I’m so lucky!

kitchen

Lucky because the kitchen project is moving towards the final phase - the home makeover is nearly complete and domestic life will return to normal just in time for the annual holiday invasion!

Lucky also because I’ll be working on an exciting new venture in which 9 and 10 year olds will be experimenting with avatars in a virtual world. We plan to have 10 teachers involved in action research on the project and the work will then roll out to include more schools. Watch this space for further developments. And by the way, did I post this on collections and chaos before? I can’t remember.

Recontextualising again

DSC00559

Home again through Hunters Bar on foot - it’s the dwarf Christmas trees and fairy lights above the shops that I really like. And then I came across a window display of Penguin Classic mugs (potential presents for our literary friends. Now, whilst I prefer my very own Tigger mug, there’s something quite interesting about how the old paperback design has become iconic. I think a couple of years back they even made some new Penguin imprints with that retro design.

Printed on a mug or t-shirt these book-covers are recontextualised and they become something very different. They say something about the identity of the mug’s owner, her allegiances – how she wishes to be perceived. In this way a mug rack could be like a links list or blogroll. There’s also a sense in which this is a sort of remix – not exactly a creative remix as described here; nor remix as active consumption as described here, just a repurposing of the original (authentic?) image….. after all you read a mug rather differently, don't you?

There’s a whole lotta clickin’ going on!

dead mice

Some of my dead mice – abandoned, over-clicked and now completely useless. Funny, I never imagined inhabiting a future with so much clicking, but here it is. My favourite future gazer is Howard Rheingold, and in an article from last year he poses the question ‘How do virtual communities affect physical communities?’ - and that’s really part of what I’ve been thinking about with respect to the overlapping online/offline social networks of bloggers. But, that aside, this is a great little article sketching, as it does, the next digital horizon. He also provides some interesting leads to other work in the field. And, I love the idea of 'person as portal', and the sorts of subjectivity and relationships that this suggests. A book…maybe a film ‘I, a portal’?

It's for real!

kitchen

Introducing the RAB phenomenon (Remote Artifact Bonding) - here’s how it works. When you’re together in meatspace you go shopping with your friend (or friends) and buy similar artifacts from the same shop, thus having a good shared real time experience of consumerism. As you connect through space and time in the blogosphere (or whatever medium you use) you connect your artifacts, too! So, click through yesterday’s picture of me (or this link), roll your mouse over the pic on the Flickr site till you find the note that leads you onto Anya’s Flickr – the cube of artifactual bonding. And you can follow this path of polished stone cubes rather than reading my lengthy spiel on faking it!

Increasingly my family networks are maintained and extended through digital media. My 3 daughters all work in office spaces in London. Part of that culture, as I have noted before, consists of circulating ‘joke’ emails. Some aren’t funny at all, and others are politically or ideologically very dodgy – for example stuff about ‘chavs’. But occasionally, I get copied into one that really is funny, or one like this which actually manages to capture something interesting:

YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2005 when...

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.

6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or ! 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )

12. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.

13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.

15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a #9 on this list.

AND NOW U R LAUGHING at yourself.

Faking it

tired

I drove home through Hunters Bar and Sharrow this evening. Hunters Bar is particularly attractive at this time of year - all narrow streets, small shops and twinkling winter lights. I came out just across from the tanning shop called "Fake it" and that set in motion a whole train of thoughts around contemporary notions of faking.

I think we have quite ambivalent attitudes to faking. Getting fake designer clothes when we're on holiday quite appeals, but fake laughter and fake money are beyond the pale. Fake fur? Maybe. But fake jewellery just isn't real jewellery. But worst of all is being a fake. That's a real put down.

Lifestyle changes, home and garden makeovers, house swaps on TV seem real enough and no-one seems to care too much about faking on reality TV or celebrity chat shows. This suggsets that we make strategic choices about what's 'real' and what's fake according to how we value it, ignoring, as we do, the fact that fake is just another kind of real. Fake fur is a good example: either it's not real (ie cheap or simply a synthetic imitation) or else it's better than real (depending on your value systems); whichever, it's still real enough to wear.

So, I click down my blogroll and read the people who's authenticity I value. Here's drJoolz writing about authenticity - same theme, different take (and BTW I wasn't politely bored!) - very important stuff, because the fake/authentic binary cuts right across identity performance and those ongoing narratives of the self. Well, my blog voice may be different from my other voice(s), but it expresses me...and the performance over on Blogtrax reflects on that performance - it couldn't really be made up (could it?), couldn't be fake auto-ethnography. Well it could but it isn't.

Today really

book

Today I’ve been reading this, kindly sent to me by this person to do a review for this! (English in Education). That’s hypertexting for you (although you probably chose your own reading path!). I’m still processing so many ideas from NRC, and have come to the conclusion most of them came up from informal interactions with excellent people like Michele, Angela, Barbara, and of course Julia – and many others, too.

