mobile editing on iphone

Have been learning a super audio gathering and editing tool the Poddio app for iphone which allows gathering broadcast quality sound in wav format and even assembly and basic editing on the tiny pocket screen. Getting it to full balanced mix using the laptop is child's play. This opens up amazing possibilities - really high quality audio podcast production with no equipment, using impulse and spontaneity in the field. A whole new way of reporting and processing experience. To share it with the world, nothing more is required. Hope to embed first cast here soon !

Annual Telecommuting Experiment

Second summer in which I've attempted to maintain a reasonable work out put while being physically distant from normal place of work. The changes over time are instructive.

In 2008 I was using a pay-as-you go local web-n-walk stick and the laptop was struggling with vista. Phone comms had to be by a locally-purchased handset and SIM number for the country. Iphone was crippled by absurd roaming charges. Managed after a fashion to support projects with writing, editing, commenting on sites as build proceeded etc, and client feedback.

In 2009 I am in a different location, with local wifi which makes a big difference, but the changes that have made most impact are that the PC got a memory boost so vista no longer destroys it every hour, and I have an online skype number in London so I can make and take all calls through the PC for next to no cost. The google interface connects me with the London weather and industry news minute by minute, and at last there is an Iphone app that gives me Radio 4 while I work so I feel really quite connected with the same realities as my colleagues.

The fact that I am in reality only a few KM from here (picture) no longer bothers me, or occurs to anyone ! What makes this truly different, is that the element of surprise, personal contact, unexpected twist (all that stuff that makes for interesting and deepening experience) can happen despite remoteness. That old sense that when accessing remotely you were merely turning the handle of a machine, is gone.

What's attention

Contentious argument - "the ability to shape people’s attention is now a more valuable commodity than the things around which our attention is presumably focused" - Richard Lanham, cited by Eric Gordon in an article in latest Digital Humanities Quarterly (thanks to George Siemens for link).

I'm going to use this next week in a set of sessions with MoD training experts. Is their business one where the thing you're trying to learn about is less valuable than the commanding of attention ?

I think he's right but for the wrong reason. This is a truism that has probably always been the case. That's to say, I don't think any but a hard line Platonist would have disagreed 2500 years ago. Nor would any teacher even possibly a religious teacher in the time since. So it's right because it's always been right; not because the digital age has suddenly made it a burning question.

Cebrian and the Pianist in the Whorehouse

I haven't read the full text but the extract in El Pais of Juan Luis Cebrian's new book El Pianista en el Burdel makes for compelling insight.

Cebrian takes the story back to the infancy of journalistic writing, the "Gazzetto" pamphlets distributed by Gondoliers in Seventeenth Century Venice.

Cebrian seems not to say much about it, but I think these ancient fathers of daily writing have something to inspire today's online writers. In their brand new medium, they had a total disregard for authority, and a reckless determination to find readerships.

Nevertheless, Cebrian is gloomy about the low returns of digital publishing: in El Pais's summary, "estamos ante una revolución ("y todas las revoluciones se han hecho con sangre") en la que "las costumbres de los lectores cambian más rápido que los modelos empresariales y profesionales de los periódicos". Según Cebrián la sociedad digital es una oportunidad, no una amenaza. Eso sí, el margen de beneficios en el periodismo digital (entre un 2% y un 3%) es mucho menor que en el distribuido en papel (entre un 20% y un 25 %). ¿Y en qué se traduce esa reducción? "En que por ahora se puede hacer menos inversión en capital humano, algo que afecta a la calidad de la información. Sólo hay que pensar en que la guerra de Irak se ha quedado sin enviados especiales".

I wonder if we need to be so pessimistic ?

Africa's brilliant network info system

Here's an elegant information management network which I observed in Senegal's Gares Routieres (Bus Stations) last week. These apparently chaotic and formless empty spaces are crammed with ancient vehicles, beggars, rubbish. Nothing to suggest that any system at all is operating, let alone a textbook network design in gathering and locating information.

