Preoccupations

Newspaper Club

Last week, just as term finished, the team behind a school magazine, Black & White, published issue 72. What made this issue different was that they had chosen to run with Newspaper Club. Kudos to Tom Turner (Year 12) for leading the student team in this new venture. (I should make it clear that, beyond chatting early on with Tom about Newspaper Club, I’ve played, and play, no part in this.)

I love what Newspaper Club is doing. I’ve got five of their things. Things Our Friends …

The BBC/AHRC 8 Essays,

James’s intriguing, enigmatic and playful Immanent in The Manifold City — or, How To Travel Through Time In The Nineteenth Century, a celebration of Walking Stewart,

Buy it!

Chris’s As It Is To-Day, ‘A 12 page newsprint periodical collecting and collating the best of literature from travel guides, treatises, pamphlets, books, receipts and ephemera. Each looks through the lens “of to-day”, revelling in the present and present history, whether from the 18th Century or the 20th.’

And now this from school:

There was a very peculiar thrill to seeing the impact at school of Black & White appearing in newspaper format. Walking into our staff room and seeing it being read by several colleagues and knowing how it had been made … as clichéd as it sounds, here was something both familiar and new.

Chris’s newspaper went with me to London last week. I loved it. You can read about the background to it on his own blog: the past is a mirror of the future.

By the time As It Is To-Day got to me, I’d just about stopped treating these newspapers as things–I–should–handle–carefully and was actually ready to read them like newspapers. So on the train, amidst all the copies of the Metro and the Evening Standard, I read As It Is To-Day, issue 1, the London Special. I could quote lots here, but you should go buy a copy — it’s very good.

From Hints to Railway Travellers, 1852:

It is well to have a newspaper—or say this book—in your hand, to resort to in case tiresome people will talk—a purpose that railway travelling was never intended for.

From The Heart of London, 1925:

In two thousand years’ time will there be brambles growing on Ludgate Hill, I wonder, and will a shepherd graze his sheep in Piccadilly Circus? It happened to Thebes and Carthage … There are great days in store for those who will shake up our dust and worry our ghosts, and even attempt to discover our gods.

(And, of course, I liked this from London As It Is To-day, 1851: ‘Within a short distance of St Paul’s, is situated the Post Office, the Money Order Office, St Paul’s School …’.)

Schools and young entrepreneurs

There was a piece on ReadWriteWeb earlier this month about the Teens in Tech conference: ‘They haven’t learned that the sky is not, in fact, the limit - and for god’s sake, don’t tell them.’

Teens In Tech Conference 2010 from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo

In January, Stephen Heppell, quoted in the Guardian, said of the iPad: ‘It’s gorgeous, I want one, but I want to see children and teachers develop for it … nearly there.’

I’ve been meaning for some time now to say something here about what George Burgess, a final year student at St Paul’s, has been doing. I’ve known George for three years and he’s the most business savvy student I’ve ever come across. It’s in his blood: he operates with a shrewdness and an eye for opportunities. George is alert to changes in the game:

‘The idea that anyone, all the way from an individual to a large company, can create software that is innovative and be carried around in a customer’s pocket is just exploding. It’s a breakthrough, and that is the future, and every software developer sees it.’ — Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now, NYT, 6 December, 2009

Late last year, George had his iPhone app, GeoRev, accepted and on 24 November it appeared in Apple’s store. You can read about it on his website, EducationApps. From George’s press release:

GeoRev is designed to help students revise for their Geography GCSE exam and consists of 600 multiple-choice questions. These questions are separated into 15 topic areas with both foundation and higher tier options. The topic areas aim to incorporate the majority of material required by major exam boards.

GeoRev is the first of many revision apps Burgess will produce as part of his business, EducationApps. The business aims to produce high quality education applications for the iPhone and iPod touch which help pupils to learn and revise for exams.

Since then, he’s released a free, LITE version of GeoRev with only 150 questions, with the aim of sparking further interest in the full version by giving users an opportunity to try it out first. (When I spoke to George in early February, he’d sold over 400 copies of GeoRev, now priced at £1.19.)

