Preoccupations

Back in May …

… St Paul’s held an open day to celebrate its 500th anniversary. For our part, we put together a small show in our main ICT room. My thanks to the four pupils who helped me set this up and who looked after our visitors so well for the whole of what was a fun but long afternoon.

     

Making use of the bank of desktop machines in the room, we gathered together a number of videos under this umbrella:

A brief introduction to the modern web: an overview of how computers shrank, became mobile and ever more powerful, an insight into how we teach about all this and a glimpse of the world we’re all soon going to be living in.

It may be that some of what follows in this longish post (a lot of video) is of interest beyond the immediate occasion of the day. I put the videos in playable form here as you may want to scan quickly and then dip in when something catches your eye. On the day, visitors could go round a number of videos/slideshows (mostly paired and in the sequence below) but of course, and as we expected, people dipped in and out: it was that or giving over a lot of the afternoon to this one room. (For me, in these very general talks or events, there’s quite a bit of churn, but it seems always to be the case that there’s plenty of new hooks for anyone whose life isn’t spent immersed in this stuff.)

Incidentally, one of the successes of the afternoon was the discovery of what you can do with the simplest of devices. Spotted in the field the previous week at Manchester’s Urbis, Staples’ slanted clear acrylic sign holders are a brilliant way of signing an exhibition with the minimum of fuss and a lot of clarity:

  

The only nod towards a more formal, display-board style of presentation was this:
 

(Sources: see the first slideshow below, Gizmodo for the smiling boy with the make-believe mobile and Intel’s Moore’s Law 40th Anniversary Press Kit for the two charts on the right.)

Finally, alternating on the overhead projector throughout the afternoon were these videos:

                     

1/

Slideshow 1 (credits as per the links and also: original Apple iPhone ads — see 6/ below; stills from Did You Know; the Flickr slide — from here).

A short history of how computers have grown in power, how their size has got smaller and smaller … and how they’ve gone mobile. Also (and very swiftly), an overview of developments in technology and the web, the advent of both cloud-computing and ubiquitous computing … and the emergence of astonishingly rich social sites and practices.

 
Steve Jobs (1991?) talks about what computers mean to him: ‘Computers are like a bicycle for our minds’.

 

2/  Apple, 1984

In January 1984, a youthful Steve Jobs demonstrated the first Apple Mac. This film still has the power to impress, such was the reception this innovative machine received. And then there’s also Jobs’ own reaction …

This advert, directed by Ridley Scott, was shown on US TV in 1984 and introduced the Mac personal computer. As they said in a later campaign, Think Different.

 

3/  California dreaming

‘Knowledge Navigator’: another Apple film, from 1987, imagining a personal computer that would be like a PA, memex machine, scholastic aid, visual display — oh, and phone. (Sound familiar?)

‘Time Capsule’: an Apple film made in 1987 and imagining the future of 1997. “No question about it, the 1990s have really been the Apple decade.”

 

4/ Google and Cloud-Computing

It’s hard to believe that Google is just ten years old. In January this year, the company released this film looking back at what they’d done in that time. All 4^th Formers get a thorough grounding in using Google’s tools and in managing their personal identity and privacy.

Cloud-computing: more and more of the data we create and use and store is not on our devices but “in the cloud” — in data centres such as this one. Google makes energy efficiency a priority.

 

5/  Google Earth

Everyone knows Google Earth and Google Street View. We explore in our 4^th Form course the implications of these technologies for the visualisation of information. We also discuss the emergence of location-based social software and its implications for privacy.

Here’s a beautiful example of the educational value of Google Earth: Ancient Rome (a layer in Google Earth) as it looked in 320AD.

 

6/  iPhone

A game-changing device. The original advertising campaign from June 2007 summarises brilliantly what had been achieved.

The iPhone brought touchscreens into the lives of many. Will it be a key player in bringing ubiquitous computing into our lives, too? 4^th Formers are taught that “computers” are much more, and much more present in our lives, than the single desktop this film is playing on.

 

7/  Living in a digital world

Slideshow 2:

An idea of how our students use web-based tools and a panoramic view of our course for 4^th Formers.

(I used much of this material in my talk at C4’s recent What Comes Next? The Channel 4 Education Summer Conference.)

Editing Wikipedia: a time-lapse film of the edits made to the page about the London 7 July, 2005, bombings. The article was created, that morning, at 9.15am. In its first four hours, it was edited over a thousand times. All 4^th Formers are taught how to understand, evaluate, use and edit Wikipedia.

