Preoccupations

End of the summer

I'm told that in Finland they say, 'there are three good reasons to be a teacher — June, July, August'. It was certainly a good, long summer (some terrible weather notwithstanding). I read a lot, online and off, but mostly the focus was on DIY at home, catching up on things left undone for a number of years now. I saw more of IKEA than I think anyone should have to, share Michael Sippey's sense of awe at IKEA's design-and-execution, feel I earned one of these (not sure where I saw this linked to over the summer, but it hails from Onfocus)

and marvelled at the scale of the IKEA "project" (not sure, either, where I came across this video, but I think Ben Hammersley pointed at it):

And my spirits were lifted by Logomotto Gallery ("Logo and motto are mixed at random")

Autumn is now here and the new school year is well under way. My thoughts have turned, inter alia, to a book I'm co-writing with Judy Breck on education in the digital age (to be called, Intertwingled) and to the new IT course we're evolving at St Paul's for the 13 year-olds who joined us this September. More soon about the latter — and more here on other things, too, now that my life is not dominated by either the 10pm check-out queue at IKEA or home decorating. (Unsurprisingly, micro-blogging really came into its own for me this summer.)

On Shaving

I'm curious to see bloggers posting about shaving: here's Alex, Merlin Mann and Euan. Shaving is something I was never taught to do — and I can't think of anyone my age or younger who was.

Years ago (when I was teaching at a school in Devon), a German student, new to the school and in the sixth form, went around for a few days with a good growth of facial hair. Asked about it, it turned out he, too, had never been taught to shave — but then it emerged he didn't seem to know anything at all about shaving. Anything. At all.

Given a brand new razor and sent away, he soon came back, clean shaven and wanting to return the razor. 'No, keep it: you can use it tomorrow — or the next day.' Blank incomprehension, turning to disbelief and then alarm.

Somehow we stumble along, discovering that shaving against the grain of the beard upsets the skin and working out for ourselves whether manual (wet) or electric is best. Like both Merlin and Euan, and for some time now, I'm a fan of Taylor's shaving creams. Like Alex, I now use an M3, but still go back to the Mach3. (I don't think the Fusion has appeared in the UK yet, has it? How expensive will that be?)

And I got what knowledge I have via The Gentleman's Shop at Hungerford: lying between the M4 and my home town, Marlborough, it's a barber-shop I passed several times before I decided to stop and check it out. Glad I did, for Robert's a fine barber and he and Charlotte run a mini-emporium of all that's best in 'gentlemen's shaving & grooming products': American Crew, The Art of Shaving, Edwin Jagger, Trumper and many other famous names, including the legendary Simpson badger shaving brushes — browse the range here (I have one of the … cheaper ones).

There's an amusing Economist article on a Moore's Law for manual razors:

Can we take this shaving business far, far too seriously? You bet. But Robert's Guide to the Art of Wet Shaving is definitely one thing well worth reading.

Meanwhile, head-shavers should look no further than HeadBlade (or so I'm told).

Technorati tags: shaving, Alex Barnett, Merlin Mann, Euan Semple

Time & tide

Despite good intentions, I'm way behind here with things I've been wanting to write about. The last few weeks have been busy: teaching (of course), two conferences, family matters … and a job application. I'm delighted that the latter went well: come January I'll be based in London as Director of ICT at St Paul's (Wikipedia entry; for overseas friends, St Paul's is academically very successful, but do read all of this page — there's rather more to life than league tables).

Many things lured me to apply for this post: in particular, 'There will be plenty of opportunity for the successful candidate to be creative, experimental and innovative'. To this end, the teaching timetable (ICT and Eng Lit) will be around 40–50% of a full load, leaving me with much more time in which to work with departments (faculties) and colleagues on the ways in which the read-write web can be used in education … on the ways in which it will change education (and schools).

It would be an understatement to say that I am really looking forward to this new role. I have benefited greatly from my time at Radley, but this opportunity will allow me to build on and develop so much that I have been working on over the last four years with my colleagues here — in particular, Ian.

