Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Links for 2009-12-16 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

marblemedia.com
Interactive storytelling company, Toronto
Browser Size Tester
BBC News - UK consumers enjoy 'advanced' digital communications
The UK is one of the world's most advanced countries in terms of digital communications, an Ofcom report says. The telecoms regulator said people in the UK watched more TV and sent more texts than people in many other countries, but had slower broadband. The UK remains the country with the highest proportion of households with digital TV on their main set - at 88%. The Ofcom study compared the UK with countries including France, Germany, Italy, the US, Poland and Spain. The Netherlands, Sweden and the Irish Republic were among the other countries included in the study. It found the UK had seen the highest average rise in TV viewing in 2008, up by 3.2% to 3.8 hours a day.

Owning My First Original Johanna Basford: Art Made By Twitter

2009-12-16T19:14:39+00:00

TwitterPicture was quite a feat for a young artist: Aberdeen-based artist Johanna Basford made £15,000 (about $892,000 ;-) in the space of 48 hours of twittering, by inviting normal untalented folk like me to suggest what they wanted drawn by her famous black pen.

The lovely Damien, Suzy and co at the wonderfully cool, hip and talented ISO Design thrust a stocking filler under my arm this evening. And I'm now the proud owner of Twitter's first piece of crowdsourced art, made by Aberdeen-based artist Johanna earlier this year.

In theory, at least, I've also helped make this masterpiece, as mine was one of 230 tweets that fed the end-result - an A3 line-art collage, of the distinctive style that will make Johanna a Turner-winner one of these days (I hope). It now takes pride of place in the living room, where I am reminded of contributions made by quite a few of my twitter buddies.

At the end of Day One, the Central Station arts platform, on which I've been working with ISO, joined the push to get as many people as possible to promote the project and chip in with their own ideas for inclusion. The result is fascinating and beautiful, with "any dinosaur in casual attire" resting next to my own "a baby's first laugh". You can see all 230 suggestions on the artists' certificate of authentication, and come around to mine for a cup of tea to find them all.

It's a beautiful living room piece, and the first original artwork I've ever owned. But it strikes me that this could be an almost weekly occurrence in art and design classrooms around the world - it's Twitter storytelling for artists.

Catriona's already started trying to emulate Johanna. She's got a bit to go, but she'll get there one day. You can see some of the detail in it on my Central Station art profile, and follow CenSta on Twitter to catch the next time there are fun happenings like this.

How Mobile Cell Phones Change Everything When We Do

2009-12-15T20:51:42+00:00

Will Richardson posts the above picture and asks

"how many educators look at that picture and think "OMG, puhleeeeese let me teach in that classroom!" (I suspect not many)".

He points out that with the mobile technologies already in our students' pockets we're probably not far off that level of ubiquitous kitting out in our schools already. He's right. But he's less right in implying that great teachers would want to teaching in that classroom.

Further on Will points out that often teachers and decision-makers can get hung up on the "what technology" question, rather than the "curriculum question". This might be a linguistic anomaly, but curriculum, to me, is deciding what we learn, when. It is important, but the most important peg on which we need to hang our thought is pedagogy, which is about how we learn. Teachers decide pedagogy, not administrators, authorities or Governments. That's why teachers discussing not tech, but teach, becomes ever more vital as technologies open up new ways to approach learning.

But linguistic anomalies are the stuff of learning, so I hope Will doesn't mind me challenging this one, and seeing what we really think it possible if we could encourage colleagues to move beyond "OMG puhleeeeese" statements.

The reason the picture presents a dubious message is that neither curriculum nor pedagogy have changed an iota in this learning space: it's about the same layout - with as many apples on laps - as a Victorian classroom would have appeared.

It's not an image to proud of, to smile at, to wonder at, or one I'd want to be in. It sums up the biggest challenge facing learning: too many educators look at that and think all of above.

What can we aspire to?

The other night Stephen Heppell pointed out the Education_2010 report that he, Graham Brown-Martin and other luminaries had pulled together in 1999, outlining what they thought technology would be doing for learning in 2010. The predictions and visions hinted at in that Garamond/Helvetica-shocker of a ClarisWorks document are not far off what we're close to as hurl towards the end of this decade. And that, in no short measure down to the work of the authors in promoting mobiles' inevitable conquest of learning spaces. The key message: learners will all have access to portable 'micros'. The micros, though, are maybe not the laptops or notebooks, even, that photos like the above one hint at.