 

8/  The near future

CGI: no water was harmed in this film. Or even used. Programmers from St Paul’s can look forward to working on enhancing such techniques even further, in film and videogames.

Big Dog, a robot built by Boston Dynamics, walks on rough terrain and ice whilst carrying heavy loads (340lbs). Control Technology works in areas that prepare students for fields like this.

                                          

 

9/  Games

A contentious area for some, the development of a substantial body of critical literature and the wise words of respected reports such as last year’s Byron Review, along with research and better knowledge generally, are leading to a more considered reception of computer games. This slideshow outlines some important research from last year and highlights a talk given here in November 2008.

Old Paulines created Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto, etc). In school today, we are creating an intelligent ethos for the discussion and understanding of games.

In designing videogames, something called The Uncanny Valley needs to be avoided. An entertainingly presented talk.

 

10/  The internet of things

Many of us have grown up thinking the internet is mainly the web — a web of pages. But the machines are coming: embedded devices of all kinds … Machines … talking … to us.

Gartner think that, “By year end 2012, physical sensors will create 20 percent of non-video internet traffic. … The extent and diversity of real-time environmental sensing is growing rapidly as our ability to act on and interpret the growing volumes of data to capture valuable information increases.”

Sensors to monitor energy consumption will become very common. Simon Hay, OP, has been working on this concept (see this poster and site) and three current pupils in the school will be using AMEE to record and monitor our energy usage.

This final Apple video shows the iPhone 3.0 and its use with medical devices — for example, in the monitoring of diabetes.

 

(And for further food for thought, Matt Jones’ iPhone 3.0: everyware-ready?.)

 

11/  Getting it wrong

So many of the things we imagine about the future are wildly wrong. This trip round the recent past and the fast-developing present has tried to avoid such wild predictions, preferring to look instead at some things that are coming true already (a near-future becoming the present) or that are already here.

Cue Postcards Show the Year 2000 (circa 1900). And then:

Here, in two parts, is the GM Futurama 1939 World’s Fair looking ahead to the imagined 1960s, a techno-utopian vision we still haven’t achieved.

Technorati Tags: ICT, computing, future, St Paul's

Our work (so far) this year

It’s again been an exhilarating experience to teach our first year’s (13 year-olds) their ICT course. The pace of adoption by them of technological developments still surprises: once again, I notice how this year’s cohort is just that much further on than the equivalent year group last year. It’s not just us, the adults, who notice this: where we might think that teenagers swim in all this digital stuff like fish in water, it’s eye-opening to watch only slightly older students being amazed at what 13 year-olds now know. So last month, a year on from when I last posted here about this course, I was feeding back to colleagues whose specialism is not ICT:

Last year, for example, we taught about tabbed browsing, but this year we didn’t need to: our 13 year-olds are experimenting freely with different browsers, wasting no time in downloading and adopting the recently released Google Chrome. They joined the school knowing more than last year’s 4ths about operating systems and several have experience of Linux. They are keen to learn about how they can maintain their personalised experience of computing (by exploiting web apps) when using the school’s networked machines and many were already using iGoogle before joining St Paul’s. One 4th former routinely uses PortableApps and showed others how to do the same. Others know about running Firefox from a memory stick, retaining all their individual settings no matter what PC they are on. There is a wide range of hardware in use and the barrier between desktop machines (hitherto commonly taken to be synonymous with computers) and mobile devices has gone — notebooks, mini-books, smartphones, the iPodTouch, iPhones ... all proving their computing worth in day-to-day life. Location-based services are being widely used on mobile phones; such services are coming soon to browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and operating systems (eg, Windows 7).

Some further context here: a year ago, iGoogle was alien to nearly all our first years; memory sticks were used more or less only as … memory sticks — running apps off of them was a fringe experience; browsers and the exploitable differences between them simply hadn’t the popular prominence they have now. Most interesting in many ways to me is the demand for Open Source software: because of 13 year-old, pupil-led demand we are networking Open Office, running it alongside MS Office. It’s up to the user which product he/she wants to use. I’m also interested in reports from colleagues about 13 and 14 year-old pupils, when asked to create a document or to collaborate, opening web-based apps as a matter of course.

So, the course as it is evolving this year is currently online here. I have no doubt, though, that we are now at a watershed and, as I also summed things up for colleagues, ‘The current course, revised from that of last year, will need fundamental revision for next year in order to keep pace with the changes afoot and the rate of adoption by young teenagers’. In particular, I think we’re now ready to make a fundamental shift towards the creative — and this pleases me a great deal.

