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 !