I’m really interested in the overlapping identities of cyberspace and meatspace –Anya’s comments on my own textualised identity are really thought provoking. So, as ever, I keep on thinking about identity and social networks. Narratives of the self always interest me and I’ve been intrigued by some comments by Michele about distributed identities –similar I suppose to distributed narratives (link here).

Another take on the same theme is the issue of authenticity and blogging. When is a blog a fake blog or a ‘pretend’ blog? There’s an interesting discussion of this in an archived post I found. And then a couple of days back Danah Boyd posted on social networks and attention networks: another take, but somewhat inconclusive....still thinking.

And, welcome back to the blogosphere, Simply Clare!

Searching for a happy accident

nightcruiser

Today’s news that ITV has bought Friends Reunited for £120 million just illustrates the enormous appeal of applications that do what people want most – social networking. Friends Reunited has 15 million members in the UK and my (admittedly narrow) sample suggests that interest isn’t restricted to a particular age group – if you're 20 or over you're likely to be interested.

Friends Reunited began very small – a bit like Google, which is now being described as the fastest growing business of all time. Like Friends Reunited, Google delivers what people want. It structures many people’s experience of the Internet. In the UK there are 17 million users per month.

Trying to understand how Search Engines work, I realized the role played by advertising. To its credit, Google shows search listings that are paid for. Google AdWords appear in a separate section down the right side of the screen. Advertisers bid on keywords, and the more an advertiser is willing to pay the higher it will appear in the list of adverts served.

This site explains that “when a Google spider, or bot, finds your site a number of things are taken into consideration. Not only does this spider search through the content and links on your page, cataloging keywords, page titles and descriptions, backward links, and meta tags as it goes along, it even looks through your whois information. Whois information is the information provided through your hosting company on who exactly owns the website, including name, telephone number, email address, physical address, how long your site is registered for, and more.” Wow!

Search engines of the future may look very different. One version works a bit like Amazon – your search engine gets to know what you like and delivers a personalized service. Other possibilities include multimedia searching and, yes, SMS searches! But let’s not forget the happy accident (like my nightcruiser pic) that gets good, if unexpected, results from time to time.

Lowrider, Miami

lowrider
Originally uploaded by edsghm.

I’m pleased to see that Sarah blogged the full parrot picture from the Bayfront, Miami! Well this is my Bayfront shot. You see shortly after hearing Lee Freeman talking about Lowrider art, I found my very own lowrider. He was quite excited about having his picture taken and being on the internet. The bike, he tells me, is 50-50: 50% gas, 50% electricity – who knows.

Here’s another study of lowrider art. Peter Cowan’s study uses ethnographic methods “to explore drawings, commonly called lowrider art, and the social practices of taking meaning from the environment and communicating meaning visually.” He looks at how “culturally distinctive icons are used to create drawings that function as visual texts with analyzable cultural meanings”.

And I’m back home now, adjusting to this time zone. On the way back I read about britblog. I don’t know - it seems so parochial - I’m not sure I’d want to get listed: what would I get out of it?

Present

Emma 1

I was like a big kid on the monorail out to Dadeland Mall to get Emma's surprise present - eyes on stalks, head spinning round! And that was a good clean break, because I felt sooo present at this morning's symposium.

Despite the setbacks: confusion over the start time (was it 8.00; 8.10; or 8.30? and a whole load of setbacks that delayed Barbara Guzzetti), the symposium went well. In the end it featured me, Michele Knobel, Shelley Xu and Donna Alvermann.

I posed 5 questions - missing out the detail these were:

1. What are the limits to the incorporation of new literacy practices into the curriculum - who gatekeeps?
2. How can we best theorise resistance through new literacy practices?
3. How do everyday literacy practices translate into cultural and social capital?
4. Are there more sophisticated ways in which we can explain the relationship between engagement, school achievement and new practices?
5. How can we provide new spaces in educational settings that allow for exploration of the liminal worlds between work and play; formality and informality; social networking and learning?

The ensuing discussion was particularly stimulating, which made for a good start to the day's shopping! Hey, ho! So that's NRC 2005, back to Blighty tomorrow: back to the cold.

Ride 'em hard!

moby

An average meal last night in the splendour of Mr Chu’s, South Beach with excellent company was followed first thing this morning with a symposium with more or less the same people. Achirya Rezak on LiveJournal used Gee’s discourse analysis; Sarah Lohnes problematised the notion of authenticity in education blogs; and Dana Cammack challenged us to think of a new theory which describes identity performance, interaction and allegiances in overlapping social networks. All really interesting.

On the boring side we have the reductionist approach to reading in the UK government’s acceptance of synthetic phonics. I quote the Guardian newspaper:

"MPs on the Commons education select committee, which produced a report into reading methods, were impressed by its proven success in trials involving 300 children in Clackmannanshire. By the age of 11, those children taught using synthetic phonics were three years ahead of their peers in reading skills."

Oh, yawn! I find the dullest blog in the world, which hardly ever updates, far more interesting!

