring, productive form of communication is going to rely upon narrative, it’s about basically telling a story. There are other approaches you can take to communication and if motivation levels are high perhaps because students have to pass the unit, you could force them to sit through a data dump and take on board that information, but it’s not a very effective communication style. It’s very much more effective to tell a simple story. Since this is the fourth of November 2004 and we are taking in the news of American Presidential election results. It’s a reminder to us that, it’s not always the case in politics that the best man or women wins, it’s generally a case of communication. Who can get across their vision, generally through more simple stories and bases of information that can be digested and internalised and I think that should be the approach with lectures as well. That textbooks and readings can convey more data. What you would like to, I think what you should try and achieve with the lecture is, that a student comes out of a lecture after listening to you talk for perhaps only fifteen minutes or forty-five minutes and has in their head some stories, some points of arguments, some nicely shaped lines of argumentation, that were interesting and accessible to the point where they have internalised them, so even if they didn’t take notes and even if they weren’t consciously paying attention to memorizing what was said, then hopefully in the next week or the next year or the next decade if that topic came up then something about the lecture which they would remember and that’s only possible if you package it in a narrative. So that was my approach with lectures, I think that’s an approach that really is generally the approach we should have with all communications, so textbooks and scholarly books and popular books and articles whatever we are doing. But in a lecture where obviously it’s an oral/aural format and particularly be mindful of the fact it’s going to be audio streamed and so off campus students can also benefit and students can go over it again and pay close attention to the detail if they like. The most important thing is to get across a narrative which is simple enough for them to understand at first hearing but also can carry them forward so they can be helped to understand the complexity of the material they are dealing with, so you sort of paradoxically want to be simple without being simplistic but at the same time you want to leave them with a sense that there’s a whole lot more to know than they thought they needed to know and it’s more complicated than they thought it was and they both understand it more clearly than they previously did but they also realise the more they know the less they will be sure of knowing. So you want to open their minds up but also leave them with some pathway into the subject material that will be enduring and memorable precisely because they have internalised it as you have given the lecture.
INTER:	There are many different communication technologies that students can use to communicate with you and you with them. What was your experience of Deakin Studies Online in terms of the communication environment in relation to other ways in which they were using communication technologies in dealing with you?
GREG:	Well it was obvious that there was a big difference between the students doing the level one doing Asian Studies unit and the students doing the level two, three politics units. With the level two, three politic units the students made more use of the chat space. With the politics unit, with sorry the Asian Studies unit, there was hardly any use made at all apart for a few questions about assessment and it really never caught fire and never built. Even with the politics units however the students are not yet use to a digital environment and not yet use to using a chat room type forum for discussing their ideas. I don’t think that students generally aren’t used to chat rooms because you only need to spend some time on the internet to realise it’s, it’s an increasing common way of getting information and even socialising exchanging things with people. But I think the idea of it being part of the unit was something new so we are still at an early stage and I think that will obviously improve. I think that there was a certain degree of resentment because the technology was not as user friendly as it could have been but the interface for WebCT Vista DSO is a model of how not to do interfaces. It’s the opposite of Apple’s IPod for example it’s got half a dozen different ways of tracking your way through levels in ways that are not consistent and not immediately and intuitively obvious and I think students often couldn’t find things that they were looking for, for that reason. We got around that to some extent by keeping the structure of our content very, very simple and I think if we hadn’t or if we had tried to make it any more complicated than we did, we would have lost more students and we, I think got a lot of student goodwill by making the material available on CD Rom. I think if they had been totally reliant on on-line delivery given that we don’t have universal broadband and we don’t have a reliable on-line environment either. The DSO environment was often slow and often down and students strongly felt there wasn’t much transparency about communicating problems with the system. That they might occasionally get good technical support but there wasn’t any sense of being, you know leveled with at what was going on. So the fact that they didn’t have to work entirely through an on-line environment I think brought a lot of goodwill. But those sort of issues I think tended to undermine student desire, to spend a lot of time on the online environment and as a result there wasn’t much use made of chat space as there could have been. Of course students have other alternatives they could use conventional e-mail, which they did. Some students I think, mistakenly used the DSO WebCT e-mail, which doesn’t work, so that was a further discouragement for them. I think if the chat spaces had been more intuitive then there probably would have been more use made of them. I know myself posting items and posting responses sometimes things would mysteriously disappear so it was frustrating. So I think probably there were some students that tried and felt frustrated and didn’t try again and they had other means of contacting me, they could phone me and the fact that they could phone my mobile phone meant that they could get through to me fairly easily I mean there’s never a hundred percent possibility of getting through the mobile phone cause I may be driving or I’m in meetings or something but it does mean that if they persist they’ll get through to me fairly quickly more so than if they were phoning my office because I work at two campuses and it would take longer to track me perhaps. So that meant that students did these things, they phoned me or sometimes they text me on my mobile phone, sometimes they’d phone land lines but they generally spoke with me or they used conventional e-mail. I don’t think that experience means that the idea of an online chat space is a foolish idea I think it clearly works for hobby interests and other interests, social interests. If you wanted to buy computer equipment if you wanted to buy photography equipment, or audio equipment and you were looking for information you would go to not just web sites, but sites with formal discussion groups and find it very beneficial. The volume of communication suggest those things work well so I don’t see why it can’t work well for us when teaching, but my experience this year, was that it was used at a fairly minimal level when it could have been used at a more extensive level. So as I said I put it down partly to the very disincentives that we have built into the system unwittingly which would discourage students and it’s clear that first year students in particular have to be particularly encouraged and helped because their not immediately comfortable with this idea and I think it will improve over the next year or two, but anything we can do in terms of the technology and in particularly the interface to make it easier than the better.
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