Not standing still, he’s gone on to release two Economics apps, with revision notes for Units 1 and 2 of Edexcel’s AS Level Economics. The notes are split into topic areas and there’s a search function to allow users to quickly find relevant material (particularly helpful for homework). ‘I’m currently working with teachers to try and produce the following GCSE apps before Easter: Maths (a basic version of this might be available within the next two weeks), Chemistry, Biology, Physics and RS. I’ve also received permission from OCR to use their word lists in the making of my foreign language apps. I’m therefore working with a developer in Australia to get these started.’

Oh, and over Christmas his seasonal Trivia Quiz made it into MacWorld.

George ran his first idea for an app (GeoRev) past the school and then drew up a contract with our Head of Geography: they co-wrote the questions and answers (George is studying Geography at A Level). Once version 1 was out of the door, he began working on new features for version 2, including random testing and beat-the-clock.

He’s happy for me to re-tell the story of how, in our junior school, he got into some trouble … as a result of his business sense. Travelling quite often between the UK and the States, he noticed how his friends liked the American sweets he brought back. So he started bringing them back in quantity and selling them on. That’s what business people do, but it’s not quite the form traditionally expected of school pupils. (Bruce Chatwin got into trouble as a schoolboy at Marlborough College when he exercised his discerning eye and bought stuff from the local antique shops that he knew would fetch a good price in London. In his case, the local dealers got together to protest to Chatwin’s headmaster: Chatwin was destroying their credibility, they said …)

One thing I find admirable in what George has done is that he’s done it at all, whilst still at school. He’s not the first, of course: there’s a long line now of school-aged innovators seizing the reins, writing code and changing the world a bit.

In George’s case, he didn’t write the code for GeoRev himself. Like me, he’s not a coder, but unlike me he had the idea for an app, knew what it should do and what it should feel like, found a developer in Pakistan and commissioned the work. And in order to do all this, he approached my colleague, his Geography teacher, and invited him to enter into this business proposal, contract-based, clearing the idea with the school as he went.

Since George got his first app on the market, other GCSE revision apps have started to appear. He’s swift to watch for new competition, seeing what each does and appraising the strengths and weaknesses of their products — ‘this developer produces quite boring and basic apps (including the ICT one), which consist only of audio commentary with some notes on the screen’; ‘these ones only cover science but look quite good, with a similar approach to mine (multiple-choice questions)’; ‘this developer just produces revision flash cards with text and pictures’.

It will become a crowded space and then there’ll be the inevitable shake-out. That’s his challenge. Ours is to respond adeptly to this most significant change in empowerment: not just to tolerate or learn to cope, but to create the ethos which encourages entrepreneurial initiatives and offers guidance and support — not least in avoiding the pitfalls. I’ve seen more complicated, student-driven initiatives just recently, and one thing we can bring to all this is a sense of realism about legal and other issues surrounding these ventures. But ‘realism’ must not be a reason for dampening enthusiasm. We’re here to guide and enable, as best we can, as these young entrepreneurs aim high.

Things you might try to pass on

I find it hard to believe that the Paxman/Kissinger encounter on ‘Start The Week’ occurred all the way back in 1999 (here’s a Guardian piece about it, too). (I heard it live and I’d love to hear it again: all these years on, a kind of acoustical aftershock is still resonating in my head.) It’s recalled in the first comment to a 2002 post by David Weinberger. Weinberger calls Kissinger a ‘disgraceful, banal man’.

I came across a quotation from Kissinger recently that struck me. (That’s thought-provoking in itself — to come across something that seems important said by someone for whom, at best, you don’t much care.) This is from Nat Torkington’s excellent O’Reilly Radar post earlier this month, Rethinking Open Data. The last sentence is his own.

Henry Kissinger said, “each success only buys admission to a more difficult problem”. I look forward to learning what the next problem is.

