On Collaboration #3: John Kieffer

Ahead of our next Group Think event in May (co-produced with the Barbican Centre), on the subject of collaboration, we've been talking to some of our friends, colleagues and clients about how collaboration fits into their lives and work. So we sent out a little questionnaire and, over the next few weeks, we'll be publishing what everyone told us. Here's our third guest post, from our old friend John Kieffer, who has more hats than Lady's day at Royal Ascot, or something.

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm John Kieffer. I do lots (possibly too many) different things including: working with three friends/collaborators as John3Shelagh, advising on creative industries/arts policy and editing the odd book when we get the chance; working with mentoring producers, curators and SMEs; chairing arts and learning organisation A New Direction; some consultancy and strategic planning; working with Touch Music as a 'minister without portfolio'; advising organisations ranging from big (Tate) to small (Cafe Oto); and some of my own work as a writer and curator.

Why do you collaborate?

Hmmm. It depends very much on context, but basically it works if everyone learn things they never knew before and the job gets done.

Which collaboration tools do you like and why?

It again depends on context. Anything from googledocs to various online platforms to sitting round a table with a big sheet of paper and a couple of bottles of wine. As a fairly close observer and supporter of Heart n Soul's Dean Rodney Singers project, I'm very excited by the potential of iPads as collaborative tools - not just because of the availablity of great apps - but because of the social and convivial nature of the device itself. There's something interesting happening here I think.

When does collaboration tend to work best?

It's a terrible cliché I know but a collaboration for me really does have to result in something that's more than the sum of its parts - whether it's creative, business focused or both - to be worthwhile. I'm not entirely sure why but (in my world at least) collaborations in a commercial environment are often more successful than for example those between not-for-profit arts organisations. Possibly the former have a strong 'problem solving' impetus whereas latter are often little more than combining budgets and logos with not a lot of innovation or mutual learning.

What framework or rules do you need for successful collaboration?

Again framework and rules may vary somewhat with context but to me a true collaboration must be more than a simple combining of resources (although there's nothing wrong with that of course) and should aim to harness the creativity and intelligence of all the players and ideally open up a 'third space' that surprises everyone involved.

Briefly describe a collaboration you admire and tell us why you think it works.

An old-school musical example. The collaboration between Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny on the Song X record and tour back in the mid 80s has always been a bit of a benchmark for me. You could strong elements of both artists in the music but the results still sound like nothing made before or since. I also like the fact that the collaboration was never attempted again and was allowed to exist in its own time and space.

When has collaboration gone wrong for you?

I've had most problems with collaborations either where the ground-rules have not been properly established or the parties come to the collaboration with very different agendas and/or levels of commitment. There are some situations where collaboration is not the best way forward and a single voice or context is preferable - perhaps particularly with artists. In a particularly candid moment a distinguished theatre director described the plethora of international festival co-productions and collaborations to me as 'a kind of bland cultural mush' ....

UK arts: the place of Digital in the wake of funding cuts (2): Education

I started this thread a couple of months back; I apologised then for it being a little after-the-dust-settled, and now? Well, what can I say - we've been busy. In any case, I think this stuff still has real currency, so here goes with number two...

Pretty much every arts body has its education strategy, albeit that another term might be thought desirable (outreach, learning, creative learning... take your pick). I'll leave to one side the broader question of why these programmes exist, and whether education is sometimes oversold as a justification for public arts funding; let's just take it as read that education is a central delivery priority in the public arts world. The reasons for a commitment to digital here are clear, I think. Certainly if we're talking about teaching children and youth then, yes, it's a truism, but digital media is where they are. Digital tech is so pervasive in the lives of young people that to ignore it as an educator is, at the very least, to be missing a trick, and at worst to lose them altogether. But like I say, that is something of a truism; there are other compelling and frankly more interesting reasons teaching needs to take advantage of digital. For me, they include:

Iteration and instant feedback
The real wonder of digital interactive learning, in my book, this one. Not that it's easy to do well, but when digital systems are designed so that the student can receive instant feedback on, say, a musical performance, the speed at which they can learn is potentially staggering. Compare and contrast with the way that you very possibly learned a musical instrument as a child (certainly the way I did): a lesson, an assignment or two, then at least a week to find out how you were getting along - potentially disastrous. An awful lot can go wrong in a week: mistakes become reinforced through repetition, the student can become frustrated, truly able ones can - no will - become bored. And what an opportunity cost - no fast learner is going to want to wait a week for feedback and new stuff.