A bit of a gap

At my school, the last three weeks or so of the term that's just died are dominated by mock exams for the final year GCSE and A Level groups — and therefore, for us, the teachers, by marking. Hence, in part, my silence. This last week (the start of our holiday), I have been absorbed in things literary: John Burnside came and read for us a few weeks back, and then I wanted to finish his new book, the memoir about his father, A Lie About My Father, before he read from the book at the end of the Oxford Literary Festival (event 136, yesterday).

This is a great book and one that exhausted me: for all the difference between our backgrounds, there is enough in common between my father and John's for the effect to be both illuminating and draining. Blake Morrison reviewed John's book well in the Guardian, but it's to Hilary Mantel in the LRB that I keep going back:

The book ends as it begins, with Halloween, or rather in the light of the day following, as the writer leads his small son along the quay of a small Scottish fishing town on the east coast. We see that this is the child for whom the phantom of fatherhood must be raised. The writer leaves us with a final sharp picture of the man of lies whom the book has transfigured into truth. He sees him, on a distant night, standing on the edge of woodland; white shirt visible against the dark, a cigarette in his hand, he is captured in a moment which holds, on an indrawn breath, all the events and non-events of his life, all that happened and all that ever could. He did not want to die in public, but that was his unheroic fate: collapsing at the Silver Band Club, on his way to the cigarette machine. An ordinary man with an ordinary death, a nameless man with thoughts that few would care to name, he is now one of the ‘spirits’ who ‘feed our imaginations’. To move from the interiority of this memoir back to what passes for ordinary life is like surfacing from under the sea, reshaped by its strong and unforgiving currents. It is a book by a master of language, pushing language to do what it can. Fastidious, supple and unsparing, it is a book about lies that is more true than you can say.

It was a great pleasure to hear John and to have so many friends together: Tim, Colin and Molly, Olly and Ben, Karl, Mark and Georgie … Like that evening when John read at Radley, a couple of weeks back, this one wound up in the wee hours.

The day before, Karl and I had gone to hear Tim talk (event 97; capacity audience) about his latest book, What is the Point of Being a Christian?, and yesterday afternoon we'd taken in Tsotsi, a profoundly moving film — the book of which I'd read over two decades ago. (See also this Guardian piece.)

Tonight, I had the chance to read John's as yet unpublished sequence of poems centred on/inspired by Saint-Nazaire (which he read at Radley a few weeks back). My head is full of these beautiful, resonant poems — annunciation, tradition (Eliot!), the 'actually loved and known' …

On Molly's recommendation, I've just ordered Keeping Mum and am about to start on Memoir — and then news tonight that John McGahern has died. A bit of a gap.

Technorati tags: John Burnside, Molly McGrann, Timothy Radcliffe, Tsotsi, John McGahern

Prospect Books and La Varenne

Light blogging of late (but plenty still going through to del.icio.us) — so much on at school and elsewhere. Many things have had to go on hold. Cooking is one.

Returning home on Saturday, I found a fat parcel waiting for me: Prospect Books' newly published translation of La Varenne's three books, The French Cook, The French Pastry Chef, The French Confectioner. (You can get the index here as a pdf file.)

These three books by François Pierre de la Varenne (c. 1615–1678), who was chef to the Marquis d’Uxelles, are the most important French cookery books of the seventeenth century. It was the first French cookery book of any substance since Le Viandier almost 300 years before, and it ran to thirty editions in 75 years. The reason for its success was simply it was the first book to record and embody the immense advances which French cooking had made, largely under the influence (of) Italy and the Renaissance, since the fifteenth century. Some characteristics of medieval cookery are still visible, but many have disappeared. New World ingredients make their entrance. A surprising number of recipes for dishes still made in modern times (omelettes, beignets, even pumpkin pie) are given. The watershed from medieval to modern times is being crossed under our eyes in La Varenne’s pages.

So important was this book that English cooks of the time immediately bought copies and one (anonymous) even translated it into English in the middle of the Puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell. This translation, as is the original, is extremely difficult to understand: there are difficult words, omissions, mistranslations, and other opacities. Terence Scully has solved all modern readers’ problems by undertaking a modern translation with detailed commentary of the original French texts. His work takes cognisance of the early English translation, as well as not ignoring contemporary works available to those early cooks for purposes of comparison and contrast. Even French people will want to buy it for what he tells us of the workings of the French kitchen in the seventeenth century.

