digitaldust

Knowing that they have a people working on city wide wireless coverage makes me glad I’ve moved to Bristol.

St Werburghs ‘joins’ the backbone.

It is all the little things going on like this that makes Bristol seem so exciting. It has a great mix of creativity, bunches of people with tech know-how and a crusty/hacker/maker ethic underlying it all. And the BW folks live just down the road in the community centre. Pity I can’t seem to get on to this node though.

Update: Oops, it’s just the backbone there. So not likely to get on that. Still, I can see you’re WCC node down the road, just can’t get on

Piers has just posted some nice rules for working the classroom.

There are 3 golden rules:

1. Move around

   As you move around the classroom, you spread your influence and it’s easier to stop children switching off. Moving your questions around, i.e. not always asking the same children, keeps everyone involved.

2. Vary your delivery

   Whispers, sharp yelps, different visual cues all keep children on their toes and focused on what’s coming next.

3. Balance criticism and praise

   If you have to reprimand a child make sure you come back to them later, and find something good to say about what they’ve said, how they’re behaving. It stops children making a virtue of being naughty.

As he says they are gold dust… the condensed tacit learning from a lifetime in teaching. I have to admit that the moving around and variation of delivery are things that are heavily on my mind at the moment.

As part of my “Academic Development” I just had a session where I had to lecture to peers and get feedback. One interesting point that came out of that and out of everyone’s microteachs was about movement. From the beginning I’ve been trying to move around a lot so I don’t end up as some kind of human speaking pole behind a laptop. Recently though I am moving less and not cycling back and forth across the room… it feels a bit more natural I think to not move too much.

The interesting thing I noticed whilst critically watching 9 other people teach in a short space of time was how the obviously confident ones didn’t move… but also the really uncomfortable ones didn’t either. And apparently I prowl around a bit to begin with and then settle down.

Although maybe a lot of energy can be built up by movement it is distracting and the biggest indicators of excitement do seem to be in tone of voice and body language. Probably the most exciting of our short lectures I saw was on Gerbils, and the lady giving it mostly just leaned against the podium. But most importantly the excitement showed through. Which is exactly what Piers said his humble mentor missed out.

This cracks me up. My new life, exposed in all it’s glory.

And he has some friends, Mr Undergrad and Mr Postgrad.

Wow! From the new house I can drive to work and do it door to door in 15 minutes. Even though UWE is 5 miles away.

Driving to work seems like such a luxury. In nearly 10 years of working life I’ve never done it, up till  now. It feels very weirdly grown up, something I probably get from doing similar trips into university with my father in my late teens. He was the adult there and there were lots of other grown ups all driving into work at the same time. So, together with buying a house and commuting and teaching I’m feeling all very mature and adult. OMG what is happening to me!

But this driving thing is being a bit naughty so I’m back on my bike on Monday. I can pull some wheelies on the way to work.

Heather and I finally completed on our house this morning and are moving in today!

Very exciting. New house, new job, new city, new life!

Wow! Great looking deep sea wind turbines I spotted on treehugger. Good idea to have them float over the horizon and way out to sea where the winds are higher. Plus it will stop all those moaning, 5L range rover driving, peasant burning, countryside types from compaining about their skylines.

But imagine a fleet of fully automated, robot controlled, floating wind turbines running amok on the high seas… hunting down oil tankers to justify their own existence.

I find it ironic that the ancient Cynics coined the phrase Cosmopolitan to mean not belonging anywhere and it’s now a shallow magazine fixated on female consumerism.

I’ve been listening to In Our Time again.

Over the weekend I went to see Serenity and caught the trailer for the new Doom movie. Which looks like an unabashed rip off of Aliens. Unsurprising as Aliens is no doubt one of the inspirations for Doom.

At the same time I’m playing (and enjoying) a bit of Halo on my new Mac. So, as a synchronous moment, this snippet about Peter Jackson signing on as Executive Producer for the new Halo movie really caught my eye. A bit of poking and I also find out that Alex Garland, of The Beach fame, has written the script for it.

The Doom story doesn’t really have legs and I’m not really that interested in seeing it unless its got the big floating Cacodemons looking menacing in 8 bit colour spitting fireballs at the good guys. However the Halo story is a bit more engaging. Doom is a distillation of horror movies, Halo is a distillation of sci-fi stories. There’s only shocks, thrills and blood in Doom, there are at least a few ideas hanging in the background of the halo backstory (even if at the end it’s horribly linear a 1st person shooter).

Alex Garland did very well pulling together a bunch of post-apocalyptic threads with 28 days later and provided a deep enough script about zombies taking over the world. I hope, and do have confidence, that he and Jackson can reverse the trend of terrible films based on blockbuster games.

It often seems like I’m way behind on the buzz word frontier. When I get to these outposts of neologisms they’re past their gold rush days and are ghost towns inhabited by the die-hards and the dogmatic; the 49ers and speculators have moved on to another cool conceptual vein to exploit.

Suddenly I’m hearing a lot about Web 2.0, there are a ton of sites and posts about it and now an O’Reilly conference.

I don’t want to rain on any one’s parade because I’m as keen about this stuff as the next guy, but the stuff they’re talking about has been mooted for quite a few years, web services, many pieces loosely joined, SOAP, etc. It’s just now that there are a few public facing sites that are now making full use of these concepts. And what’s interesting about reading about web 2.0 is that it’s a definition by selection. Flickr, delicious (i can never remember where the dots go) and Google maps are all pointed at as being “good”, they are 2.0, other things are not because the 2.0 community deems they are not.

Primarily though these things are still web sites. The vast majority of the bigger things are used purely for their Web 1.0 effectiveness, and that’s why they’re around. Some of the other 2.0 stuff is the purely the province of geeks, and more so the hacks that require greasemonkey or some other messing around to set it up.

One of the great things about this is that it is a rallying flag and a communicable concept. I’ve always had problems communicating these things to people who don’t get it. A frustration I’m sure most people in the web have felt at some time. However encapsulating it and having some heroes and success stories as well as a sweet little philosophy help make this a real thing. This sort of stuff helps sell it to the organisations beyond the early adopters, even if they don’t understand the philosophy they can be convinced by the dogma.

But as I did say before, even if I do appear a little cynical, I’m as fired up about this 2.0 stuff (Though I’ve only just found out what it’s called, I would just whiter on about XML, web services and open APIs. Now I have a clumsy buzz word.) as anyone. I can see the promise, in that hazy way of seeing futures that have a big fat rich mess of creative opportunities. Most importantly for now the thing that is great and most helpful about the, heroically proclaimed, 2.0 apps is that they are also successful 1.0 apps. The 2.0 side of them, APIs and open, remixable data is still nascent, but they do the 1.0 stuff really, really well. We need these 1.5 apps to get to 2.0, otherwise the 2.0 will languish, like it has done for years, even though the technology has been available. These are the bridges, the proof and the rich loam for experimenting on that will make the 2.0 dream a reality.

NOTE: A bit hasty above, the conference is in its second year and is itself the namesake for this whole 2.0 thing.

Robin sent me a link to buzztracker this morning. Looks very cool, I have no idea what I would use it for but I’ve stuck it in my side bar in case I ever need to look at it. In their own words buzz tracker…

… is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations in the Google world news directory.

It’s our attempt to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.

They’ve also got an OSX widget

Also google news has just launched an RSS and Atom (suprise, suprise) feed.