They don’t have blogs, or I’d link to them, but my gratitude to the team with whom I co-teach this course (Richard, Andrew, Olly, David) is great: my thanks to them for all their hard work and enthusiasm.

This year has been very busy on a number of other fronts. We took the decision late last academic year to re-design our website and asked Clearleft to undertake the work. As I knew it would prove, it’s been a pleasure to work with Clearleft: we’re somewhere around halfway through the project and I’ve learned a great deal from them — about web-design, for sure (we had fun with affinity diagrams and played with post-its), but also about how good design work probes and challenges a company’s perception of how it’s promoting itself. I recommend the experience.

We’ve also been working a lot with Firefly, the company who write the software that powers both our website and our intranet. Simon and Joe, the founders and developers of Firefly, were pupils at St Paul’s and wrote the first iteration of Firefly whilst studying here. With the great help of Jess and Serena from Headshift, we have worked together, discussing how the interface and capabilities of Firefly might be developed, and this month saw the release of the new product. Thank you, Joe and Simon, for all your work on this. In summary: comments can now be enabled on all pages; we have blogs; the editing interface has been re-worked and made in-line, write-access is on by default and key editing options are immediately visible in hover-over mode; RSS has been made both much more obvious and widely available; the permissions dialogue has been improved and made more transparent; search has been improved both in UI and performance; template documentation is on its way, as is tagging; shared workspaces are available; calendaring now supports iCal; pages are owned by their creators but stewardship of a page is assignable (useful with classes, projects, etc). These are major software improvements for our intranet (which has amassed some 25,000 pages), providing us with something to build on collaboratively (staff and pupils) and develop further.

When we were deliberating the next iteration of our ICT Development Plan, I wanted green computing to be high on the agenda and I’m delighted that we worked with Gavin at AMEE and are now poised to start aggregating our energy data for the school (ie, the whole site) with AMEE. Our building program recognised the importance of sustainability from the outset.

We’ve been in discussion with Google about starting a branded YouTube channel. We filmed most of this year’s talks (see below) and have these and other stuff to go up. All this takes time, of course, but it’s coming.

This year we also began what I sense is necessarily a thoughtful, slow and sensitive engagement with games and gaming. These have a poor standing in schools, yet their cultural influence and their ubiquity in the lives of many younger people (by no means “just” students) is evident and widely reported. Grand Theft Auto originates from Paulines, of course, and it was high time to address the whole “matter”. We founded a society this term, met a couple of times (the first time without anyone, perhaps, realising it was meeting) and grew it out of two influential, important talks (see below). Next term we move the throttle forward and give it some more oomph. Those involved (it’s pretty popular) bought the idea of everyone reading more about games, and we’ll start with Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.

We’ve had a great run of speakers so far this year, with more to come. Last academic year I blogged these talks as we went, but this year things have been too busy for that (along with all the work detailed here, I’ve also switched to commuting daily, which involved decamping mid-term from my school flat and giving some much overdue attention to our own home — and then there was learning to live with First Great Western …). So here’s the run-down …

The certainty of chance

From the Economist's obituary of George Melly:

As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”.

'The 'certainty of chance' was', James Boyle says, 'the phrase André Breton used to describe both modernism and his own philosophy of life'.

Earlier this month, the TLS reprinted George Melly's 1991 review of A Book of Surrealist Games, in which he concluded:

It may puzzle the more pompous as to why this body of men and women, these ardent revolutionaries of the spirit, spent so much time engaged in occupations usually considered more suitable for bored children on wet afternoons. The answer is, to quote the preface, that “Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic”, that it “breaks, the thread of discursive thought” and, above all, helps to confirm the primary Surrealist belief in what they called “objective chance” or “the certainty of hazard”. These games will prove to you that not only was Lautréamont justified as to poetry; one could add a rider: “Surrealism too can be made by all.” 

Of the cover, George Melly wrote:

… a bourgeois interior, painted with the minimal realism of early Magritte. Seated opposite each other in identical armchairs, a young father is engrossed in his newspaper while his wife is teaching their son to read. Something is mildly askew. Is it because, while it is dark outside, the curtains are undrawn, or that the room is lit by anachronistic Victorian oil lamps, or that the newspaper, despite the completely Western ambience of the decor, is printed in oriental typography?

The origin of this illustration is unrevealed. I suspect it may have been an advertisement for a pre-war European product aimed at the Japanese market, or vice versa, but it is a brilliant trailer for the displacement on offer within. In a balloon-shaped inset, replacing perhaps a commercial slogan, is a quotation from Lautréamont, the nineteenth-century writer so revered by the Surrealists: “Poetry should be made by all.”

