Augmented reality

The way Layar can deliver additional location-based information is a real bonus if you're in the right place with the right kind of phone, but all the same some of the more extravagant claims made about augmented reality warrant careful examination. Surely an augmentation would involve a heightened sense of reality whereas most AR apps are just clever annotations. In a way reality is diminished if you stare at it through the window of your phone. That's not to claim its of no use; it's just a matter of definition. Of a different order, of course, is the headset or the reality goggles. The BMW video shows AR goggles in operation. Surely, the ultimate toy for boys! I watched this with interest knowing full well that if I was working on an engine bolts would fly off, tools would malfunction, things would go wrong that no amount of augmentation could fix.

First Skype call

In affluent and highly-digitized societies childhood is infused with technology. Digital technology has to be factored in from the prenatal stage when the first images of a baby are scans on screens, circulated by mobile phone and posted on social networking sites. And for the newborn, not only are the toys digital but the everyday practices that they participate in with adults are similarly mediated. I'm slowly building up an archive of images - here's Dylan at six months doing his first international Skype call. And that's just the beginning!

The hammer and the keyboard

In the everyday use of tools, their operation becomes routine and normalized. Interfaces work in the same way. When we switch devices there is often a certain amount of disruption and we are thrown back on the stubborn materiality of our instruments of control, those tools that we normally experience as being straightforward - become almost invisible. 'Heidegger's hammer' is a way of explaining how the tool recedes from view in daily use. Its visibility is heightened when 'the tool turns out to be damaged or the material unsuitable.' (1962:102). That was my experience operating the above keyboard. Nothing went well. I had to look a bit closer to see that the familiar looking object was subtley different. The letter arrangement is not the usual QWERTY layout, but the Belgian equivalent. It disrupted my operations, I became hesitant and dependent on an expert to guide me.

Yardie shoes

For me Clarke's shoes are forever associated with the sensible and conventional footwear of the late '50s. Now they are the shoe of choice for the discerning Yardie - at least if we believe the video. There is that strange loop in which naff things suddenly become cool and cool things become naff. The same happened to Burberry (which I believe is back where it started) and high-waist wide-leg trousers which are making a come back. Who knows, maybe Vybz Kartel have got it wrong about the shoes - maybe Yardies prefer sandals - or maybe it's subtle viral advertising. But if I'm sitting on the Tube and catch sight of some Clarkes, I think I'll play safe and avoid eye contact. You never know.

Whose generation?

Young children lit up yesterday's dissemination conference of the 'Children's playground games and songs in the new media age' project at the British Library. The documentary film Ip-dipi-dation: My Generation was a triumph. I hope it gets a more public airing or at least gets posted somewhere where more people can get access to it and talk about it. Adult intervention has been minimised, the kids just talk and show what they do, and that's what makes it so powerful. Having said that it is, of course an adult view, with the images carefully framed, edited, and sequenced. We hardly notice the meta-text which is about adults talking to adults about children. And I was left with that overall feeling about this area which is such a tricky one to study. The project team have been meticulous in avoiding over-interpretation and unnecessary theorising, but as adults we certainly have a thirst for that. The British Library now have an impressive digitised archive which you can see here and the researchers have plenty to write and talk about. Part of that, I suspect, will be about the methodological problem of making sense of children's worlds in the first place. I was struck by how much we want to make some of this ephemeral stuff meaningful. For the children themselves, particularly the younger ones, I suspect that meaning is always in process. They do it because they do it, without being clear about why, and so the meanings are both opaque and fluid, and always multiple.

Robots can dance

Will robots ever become part of everyday life in the way that computers have? Well, I suppose it depends on what counts as a robot. I'm looking for something robotic for our futures event in July and came across these little ISO-bots. They don't look great, but they can be controlled with a nunchuc which is pretty impressive. If your associations with basic robotics are anything like mine then they're about turtles and roamers and they become a sort of conceptual exercise in programming. Skip the alpha-numeric stuff and go straight to movement sensors and gestures and you have a whole new kind of robotic control; something akin to an out-of body experience! I looked for a good clip and found the one above. I'm not sure how these ISO-bots are controlled (I think its the standard controller), but the choreography is interesting. The guys' reactions are at least as good as the dancing robots! If you want more go here.