Christmas Cracker Research

It's particularly apt as the decade ends with a supposedly "credit crunch Christmas" where iPhones and iPod touches, and cheaper but no-less effective smartphones with the major carriers, will be appearing under the trees of our youngsters (and, in what even I, a gadget fan, would consider a touch of spoiling, in their stockings).

In the UK the changes in equipment provision is already happening, and in the US it's going to follow really soon: the image of students locked to their laptops could change to a more human image of students talking to each other face-to-face, and using their mobile phones for research, reference and recording.

That change from the tech-oriented to the person-oriented could change, but it needs teachers, not tech, to make that change happen.

In the UK children have owned and used mobile phones at any kind of scale in schools (legitimately or otherwise) for about six years. I remember the Christmas when they all came back with them. The next year it was the mp3 player. This Christmas I bet it'll be the hyprid iPod Touch or iPhone (if they're lucky). What kids get for Christmas one year is nearly always the forerunner to what is really desirable in a few years' time. Where mp3 players were the hot item in 2003, the iPod shuffle and mini took until 2005 to hit the mainstream school audience. Where iPhones and iPod touches hit the Christmas pressie list in 2009, there will be something more profound and far more widespread in adoption in 2011.

If you want the real aficionados head to South Korea and Japan for a lesson in ubiquity, but still, I wouldn't bet on their curriculum or pedagogy having changed much as a result (and their relative educational success is more likely down to the insane hours students and their private tutors put in, compared to the average three weeks' per year absenteeism of Scottish students).

As the iPhone makes the mobile's northern American cousin, the 'cell', something more mainstream over the Pond, mobiles' learning potential is finally gaining more than a niche gadget audience's attention. It becomes even more palpable as the replacement cell phones are not of the simpler phone-text-image cariety, but, of course, the of smartphone stock. The pic below shows the scale of this: it's part of the half-a-million cells thrown out every day in the USA as people upgrade to the next, better model:

But the lessons learned about cell phone use (and handheld learning devices stuck in schoolbags) for learning in the UK, through trials, pilots and the generally higher adoption of mobile telephony here than over the Pond, risk being ignored. Most of the conversations being had in Will's monster 130-plus comment post are thinking through issues that have been thought through, put into action, analysed and researched in the UK as long as four years ago.

There's a monster post (or a book) in pointing to the work of the past decade and what it means for the next one. Many of those lessons are online, in places like the Wolverhampton Learning2Go project, whose initial work in mostly offline potential of PDAs was groundbreaking, or the Consolarium in Scotland which has pioneered games-based learning using devices often hidden away in school bags, not a pioneering effort in theory, I hasten to add, but in hard-to-initiate classroom practice.

Finally, though, it is heartening to see that the pedagogy of Higher Education institutions is changing. The above picture is still far from being out-of-date - for many campuses it's still light-years ahead. But iPhone-equipped students of Abilene university in the States have seen their lecturers change from information-transferal mode (that's what Google's for) to educator, leader and even developer roles in the lecture hall.

It’s like a mashup of a 1960s teach-in with smartphone technology from the 2000s.

Each participating Abilene instructor is incorporating the iPhone differently into their curriculum. In some classrooms, professors project discussion questions onscreen in a PowerPoint presentation. Then, using polling software that Abilene coded for the iPhone, students can answer the questions anonymously by sending responses electronically with their iPhones. The software can also quickly quiz students to gauge whether they’re understanding the lesson.

... And if students don’t understand a lesson, they can ask the teacher to repeat it by simply tapping a button on the iPhone.

This is the exception to the rule. Heck, it's in Wired. [Update: My good friend, former Pentagon man and superb Ireland-based educator Bernie Goldbach, blogs on what his students are doing with their Nokias, and the joy they have researching with them.] But a student in the story outlines why making these fundamental changes to access to technologies, whether that is giving it away for free (in Abilene) or just allowing students to bring out the panoply of kit from their Christmas 09 haul, is a no-brainer:

“They’re preparing us for the real world — not a place where you’re not allowed to use anything.”