Holiday season, Miami

Christmas lights

Apparently, in order to be 'sensitive to diversity' it isn't Christmas here, and this man isn't putting up Christmas decorations, just holiday season lights. Newspapers here, are making the usual noises about 'political correctness'... OK, so predictable - but this idea of sensitivity to diversity seems to miss the point. What about acknowledging and embracing diversity?

Here, at NRC there's an interesting gatherng of people who are accustomed to hanging around in cybersace together, and now are all meeting (meating?) up in meatspace only to discover we know each other quite well.
So we have celebrity Anya, DrJoolz (a photograph of me on Wednesday - I'm innocent!) and Sarah. Yay! And today it's Brian Steet's turn to entertain us!

Anya!

Anya

Here's Anya, just after her presentation at NRC. She took part in a great symposium with Michele Knobel and Kevin Leander. (I'm afraid I put her off by brandishing my camera!-sorry). Also, today is DrJoolz' birthday - so there's a lot going on down in Miami!

In search of an author

unicursal

Safely arrived in Miami, thinking of Pirandello: 'My drama lies entirely in this one thing, in my being coscious that each one of us believes himself to be a single person, but it's not true. Each one of us has many different possibilties of being. We are different people with the different people we meet and all the time we're under the illsion of being one and the same person with everybody and it's not true.' Food for thought.

Hearth and home

hearth and home

Yes, that's how it's supposed to look. What I call a very distressed kitchen style, something that the Sheffield School of Design would be proud of. Anyway, it could look like this by the time I return from Miami, but some how I don't think so!

Not the Yamaha QT1

Penguin metronome

Went to see an installation of 39 metronomes by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed today. These metronomes are strategically and unobtrusively placed around the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. The blurb says: “the viewer becomes aware of the architectural spaces and the collections in new and challenging ways.” I reckon they were Yamaha QT1s, but they were all placed too high up for me to see. I liked the clocky tocking sound in that rather fusty old building. The out of phase rhythmic sound made me think of John Cage, making in interesting backdrop for familiar works of visual art. Well done, Martin Creed, not quite as good as work no.79, but still ahead of the rest. (Work no.79 is ‘Some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall’, and it's here...well I suppose it isn't really, this is just a photograph of it but you get the idea, don't you?)

Phone rage

Emma

I was interrupted whilst eating last night with a follow-up phone call from the University of Nottingham politely asking me to consider donating money. I hope my response was equally polite, but deep down there was a simmering experience of phone rage – my private space intruded upon, and the repeated requests to donate money really irritate me.

I thought I invented the term phone rage there and then but oh no, it appears it’s been around some time. Of course, there are many triggers for phone range. Some people just hate computerized phone systems – so, for example, here’s an American website list that helps you bypass the computerised system and talk to a human!

But from the other side of the fence, sometimes you wind up in a position when you’re on the front line, getting the flak – someone else’s phone range. Worry not, help is at hand:

"Phone rage is on the increase! So how can we control it? Understanding the causes of phone rage in your customers and using techniques to manage them is an essential requirement of any organisation."

Yes, this Capita training course gives you the skills you need to cope with other people’s phone range!

I heard a piece on the radio the other day where someone reported on their partner’s favourite approach to unsolicited tele-sales – not phone rage, but the gently-voiced question, ‘What are you wearing?’. Apparently it’s very effective! And, to conclude this is a totally different kind of phone rage altogether.

Open door

kitchen door open

OK, a bit more of the not-kitchen then. This destruction/construction event is caught on camera - and that’s today’s verb. Visually we ‘capture’ events in order, subsequently, to be captivated by them. Sometimes in celebrity discourse our central characters are ‘caught’ in unflattering or compromising circumstances, and of course this is what celebrity journalism specializes in. In this sense the photographer makes a coup…a scoop, a catch.

The verbal metaphors of ‘catching’ and ‘capturing’ add to our ideas about the photographer as detective, a recorder of undisputed reality and extend to the ways we see cameras as tools of surveillance. So much for the visual - words on the other hand describe different kinds of reality, from the detective’s notebook, to the journalists report, and the blogger’s thoughts. Ah, and it was so good to get comments yesterday from Princess Sally down under. Better than any celebrity and she takes good pictures too (particularly flip-flops on the beach)!

Taking the wall

wall

The kitchen wall: it could be a canvas, but it isn’t. It’s just a photograph I took…I’m interested in the way we use the verb ‘to take’ when we talk about photographs. We take a photograph – take or appropriate an image. It suggests that the image (the sign/the meaning?) is there for the taking.

I’m sure Barthes says something about this in Image, Music, Text or Camera Lucida. In contrast we compose writing, we make meaning, we weave in hyperlinks and we make sure we do not take (or at least we hide our takings).

Some people take photographs seriously. There’s as much composition as appropriation on this photoblog. And this skyscraper image is amazing. Surely, this is more about making meanings than taking them. Nevertheless, straight comparisons with another mode (eg writing) just won’t work. What would the equivalent to the irony of The Dullest Blog in the World be, I wonder?