Amazon carries an "editorial review" (cited as Amazon.com): 'Surrealism is far more than some dead art movement: it is also a collection of tools for perceiving and representing the world in ways that transcend normative perspectives. … If you have any spark of creativity, you are strongly encouraged to get this book to help loosen the holds of quotidian existence on your craft.'

I see Anne's been here before — and quotes more of the preface to A Book of Surrealist Games than George Melly did:

Surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminancy for premeditation and deliberation... In one particular and important respect Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic. This is in its irrepressible propensity to the transformation of objects, behaviours and ideas. In this aspect of its proceedings Surrealism makes manifest its underlying political programme, its revolutionary intent.

Before going on to put some surrealist games online, Anne also quotes Philippe Audouin:

It is not to belittle Surrealist activity to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.

Unsurprisingly, various things here made me think again about the aleatoric. 

Technorati tags: George Melly, André Breton, surrealism, chance, aleatoric, play, magic

Will Wright on Spore

Interviewed in PopSci.com:

Do you see Spore, or the rest of your games for that matter, as being educational? 

I think in a deep way yeah – that's kind of why I do them. But not in a curriculum-based, 'I'm gong to teach you facts' kind of way. I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity – creativity is a fundamental of education that's not really taught so much. But giving people tools… what it means to be human is to learn to use tools to basically expand your abilities. And I think computer games are in some sense a fundamental tool for our imagination. If we can let players create these elaborate worlds, there's a lot of thought, design thought, problem solving, expression that goes into what you're going to create. You know, I think of the world of hobbies, which isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid, you know, people that were into trains had a big train set and they spent a lot of time sculpting mountains and building villages, or they might have been into slot cars or dollhouses or whatever, but these hobbies involved skill, involved creativity, and at some point involved socialization. Finding other people and joining the model train club, comparing and contrasting our skills, our approaches. And I think a lot of computer gaming has kind of supplanted those activities, they have a lot of the aspects of hobbies. Especially the games that allow the player to be creative and to share that creativity and form a community around it. I think just in general, play is about problem-solving, about interacting with things in an unstructured way to get a sense of it and what the rules are. 

Which is counter to current trends -- educational philosophy seems to have taken a huge step towards the three Rs, the basics, what you can regurgitate on a standardized test. And this seems to be going back to process-oriented education, where you're learning problem solving. 

And a lot of it also is… you know, some of the most effective education is failure-based, where you're given a system and you can manipulate it and explore different failure states and success states, and all that. Most of our educational system is designed to protect you from failure. You know – here's how you write a proper sentence, here's how you do a math problem without failing. So basically, they don't let you experience failure. Failure is seen as a bad thing, not as a learning experience. And even when you get to the professional world, things like architecture, engineering, industrial design, they teach you how to do it the right way. Where it used to be you would build five bad buildings and they'd fall down and you'd learn yourself – that was more the apprenticeship, craftsmanship model. You'd build 20 bad chairs but eventually learn how to build a good one because you would learn the failure states yourself, inherently – you'd experience them directly. Whereas when you go to engineering school they teach you how not to fail, so you're never directly experiencing those failures. It limits your intuitions. Whereas a kid playing a game – the first thing they do is they'll sit there and play five or six times and learn from that, and they learn at a very core level in a very different way. They've actually explored the whole possibility space. It's not that they've been told 'don't go there because you'll fail' and so they never go there and never experience it directly on their own. They're encouraged to do that all on their own, in fact they're directly building that possibility map.

*** 

Where do you see gaming moving in the future? 

One thing that really excites me, that we're doing just a little bit of in Spore… I described how the computer is kind of looking at what you do and what you buy, and developing this model of the player. I think that's going to be a fundamental differentiating factor between games and all other forms of media. The games can inherently observe you and build a more and more accurate model of the player on each individual machine, and then do a huge amount of things with that – actually customize the game, its difficulty, the content that it's pulling down, the goal structures, the stories that are being played out relative to every player. So in some sense you're teaching the game about yourself and it becomes kind of your ultimate playmate, in terms of knowing 'oh, I think you'd enjoy this' or 'try that,' and it's kind of playing against you. You and I might buy the same game off the shelf one day, play it for a month and, a month later, our games are almost unrecognizably different – because yours has evolved to fit and entertain you, and mine has evolved to fit and entertain me. And I think that's something that's going to be a fundamental thing about games about ten years from now, because we're just starting to see that more and more at this point.

