Butetown

Can Butetown - the Cardiff Docks - be regenerated through digital inclusion ? Just beginning to think about this with David Barrie. Together we met community leader Keith Murell – a fantastic Somali-Norwegian social entrepreneur who heads up Communities First. Where physical connection has failed, what about virtual communication ?

Butetown has certainly had its guts and soul clobbered by speculative Barratt developments that will never in a million years create any social wellbeing. Gated piles of boxy one-bed flats stacked in viewless blocks. I think no Victorian tenement comes close to Century Quay for its ability to blight and disfunctionalise the inhabitants. Socially responsible development only please !

I think the ray here might be that this community, while alienated from Wales, is very plugged in to the rest of the World. No one in Cardiff listens to them, but plenty of people in Somalia do.

But this will be a process of patience, gradualism, and modest aims. Plan to start with a few community websites.

Steve Bloom’s African Photographs

Son Remy (13) is a wannabe travel photographer. We went to launch of African Photographer Steve Bloom’s latest book of prints, Living Africa. Amazing Christmas present. The shots in Senegal gave us renewed encouragement to try to get there next year for our annual African jaunt.


The ritual of the printed page, the gorgeous photo, the bound book - so atavistic, so entrenched, so compelling. Bloom is a fabulous mix of swashbuckling yarnspinner and humble technical perfectionist, mad and patient enough to wait four days for one shot.


Remy got promoted to higher sets in Science and French and German. He’d worked hard for this, wanted it, and was very pleased. Life comes together around 13, one begins to find out what is one’s groove.

Slovenian skip

Looks like a collaboration with Slovenia’s Institut Jozef Stefan is on the cards. I’d corresponded with VideoLectures.net producer Sebastjan Mislej for a year, and we arranged to meet last summer on the shores of Lake Bohinj while I was walking the Julian Alps with the kids. We hit it off and decided to look for ways to work together.
Now we seem to have one – an element of the consultancy project I have just taken on for the UK Higher Education Funding Council will be delivered from Ljubljana by him and his team.

Social learn is off

Didn’t get into the social learn competitive dialogue. A big disappointment. Our PQQ scored 672 out of 1000 points. Life sometimes makes you adopt your positions regardless of what you actually feel: there are two possible “takes” on social learn. Visionary forward preparation. Superfluous challenge to worldware. I have to stand on the latter side now….

Of Bricks and Buildings

Bricks or Buildings
Discussing with my brother who is a Neuroscientist about how the discipline of science is responding to the influence of digital publishing and electronic networking between the practitioners.

Science production is slow piecemeal construction, brick by brick, of a wall of evidence which eventually becomes strong and tall enough to be a lasting structure. Each scientist toils away to make a few bricks – with experiments, replications, revised hypotheses, improved data. Sometimes (rarely) they get a chance to step back and synthesise all these bricks into their rightful place, allowing knowledge to move on a step, and providing a basis for the next layer of knowledge. The crucial process to ensure the strength of the bricks, and their ability to sustain the entire structure, is the rigorous examination of their quality by informed peer criticism. This takes place in face to face social rituals which are geared to challenging each scientist’s output and toughening it. Seminars and closed sessions in conferences. Named peer review in closed communications.

So far, online and electronic systems have not made inroads into these ritual processes. The forum of the physical seminar meeting – unrecorded and unminuted – allows for transactions in which criticism is advanced, tempered, withdrawn, adopted – without any earlier versions or procedural comments becoming part of the documented record. Scientists are trained in these rituals, know how far to push their critiques, and are not frightened of rigour or aggression because it is contained by agreed conventions.

Digital culture on the other hand fetishises the single utterance, by giving it status and permanency, connecting it to other significant discourse. Moreover, the online world lacks the machinery for stepping back from its proximity to specific digital objects and synthesising a wider and acceptable theory about a topic. When that happens, it’s usually at a social ritual (witness the recent web 2.0 Berlin conference consensus that web 2.0 has to grow out of flipping and instead create social value).

Also talked about the challenge of properly reviewing publications in science. For all bar the very top journals, reviewing is now effectively based on proxy criteria: what else has this person published, was it OK, does this paper have any obvious flaws. Adequate answers return a green light for publication. So this is a candidate for automation or automatons. The very top journals still operate a reviewing policy which demands that readers confirm there is original and significant science. That’s why citations in those journals are such coveted prizes.

The end of genuine editorial assessment ?

In my work on language testing, I am seeing the end of examination by an individual. Oral exams now test candidates ability to replicate a procedure.

Internet works by chaos and flapjacks

A thoughtprovoking feature on the web's own internal chaotic evolution from Stowe Boyd the self-professed social revolutionary. He talks about the "web of flow" and how many of our applications interrupt and stop the flow.

Another radical web event - a community regeneration in Bosnia - is subject of a talk by Lee Bryant. Great data on what happens when you take a trashed community and give it tools to communicate.