Getting better

freerun

Recuperating… entertaining myself with 3run stuff (although that really does look too energetic by far!). I enjoyed DrJoolz close-up photo thing, as well, and I think I won. Yay! I seem to remember that sort of ‘brainteaser’ from way before CBBC. Also read this stuff on LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis), which is software that can be used to do marking for you. Appealing, but not appealing both at the same time. So here’s the link to Wired News on how LSA can be used for automatic marking of essays.

I also read again about how you can risk your job blogging – well maybe, but mostly I think, if only it was so daring! And then on the possible health risks for young children using mobile phones, the Guardian reports on this new study which promises to provide us with some useful information.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been really cheered up by reading sympathizing and encouraging comments on my ‘being ill posts’. It’s a strange experience being ill online, but somehow or other I’m glad I posted about it (sneezes on screen). Thank you!

Closed door

closed door

Well, I'm closing down until I start feeling better. I hope that won't be too long!

Ill

hm2

I’m not good at being ill, but today I’m grounded (feverish/sore throat – hope it’s not bird flu). Even photographing the skateboarding Honey Monster didn’t really cheer me up. I’ve had to cancel attendance at the UKLA meeting tomorrow, which means missing out on meeting up with my wonderful daughters, and I probably won’t get to Graduation on Monday.

On the other side of the road, Jackie keeps up her output as a very prolific person here. It’s great evidence of the impact of the digital on the lives of very young children, and the call to develop appropriate curricula and pedagogy is powerfully argued. This is the foundation for what Colin’s called School 2.0. Well done, Jackie!

Another window

bathroom window

All day I’ve been wondering whether blogged research-thoughts, as a form of self textualisation, constitute a more valid subject position than the usual product of modernist narrators. In these sorts of posts (or on Blogtrax) we perform indeterminate, fragmented and multiple narratives of the self. These first-person narratives are a kind of life-writing (although to be truly post-modern we would need to interrogate and problematise the projected identities that are produced).

The difficulty in developing an authentic account of blogging seems to turn on the challenge to claim an authority which is acknowledged as a social construct and avoids a return to the pretense of impersonal objectivity. The problem is also one of applying a relatively stable analysis to fluid multivocalised and tightly interwoven texts…the camera looks out of the bathroom window. I think there must be a connection, or is it apophenia?

For Wendy

Seal point

I just caught up with some comments on yesterday's post, and with an uncharacteristic recognition of audience thought I'd blog a seal point. I came to this decision after being inspired by Wendy's manifesto on how to be a Badass Knitter. And now...a badass blogger!

Here today, gone tomorrow

becky_bowley

Wednesday is the last of the wonderful Becky Bowley’s durational performances at the Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham. She knits with yarn that dissolves before your eyes as she works. Her knitting has no visible result - its only measure is passing time! And thinking of knitting I wonder how things are getting on with Lucy, the sealpoint Ragdoll kitty and knitting supervisor, and those stunning knitted kitty baskets and the world of Wendy Knits?

This feature introduces us to mociology and Joe Trippi’s book ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’. Trippi argues that bloggers and mociologists (users of mobile phones) have the power of a ‘two-way printing press’. This he suggests will impact on the political process ‘It'll do for 21st-century politics what print did for the 18th.’ – or maybe we’ll just use our camphones to record our birthday parties. Who knows?

Windows

window

Morning sunlight was particularly good this Saturday. I had a few hours in the window with Christine Hines’ Virtual Ethnography. She talks about newsgroups and webpages (let’s add blogs) as “instances of self-presentation which it is hoped will be accepted as appropriate and plausible performances.” (p.122) - it’s interesting that use of the word ‘hoped’.

Later she argues that the webpage is “made meaningful primarily through the imagining of an audience and the seeking of recognition from that audience.” (p.136). There’s also a useful page on virtual ethnography here.

A stubborn medium

blav

Instant messaging presents some interesting possibilities for communication. I have a clear memory of Michele Knobel at the IFTE conference in Melbourne doing a live i-m question and answer link-up with Colin, all bleary-eyed in a Glasgow office. We’ve been using MSN as a family network for a while now and I wanted to explore some of the frustrations with i-m which lead me to conclude that it’s rather a stubborn medium.

Earlier this week, Hannah was at her sister’s house in Ilford (East London). Now although Sammy uses MSN to talk to his family in Morocco, that evening he had a friend round – the webcam showed them talking as a sort of backdrop. Hannah was keen for us to see her new hairstyle, but I tripped over the mike cable, so apart from gesturing inanely via the webcam, I was reduced once again to writing, Hannah to shaking her curls. Nothing much was said.

At the same time, Ruth was at an internet café in Ealing (West London). The backdrop showed the proprietor sitting god-like on a throne of a chair, surveying his heard of cash cows. Ruth had Oli in Tenerife in one window, us in another and Hannah in a third. We’re all linked up, but a multi-channel cam-chat is impossible to do. We had connection, but not much communication.