That's from the publisher's website. It's a tome and a half (628pp):

So, definitely another holiday job pleasure.

It's a (characteristically) beautifully produced book — kudos to Tom Jaine. If you don't know Prospect Books, you can read about Tom and the history of this independent publisher here. And don't miss the Telegraph's profile of him:

Prospect publishes between six and 12 books a year. "We are not talking Grub Street, we're talking micro-publishing. I never expect to sell more than 1,000 books, and some only sell 50. I edit, re-write, typeset, design; the authors get no advances, only royalties. We just keep afloat."

Alan Davidson's entertaining account of the inception of Prospect Books is here — worth reading for the story of Richard Olney's involvement alone.

Technorati tags: Prospect Books, La Varenne, Tom Jaine, Alan Davidson, Richard Olney, publishing, small publishers, independent publishers

The Tom ap Rhys Pryce Memorial Trust

The killing of Tom on 12 January has affected many people, as Alex said in his comment to my post of 14 January.

The absence of hatred and anger in Tom's parents, as reported today in The Times, and their determination that out of this immense loss will come good, alike deserve all our respect and support:

THE parents of the murdered lawyer Tom ap Rhys Pryce said yesterday that they pitied and forgave his killers.

John and Estella ap Rhys Pryce, who are devout Christians, said that they believed their son’s murderers were “not intrinsically evil”.

The couple have set up a trust as a memorial to their son, a high-flying lawyer with the City firm Linklaters. It is hoped that the charity, which has already received £350,000, will raise more than £1 million to help to educate impoverished children.

Details about The Tom ap Rhys Pryce Memorial Trust can be found here. Linklaters has a page about Tom here.

Thomas ap Rhys Pryce

The news of the brutal, gratuitous killing of Tom has shocked and upset me greatly. (News reached me via The Times — here and here; the Telegraph — here and here, the BBC and Life Style Extra.)

I knew him during my long period of teaching at Marlborough College, where Tom was a boy in the boarding house where I first tutored (B1). He was a gentle, clever, thoughtful student — someone already forever in my memory as a person of great gifts who carried them with a modesty and shyness that won the love of those around him.

I cannot imagine how devastated his fiancée and family must be. The thoughts of all at Marlborough who knew Tom will be with them.

The Apple honeymoon

Surely it's got to end?

I'm thinking seriously of buying a PowerBook once the new ones are out — I'm following Jeremy Zawodny's line of thought. BUT meanwhile, and for other reasons, I can't believe what Apple is getting away with. My sons' iPods have broken down not once now, but twice in their first year of use (and I hear similar stories from other users). Twice my sons have had to go through the 40 minute phone call to Apple UK, clearing the various hurdles before their iPods get sent back to base for repair. Once these warranties are finished, that's it: when they break down for a third time, buy a new one … Or not. Apple have lost two future customers here, so disillusioned are they with the gap between the hype and the reality.

Dave Winer's just posted this:

The user interface on iTunes is awful. It's the worst piece of crap I've ever used. People would tell me when I was a Windows user that it was because the Windows version of iTunes is crap but the Mac version is easy. Well, both programs are head-up-butt impossible to figure out. The user model makes no sense. When is something on the iPod? How many copies of the music do I have? Where the fcuk are they? How do you delete something? Is it really gone? Why does it wipe out the contents of the iPod when I don't say it's okay to?

I don't understand how they get people to buy so much music on their store, I wouldn't give them a dime. I buy the CDs and scan em in. Someone bought me a copy of Alice's Restaurant as a present when I got the new iPod. Well that was gone in less than a week, never got to play it once. What did I do wrong? I swear, I have no idea, and I'm a professional software designer. What about the poor schnook who is just a user?

I'm reminded of Douglas Adams:

… ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’

Merry Xmas to one and all.

Uncoordinated acts

Seth Godin writes about 'A great phrase coined by Glenn Reynolds': Horizontal Knowledge.