Links for 2009-12-15 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

Do people in the music industry understand music? - Rory Sutherland's Blog - Blogs - Brand Republic
People don't really see the difference between the best and the least-likely-to-be-shite. Best plump for the least-likely-to-be-shite if you're hitting the mainstream for something.
How the iPhone Could Reboot Education | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Abiline Uni iPhone trial - changes in pedagogy
JEREMIE Fund
The JEREMIE venture capital fund (Joint European Resources for Micro to Medium Enterprises Initiative) as it is provisionally known, is the first fund of its type in England and will formally be open for business from 22 January 2010, when all financial and legal clearances will be in place. The European Investment Bank - which has contributed £62.5m and the European Regional Development Fund 2007-2013 and One North East - jointly contributing £62.5m - have all cleared their finance for the £125m scheme.

Links for 2009-12-14 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

Contractor Calculator Resources :: Calculators for IT Contractors and Small Business Owners :: Contractor UK
"Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"
As of late, we've been talking a lot about content streams, streams of information. This metaphor is powerful. The idea is that you're living inside the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it. The stream metaphor is about reaching flow. It's also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society. Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. This state is delicate, plagued by information overload and weighed down by frustrating tools. ...Think about how we monetize sociality in physical spaces. Typically, it involves second-order consumption of calories. Venues provide a space for social interaction to occur and we are expected to consume to pay rent. We've yet to find the digital equivalent of alcohol.
What does #xfactor mean on Twitter? Definition of tags
Culture doesn't always carry on the web

Collaboration with a point: Help Me Fix The Last Picture Of My Mom

2009-12-14T20:22:00+00:00

All too often I see examples of collaboration on the web that just don't stand up to the initial "so what?" test. The end results could have happened without the technology, people collaborate to find out things that just don't matter to most folk or they are contrived as if to solely provide an example for a snakeoil salesman to regurgitate at his next dubious conference keynote.

But Reddit provided the platform for some technically talented creative people to make a fundamental human difference to the individual initiating things:

My mother died of cancer yesterday. This is the last picture of us together and I wondered if anyone with mad Photoshop skills could touch up the picture and remove the oxygen cannula. I would greatly appreciate anyone who could be of assistance.

Follow the discussion trail to see how respondent after respondent tries to build on the work of the photoshopper before him or herself. Heartening stuff, and meaningful.

How many times can the collaboration we all take part in, online or in endless meetings at work, be called either heartening or meaningful? One worth thinking about the next time you enthusiastically embrace 'collaboration'.

Thanks to Dean Shareski for saving this to his online bookmarks for sharing.

The Edinburgh Informatics' Startup Café has a lecture from Reddit's founde r , Alexis Ohanian, explaining how the site came into being and what makes it such a great space for these kinds of collaborations.

Links for 2009-12-13 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

Boxee
Open source social IPTV
Welcome To Clipsync : Leading the Social TV Revolution
Clipsync are actually the underlying technology behind several of the services featured here (Epix, CBS, TV.com etc). They bring the basic capability for remote individuals to come together as groups to be represented as avatars or text fields watching simultaneously streamed content. They have a vision and one area of their site I found interesting was their mini history of social TV
tvChatter iPhone Application
tvChatter is a free application for the iPhone and iPod touch that presents real time Twitter-fueled commentary about your favorite TV shows. Watch your show on your TV or PC, launch the tvChatter app on your device, choose the show from the social program guide, and watch the streaming commentary text. If you have a Twitter account, you can post your own comments, reply to others or filter on your followers for a more intimate conversation.
Tweetminster search
Sentiment detection on the elections, issues, MPs
CloudSplit - Real-time Cloud Analytics. Real-time spending insight. Real-time cost control.
Real-time spending insight, real-time cost control.
Blog Smarter | Zemanta Ltd.
Realtime recommendations for connected material as you write.
Vision « C.S.I: Wonderland
New approach to a classic - social media used to track one group's learning and discovery of Alice in Wonderland, and bring in related elements from throughout the web
Sunderland Software City
Sunderland Software City is a new initiative, based in the North East of England, designed to inspire and encourage the growth of the Software Industry in the region, and to make the area an attractive location of choice for software businesses.
Welcome to DigitalCity Business - Digital City Business
Welcome to DigitalCity Business - the business driver for the DigitalCity Tees Valley, fast becoming the UK’s most vibrant digital hub.
Common Purpose | Leadership Development Programmes
Common Purpose offers a wide variety of programmes designed to suit every kind of emerging or existing leader.
Author William Poundstone Dissects the Marketing Tricks Built Into Balthazar's Menu -- New York Magazine
In his new book, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It), author William Poundstone dissects the marketing tricks built into menus—for example, how something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak.