In the same post, there’s a lovely bit which runs:

As Krishna was told by Arjuna, “a man must go forth from where he stands. He cannot jump to the Absolute, he must evolve toward it”. I’m just noting that, as with all creative endeavours, we learned about the problem by starting to fix it. …

Conveying something valuable about life’s complexities and problems — that’s one of the very best things in teaching, whether done within a disciplined area of study, in guiding an enthusiasm or individual project or in being alongside someone in the larger matters of living itself.

I liked very much what the Guardian reported Rowan Williams said recently in a lecture about Dostoevsky: ‘he loved Dostoevsky’s characters because of their soul-searching and sharing of other people’s burdens’. And there was this (the words are Williams’ own):

Irony is when you recognise that your own sense of dramatic power is always something that is going to be absurd in the light of truth. The readiness to cope with that absurdity is something that you have to learn in order to grow up.

That’s good.

Datadecs

One of the things which brightened up our Christmas holiday was the arrival on 23 December of these datadecs:

(After years of large trees both real and, recently and unappealingly, fake, we were given this wee-but-living tree. As one of our sons said, ‘Not so much minimalist as miniature’. Give it time.)

A lovely present: many thanks to Russell, Tom and Ben at RIG, and to Andy — who writes,

For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical. … Three of the four Datadecs are laser cut and one is rapid formed. For the laser cutting I developed a series of Processing sketches to generate cutting paths and the snowmen were generated using RhinoScript.

As Phil summarises it:

The snowman’s head size represents the number of followers I have on Twitter. The cloud and its rain represent my year’s trips on Dopplr. The blue shape shows the apertures of my photos on Flickr. And the red shape is the amount of music I played during the year, got from Last.fm.

More about these datadecs and their making in Andy’s post, and see, too, RIG’s page about them, Twitter mentions and Flickr tagged photos.

Very struck by these. Julian Bleecker: ‘this association between things materialized and things quantified is really significant’.

Technorati tags: Andy Huntington, data, datadecs, Dopplr, Flickr, informatics, Last.fm, making, personal informatics, quantified self, rapid protoyping, RIG, Twitter, visualisation

‘We run videogames in our heads’

It was a very great pleasure to welcome James Paul Gee to talk at school, shortly before we broke for half-term. James spent an hour in conversation with our students, examining what games and learning have to do with each other. He was in the UK to speak at Handheld Learning 2009 and this is his talk from there:

At the heart of both talks, besides his zest for life, learning and a passionate engagement with his subject, is the critically important idea of situated meanings and their role in learning: ‘Comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations [of experience] that prepare agents for situated action’ — Barsalou (1999).

Some photos of slides James used at St Paul’s (which illustrate what he means when he says, around 5m 50s into his Handheld Learning talk, ‘Our schools don’t use the best principles we know about learning, but our popular culture does’):

Many students who came to hear James talk had read Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You (2005) and will have recalled Steven’s discussion of James’s thinking. Here’s Steven on ‘probing’, that process in learning to play a videogame where the player ‘probe[s] the depths of the game’s logic to make sense of it’ — exploring the rules, yes, but also something subtler and more complex, ‘the physics of the virtual world’:

The games scholar James Paul Gee breaks probing down into a four-part process, which he calls the “probe, hypothesise, reprobe, rethink” cycle:

1. The player must probe the virtual world (which involves looking around the current environment clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action).
2. Based on reflection while probing and afterward, the player must form a hypothesis about what something (a text, object, artefact, event, or action) might mean in a usefully situated way.
3. The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets.
4. The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or rethinks his or her original hypothesis.

Put another way: When gamers interact with these environments, they are learning the basic procedure of the scientific method.