If we had started planning in 1993, we probably wouldn't have gotten here by now. The Web, Wi-Fi, and Google didn't develop and spread because somebody at the Bureau of Central Knowledge Planning planned them. They developed, in large part, from the uncoordinated activities of individuals. … We didn't need a thousand librarians with scanners, because we had a billion non-librarians with computers and divergent interests. … what lots of smart people, loosely coordinating their actions with each other, are capable of accomplishing. It's the power of horizontal, as opposed to vertical knowledge. … As the world grows more interconnected, more and more people have access to knowledge and coordination. Yet we continue to underestimate the revolutionary potential of this simple fact. Heck, we underestimate the revolutionary reality of it, in the form of things we already take for granted, like Wi-Fi and Google. But I'm not a wild-eyed visionary. As a result, I'm going to make a very conservative prediction: that the next ten years will see revolutions that make Wi-Fi and Google look tame, and that in short order we'll take those for granted, too. It's a safe bet. Glenn Reynolds

Seth Godin continues:

It's best understood by thinking about its opposite: Vertical Knowledge. The stuff you get from the boss or the MSM or the person at the front of the room. Whenever I go to a conference, I learn more from the people in the lobby. And the web is one big big lobby. … Planning implies vertical, top down thinking. And in many areas, it's backfiring.

There's a lot rolling around in my head that says this kind of thing, too, and in education I have never let go of that remark I read years ago, 'regimentation and education are incompatible'. Let things shoot, grow up and develop. Be very careful with, be very wary of the top down.

Nokia's SmartPhone revolution

The Nokia N70 is a fine, fine phone. (I was fortunate to be sent one as part of Nokia's 360 SmartPhone Study.)  Jason Fried sang its praises last month: 'overall the N70 is the best phone I’ve ever used'. Marc Eisenstadt produced a very informative posting of his experiences with one (a 'Swiss-Army Phone') which is also a vade mecum for all phone buyers:

… there are some specific factors you need to consider when purchasing a ‘modern multi-purpose mobile (smart)phone’, and which don’t get mentioned in many reviews … :

1. Grab without thinking: If you have to think twice about whether to carry a gadget with you on Errand X or Trip Y or Meeting Z, then it’s too big. The N70 is an absolute winner on this front …

2. Thumb-centric vs pen-centric operation: if you’re making the jump to a smartphone (i.e. phone with PDA functionality), one key attribute you should consider is whether you prefer to enter short items with your thumb or with a pen …

3. Satisficing beats moving goalposts: when Nobel-prize winner Herb Simon invented ’satisficing’ in 1957, he meant (among other things) that people had a great gift for trimming a search space opting for solutions that were less-than-optimal but ‘just good enough’. Since Moore’s Law means there will always be a better gadget around the corner, and indeed the special-purpose gadgets (MP3 player, camera, etc) will get better even faster than an all-purpose Swiss Army Gadget, you just need to decide on your threshold of ‘just good enough’ acceptability for the features you want, and go for it.

… the N70 is a good all-rounder. The era of ‘jaw-dropping surprises’ is over: the fact that the N70 can do so much of what it does, and so well, ought to amaze us, but our expectations keep growing and we are increasingly hard to impress. … what are my biggest gripes?  Just two:

1. If you are a text-messaging fanatic, you will be unhappy with the N70: the keys are too small, and, most importantly, the ‘Clear/delete backwards key’ is in the wrong place, certainly for right-handed users. For me, this is an acceptable tradeoff given the good screen size and compact size of the phone (all things considered).

2. Scrolling through news/articles/messages/emails of more than, say, 30 lines in length is annoying because there is a ‘discontinuity jump’ as each new segment is rendered, which makes it hard for your brain to ‘do the right thing’, the way it can when scrolling even longish articles on most PDAs. …

So, there you have it.  Now to deploy my new productivity tool (by ignoring it). … Don’t get me wrong, this is one gorgeous phone! By ‘ignoring it’ … I mean ‘letting it blend unobtrusively into my activities, without fuss’.