Obsessing about fonts

Studies of the textual landscape seem to be grabbing our attention at the moment, and some of the work seems to reach a bit further than the original geo-semiotic work. But today I was made aware of the strength of popular feeling about the presentational features of alphabetic representation in the environment. Before the advent of word-processing, choice of font (and the very word itself) was the preserve of the publishing industry. Now it's everyone's business. Name your font, search for it in YouTube and you'll quickly see the level of interest and the strength of feeling about different fonts. I enjoyed this particular offering, which happened to lead me to bancomicsans.com. But what lies behind all this isn't just a simple question of design, it is also very much about socially agreed matters of taste. And the videos themselves are part of the process, producing and performing our ideas about what writing looks like.

What colour is the future?

The way in which colour associates with ideas and rituals is certainly a cultural construction. Note the way in which people in different societies use different colours at weddings and funerals. The same goes for an idea like the future. For a long time I was so impressed by the advertising campaign that I thought that the future was Orange. But recently I've succumbed to the idea that the future is in fact blue. Cars are employing blue technology (which is apparently green) and all sorts of new gadgets are blue-chipped or have bluetooth fitted, and videos, of course now have blu-ray equivalents. But the future is a moving target and my future colour scheme underwent yet another change on Friday. I was, in fact, reminded of Proust and I quote from the last book of his monumental work: 'As in a snowy landscape,the degree of whiteness attained by a person's hair seemed in general to be an indication of the depth of time through which he or she had lived, just as in a range of mountains the higher peaks, even though they appear to the eye to be on the same level as the rest, nevertheless reveal their great altitude by the intensity of their snowy whiteness.' I was at yet another retirement do; and that's where I formed the distinct impression that the future is now white. In fact, at least for me, white is the new black.

Images

I love Michael Constanza’s video of Hope Sandoval on this YouTube clip. The dreamy quality goes so well with the track. It’s interesting how readily music and image combine in new media. I'd love to write a bit more about music; I had so much fun doing that chapter in the Web 2.0 book. And image has been very much on my mind of late. So for my latest project I’m looking for a reliable way of streaming live video. I’ve been experimenting with U-Stream which does the job quite well. I also learnt today about Screencast-o-matic which seems to do everything I used to do with Jing, but not what I want to do on the project, but I’m looking into that one, too.

Firewall frustration

Talking with one of the teachers we hope to involve in the learning futures project, the old topic of firewalls came up. She described the imposition of a blanket firewall as an action worthy of a police state. Even quite reputable educational sites are blocked, along with YouTube etc. Googling, as you do, I wondered who else had recently been writing about school firewalls, but what appeared in my rather crude initial search was pages and pages of firewall hacks and dodges such as this one. In other words there seems to be more interest in subverting systems than challenging those who operate them! I suppose in the long run widespread adoption of such practices would undermine the justification for having firewalls in the first place. Perhaps this is an instance of a new digital politics in which sneaking round firewalls, dodging copyright restrictions, freeing-up information and networked action are coming to the fore.

Coming soon!

I always think a good breakfast sets me up for a day of writing, and having just signed a couple of contracts I'll be needing all the help I can get. Last year's ESRC seminar series is coming to fruition with an edited book for Routledge called 'Virtual Literacies' and I'm involved in a couple of joint ventures producing handbook chapters one on digital texts in the classroom and the other on early digital literacy. Apart from that we have some exciting collaborations between the two Sheffield universities which may well result in some publication. Some colleagues have also been successful in setting up a BAAL seminar series on language and deficit; I'll be doing a keynote at that with the snazzy title 'The Trashmaster: Popular Culture, Bad Language and Writing Online.' So although the policy context is looking rather grim there seems to be plenty to be getting on with. I'll need a good breakfast, but maybe I'll skip the Krave.