It might be useful to summarise here James’s six headline slides from his Handheld Learning talk about what characterises videogames: an experience of being simultaneously inside and outside a system; situated meanings; action orientated tasks; lucidly functional language; modding; passionate affinity groups. From his talk to us, some points I jotted down:

• 700 games design courses have started in US universities in the last six years.
• “We’re a profoundly contradictory people”: we worry about violence and videogames and GTA is put in the spotlight, yet a very violent game like Postal goes largely unnoticed and America’s Army is free — funded with tax-payers’ money! (James talks about America’s Army here.)
• Games are not like books: Doom has a poor story (and graphics), but very good mechanics and mechanics really matter in our appreciation of a game. Warren Spector thinks story is very important to games. The creator of Doom doesn’t. Of course, if it’s got good mechanics and a good story …
• The modern world handles knowledge distinctively, working with large, broad, cross-disciplinary themes.
• If education is only about standard skills, it will only get you a job with standard skills (probably off-shore). In the US and UK, three-fifths of workers are in the service industries.
• Success at school may square with the job you get, but it doesn’t predict how well you’ll do in your job.
• Games are about problem-solving. Our problems are now all complex ones — complexity and complex systems interacting. You must be able to think way beyond standard skills.
• Cross-functional teams, a feature of games such as World of Warcraft, require very high order skills — greatly valued in high-tech firms. Working in such teams is exceedingly intense and demanding.
• A game like Portal creates an embodied feel for physics and provides continuous assessment of your knowledge (performance). The game itself guides the experience.

• Good games makes you feel smarter than you are. Play first, learn later (situated meanings). Where school fails is when it’s like a bunch of manuals without the games — and that’s also a very good way to make the poor look stupid.
• Yu-Gi-Oh cards and their associated ecosystem are a striking example of geeking out with passion. Here’s a card James took from a seven year-old — who understood it completely (complex, technical language made lucidly functional by being married to action in the game) and explained it to him:

• Modding: not only ‘How can I use what this game design has given me to my best advantage?’, but also ‘How can I improve/develop this?’

• As Will Wright said, my games designers can make better stuff than 90% of players — but not the other 10%.
• Recommendations: Half-Life; Deus Ex (1); System Shock; Flower (PS3); Braid. My colleague, OIly Rokison, chipped in with Fable 2.

Here’s an interview with James from Gamezone, 2007:

What is it specifically about video games that help people learn?  Does it have more to do with the gameplay than the story, the visual content or the characters?

My book covers 36 good learning principles built into good games like System Shock 2, Rise of Nations, Arcanum, or even Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation.  But there are many more.  Let me just give a few examples.  First, humans are terrible at learning when you give them lots and lots of verbal information ahead of time out of any context where it can be applied.  Games give verbal information “just in time” when and where it can be used and “on demand” as the player realizes he or she needs it.

Second, good games stay inside, but at the outer edge of the player’s growing competence, feeling challenging, but “doable.”  This creates a sense of pleasurable frustration.  Third, good games create what’s been called a “cycle of expertise” by giving players well-designed problems on the basis of which they can form good strategies, letting them practice these enough to routinize them, then throwing a new problem at them that forces them to undo their now routinized skills and think again before achieving, through more practice, a new and higher routinized set of skills.  Good games repeat this cycle again and again—it’s the process by which experts are produced in any domain.

Final example: good games solve the motivation problem by what I think is an actual biological effect.  When you operate a game character, you are manipulating something at a distance (a virtual distance, in this case), much like operating a robot at a distance, but in a much more fine-grained way.  This makes humans feel that their bodies and minds have actually been expanded into or entered that distant space.  Good games use this effect by attaching a virtual identity to this expanded self that the player begins to care about in a powerful way.  This identity can then become a hook for freeing people up to think and learn in new ways, including learning, or least thinking about, new values, belief systems, and world views, as the Army realized in building America’s Army.  If you stick with it, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind does this brilliantly and people play the game very differently depending on the different ways in which they have invested in their character.  We would do better at teaching science in school if kids really invested in a scientist identity.  But you have to make it happen, you can’t just say “pretend.”

You can read a recent paper written by James and Elizabeth Hayes, his wife, here: Public Pedagogy through Video Games.