All this while baking the flapjacks for the Church Halloween Kids Party tonight. Flapjacks are the perfect baking for while you are working

My recipe:
200 g oats in a bowl. Coarse jumbo oats is my preference. Mix it up with 3tbsp sugar, and anything tasty you fancy. I put seeds, nuts, raisins, nutmeg, cinnamon, whatever it to hand. Even uneaten museli will help
150 g butter, melted with 1 tbs syrup and 1 tsp molasses
Mix this all up well, put it onto a baking tray and bake it at mark 4 for 15 to 20 minutes. Undercook if in doubt. Edges going brown shows it's ready.

Cut it into squares not straight away, but before it's cold.

Enjoy.

Social Work

One of the great things about the work at the moment, is that the value and the mission is all in non-commercial engagements around goals which are fundamentally about public good.

I'm really excited about a project with the former Schumacher (he of small planet) Development charity, now renamed ">Practical Action So far it is just a dialogue with their team of experts in how knowledge transforms lives. I bring what I know about how digital networks enable knowledge to move around. There might be a conversation later about jointly proposing work in this area to DFID, about how their ideas could be scaled up. It's a special pleasure to be working in Polish with their knowledge guru Zbigniew Mikolajuk, who is a tall energetic polymath. I like his favourite observation, "technology doesn't frighten me. People do". Polish vocabulary and mindset has a great genius for precision - and I see it more in men of Zbiszek's generation (he's a Solidarnosc exile) than in the younger Poles I mostly know. I mostly get to use sloppy domestic and emotive Polish at home - I'm seldom exposed to this treasuretrove of exacting and structured reasoning.

A contact who blogs on headshift writes about a possible social regeneration project we have been discussing. If he runs an 'un-conference' on this digital/social media initiative, essentially an open brainstorm, such as is necessary to get public sector engagement, might this go against the commercial imperative I ought to have as a consultant who's working mainly for a commercial company. The interesting thing is that actually it's the contrary. In any case my terms leave me pretty free to contribute my time and energy wherever I think's best, and I'm chosing to give energy this year not to areas laden with money, but rather to fringe ones that might expose me to problems and areas which are way outside the main moneypots.

The stuff with ESOL on facebook has been all about reaching disenfranchised asylum seekers. And I've had more insights from that into how you get complex content into web 2.0 than I've had from any number of whizzo commercial contracts. Because it's a genuinely new area, where no one has sought for solutions before. It happens that I also talk a lot about ESOL with the top commercial publisher in the field, and we have won several big online production contracts from them. No names given ! But the work was not nearly so innovative as what we did for zero money on the fringes of society. The ESOL client wrote to me today, is puzzled by the small worlds application I built, so I have asked them to meet me there. Check it out in small worlds by searching from Tinopolis ESOL location when you have got your avatar. It's a great AR environment, beats Second Life any day.

Languages and the Social

Meeting colleagues at Open University to frame our joint bid to run the Government online language support service Open School for Languages.

One tendency: build a specialised LMS system to handle this requirement.

Other tendency: simply show that lots of already widely used free applications even Twitter can be bent to use foreign language communication. And let them submit that for validation.

Exciting thing here is that if you can talk directly to the kids - and take the stuffy conservative learn - and - churn approach of the teachers out of the loop... why then you might actually harness kids' natural urge to communicate and to build bridges !

Languages whether foreign or native are just ways to make contact and communicate - and the web can make that possible better than language instructors... maybe...

Moodle or mishmash

Today's project: need to finalise a proposal and recommend a system for managing learners and their learning for a project for HEFCE the UK Higher Education Funding Council. University-linked, but not on campus. My boss says the behemoth of all learner management systems (Moodle) should be the choice. I say no. I think the day of large customised systems - however open - is gone. The fact that it is open source is yesterday's battle. The new frontier is: how to read and amalgamate the unstructured mass of content that everyone creates everywhere in a messy undisciplined way. No one wants to be trammelled into an institional VLE. They want to stay on the pages where they have their own passwords pictures and followers. And do their learning from there.

Martin Weller's blog on this is the starting point

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Nursery Mess

IN a spare hour before work on Friday I did bread-making with the kids at Eryk's school. See picture.

The staff took the photos and want to have a disk from me "so that we can show it to the Ofsted inspectors as proof of parental involvement".

Sauce for the goose sauce for the gander.

Why the mess

You decide to blog. You look for a theme, a point of view, something particular to give it definition.

I found this : my things that are public enough to talk about online don't add up to a very rich and diverse life. I raise the kids, and I do work. There's not much time left after that for anything interesting. But I do love the way I am doing it. With unpredictability and often anarchy extending across both my play and professional life. The two feed off each other, not in a neat replicable way, but in a way I like and I feel comfy with. I thrive on the randomness of flitting between toddlers or teenagers one minute, and digital strategies the next.

It's not the mess of domestic chaos, nor of professional incompetence. I don't do those. It's the mess that invades from unexpected and sometimes unwanted energies around me - and fills the days and weeks with stuff that always changes, never bores, and continually excites.

That's the blog. Messy times !