Technorati tags: Will Wright, Spore, play, personalisation, failure

Play, play, play ("Education, education, education")

Most naysayers are hopelessly old media, entrenched in their one-to-many broadcaster models. But what they're missing is that the new media revolution has highlighted that everyone plays. We surf, we tweak, we mash up, we blog. It's how we grapple with new concepts, new ideas and new experiences.

Aleks Krotoski, Guardian (my bold)

Technorati tags: play, ludic, learning

Some Aula videos ... and three others

In moments this last (busy) week I caught up on some podcasts and video stuff. The first ones below are from, or arise from, Aula: Movement, a series of conversations on social technology held in Helsinki in June 2006. (More information about Aula here.)

Via Loïc Le Meur, Joi Ito and Cory:

I was at Aula in Helsinki for two days (thanks Marko, it was great!) and took a series of video recordings, here is a video podcast with my friend Joi Ito, a 50 minutes conversation on online games (WOW and Second Life), video, online music and copyright. You can view it below or download the video file (itunes/ipod .m4v about 300 Mo) or the audio file.

Cory Doctorow's closing speech: 'The big picture is about the world of self-determination'.

Via Jyri, on Blip.tv:

Matt Jones and Matt Webb on Digital Parkour (comics, Parkour, psychogeography, maps, senses, pataphysics, robot readable planet … digital fingertips and foot candy)

Joi Ito on MMORPGs (the polychronic reality of World of Warcraft; 'Second Life is very interesting, but it's not fun')

I would have watched danah on MySpace, but the link on Blip.tv isn't working for me.

Also from Aula, but August, 2005, Ben Cerveny talking about 'Meaning at Play' ( mp4 [large res], mp4 [small res]). Some notes (mine) on areas Ben touched on:

Play is about exploring boundaries and the organisation of constraints in behaviour — it helps us understand the constraints between ourselves and others. Then we formalise, creating formal rule spaces. A third element of what brings meaning into play and makes it important is collaborative improvisation. A fourth is the creation of metaphoric frameworks in play; these are also windows into the culture that is the originating context of the game. Next, interpretation (Tarot), composition (in computational gaming) and performance — and the tide of movement in and out between active play and compositional re-arrangement. Finally, presence and state machines (from camphone to posting-on-Flickr takes about 5 minutes —an almost real-time awareness of where and what your friends are doing): SMS has a lightness to it that is playful — contrast e-mail; simulations are metaphors or skins on top of an abstract computational space and, once you're familiar with the game, you don't need the metaphors in order to continue playing — players internalise the model of the game in a very abstract way, and this process parallels the way we build internal models for understanding how other people behave (it's the same type of state machine); we can express our own states through simulation behaviour.

The dynamic systems of play and the modeling involved in MMORPG and simulation games are portable and artists who understand them can use them in creating their work. New languages will evolve within, and from, the media we are now beginning to use to communicate with each other.

'In play we're going, I think, to be given more and more opportunities to use our own content.'

Finally (and not to do with Aula):

Bruce Sterling speaking at the 2006 LIFT Conference (Six Trends for Objects: RFIDs; geo-location; Googling and auto-Googling objects; 3-D modeling, computer-aided manufacturing; rapid-prototyping fabjects, blogjects; cradle to cradle recycling. Objects as hard copies of a data support system)

ZeFrank at TED (I liked the 'Atheist' game)

MoBuzz on privacy issues (Facebook, etc) … 'customers would like some shades of grey. And, of course, by 'shades of grey' we just mean control.'

Podcasts and videos can, of course, be very time-consuming. If I were a commuter and had significant periods in the day to fill, I might watch more but, as it is, the short YouTube video works much better for me (and, I guess, is why in part YouTube is so successful: it fits many a lifestyle). So I don't use either podcasts or lengthy online videos very much. If you, too, are short of time, I still recommend watching all the Aula pieces above. MoBuzz on privacy is also excellent — and short.

Technorati tags: Aula, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, Matt Jones, Matt Webb, Ben Cerveny, Bruce Sterling, ZeFrank, design, play, MMORPG

Education and the virtually real: Second Life

From the same posting by David Weinberger that I just mentioned comes this:

Nikolaj Nyholm talks about how Imity.com uses Second Life to prototype user interactions. 