‘Passionate affinity groups’. That stays in my mind when I’m thinking about school and how education works, doesn’t work … and is changing. Here’s James’s slide about the qualities these groups exhibit, from his Handheld Learning talk:

Technorati tags: James Paul Gee, games, gaming, videogames, learning, education, complexity, play, St Paul’s

tapTap and Beatbox

A very great pleasure last Thursday lunchtime to welcome Andy Huntington to St Paul's — to talk about his work as an interaction designer and artist. Part of a strand in our talks that seeks to show how computing is now intimately involved with the creative arts as well as the sciences, Andy’s talk both explained the background to his approach and interests and gave plenty of opportunity for hands-on engagement, focusing on tapTap and Beatbox, as the pictures show.

         

Experiencing the shared delight and pleasure in the room when tapTap left the realm of talked-about-concept and leapt into life under Andy’s hands was just great. Toy + game + interaction + music. Play and enthusiasm.

Lots of good feedback about this talk. Thanks, Andy.

We hope to be doing some follow-up, inter-disciplinary work with Andy.

Technorati tags: Andy Huntington, tapTap, Beatbox, interaction design, play, St Paul's

Colin Banks

In the same graveyard, beside the Grigsons, lies Colin Banks, son-in-law to Geoffrey Grigson.

The gravestone is the work of Incisive Letterwork:

Colin Banks bought our dual text slate ‘Inceptis Gravibus’ at our exhibition The Ground Beneath our Feet in 2000. He had apparently had his eye on it since the Spirit of the Letter show at the Crafts Council in 1989.

We first met his wife Caroline when we went to fix the slate on their garden wall in Blackheath, memorably for us, in the pouring rain. We were really honoured to see it there as we had long been admirers of Colin’s typographic work.

After Colin died Caroline contacted us to discuss the possibility of making his headstone. He is buried in the churchyard at Broad Town in Wiltshire next to their daughter Frances whose greenslate headstone had been carved at the Kindersley studio. Caroline wanted a companion stone but not a facsimile. This meant taking into account the proportion of the stone, tall and narrow, and the overall feeling and spirit of the place and Frances’s memorial. When we delivered the stone to the church rain was again bucketing down.

In 2006 Caroline asked us to carve a stone for her mother, Geoffrey Grigson’s first wife Frances, who is buried in the churchyard at Pelynt in Cornwall. Caroline’s grandfather is buried close by and his memorial was carved by Eric Gill. She suggested that we use the same stone, Delabole slate, and the same shaped top to imply the family relationship. Many years previously Colin himself had made a preliminary drawing for this stone. Caroline felt she would like something of its flavour to be expressed here and provided a copy of his original drawing for us to look at. We used his lettering style but made it bolder for carving purposes. The layout was started from scratch. After trying to make the stone look like Gill’s and not succeeding because of the wording, it almost inevitably grew into a tall and narrow memorial. We simplified the top and used a carved line to echo the moulding on the Gill stone. In the end the relationship was there and the stone has a contemporary look rather than being a copy of something from the earlier part of the twentieth century. On seeing the stone in place Caroline wrote to say that Colin would have approved. — Brenda Berman and Annet Stirling: Threads of lettering 

The Independent’s obituary placed Colin Banks in that disciplined tradition of designers, ‘a craftsman schooled in hot metal type’, opposed to ‘quick-fix tactics’, ‘greatly influenced by the traditions of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose principle typographers were stonemasons’: ‘His death does not so much bring down a curtain on an evocative era of well-crafted British graphics but serves to remind us of the continuing relevance of typographic standards and social compassion in design today’.

It was in a printing class at Maidstone that he met his future business partner, John Miles. "We took up typography," recalls Miles, "because we thought we'd make the world a better place. There was a huge amount of idealism in the early 1950s and Colin was very idealistic indeed." … Banks made many trips to India, working with local agencies on schemes for rural sanitation, cooking, schooling and low-cost artificial limb manufacture, always ready for the next challenge, always eager to show how design can be a force for good. He also lectured widely in Eastern Bloc countries before access was easy.’