I agree with Marc on his plus point 1 (but see below) and gripe number 1. As for one-handed (thumb-centric), my experience is that using a SmartPhone when busy makes one-handedness desirable. I'm not yet satisficed (?) with the camera: at 2 megapixel it's much better than what I've had before, but I still long for the day when I can leave my digital camera at home and just take my phone. And I have another gripe about the keypad: the menu/option keys are too close to the green and red (left and right) phone keys and also don't feel sufficiently different to the touch. I've mis-hit these a number of times now.

The N70 does seem to be a huge step on from the 6630 in the clarity of its software. (I haven't tried to work out why, but it immediately felt more intuitive and less like being parachuted into a jungle.) Its ease of navigation and use has encouraged me to run things on it such as LiteFeeds (RSS for mobile devices). I'm pleased with LiteFeeds, particularly as feed-reading on a mobile has been problematic until recently. (FeedBurner Mobile Feed 2.0 is not yet available, but I'd like to try it when it's out.)  Mobile Gmail works well. Audio-only podcasting is a no-no, but video can be done: see here (and there's a pdf guide here).

If I hadn't got the N70, I'd have been looking at the N90 (which Ross has blogged about here) — a far bulkier but very interesting transformer phone. My recent phones (SE P900, Nokia 6630) have been on the heavy side, and the N70's lightness is a delight. (If Christian Lindholm's right, mobile phones will soon be wearable, and the PDA will be a separate item again. And check out Nokia's 770 as reviewed by Russell Beattie and his challenge to Silicon Valley.) However, Ewan Spence's All About Symbian review of the N90 concludes:

To sum up, the N90 is Nokia’s first true cameraphone to focus on the camera, and it’s all the better for it. Yes, the unit has a number of quirks in the design, but the software, the operation and general polish of Series 60 continues, and makes the N90 the high-end phone of the moment in both Nokia’s N range and in terms of smartphones in general. It might be marketed with the camera as its killer feature, but with Series 60 it covers all the bases, and covers them well. Right now, there’s no solid reason to not look very, very seriously at the N90.

But back to light-and-thin: on the near horizon, the slide form factor N80 looks very interesting indeed. All About Symbian had a preview of an early version of this phone:

… in slide closed mode, the phone at 95.4 x 50 x 23.4 mm is essentially the smallest Nokia S60 phone yet. As a slider it is a few mm thicker than a monoblock such as the 6680, but this is hardly noticeable. It is bigger and heavier (134g) that the other modern S60 Slider, the Samsung D720, but that is a reflection of the extra functionality found in the N80. …

High resolution screen support makes a real difference – physically the screen has not changed in size, but the increased density of the pixels results in a much crisper display. … The new S60 browser, based on Safari's WebCore and JavascriptCore components, is also found on the N80. The 'minimap' feature allows you to see a full page at a glance and navigate around it, while other new features include 'visual history' and support for RSS feeds. … In use, the browser is much faster than Nokia's previous efforts … (and) will start to change the way people think about browsing the web on a mobile device. Previously, sites aimed at PCs were only accessible using SSR (small screen rendering) technologies and this had usability problems since it was always limited by the intelligence of the re-rendering algorithms. Higher resolution screens, together with minimap, mean that it is possible to quite comfortably view any web site on the phone.

A 3 megapixel camera, Flash Lite, improved Java support, Nokia XpressMusic, UPnP and Wi-Fi (to name just a few of its features — possibly Skype connectivity, too!) add up to a very powerful mobile device:

With features such as UPnP (play music on any device anywhere wirelessly), Bluetooth 2.0 (wireless stereo headsets), 3G and Wi-Fi Connectivity (music download/purchase over the air) the N80 is the most feature rich and powerful digital media playback device on the market. Imagine the reaction that wireless headphones, wireless music sharing and playback around the home and over the air song download and purchase would get if they were features announced in a new iPod and you can start to grasp the significance of the feature set of the N80.