Extreme Commuting: 2009 Travel in Review

2009-12-13T18:35:24+00:00

Doing anything three times or more on a blog almost makes it annual custom, so I wasn't going to disappoint. This year's travel was about 50% less in mileage than in 2008: 41,902 miles compared to 2008's 82,000 miles or so. But the map's not a global one. It's highly localised. Something's up.

While fewer miles have been flown, most of this travel has been done in what Mark Penn spotted a decade ago and coined as "Extreme Commuting". That is, I've been one of a couple of hundred people who regularly make the commute from Scotland to London each and every week for work, often coming back within 18 hours of leaving home. It's a trend that, thankfully, is becoming less and less common as companies feel the economic pain of sending someone around the world for face-to-face time. In January I noticed that my plane was less about 30 suited and booted regulars from the previous six months. By August, they had been replaced by tourists filling up cheap seats on their way home to the States and the Far East.

Extreme commuting is tiring by its regularity, bad food at weird times, and the sneaking suspicion that your constantly stuffed-up nose is related to the circulated air you consume four times a week. You feel hungover for the day before and after your extreme commute, regardless, I'm afraid to say, of how much fun with a bottle of shiraz you have actually had.

Heading into the new year, I'm not sure the amount of travel will decrease too much, but it will be on longer adventures, to hotter places, and just a few of them. Some of them, dear reader, might even be to see you. Bring on 2010.

Yann Thiersen Plays "Amélie" on Six iPhones

2009-12-13T11:42:00+00:00

Yann Thiersen composed the music to one of my favourite French films, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. In the video clip above he plays the Comptine D'Un Autre Eté: L'après-midi on six iPhones. Bluetooth-iPhone-App-tastic.

Links for 2009-12-12 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-13T00:00:00-08:00

Father Christmas and the Flawed Business Plan: Alex - 38minutes

Links for 2009-12-08 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-09T00:00:00-08:00

Google Analytics Blog: Holiday Bonus: More Great Features
Do you ever wonder about an inexplicable change in your traffic? Or forget exactly when you launched something, or who was responsible? After scratching your head, did you have to chase down different departments in your company or go digging through old emails to get an answer? For instance: * Was that dip in traffic because the servers went down? * When did the new display ads campaign launch? * Who's responsible for the checkout page redesign and when did it go live? Running around asking everyone from marketing, IT, and product doesn't scale. More and more large companies are using Google Analytics, so we wanted to cut down on the mileage you need to cover to account for everything that happens to your website and online marketing. This week, the wild goose chase is over -- you can now easily denote unexplained dips or spikes and figure out "what happened" with the launch of Annotations in Google Analytics.
New Teen-Produced Reality Series Shows How Teens Use Digital Media to Shape Their Lives » Spotlight
Spotlight is thrilled to announce the launch of “StudentSpeak,” a new teen-produced reality series on how teens use digital media in their day-to-day lives. Every other week, Chicago students will take viewers inside their world, and show how technology is transforming how they think, learn and socialize. Watch the sneak preview produced by Ben Wolff.
SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who is curating a new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, talks to SPIEGEL about the place lists hold in the history of culture, the ways we try to avoid thinking about death and why Google is dangerous for young people.
Facebook makes us face facts about impact of lifestyle | Irish Examiner
IF you ever doubted a man’s face is his autobiography and a woman’s her work of fiction, look no further than the latest Facebook application. MirrorMe, launched yesterday, simulates facial ageing in a manner unlikely to conclude that your face will remain your fortune. Instead, having weighed up the effects of lifestyle, and availing of CSI-style facial recognition technology, MirrorMe will give a no-wrinkles-barred presentation of what your kisser will look like going into the future.