Three years ago, my neighbour, formerly the printer at Libanus Press, moved to Cornwall and asked me if I’d like to buy a large book (folio) he no longer had room for, London’s Handwriting. The book was the work of Colin Banks (I knew very little about him then), honouring the work of Edward Johnston, and subtitled, ‘The development of Edward Johnston’s Underground Railway Block-Letter’. I still haven’t really digested this monument of a book, very beautiful in itself and the result of such evident attention, passionate knowledge and close observation. I love the simple dignity of Wikipedia’s current opening to Johnston’s entry: ‘Edward Johnston, CBE (11 February 1872 – 26 November 1944) was a British craftsman’ … Johnston would surely have admired the craftsmanship of London’s Handwriting.

The book bears an epigraph from Firmin Didot, ‘the punch-cutter in 1783 of the first true ‘modern’ face Roman type’:

For we must not confine ourselves to perfecting the art in the sphere of luxury … but rather we ought always make it serve the public good.

Colin Banks must have invested so much in London’s Handwriting. For one thing, his love for his subject is so clear: ‘The wider importance of Edward Johnston’s work is based on his single-handed rediscovery of the medieval techniques involved in writing with a broad-nibbed reed pen. … His book Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering (1906) became the vade-mecum for all future letterers and typographers.’

He touched many future designers by a laying-on of hands from generation to generation: we are all his children. This unbroken human chain was all the more important as his philosophy of his work was not collected together and published until 1986, forty-two years after his death. This philosophy is exerting considerable pull on the current revival and interest in crafts and deserves a separate study.

We lingered in the churchyard that afternoon, talking and thinking about what these people have come to mean to us, and about this place.

Technorati tags: Colin Banks, typography, calligraphy, Edward Johnston, Wiltshire, London

Narrating the work (II)

This resonates with me so much and I see I jotted down some notes about it before. Re-reading the posts involved, and some others, has set me thinking again. Some significant bookmarks I want to keep to hand:

1) Jon Udell, 2001, on the web:

an environment in which everyone can produce as well as consume web content. The web began in this state of grace, soon fell from it, and has recently been trying to find its way back. It's been a hard road, frankly.

That's both beautiful and true.

2) From the same:

There's one talent common to all these creative disciplines: storytelling. We are, as a species, hardwired not only for language but for narrative. A story is, you might say, an evolutionary mechanism designed to focus the attention of a group. Sometimes the point is to entertain, sometimes to teach, often both. The power of narrative, whatever its purpose, flows from a deep human need to identify with a group, and above all to find out what happens next. … It all boils down to just three things: a storyteller, an audience, and a venue.

3) Dave Winer, 2002, discussing an Instant Outliner:

(…) narrating your work is the way to go.

4) This is Jon Udell, back in April 2004, The participant/narrator: owning the role, writing about the "XML-Deviant column at O'Reilly's XML.com … which began in January 2000, [and] would have been called a blog had the term been more current then":

For people who lack the time to closely monitor activity in some area, these bulletins are a way to keep a finger on the pulse. For the participant/narrator, they're a way to build personal brand and -- perhaps -- influence the agenda. It's been clear to me for a long time that the participant/narrator, armed with easy-to-use Web publishing technology (aka blog tools), will be a key player on every professional and civic team.

And:

Now that the hype about political blogs has died down, it's clear that this is the real deal: a grassroots effort to connect a political process to itself, to its constituency, and to the outside world. No fanfare, just steady and reliable information flow. Every team can benefit from this approach. By narrating the work, as Dave Winer once put it, we clarify the work. There can be more than [one] narrator, but it makes sense to have one team member own the primary role just as other members own other roles.

5) Jon Udell, July 2007, Beautiful code, expert minds, discussing a book where coders narrate their work ("Although this is a book by programmers and for programmers, the method of narrating the work process is, in principle, much more widely applicable"):

Access to expert minds is just inherently valuable. We’re entering an era in which we’ll be able to access many more — and many different kinds of — expert minds. I’m looking forward to it.

6) All this was set going again by Dave Winer's fine post yesterday, Narrate Your Work, "a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho":

I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different, and this is the point of this story. I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don't know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others' posts, I don't know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn't work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times. … real reporters dealing with a true breaking story not just a simulation of a breaking story, let their hair down and share everything they know with the world. This is the impulse of news …

Jon Udell, 2001: "The web's leading blogger is clearly Dave Winer, who has for years pursued parallel careers as a software developer and storyteller (or, he might say, technology journalist)."