Back to Alex’s post about blogging. What sort of comparisons can be made? I-m, unlike blogging, is essentially a one-to-one medium, not particularly good at establishing or maintaining a network. For:

1. dispersed communities – obviously good at the dispersed bit, but as the examples above show, it's insufficient, on its own to, to create that network.

2. conversational desire – it seems to work quite well if you’re just writing. My experience is that the web-cam changes things…and not for the better. I wonder if this is my lack of experience, but frankly, I’d rather phone or type.

3. participation – OK, yeah, this is easy enough, but of course we are talking about synchronous online communication with all the strengths and weaknesses that has.

4. Thinking-in-progress – mm, not really. This is much more about phatic communication in my experience. Nothing wrong with that, of course.


So, at the moment, I find i-m a stubborn medium – hence the photograph of Madame Blavatsky, above.


(Incidentally, the wonderful Peggy Reynolds did an excellent radio feature on Blavatsky last December)

A hungry man is an angry man

in my fridge

I don’t usually do politics on my blog, but I wanted to post on the Blair debacle. It seems patently clear to me that Blair’s foreign policy has laid us wide open to the threat of terrorism. If that’s what the Labour revolt is really about, then so much the better!

But, I also wanted to underline that unrest in Paris is derived from the failure of the French to acknowledge institutional racism. Michel deCerteau reflecting on social upheaval in Paris, 1968 came to see how difference and diversity were essential to a society’s vitality and power of invention. We seem to be slipping into a politics of polarization on both sides of the Channel. We do it differently, but maybe the end result is the same.

I wanted to post on politics, but found the inside of my fridge more interesting. Is this the end point of consumerism, or is it simply time to go shopping? The fridge’s door opens on another collection of random things – a what’s in my fridge meme. Interestingly, Nancy’s webzine also features collections – is that synchronicity ?

Writing about ....

for writing

Another collection – this time it’s writing tools, sparked by hearing about historian Bethany Hughes talking about the impact of paper on European civilization.

As we know paper was invented by the Chinese - the idea probably traveled down trade routes, collectively referred to as the Silk Road, into the Mediterranean area. Hughes claims that Muslims learnt how to produce paper, and that it was the Moors who introduced paper into Europe from their paper factories in Andalusia.

In a fascinating documentary on Channel4 Hughes traced the history of the Moors and their Islamic society that ruled in Spain for 700 years. She explored the Moorish influence in mathematics, astronomy and medicine, romantic love, paper, deodorant… Just what we need to counter the current wave of Islam-a-phobia.

All right, so we have new surfaces for writing, new technologies, and, of course blogging. Here’s Alex Halavais writing about blogging. He isolates 4 things that blogs do. According to Alex, blogs:

1. promote communication in dispersed social networks
2. encourage reciprocal communication (feedback through comments, links, and other channels) fulfilling a ‘conversational desire’.
3. accumulate content in small segments, and have a low participation threshold
4. give a relatively open and unfiltered view of thinking-in-progress.

I’ll go with that. Anyone for a 5th?

What are my pumpkins?

feminine side

My Flickr eyes were open. I walked into the Room-That-Time-Forgot, and I knew what I would see and photograph. Hannah’s stuff, abandoned like crockery on the dinner table on the Marie Celeste. I’m infected by a meme on collections of stuff.

Last week I posted this: 'We collect things for shelves, wall displays, mantelpieces etc. We collect ideas: "Collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge.” (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project)' ; I read the Dr Kate comments on collections and didn’t comment; I read Colin and Michele wondering about random Flickr groups. I posted pumpkins on a skip and was invited to submit my picture to the Skips and Dumpsters group. I didn’t. I decided to be more cautious about my use of tags.

I think I see a move to construct understandings in different ways. A sort of emergent pattern-recognition, like the way themes emerge in a blog, and tags cluster together as affinities develop. But are my pumpkins part of ‘skips and dumpsters’? LeoL30 politely suggests the picture fits the image pool. I remained unconvinced. After all who’s collecting who and why?

Questions of identity

othertoy

I see Kaye Trammell’s been busy writing a paper called ‘Impression Management and Self-presentation Online: An Analysis of Popular Blogs’ for the National Communication Association conference in Boston. That’s right in line with what I’m working on now (although I think I’d rather leave the ‘popular’ out of it).

On from here, i-Anya posts a link to Cynthia Lewis and Bettina Fabos who look at the social identities that shape and are shaped by the practice of IM. I’ll be reading that one tonight.
And I’ve only just caught up with Colin and Michele trying to articulate what they do so well in terms of ‘trying to push academic theory into areas we think need to be explored.’

Just when we thought we were moving forwards we seem to be moving backwards with this chunky James Bond watch that acts as a remote car-starter!