The smartphone is often touted as the ultimate convergence device, and the N80 is just one more step along that road. Nokia made it clear they see the N80 at the heart of the digital home with UPnP, with its auto-discovery and remote control properties as the enabling standard. But it is also clear that this is just the first stage and we can expect to see increasing integration with other devices around the home in the future, which will be achieved through the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) 1.5 guidelines (which aims to enhance interoperability and user experience). All About Symbian

I blog all this because I am personally interested in what these slender, hand-held devices can deliver but I also believe that they will alter fundamentally the way schools and students operate. Moreover, although they are as yet so much the playthings of the richer countries these new generation phones have the potential to make the world more equitably connected — and for education that is also very exciting.

Or, if you prefer, as AAS concldues: all this is 'a story of four years of development in which the smartphone has moved from the initial concept smartphone to a series of feature-rich and powerful multimedia computers which will sell 100 million units in 2006. For the consumer electronics industry, it is an unprecedented story of product-line creation, growth and success and one that is largely unnoticed by mainstream technology pundits'.

Technorati tags: Nokia, N70, N80, N90, SmartPhone

The leaving of Liverpool

We had much less time in Liverpool yesterday than we'd hoped for: beware, traveller — the M5 and M6 have so many roadworks … I lost count, the journey up taking almost twice as long as it should have done.

So, a rushed job when it came to the Albert Docks and a bit of the centre, but enough to make me appreciate what a mighty city this has been … and how vibrant it is today, with all its possibilities and problems: European City of Culture, 2008, yet Liverpool University (where one of our sons is studying) lies cheek-by-jowl with some of the worst inner city areas I've seen in the UK.

Down in the Docks, the Tate is very fine. We had enough time to take in the New Realism room in the DLA Piper Series: International Modern Art. I liked the early Chapman brothers' piece, Disasters of War, which I'd heard a lot about and not seen before, the Grayson Perry pots, Germaine Richier's Storm Man and Hurricane Woman, the Giacometti portraits (of his brother, Diego) … I want to come back to Liverpool many more times, see much more of the city, get round all of the Tate and see the Walker and Lever galleries.

When we got back home, there was Tom Coates' posting to read: On the BBC Annotatable Audio project ... — 'a demonstration of a functional working interface for the annotation of audio that's designed to allow the collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music'. Euan Semple comments: 'After 21 years working in broadcasting I reckon this is one of the coolest things to happen for a very, very long time. The ramifications of this will go very deep indeed'.

All the more fitting that our journey back took in some good to outstanding radio on Radio 4. I'd pick out here:

• Antony Beevor and Gillian Slovo discussing the significance of novelist and war reporter Vasily Grossman with Francine Stock (Great Lives). A towering figure — to protect his second wife and her children, whom he'd adopted, he dared even to misquote Stalin in a letter to the head of the NKVD — his masterpiece, Life and Fate, was published after his death. I'm ashamed to say I've never read it, but it's now on my list for the Xmas break.



• David Cannadine exploring the way the UK we know today differs so much from that of those whose lives were rooted primarily in the first half of the twentieth century (A Point of View): if you're in your mid-40s to mid-60s, you didn't know a world dominated by two World Wars and the greatest economic slump the modern world has ever experienced; instead, the social disruption of the Butler Education Act, plus the immense amount of money poured into education, created a country where, for all its faults, "those in charge" today do not have to be the product of inherited or privately financed privilege — he cited (as examples) grammar school boys Melvyn Bragg (In Our Time), Andrew Turnbull (former Cabinet Secretary) and Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England). These short programmes are his for the next 13 weeks and he seems to be setting out to look at the role Universities play in our society and how they are to be funded.

Friendship — a creative thing

I felt and feel, tho' left alone,
His being working in my own,
The footsteps of his life in mine;

Tennyson, writing about his friend, Arthur Hallam (In Memoriam, LXXXV). Quoted by Lyndall Gordon in her Guardian piece today, where she writes about 'a flair for friendship as a form of creativity', the biographer's life … and her school friend, Flora Gevint:

A more formless life is hard to imagine. And yet, as I remember the passion with which Flora urged her friends to be and do, I wonder if there are forms of action like friendship which leave no record but are as creative in their way as more public forms of creativity. … articulate as Flora was, and fearless in her truth to experience, she could not transmute life into art. Her skill was to shape people, not works; and this, I now see, was the pattern of her life - possibly, the pattern of many unwritten lives that are attuned to what Middlemarch calls "the roar from the other side of silence".

