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.