HMP

hoody

That’s Hoody Moral Panic: Google it and this Flickr group comes up straight away. You can also read here about the injustice of moral panic around hoodies. Well there’s:

1. Robin
2. Neighbour
3. Red Riding

And then there’s Justin (bottom left in the pic). He just uses the hood to keep his 3D glasses on, nothing wrong with that. Just to think, when I was growing up, the big embarrassment was to own a coat with a hood in the first place (unless, of course, it was a duffel coat or a parka)

Smashing pumpkins

pumpkins

I couldn’t resist showing these discarded pumpkins on a skip outside my house. They really are smashing pumpkins – detritus from a few nights back. This by association is The Smashing Pumpkins site with a great manga-inflected video.

And ‘Holy Lemons!’ – that’s the title of a paper by my colleagues Cathy Burnett and Jeff Wilkinson who looked at children’s use of web-based text in out of school contexts. They introduce us to the concept of information bricolage. A term that might well describe this post, this blog, this, that and the other….pumpkins and lemons (an unlikely combination).

Eid-ul-Fitr

Sammy

This is Sammy’s hair style at the start of Ramadan. Eid Mubarek to Sammy and his family! Today is the end of the fast, as Muslims all over the world celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr. I note in passing that although GoogleUK dresses up its logo for Christmas and for Halloween and receives plaudits for this, it remains unchanged today (am I surprised?).

Consumed

trainers

To consume:

1. to eat up
2. to completely destroy
3. to engage or dominate (often passive)
4. to use up

As a consumer, I blog my new trainers. I like them. I consume them/they consume me…part of a train of thought that I embarked upon when I wanted a bookshelf on the sidebar of my blog. My intention was to be able to share what I’m reading (listening to) with my friends and readers. The provider, gives the default header of “3 things I’m consuming”, and I must admit to feeling a little uneasy with this. I subsequently re-worded the header “interest” and then “interests” – but it’s still not quite right.

Of course 43 things’ default header is quite accurate – these are indeed things I’m consuming. You buy them from a shop or order them from Amazon. I consume therefore I am. At the same time I have deeply ambivalent feelings about being positioned as a consumer in a consumer society in which everything gets trashed (definition 2) or spent (definition 4).

But still, I like my trainers…maybe I should eat them before they eat me...

OK, whatever

flower

OK, whatever, it's not perfectly framed but look my pics are getting better!

I found an interesting article on social software and learning here by Ulises Ali Mejias. This is his blog, Ideant. His main idea is about blending online and offline activity and how social software impacts on pedagogy by “inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.”

I also wanted to quote directly from Kat on a paper given at the Internet Generations conference, Chicago (Association of Internet Researchers). It echoes some stuff recently posted on Blogtrax:

“I talked about my experience of using a blog to gather, analyse and present data, about story telling (mine and other peoples via the 73 story blog), about managing multi-facted roles (how to cope with simultaneously being technical, a designer, blogger and researcher) and dealing with the transparency of an online process (how the act of blogging reveals the messy, awkward and ill-fitting fragments of research that are often cleaned and smoothed out in more formal research accounts).”

Enough? No? Oh well there’s some great stuff on Streetstunts, free running, street tricks and so on to lighten your day.

Networks

mosque

I like the look of the new mosque on Wolseley Road, particularly now it has the dome in place. It gives the area a completely different look and will certainly provide a hub for the local Muslim community. The emphasis on locality reminded me of deCerteau writing about networks of communication:

"….ethnic ties do not replace economic relations, but they allow them to be developed. In the same way they do not suppress the importance of locality, but reinforce it, with ethnic groups seeking to find a common space by living together in the same neighbourhood or along the same axis of trade or public transportation, whether in the city or the suburbs, depending on the possibilities on offer." (deCerteau, 1997:112)

But locality is only one dimension; he also reminds us how new media can make it possible to break up the "stodginess of local networks and to establish relations with new partners for given projects of common interest". I’m sure this is happening, too.

Meeting a motley group of friends and academics to launch UKLA’s Digital Literacy SIG caused me to reflect on my own networks and how these are part local and part dispersed; part face-to-face, but also heavily mediated by new technology. It seems here that another group may lead to another blog. Maybe it’s time to kill this one off – my only reluctance is that the colour pics look so good on a black template!

An angel watches Scooby Doo

Tegan

Whilst everyone else gears up to Daylight Saving Time, Halloween, Eid, Diwali and Bonfire Night, this angel seems content with Cartoon Network. Scooby Doo!

Down the road work is going ahead on Sheffield's first purpose-built mosque (on Wolsey Road, Sharrow) The Madina Mosque is built on the site of the old Islamic Centre, which was housed in a former Co-op building.

[picture to follow]

Novice/time

late flower

Seeing beautiful flower images on other people's blogs (such as i-Anya) has prompted me into action. This is a late arrival - a spring flower - showing that time's out of whack with one of the warmest October days on record. A shame I'm still a bit of a novice at photography.