Institutions of this new century

via Pasta and Vinegar:

« My ideal XXIst century institution would appear less like an “institution” as such, than as a constantly evolving and flexible organism, or a network connecting people on a “global” mode, people who have ideas and people who act. It should be able to respond to the most varied forms of thought and media, and more precisely, to face the challenge represented by the new complexity arising from the merging of new forms of social emergency and new technologies. And while it develops it should also take in account the emergence of this other fact : the collapse of the centre of the world. »

Hou Hanru : curator indépendant in "Qu’attendez vous d’une institution artistique du XXI° siècle ?" (What do you expect from a XXIst century art institution ?). Ed palais de Tokyo. Conteners

I've always had the greatest problems with institutions and institutional life. ('Regimentation and education are incompatible' — Gerald Vann, OP.) Hou Hanru's vision is something I can understand and respond to. Nicolas Nova (Pasta and Vinegar) comments (I'm selecting and, in this instance, changing his emphases):

… it seems that this kind of definition is more applied recently to private companies in our supercapitalist days … Will private companies be organized like art groups? interactive labs?

(My son, Tom, who's studying in Paris, showed us round the palais de Tokyo earlier this year.)

Stats

About midday yesterday, things went haywire. Thanks, Colin (entry for Tues, 27 September)!

Patient Opinion

Ross:

I'm at Our Social World in Cambridge, UK today and taking notes here. But wanted to point out a really interesting Enterprise Social Software project that Headshift launched today:

Patient Opinion. Just under a year ago, my father died in hospital. My mother, an NHS nurse of many years and herself now hospitalised, was aghast at some of the lapses in care that my father experienced. She is sure (and I share her view) that his end was hastened by these failures — failures made all the more obvious by the contrast with the often very good care he received.

Happily, she is now in a different, and much better, NHS hospital. She'll be interested to hear of this new initiative and I am sure she will not need much encouragement to contribute her voice. (There will be many questions to be asked, of course, and the FAQ page is here.)

Who's behind it?

• Paul Hodgkin is the director and founder of Patient Opinion. He is a Sheffield GP and has worked for the Department of Health, South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority and The King's Fund.
• Miriam Rivas-Aguilar is Operations and Services Manager for Patient Opinion.
• James Munro is a consultant to Patient Opinion on IT and health services research issues. He is director of health services research at ScHARR at the University of Sheffield, and editor of healthmatters magazine

Yes!

Tom Coates writes of FooCamp:

It's absolutely clear to me that the whole reason for the event is the people and therefore the opportunities for creative collision and friction. As such, it has a tremendously collegiate non-competitive feel to it, with everyone believing that the best way to make great things and change the world is to share ideas and learn from each other.

This is exactly what I felt and feel about Reboot. It sounds excessive to say so, but nothing that happened during my five years at University quite compares with the excitement and stimulation of Reboot — because of the collegiate opportunities for intense, 'creative collision and friction'. I would add, also, how essential to the experience was the inter-disciplinary nature of the event — another feature of Reboot where my university experience compares badly: I was reading widely for myself back then, but my courses of study were fundamentally self-contained and introspective, one or two inspiring influences apart.

Tom Coates goes on:

As Danah has said, it's incredibly depressing and conflicting that this kind of event just doesn't scale well enough to let in all the people who should be there. I'm more than aware that there are hundreds of people in the world who would have had more to contribute to this event than I, and I was surprised to be invited and was humbled by the stature of many of the other participants. I think Danah kind of hints at something interesting when she talks about the parallel BarCamp, and about the nature of competition and alternatives. Perhaps a competitive market in collaborative events could be a way to achieve fairness - or maybe that makes the divides wider. Maybe it's impractical to think about collapsing hierarchies, and we should instead be proliferating them wildly - cut in all kinds of different directions, removing a sense of one embedded power structure and replacing it with hundreds of parallel, orthogonal ones. I don't know - scarcity of time, attention and resource have always been problems and we all have a responsibility to try and work out ways to alleviate them. In the meantime, all I can say is that FooCamp was a hell of an experience, and one that I'd delighted to have been able to attend.