Matt Bidulph has been doing Second Life mashups. You can use http, he says, to pipe out info from SecondLife, including what people are saying. Cory Ondrejka, Second Life CTO, says that there's been an explosion of interest and development since they put in http requests. (Someday, he says, they'll make every object a Web server.) He says that there are 100 classes a week inside Second Life in how to use the API and scripting language. He looks forward to the day when there is a Second Life renderer inside a Web browser.

Now, I don't (yet) use Second Life but I am interested in ways of prototyping things (there's more than one feed-in here to using similar ideas in education). Up until recently, I was prepared for things like this: 

Video scenarios present people interacting with fictional technology by faking the actual functionality through the use of film techniques. … the idea of making little movies that demonstrate interaction ideas is really liberating. Orange Cone

That's exciting, but now I'm suddenly aware of Second Life being used by designers and businesses in similar, or near similar, ways — see here for two examples: W Hotels ('opening a virtual hotel in Second Life to test out "virtual architecture"  for ALOFT, a new hotel idea') and American Apparel ('opened a virtual store … people can outfit their avatars. That gives American Apparel an inside look at what they want in the real world'). Amazon seems to be going SL-wards, according to Business Week online, and Jeff Barr, Amazon's Web Services Evangelist, reports he has been working on 'a prototype for a developer relations “outpost” in Second Life' — see the images he's posted there. 

There's going to be a lot of this and very soon we'll be using Second Life (etc) in teaching, too. Some have got there already. Here's an example from NMC Campus Observer, focusing on the work of 'Lorenzo Stork (a.k.a Larry Miller, from University of Tennessee)', interviewed (of course) in SL itself: 

Lorenzo/Larry went on to talk about his first in world project, a Continuing Medical Education class … in cooperation with the University of Illinois, Chicago Medical College Library. … Doctors will get a small dose of content, but they will then have to address a patient scenario related to hypertension and diabetes. In the scenario, they will be required to use some of the Second Life library resources accessed via Info Island, then return at the end for some in world discussion. Participants will be practicing doctors working on their CME credits, and it is Lorenzo/Larry’s hope that the doctors build some of their experience in Second Life before the workshop.

NMC Campus Observer is one site to watch closely. This from their About page: 

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming.  In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world  and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments. 

Ultimately, Second Life was chosen, and working with an advisory board drawn from its membership, the NMC began designing a space within Second Life expressly to support collaboration, learning, insightful interaction, and experimentation — and to encourage exploration of the potential of virtual environments.  (See the Concept document for the NMC Campus for additional background.)

Other SL-centred developments I've noticed recently include the communal writeboard facility in Second Life and (going back to the opening idea of mashups) the ability to listen to Last.fm stations within SL. 

Mitch Kapor is reported recently as saying (this via his own blog): 

Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet. “Everything we can imagine and things that we can’t imagine from the real world will have their in-world counterparts, and it’s a wonderful thing because there are many fewer constraints in Second Life than in real life, and it is, potentially at least, extraordinarily empowering.”

Technorati tags: Second Life, virtual reality, virtual environments, prototyping, business, educational gaming, e-learning, MMORPG

Layered, furcating stories in time and space

Kim posting Stories in Urban Spaces and my happening to be re-reading Borges (in the Andrew Hurley translation), made me go back to 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941).

Borges' narrator, Yu Tsun, is the great-grandson of Ts'ui Pen, a 'governor of Yunan province … who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way'. Ts'ui Pen is murdered after 13 years of work on these labours, and what survived was a 'novel (that) made no sense' — and 'no one ever found the labyrinth'. Early in the story, Yu Tsun, on the run, reflects that 'all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me.' Choosing a name from a phone book (the reason for which choice only becomes fully clear at the end of the story), he finds himself at the house of the famous Sinologist, Stephen Albert. Improbability is heaped on improbability (after all, this is anti-literature, no matter that it is also literature of exquisite skill, intelligence and inventiveness), and Stephen Albert is not only intimate with the life and work of Ts'ui Pen but has, he believes, cracked the secret of both novel and labyrinth: they are one and the same. Ts'ui Pen had left a fragment of a letter: 'I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths'. Stephen Albert explains to Yu Tsun:

'I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.' Almost instantly, I saw it — the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'several futures (not all)' suggest to me the image of a forking in time, rather than in space. A full rereading of the book confirmed my theory. In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts'ui Pen, the character chooses — simultaneously — all of them. He creates, thereby, 'several futures', several times, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at the door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are various possible outcomes — Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be killed, and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's novel, all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the starting point for further bifurcations. Once in a while, the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example, you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend.

… 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.