I'm a novice too in using RSS, but I'm slowly getting to grips with feeds. They seem to mash up time and space, too. So my IRA blog feed tells me what's going on with digital video down the road in Peterborough.

At the same time, the London train's late again. Emma's delayed by "burrowing animals". I hope it's not those pesky squirrels again! Call the RSPCA, somebody!

J’ai un talent

wind-up clock

The mashed-up voice of Banksy in interview was the centrepiece of BBC2’s Culture Show this evening. It does seem that the enigma of ‘who is Banksy’ becomes more problematic as he becomes more mainstream. Nevertheless, I admire what he’s done for the urban artform.

Talent of a different kind is on display on this video from French TV: the Human beatbox. We’ve heard this sort of thing before, but this is an amazing performance, how does he do it?

On display today, the broken wind-up clock locked at 12 o’clock, reminding me of that bizarre routine of turning back the clocks for winter this weekend (or is it turning them forwards?). Whichever, it’s always totally confusing.

More stuff

Squirrell

I suppose collecting is something we all have in common. Squirrels are collectors - notorious foragers and hoarders, but when I read the reports here and here of squirrels on crack, frankly I was surprised. Surprised - until I learnt that it’s another urban legend. Anyway I like the way the RSPCA spokesman said "he was unaware of the squirrels taking crack in Brixton.” The RSPCA seems reasonably well-informed

So we collect things for shelves, wall displays, mantelpieces etc. We collect ideas: "Collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge.” (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project); and we collect novelties such as this tea serving robot. Today’s collection ends with this report on the Scandinavian mobile-phone throwing competition. Anytime, anywhere, but where exactly?

Stuff

jar

When I first met Kate I remember having this long conversation about mantelpieces and what gets put on them. So that, and looking at Kate’s collections, has prompted me to show some mantelpiece stuff.

I got this Navajo pot from the stunningly beautiful Pyramid Lake in Nevada, which is the ancestral home of the People of the Cut-throat Shark (Cui-ui Eaters). Our half hour there with Ben, in the little town of (would you believe it) Nixon, taught me more about indigenous people and water rights than hours of reading would have done.

Although I sometimes leave CD cases on the mantelpiece, or use it to display my birthday card on, it’s not cluttered with gas bills or lip-salve and other stuff. For me, the kitchen’s the place for that stuff.

Over on Blogtrax, there’s the next stage of working through the autoethnography that Julia and I are doing. One of the things this has brought to light is how online publishing can alter the research process – particularly the relationship between researcher, participant and user-group. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in one category or another, so you could go there and leave a comment. Alternatively you could leave a comment about commenting, here or on Dr Joolz.

Old technology

nano

Looking back at cassette tapes, once the ubiquitous format for analogue audio storage, we can see it’s just a case of the same thing looking different. This photoblog is interesting in that sort of way. Mass production moved on from the Henry Ford standard of “any colour so long as it’s black” to something just a little more diverse. And that diversity is at the heart of consumerism. So, Color-ware Inc pride themselves on being able to alter “the color of existing products. The idea behind Color-Ware started with transforming the ubiquitous beige computer into a custom-colored work of art.” Well, that’s just what I always wanted! My Nano-pic is a design from the palette (have a play here). Is that choice?

Not for me. Choice is something to do with functionality. So a good MP3 can shuffle through your whole library – I like that. The best you could do on cassette was create your own (unilinear) mix. For me a 20Gb iPod beats the Nano because there’s more on there to shuffle through – more choice - unless, of course, you want colour (the same thing looking different)!

New online

line

After serving her time as blurker and blog commenter, Kate now has her own blog and so, in celebration drkates artyfacts is top blog. I really liked the agenda setting statement in her first posting:

"Commenters may be interested to know the themes in advance, so they can adjust their comments accordingly.
For now the themes are:
rucksacks
lost tickets
lost items"

I liked it because I’ve been reflecting on regulation, self-regulation and ethics in blogging. So, Kate’s provisional agenda reminded me of this, and what Torill does not write about on her blog. And then, from another point of view Danah Boyd writes about other people wanting to control what she blogs. "I want the right to control my voice" , she says, and that’s a theme that’s emerged for me through this last week.

Freed voices

Xinran

One of our administrators tells me she was a Red Guard towards the end of the Cultural Revolution. She also has clear memories of earlier times of turmoil in China. She’s lent me a copy of The Good Women of China by Xinran. This book is based on the stories women shared with Xinran, when she presented a radio programme called Words on the Night Breeze. These stories are very moving. I was struck by the similarities of Xinran’s work to what Pratap said about giving people a voice – the media at its best, as deCerteau says, helping:

"the person to follow the thread of memory, which easily twists or knots up or gets lost in chaotic or confused repetitions…helps to relate one kind of experience or another…to clarify the chronology of events in reference to the history of the region or the nation." (1997: 130)

Blending: a true story

blogcard

In that strange world of academia the exchange of ‘business cards’ – particularly at conferences, is quite a thing. I don’t think you can ever ‘catch ‘em all’ like Pokemon cards, but it’s an interesting enough ritual. So naturally, I thought it would be good to get my blog address on mine this time and I’ve described how I went about it at length here.