Bolton boys blog

Well, good: blogging is catching on! But I was left rather bemused by this article that showed how introducing children to blogging had revolutionised writing practices in Bolton (taught them to write properly). In the current climate of increasingly myopic curricular vision when something like this becomes national news you just have to celebrate it. Maybe my eyes have been dimmed by too many digital innovations, but the whole idea that blogging solves the so-called gender and writing conundrum is a bit underwhelming. Oh I'm glad enough they're blogging (by the way, is that a 21st century skill?) but 5,000 word stories for their blogs? I ask you! I'm still working on that one myself. Scores are going up too. That must be good? Call me a cynic, you can do that, but I was genuinely pleased to read that 'they exchange blogs with places as far apart as Canada and Australia'. Yes they're really far apart, that's global. I know there are other countries, too, but it's good to hear that Bolton is connected. So that's little me in the picture above on the left, before I got glasses. OK so I might be squinting but at least I was legally blonde. And now I'm resolved to improve my writing with more blogging; I'll have to work hard!

Stories from things

I've just finished reading de Waal's book (see interests) and I must admit that I'm still unconvinced that it deserves so much critical acclaim. But, the quote on the dustjacket does capture its originality: 'You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story.' And that's a theme that certainly resonates with me - the ways in which objects shape the stories we tell. Anyone familiar with the poetry of Seamus Heaney will know how so often it's the object that's the way in; but narrative research often uses objects in a similar way. The shoebox fad is one example, but I'm also thinking of the way in which Margaret Mackey's excellent auto-bibliography does a similar thing. Putting the object in a particular place, or a series of places as de Waal does, starts to unlock the stories. In a way our memories exist in the present, and with objects we can make the link between present sensibilities and past events, thereby opening a space for reflexivity.

Twitter-lect

You wouldn't really be that surprised to find social identity encoded in microblogging, but then to find regional dialect and particularly from a corpus of US tweets is impressive. That's the work of Jacob Eisenstein and colleagues at Carnegie Melon which is carefully reported by Rupert Cornwell here. And the fact that they could accurately predict the regional origin of tweets to within 300 miles adds to the wow factor. I suppose that all underscores the fact that from a sociolinguistic perspective there's nothing radically new about digital literacies except for the very fact that old themes persist in what seem like radically new media.

Virtual culture

Do we have a cultural obsession with the virtual, with concerns about the boundaries between fantasy and reality, who guards them, and to what extent they are permeable? Watching Shutter Island and more recently Inception I have been tempted to think so. (Either that or else the obsession is some strange emanation of the mind of Leonardo Dicaprio who (coincidentally?) stars in both.) No. We are intrigued and sometimes repelled by the virtual worlds of gaming, uncertain whether to villify them, hold them up as educational worthwhile or admire them as works of art. This is a thoughtful exploration of some of these debates about videogaming. As gaming moves on, media rolls on with the creation of the first full-length machinima (The Trashmaster - trailler above), new advances in made-for-mobile movies and, I suppose, we shouldn't forget to add 3-D to this list. Maybe we shouldn't be surpised, given all this development in new media, that we wonder where it's all going. Perhaps our fantasies, our narratives, and our imagined worlds are becoming more real. Maybe we should be preoccupied with the virtual; after all it's all around us.