Links for 2009-12-07 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-08T00:00:00-08:00

Dean Street Townhouse hotel in London's Soho
Bedrooms are available from £95 in sizes tiny, small, medium and bigger and feature either king-size or super king-size beds and are equipped with treat-packed mini-bars, free wireless internet, Sony flat screen TV's with Sky plus and DVD, and bathrooms with rainforest showers complete with Cowshed goodies. Hotel reservations can be made using the online system.
Fox and Anchor London Gastro Pub and Accommodation
Welcome to the Fox & Anchor, a beautifully renovated traditional pub in the heart of Clerkenwell, serving the finest local food and with a suite of six luxury rooms upstairs. Doubles from £95
4 0 W i N K S
Doubles from £99 Situated in vibrant and trendy East London, David Carter’s home is a historic and elegant four storey Queen Anne townhouse built in 1717. David is an internationally acclaimed interior designer (check out his super cool website at www.alacarter.com), and the extensive work he has carried out has generated hundreds of pages of editorial in leading interiors magazines all over the world.
Hoxton Hotels: Book cheap hotel rooms in Central London
Doubles from £79 The Hoxton Urban Lodge, where urban living meets country lodge lounging, opened in September 2006. With roaring fires and cool cocktails, fabulous linen and flat screen TVs, sumptuous duck down duvets, Aveda bathroom products and free WiFi. With 205 bedrooms, the Hoxton Grille Restaurant and 6 meeting and event rooms, the Hoxton Hotel redefines the urban hotel experience.
Towergate Insurance - Europe's largest independently owned insurance intermediary
Professional indemnity and liability insurance: Towergate is Europe's largest independently owned insurance intermediary and a driving force within the industry. Offering over 200 specialist insurance products, underpinned by strong relationships with some of the UK's leading insurance companies, we're committed to providing customers with insurance they can trust.
Pretty Loaded - a preloader museum curated by Big Spaceship
Pretty things to look at while you wait for things to load.
Fancy a coffee morning? – Colin Gilchrist
Spending time with Ewan and Darcie at Channel 4ip, giving seminars with Mike to Business Gateway, testing new social media product launches, asking for help or advice, putting people together that could benefit from an introduction – hell I’ve even recommended it to recruitment companies. The gem of course has been learning about and taking part in 38 Minutes – which is Scotland and Northern Irelands answer for Media people to Bebo for the over educated… The dominance of this group are a core of freelance very knowledgeable social media people (some have since gone on to work with bigger companies) however it occurred to me that, right there in that room we could solve just about any problem or provide the solution to almost any situation that involved social media. So why don’t we harness it – why don’t we create this social media collective “agency” that answers all those questions you ever had or wanted to know about social media?
Antbits Illustration
Medical animation specialists
“I want MyPolice for Christmas”
“I want MyPolice for Christmas..What a promising and exciting product mypolice is: its independence and user-friendliness making it especially useful for engaging people from those groups who may feel nervous about approaching the police directly: groups who tend to under-report crime, and whose community safety needs may be less clear to the police as a consequence “ Paul Matheson, Equality & Diversity Co-ordinator, Strathclyde Police
Cost of employment [TechScribe software documentation]
Different websites suggest that the full cost of employing someone is between approximately 40% (www.interimmanagementuk.com/management-cost.htm) and 100% (www.startinbusiness.co.uk/flowchart/4flowchart_employment.htm) of an employee's salary, plus the salary itself. How are the numbers calculated? We did not find a detailed cost model that is accepted by professional organisations or HM Government. Therefore, we designed a cost model (cost-of-employment-calculator.xls), with the help of people from UKBF (www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk) and PCG (www.pcg.org.uk). Costs vary by employment sector. The spreadsheet is for office-based work. It is not perfect. As far as we know, there is no one correct method of calculating employee costs. For example, the marginal costs of a new employee do not increase the infrastructure cost. Therefore, do you apportion infrastructure cost to the new employee?