Life as layered narrative, diachronically and synchronically; shared and individual, typical/general and unique — knowledge fundamental to our sense of being human. The advent of technologies which could allow us to interact with place and time raises questions that are profoundly old. (Kim's questions towards the end of her post made me think of urban plays, from medieval pageants to contemporary community projects — The Dillen, for example.) The extension of all this, in and through new technology, into new "theatres" of play, entertainment and education … The possibilities for grass-roots up development, for social and communal initiatives which bypass official or authorised pictures of the polis … 'infinite stories, infinitely branching' (Borges, 'A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain', 1941).

But in Borges, 'infinite stories, infinitely branching' suggests a weariness and meaninglessness. (Ecclesiastes, 12.12: 'Of making many books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh'.) This melancholy may even embrace the world. 'The Library of Babel', 1941, conceives of a universe, the Library, as 'unlimited but periodic': 'If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder — which, repeated, becomes order: the Order'. In this story, the librarian finds this an 'elegant hope'; this reader finds the thought dispiriting.

Will a glut of gorgeous visualisations and interactive, highly social "games" deepen our melancholy — too much meaning to be finally meaningful? Or, instead, will the glamour of technology encourage us to forget and to take again the picture for the world? I doubt there will be anything new in the range of answers we come up with to either of these questions.

In 1984, Harold Fisch published A Remembered Future and wrote of how art can give us 'the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled'. More recently, Heaney has written of how 'We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity' ('Joy or Night', 1990, in The Redress of Poetry, 1995). New ways of presenting layered narratives, as yet but 'tiny glimmers' (Kim's phrase), will acquire their maturity as art when they allow us to conceive a new plane of regard for ourselves as both unique and typical, simultaneously liberating us from the lonely egotism of Yu Tsun, where 'everything that truly happens, happens to me', and the merely 'unlimited but periodic'.

Graffiti Tags & Street Memes

via Paul Golding, this link to John Geraci's Grafedia:

What is Grafedia?

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link.

What Kinds of Things Can I Do With Grafedia?

You can make street art with grafedia, or just leave behind simple calling cards for others wherever you go. You can have running dialogues between authors, or create interactive narratives or poetry in public spaces. Grafedia is a boundless, interactive publishing platform, base, cheap, and easy to use. It is an open system - the places and ways to use it are limitless. With grafedia, every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet.

How is Grafedia Made?

Grafedia authors can make hyperlinked text at any time in three easy steps. Simply: 1. Choose a word. 2. Send a media file from your cell phone to that chosen word plus '@grafedia.net', e.g. 'myword@grafedia.net'. 3. Write that word anywhere in the real world in blue with an underline. That word will then be linked to the media file the author sent to grafedia.net, and viewers will be able to retrieve the file. You can also upload media from your computer directly to the grafedia.net server here in order to create grafedia with more precise images.

Also via Paul Golding, a link to Tristan Manco's Fotolog. Tristan Manco is a graphic designer and partner of Tijuana Design in Bristol; he is also the author of Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos, and editor of Graffiti World.

Paul Golding has posted about the graffiti recorded in Street Logos ('an absolutely wonderful collection of graffiti art. Unlike other books on the topic, Tristan has documented a very diverse set of styles and concepts'):

Some of the graffiti work definitely inspired connections with mobilisation. I am attracted to the idea of marking meeting places with graffiti as a kind of "war chalking" tag. However, instead of marking open WiFi access, the points would mark virtual meeting places. At each tag, users could "log in" and download, or exchange, information.

What really excited me were some of the graffiti styles and concepts that seemed to lend themselves to this idea. For example, the floor-based renderings of a compass by L'Atlas would make excellent visual markers for meeting places and allow directional information to be included, perhaps to the whereabouts of the next tag. This would blend well with the location-based potential of modern mobiles.

Other tag schemes had a very distinct style that in my opinion seemed to allow for a socially acceptable, or ascetically possible, use of graffiti for mobile communities. The Space Invader invasion is particularly interesting in this regard. Interestingly, the website contains invasion maps. This reminded me of war chalking maps, but is representative of the location theme that is already strong in this particular graffiti movement.

Finally, a third key link via Paul Golding, to Julian Bleecker and his project, Street Memes:

"street meme": a sticker, stencil, or poster that can spread a single image around the world. Unlike traditional graffiti art where each piece is unique, street memes can be copied repeatedly, taking on a life of their own, and spreading through the collective effort of people scattered around the world.