Mapping the territory

I was brought up in the era of the corner shop. It was predominantly a one-man operation (and I use the gendered form consciously, because male ownership was the norm back then). That was the main commercial model and so my known universe was bounded by the the names of the proprietors and their small businesses. Pegg's the butchers, Horobin's the grocers, Glandfield's for newspapers and confectionary (sweets and particularly Anglo bubblegum) and a little further afield, Applebee's with what I thought at the time was a winning combination of electrical goods and toys. They were the outposts, and my empire lay in the streets between them, through which I would wander on errands or simply for diversion. Now I was no cartographer, and in fact I always thought that geography was rather feeble, consisting as it did then of endless rote-learning punctuated with intense bouts of colouring in. But I suppose one thing I learnt though the study of geography was about the use and misuse of maps. Even now, I enjoy reading a good map, mining the information it holds, cursing what it does not tell me. Maps are put to good use by the powerful and map-makers choose what to emphasise as well as what to erase. That might all sound like a thing of the past in our post-colonial digital world. Google Earth and Street View (like all sophisticated technologies) appear to simply tell us the truth. But those applications are the long arm of the corporate digital empire that is Google. Now I quite like Google, but I think it's important to remember that it always has a point of view. I can't quite re-trace my schoolboy peregrinations on Street View. The views are limited and timebound. In the end I'm quite relieved, because the space between those now non-existant corner shops is still my dominion. Reading Jason Farman's piece 'Mapping the digital empire' was a great comfort in this respect.

The cult of the book

Defacing books still fills some people with horror. It's amazing how often people get quite hysterical about marking one's place by turning the corner of a page or scribbling in marginalia. One of the key articles of faith in the cult of the book is to create rituals to secure its power. Carefully place it on a polished shelf and make sure it keeps good company; wash your hands before beginning your reading; hold it carefully so you don't damage its spine etc etc. Many of these rituals humanise and sanctify the book. But as we know, books have a chequered history. Marginalia go back a long way and the pointing finger doodle or manicule has attracted plenty of academic interest. More recently creative types have been glueing, sawing and cutting books up to make interesting works of art (there are some examples here). In comparison Jonathan Safran Froer's 'Tree of Codes' consists of kinder cuts. If, however, you prefer wordplay that is even gentler you need stop-motion wordplay with dingbat.

Plato's invention

The story of Socrates and the slave boy in which the latter learns some basic geometry has an almost iconic status amongst educators. It is a key illustration of the Socratic method in which the questions that the philosopher asks illuminate the boy's understandings as he draws abstract shapes on the sand with a stick. Attention is usually fixed on the way in which Socrates coaxes understanding out of the learner but what if we broadened our focus? If we did I think we would have an early glimpse of educational technology in which the surface of the sand prefigures the slate, the page, the board or the screen and the stick the stylus, pencil or keyboard.

Dealing with ghosts

After several years of teaching in synchronous environments in which participants are geographically dispersed you get accustomed to the problems of bandwidth and connectivity that cause fade-out, freeze-up and sequencing problems. These like other digital phenomena are wonderful ways of reflecting on taken-for-granted encounters in face-to-face interaction. I don't think I'm the only one who actually experiences bandwidth and connectivity issues in offline communication! In last night's teaching session there were a couple of ghosts in the room. I heard their whispers, but were they really there? Or were they actually more there than I was (after all I wasn't there at all)? I wonder how much our years of familarity with so-called RL settings help us to smooth over all the false-starts, non-sequitors and random noise to present an illusory experience of a seamless and fairly predictable world?

Networks of the world

As a way of describing social interaction, the metaphor of a network is appealing in a number of ways - after all, it suggests connection between points, as well as a sense of fluidity; but it also invites a sort of abstraction of the social which is perhaps best captured in the diagrams that are a common characteristic of network analysis. It is also a peculiarly 20^th century metaphor, one that readily associates with the network, itself synonymous with the online world of digital connection. The concept of a social network reduces the human social actor to a point, not even a point of view, but a point that connects in various ways to other points and in this way it speaks to the patterning and flow of communication and interaction by drawing attention to relationships, social groupings, friendship, intra- and inter-group behaviour as they are enacted in and across different geographical locations and over time. It has become quite common to use the term 'social network' to describe online social networking, and to assume that they are the same thing. Of course, they co-exist and overlap but I think its important to make a distinction, and that's what I've been writing about recently. In this post I commented on the mistaken idea that Facebook was connecting the world, but Vincenzo Cosenza's world map of SNSs quickly illustrates its broad appeal as well as its limitations in the global market.