Three other passages from Jon Udell's 2001 post stand out for me:

Could it be that, despite Tim Berners-Lee's dream (and mine), the writable web is not the natural state of affairs? That, in fact, it is appropriate for consumers of web content to outnumber producers? And that tools and technologies are not the major constraint on the production of web content? Recent history suggests that the answer to all of these questions is probably yes. Personal computers have forever changed the way people make publications, movies, and music. But they have not changed the people who do these things. If you lack writing or editing or illustration skills, or filmic flair, or musical ability, then desktop publishing or video or music tools can't change that. What they can do -- and it's no small thing -- is help people with latent abilities in these areas discover and grow their talents. …

Blogging as a form of mainstream web entertainment, with its star performers and its popularity ratings, may or may not be a passing fad. What will endure, in any case, matters more: a powerful new way to tell stories that refer to, and make sense of, the documents and messages that we create and exchange in our professional lives. …

It [his project weblog] looks like a newspaper, and indeed serves a similar purpose.

Technorati Tags: narrating the news, story-telling, conversation, narrative, Jon Udell, Dave Winer, community, trust, transparency, Twitter

Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

James Boyle:

Here are 2 points I wish people would understand.

1.) We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves.

2.) No work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to build upon.

via Twitter: 1, 2.

More at The Public Domain: "We have dragged all of culture into copyright, and kept it there even if the owners wouldn’t have wanted to renew."

Technorati Tags: James Boyle

Being that much better

From the immemorial to the ephemeral. I’ve been moving steadily Mac-wards in the last couple of months. If nothing else, it’s liberating to learn to think with different tools. (The desire to have tools that are ready-to-hand, but the value that lies in appreciating constraints — then we have a fighting chance when the picture might otherwise hold us captive.)

The operating system I should really be using is Linux, for the reasons John Gruber summed up so well in a footnote to his recent blog post about Google Chrome OS/vapourware. What he had to say about Linux is so good it’s worth quoting it all:

“Linux” means different things to different people. At a precise technical level, Linux is not an operating system. It is a kernel that can serve as the core for an operating system. What most people mean by “Linux”, though, is an operating system built around the Linux kernel. For use as a desktop PC operating system, all the various “Linux distributions” are basically the same thing: variations of Gnome or KDE sitting atop the ancient X Window System.

Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE “desktop Linux” racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it.

My theory on this is rather simple. Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista. But it’s still fundamentally a clone of Windows — menu bars within the window, minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top right of the window, the ugly single-character underlines in menu and button names. At a glance it looks like Windows with a different theme. The idea being that if you want Windows users to switch to Gnome or KDE, you’ve got to make it feel familiar. But that’s not how you get people to switch to a new product. People won’t switch to something that’s just a little bit better than what they’re used to. People switch when they see something that is way better, holy shit better, wow, this is like ten times better.²

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different. …

² The group that’s the most enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE desktop Linux systems consists of those who care the most about the political and licensing aspects. With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better.

In amidst fruit-picking, I’m playing with a better camera and I think I’m moving on a little, inspired by time spent alongside Jonathan, engaged by how he works, and, interesting-to-me, by computer games. To start with, that familiar sense of panic that, years ago, poetry once gave me (“I’ll never get this”) and then, at first slowly then more and more quickly, the coming of understanding and pleasure. Games absolutely encourage a try-and-fail-and-try-again approach. I used to be paralysed by the seeming unpredictability in learning anything much at all about digital photography, but treating it like play (which is certainly how I see Jonathan set about things) makes it all right — and fun.

Tools for thought: this post was semi-made on a Mac — I could have made this in a pure-Mac way (following a path no doubt excellent but seemingly laborious), but LiveWriter remains the best tool I know for blogging (a lot of the time it gets out of the way). And VirtualBox is free — and works.

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