Now, after a long delay, a bureaucrat in my institution has emailed me the following:

“You have asked to have the web address below printed onto your business card.
I'm sorry but I don't believe it is appropriate for this to go onto a University business card. We normally just have the University website, and whilst this may be connected to your work, I think it may be easier if you wrote this on the back for those that you wished to send your personal details onto.
Hope this isn't too disappointing but we are trying to maintain a standardised approach to business cards and other items of stationery.”

Well frankly I’m not disappointed…or surprised. I expected this to happen. But I do like the kindly advice to scribble my blog address on the back! It’s a bit like the street cards by gapingvoid…or the concept of blog cards (on gapingvoid’s own blog). Mildly amusing.

Well, blending’s OK on the night shift, working from home, but any suggestion that one might use the University’s good name for nefarious purposes, like publicizing your blog, meets with resistance.

Blog fuel

Fuel

I was just reading Torill Mortensen on the "what is blogged/ what is not blogged theme" (one that has also run over on Blogtrax). And then I decided to check Tales from the Bearpit and discovered the 32/5 meme (23rd post, 5th sentence). Mary Plain shows that over on California Eating. But strangely enough the same posting on California Eating does a Torillesque posting on what is blogged. I quote:

1) Info that's useful/interesting to anyone (restaurant and travel tips, and, if I was stupid, work gossip/bitching)
2) Stuff that's interesting to family and friends (daily events, observations, musings, and Clio news)
3) Stuff that may only be interesting to me (long musings about How I Feel and, uh, Clio news)

Anyway my 23/5 reads “Then again, maybe that clunky keyboard is just a throw-back to the times of typing”. Mmm the clunky magic keyboard that takes me on a strange journey from red toenails to red coats (isn’t it interesting what people choose to leave comments on?).

You’ve got to blog it

Sally, Hannah,Bella and Izzie

Here’s a picture of Sally with friends just before her trip to Australia. I ‘borrowed’ it from her blog, because I haven’t seen Hannah (far left) for some time. It’s just great that a blog can give voice, and keep us updated when friends are on the move. I particularly like reading The Wonderful World of Princess Sally…. it really tells you about Sally. So, anyway, far left Hannah, just above is Bella, then PS and on the right Hannah’s flatmate Izzie.

[ …and then here, a piece on celebrating learning through play]

Documentary

Showroom

Each year Sheffield’s Showroom cinema hosts the International Documentary Festival, which is a key event for the industry. There’s a photoblog and podcasts to accompany the event. So, anyway, as a result, it was our good fortune to spend Saturday night with Pratap Rughani, talking about his work and his inspiration to give voice to those in oppressive situations worldwide. Directing hard-edged documentaries seems a natural extension of his work as editor of the New Internationalist.

Pratap’s award-winning Playing Model Soldiers was an insightful account of young black men in the army. There’s more documentary work than I can comment on here, but I was particularly interested in the conflicting interests of globalization and state control in the series on satellite television in South Asia. Some of this is captured in this article.

Phat Thursday

kicker

It was great to learn about how Sheffield snowboarders use digital video, mobiles and their own website to capture and circulate what’s cool in the world of boarding. New technology is seamlessly blended with lifestyle identities.

Snow’s a pretty rare occasion in Sheffield these days – hence the significance of Phat Thursday, last March. Watch the video full-screen it’s great - particularly the bit where the guy rides the rails outside an old Victorian school building (a tram goes underground in the background).

Capture, archive, remix

Neal1

I’ve been turning over in mind what Danah Boyd says about remixing on Apophenia. She suggests “we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption.” Well, first off the idea of active consumption is bound to appeal – it gives us a sense of agency within a market economy. But if all it comes down to is wearing clothes from different shops, our agency is simply like that of a 70s disco DJ with a collage of ready-mades (a sentient jukebox) and that seems to be a bit of a limited construct.

To my mind remixing is better understood as a plundering of the archive, making new meanings, and is at best an act of appropriation or recontextualization. It is production in the way that identity performance must always be, but it’s also more than that. In remixing, reader-becomes-writer; consumer-becomes-producer (and this is made easier in the capture, archive, remix world of digital media). In a sense all authorship is remixing, from Shakespeare to Shabba Ranks; from Tolkein to Tupac. Anne Hass Dyson illustrates this well, here and here when she shows how children create when they remix media.

Danah Boyd highlights that part of “the identity process is to consume culture, mix it and personalize it, and share that with our friends”. I agree, but think that this is a different order of remixing. Here we’re authoring the self, to borrow (remix?) Holland’s phraseology. Danah concludes with some ideas about distribution – well I haven’t got that far yet. I’m still stuck on deCerteau and circulation!