A SEPT-PLACES (seven seater) is big car that departs when it is full, for a pre-set fare. Passengers' waiting decisisions are quite simple - they sit there until the seats are all taken, or they buy up other seats if they are impatient. We waited over two hours at Kaoloack, central Senegal, for a sept places to our destination to fill up - and had time to observe how the drivers make their waiting decisions.

Any driver wanting to run any given route writes his car number on this wooden board in a biro. Each car that departs gets crossed off. The driver can see the length of the queue of cars in front of him, make an estimate of how long till his turn comes, and decide what routes they should offer. So far so simple - just a fair queuing system.







The real genius of it is that the number on the board is also an index to locate a much more complex body of information. Working from the number, the drivers can reference someone who is likely to know the route conditions. During the wait, the drivers use the numbers to find colleagues who ran their route sector earlier that day, and get road updates. So the passengers have the benefit of latest information. A driver will always be able to tell you at the start of the journey, how long the previous driver took for that route. It's storytelling, basically, but indexed by geo-location so everyone finds the story they want,

Quality of personal contact - as in all networks - is what makes this system work. For drivers from out of town, there is a supervisor, who has a his own version of the index - a list of all next departures to all destinations written on the back of an unfolded Marlboro box. He can confirm that fairness is applied to all, and suggest routes and predict waiting times. Here he is.



What I like about this network is that the balance between the information recording system, and the roles of the human participants, is very even.

What our digital information networks often miss, is present here: the data system is above all an index to human stories and so it enables us not just to access some factual details, but also to cement networks that start with data, into personal relationships of trust and familiarity.

Also, it's real time. Information more than a few days old is discarded and doesn't clog things up. It successfully exploits the fact that the communication channel is always online.

I'd like to use this system as the basis of solving a problem where suppliers need to exchange rich information in real time. Any kind of sales management or delivery system organised this way would be very effective.

Ancient Rant of Punch

Having kids avg age 3, one has the same brain capacity. Therefore the Punch and Judy Festival is ideal. Farts, bangs, silly hidings and seekings are an easy hit. The stories are incoherently bizarre and the techniques are trite at times (thought the slapstick is always great), but there are two things that save the experience. One is the script's aside references to whatever is topical or lampoonable. The stories are so inane that you can add whatever you like in and no one will worry. The other genius is that tiny space. The universe boiled down to so little. Then, everything is possible.

They say Punch has been going strong since 1662 which means he must be very versatile to survive so long

Rationing of basic learning

DIUS (Dept of Innovation Universities and Skills) published its "new approach" to the teaching of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). See it here

As you'd expect, not one single reference to the practices and people involved in ESOL teaching. It treats ESOL as a process industry with a delivery structure that you tweak to optimize it, like insurance claims processing for example. There seems to be no acknowledgement that giving people language skills is a matter of contact, time, inspiration and good materials used well in good environments. Such a Taylorist approach may well be “new” but can it be effective ?

Also, something troubles me in the underlying assumption that “need” for language learning is a variable function of a deprivation index. Yes it is right to argue that the most excluded should be offered most attention. But No, it surely is wrong to sign up to any political economy with sliding scales of access to a fundamental entitlement like social participation through communication. Those access criteria are going to be set by political processes which may be (already are ?) venal, arbitrary, penny-pinching or hostage to interest-groups. I haven’t completely worked out what the problem is in this approach, but instinctively I’d say, “slippery”. I can’t think of any other kinds of basic education that are meted out on a socially-indexed “need” scale.

Now I expect tomorrow's DIUS proposals will be for restricting English lessons at primary school to only half of the children. And of course the Government will expect praise for setting enlightened access criteria around exclusion.

So what is it about ESOL speakers that makes them suitable for this rationing of opportunity ? Please reassure me that it’s nothing to do with their foreign origins.