"meme": A term coined by Biologist Richard Dawkins to describe self replicating ideas. Read more about the concept of the meme here.

Jyri spoke about graffiti tags last November at the 2004 Radley conference (see here), and a (zipped) pdf file of the same is available: 'Free Speech in Urban Space: Past, Present and Future'. The talk was fascinating — and now I have a lot more to follow up on and to play with. My own (as yet very small) collection of 'graffiti'-tagged Flickr photos is here.

Flickr & the future

Two, linked postings have made me think more about Flickr — one by Peter Merholz and the other by Thomas Vander Wal.

Two things stand out for me in Peter Merholz's post: 'Those sites that truly succeed on the web do so because of a fundamental appreciation of what "the network" brings. Amazon, eBay, and Google being the biggest, shiniest examples. They get that the network, with its constituent elements of people doing things, and through those activities somehow connecting to each other (whether it's direct, as in items on eBay, or indirect, as in different people buying the same product on Amazon, linking to the same page in Google), they get that that connection is meaningful, exceedingly meaningful, and if you can leverage that behavior, you can provide an experience orders of magnitude more interesting than when you ignore that connectedness'; (unlike a MMPORG, Flickr) 'provides joy through its multiple perspectives on reality' — yet play is important to the experience of Flickr.

Thomas Vander Wal picks out certain (innovative) features of Flickr as significant for the way the web might develop: it's a 'social network that makes sense' ('As physical space gets annotated with digital layers we will need some means of quickly sorting through the pile of bytes … to get a handful that we can skim through. What better tool than one that leverages our social networks'); it's a tool that extracts something of an individual's "vocabulary" for things ('metadata tools that add text-addressable means of finding objects').

I have been "playing Flickr" since about July and I feel I am only just beginning to make use of many of its features. Finding photographs (out of interest or for specific purposes) via RSS feeds, or taking pot luck and exploring various tags (the tag suggestions that Flickr throws up during this process are themselves a remarkable feature of the site — very clever) has been both intuitive and great fun. Then there's the ability to create groups (social, work-related, topic-focused …): this is a very powerful feature and I have recently started exploring these, socially and for work. Couple all this with a project like 43 Things (can Basecamp come on board, too?), with weblogs (as here) and you begin to have something that is very powerful indeed. Using Flickr is influencing my choice of phone (coming to upgrade time). Much, much more importantly, I can begin to see how it can be put to use to effect vital social missions.

Update: I failed completely to highlight the excellent discussion threads in the Flickr forums and groups. Here's one that bears on some of the points above:

Pandarine: If someone still has the impression that Flickr is less of a community than Fotolog, please get involved in the active groups, and don't just wait for people stumbling across your fabulous work! You can get assignments, be creative or use your imagination, dream, learn something, discuss, share your life, laugh, cry, participate in group hugs, communicate without language barriers, or simply show off your work in the hundreds of specialty groups! Lots of us spend most of their time with hits like flashlight and squared circle. There is a birthday list, a workshop, a place to share your recipes - or you can privately show your wedding pictures exclusively to Grandma Polly and Auntie Bertha and wait until someone comments them. After all it's your choice! Note: These groups are randomly picked, and my list is not intended to be discriminating against the many other fabulous groups on this website. There is so much going on in this community, I can hardly keep up. So please don't ever tell me again that there is "lack of community" in Flickr - or I'll make the list even longer. That's a threat, not a promise ;-)

Zen: To me immediacy of this site has been tempered with an understanding that this is more than a photo storage site... in fact, it began as a cross between a technologically aware social-interaction environment and a sort of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon to use an ancient term) and is much more a collection of people whose thread is the visual image. That sounds more cerebral perhaps, but here is also the capacity for emotion and compassion along with thought and responsibility beneath the HTML.

And one final update (2.1.2005)! Credit for the "Flickr-is-like-a-MMPORG" idea goes back to a posting at giantant.com (well worth reading). And I ought to have thrown in Mappr here as another amazing development — made possible by Flickr:

Mappr is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take. By adding geographical information to the wealth of photographs found online, it allows new ways of looking at spaces and images. Mappr adds place to pictures.

Mappr takes advantage of the cornucopia of descriptive information provided by Flickr's users to organize their photos. Flickr's admirable policy of openness with its data provides a way to anticipate and envision a future where cheaply-available GPS technology generates this placement as a matter of course. There's no reason to wait for this technology to become common; by mapping the millions of photos that Flickr makes available, we can start looking at its broad scale potential now.

There's a public Mappr group at Flickr (with feeds and project updates).