Scale

Pretty straightforward, really. No, there's no substitute for a one-on-one teacher-pupil relationship, or for small-group learning. But they sure are difficult to scale. In many ways the trail has been blazed by iTunes U on this, although in fairness this was something grasped decades before the web by the Open University in the UK and other distance learning organisations around the globe. The opportunity to reach a vastly larger (and by implication more diverse and geographically disparate) student base via the web is something to be seized upon by an educator with an interest in widening impact.

Peer-mentoring
Over the years we've been fond of showing many of our clients YouTube clips of young musicians trying to master the combination of polyrhythmic complexity, tonal savagery and absolute accuracy which defines the work of Swedish math metal band Meshuggah. Clips like this:

We could have chosen any number of artists or genres, of course, but the difficulty of Meshuggah's music illustrates our point graphically. What we've always drawn attention to is the comments threads. Now anyone who's  spent any time at all looking at YouTube will know that the language in the comments threads is somewhat, well, robust. Reading these threads when they're at their worst can make you despair for the species, but look closely and you'll see that there's a definite kind of encouragement going on, albeit a challenging and competitive one. Do the "dudes" in this ad hoc community consider themselves peer mentors? I very much doubt it, but the results are compelling; I've watched kids progress at  a rapid pace in this environment - faster, I warrant, than many of them would have done in a conventional learning environment. Apart from anything else, what kind of teacher would use that kind of language? 

Social rewards

This relates closely to the point on peer mentoring, in truth; the kids showing off their shred* guitar prowess on those clips are doing so for complex and various reasons, but among them are undoubtedly what we might term social rewards. Justin and I were discussing this very issue recently and pondered: why are exams considered a kind of hell on earth which plague our panic-striken dreams years after the fact... and yet people pay to enter pub quizzes? Well, obviously, it's partly because our schooling system insists that our entire lives depend on exam results, but there's something else: that many of us enjoy showing off our knowledge, no matter how trivial, and pub quizzes provide an environment in which it's acceptable to do this. And so does the web. I'm not suggesting that all the best learning should be competitive - and in any case, the pub quiz is as much about collaboration as competition (no one enters on their own). But the kind of shared public spaces the web does so well provide the perfect environment for a socially-driven kind of learning experience.

The disguising of educational purpose
I would hazard that much of the best, most profound learning we ever do we do without thinking about it as "learning" at all, and certainly not education or schooling. We learn when we try out a new recipe, when we're gaming, and yes, when we nail that insane guitar lick. The digital arena is a rich and potent learning environment without ever necessarily being explicit (and I didn't pick the examples of cookery, games and shred by accident). Canny educators can use this aspect of the web to their advantage: Trojan Horse teaching.

Richness of assets
Finally... I'll be saying a word in a later post about arts archives, but I want to note here that arts bodies sit on treasure troves of content: performances, lectures, interviews and of course all that metadata embedded in listings. Where so much teaching around the arts in the past has been somewhat abstracted from the arts themselves (certainly based on the experience of my own education in the 70s and 80s) arts organisations are in a unique position to aggregate learning around real examples of art in practice.

In my next post then, I'll look at some of the issues around the arts and archives.

* As much circus as art, 'shred' is the practice of absurdly difficult musical technique, most especially (although not exclusively) performed on the electric guitar. With antecedents in Hindustani raga, bebop, klezmer and bluegrass, it is now widely understood to be a subset of metal and hard rock. Just so you know.