Cost is also an issue, Tom! I was amazed, and immensely grateful, that my school sent me and Ian to Copenhagen. It shows vision and institutional commitment of a kind I've simply never encountered before in secondary education. But it couldn't stretch to San Francisco!

He's right: we have to find ways of opening up these experiences to as many people and budgets as possible. I am convinced that the future lies in this kind of collaborative, inter-disciplinary approach to work, play and learning. Educators have got to be brought into this.

Morning call

My son, at home after a gap year, working again pre-university and burning the candle at both ends, isn't the earliest of risers. This morning, just up and with 15 minutes to go before his shift at work, he told me:

I dreamt you came into my room and said, 'Right — I've pulled a few strings and you're off to Iraq'. … I woke up.

I should think he did. (And totally bizarre: I have no military connections that could get him to Iraq … and — what a surprise — no desire to see him go there, either.)

Blogging during term

I have three final year sixth form classes (18 year-olds) and one fifth form class (16 year-olds) about to take public exams. That's 15 different set texts on the go. And then there's my first year sixth and my first year GCSE class, plus extra-curricular stuff … Apologies here for the gaps in blogging. I'll try to catch up this week, but not necessarily in blog-chronological order.

If you link to this weblog …

This sort of thing is never easy, but here goes …

http://www.drsnet.org/preoccupations is no longer the link! Please update to: http://www.preoccupations.org/

I am in the process of "rationalising" my TypePad and domain mapping settings. If you link to this site, please note that http://www.preoccupations.org/ is domain mapped to this weblog (and replaces http://www.drsnet.org/preoccupations). The feed for the TypePad content of this blog is: http://www.preoccupations.org/index.rdf. The FeedBurner feed for the all the content of this blog — TypePad material, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc — is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Preoccupations. Hitherto, my default Typepad weblog was my "teaching" weblog ('DRS's Radley Weblog'). This weblog, Preoccupations, is now my default and only blog. I am in the process of transferring the posts that appeared on my "teaching" weblog to this one, checking links and repairing broken ones as I go. If you find a link that's broken, please do let me know.

Froogle Shopping Lists

Another Google initiative — just out in beta:

Create a Froogle Shopping List - Sign up today

•	Keep track of the products you want to buy
•	Create and share your wish list
•	Access your shopping list from any computer
•	Annotate products with your own notes
•	Sort your shopping list by price, item or date

The real future

It's a bumper night. This from Don Parks:

I often feel as if I am living in a river of time.  When I was young, I didn't really care what might be downstream.  As I got older and experienced many harrowing turns of the river, I found myself looking farther and farther ahead.

What I just realized was that my sense of now changed over the years to include the future, near and far.  An event that will happen feels almost as real to me as an event happening now, just as the shape of the river downstream affects the flow of the river upstream.

Don is the author of one of my favourite meditations on death and the net.

Coming up for air

The last few days have been a little manic and there's still work to be cleared. Yesterday, we held a conference about IT and the future for our final year sixth-formers (18 year-olds) and those from St Helen's. It was excellent and I want to blog about this and a host of other things which have caught my eye lately. I also want to incorporate my "teaching" weblog into this one, so that all my interests are located in one place. As I have used Basecamp for teaching, I have found less and less need for a "specific" teaching blog. We have a visit from Ross Mayfield impending and I want to talk with him about SocialText, Basecamp, etc.

Right now, though, this caught my eye and seems like a really cool innovation. From Engadget:

We always felt something was lacking about Apple’s AirPort Express, but we think Keyspan has filled that void with their Express Remote, which allows you to wirelessly control your iTunes playback by plugging in the USB remote receiver into a PC, Mac, or even the AirPort Express itself (hence our enthusiasm). Available next month for $60, the remote should also help you control Quicktime, Powerpoint, and other multimedia programs as well.

Oh, and the news that Gmail is adding POP3 support — as Anil says, 'one more barrier to me using Gmail just fell away... they've added free POP support to their mail service. I still don't use Gmail, but they're making it harder and harder to resist'. I use it already, but I know many for whom POP3 support is essential.