Taking a couple of days out of the hectic schedule which has kept me from updating anything around here for a while, I spent Thursday and Friday in Oxford for the 2008 ecampaigning forum. It was a great event, and a good time reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. I live blogged several sessions and written up some notes over in the other place, but wanted to post a pointer here because it’s likely to be of interest to those who might normally avoid the tech overload on that blog.

I don’t talk much about my work here, saving the more in depth stuff for the other place, but every now and again it seems worth mentioning some new project that has launched.

In spare moments over the past few weeks I’ve been setting up Future Music Talk. It’s a site that pulls together blog entries from a group of people talking about the future of the music industry, music promotion, etc. There’s a lot of good discussion taking place, but it’s all so widely spread out that it seemed helpful to bring some of it together for easy discovery and maybe some more cross-fertilisation.

There are a few more features I’d like to add, but it seemed high time I got this out in the open and started gathering feedback and ideas for more blogs to include. You can find it all at http://www.futuremusictalk.com

With only three and a half months left in Grand Rapids, it’s time for me to start passing along one of my few locally-based responsibilities. Building up Grand Rapids WiFi has been a great way to get to know the city and to learn a few new coding tricks, and I hope to keep enhancing the code, but it needs someone locally based who can keep their finger on the pulse of new wifi hotspots and make occasional visits to keep the site up to date.

So if you’re based in Grand Rapids (preferably the city rather than the ‘burbs, as that’s where most of the hotspots are) and would like to help out, let me know. The minimal advertising revenue to the site doesn’t cover its hosting costs, so there’s no money in it, but it’s really very little work and makes a satisfying little contribution.

I find much to enjoy in Orion Magazine, but sometimes there is an attitude within its agrarian approach which I find somewhat distasteful. That is a tendency to write off communication technology without seriously considering its context or the ways in which it can be channeled into positive uses. Lowell Monke’s piece “Charlotte’s Webpage: Children and Computers” is a case in point.

While Monke is not entirely negative about the use of computers in education, he does leave half-developed research hanging and ignores contextual details that could run counter to his argument. For example early on in the article he notes:

“There have been no advances over the past decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers,” said Stanford University professor of education Larry Cuban in 2001, summarizing the existing research on educational computing. “The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested.” Part of the problem, Cuban pointed out, is that many computers simply go unused in the classroom. But more recent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.

What is lacking in this article (and possibly in the original survey) is any breakdown of how those students are using computers. The experience of using a computer, particularly one connected to the internet, cannot be reduced to a monolith. While the cases of children simply killing time online are numerous, there are also plenty of examples of children demonstrating and enhancing their imaginations in ways that significantly benefit from access to the world wide web.

More fundamental, however, is the article’s commentary on how children weaned on what now passes for the information superhighway can find the real world dull and often want to retreat back online. There is a danger of exaggerating this risk, particularly when few educators or parents would be too worried if it were books their children were reading rather than (potentially) exploring online, developing their own narratives in MMORPGs, sharing their nascent musical creations on myspace, or even learning more about their local community.

Used carefully, the internet has a huge amount to offer when it comes to connecting people in a given locality. Aside from very small towns, the connecting power of the net allows people to discover others with shared (or fundamentally opposed) interests from whom we can learn. It connects us to a much more varied range of issues and fosters a very positive form of emergent behaviour. In modern America, sprawling and suburban as so much of it is, this can provide far more authentic experiences than the car-contained existence many of these children grow up with. And in large, high density cities it can offer a space for reflection that is sorely needed.

Certainly we don’t want children learning about their local flora, fauna, streets and buildings entirely online, or learning all about exotic places without knowing their own. We all should be not just spending time outside, but actively exploring our environs. But then we’ll get home. Hopefully we’ll talk with friends and family, hopefully we’ll read some books, but hopefully we’ll also get online and find out what a broader community has to say about what we’ve just experienced.

(via CINO’s Daily Asterisk)

Tags: orion magazine, computers, education

For at least the past two years around Oscar time I’ve bemoaned the fact that it’s so hard to get access to short films, even those nominated for Academy Awards. Last year Apple picked up some of the slack by making a few of the films available for download through iTunes, but this year there’s a more interesting offering.

Oscar Torrents provides summaries of all the nominated films and links to torrents (the files you can feed into bittorrent software, see wikipedia for an introduction) or youtube pages for the films. Not every film is available, but there are enough to give anyone a good overview of what’s up for awards.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to see the site disappear pretty quickly. It’s sure to upset the academy and the MPAA, and its creators may well be deliberately goading them. But it does once again highlight the fact that the existing distribution systems just aren’t up to the task of the most talked about films to the masses.

(via waxy, who also has an interesting analysis of piracy and the Oscars)

Tags: Oscars, MPAA, Bittorrent, file sharing, Oscar Torrents, Film Distribution

Until late yesterday afternoon there was a problem if you viewed this blog using Firefox and tried to go to an individual entry page. I’d stripped the ugly ‘.html’ from the end of links, but not completed the tweaking of the server settings to make that work as it should. That’s now resolved, and just in time to celebrate the release of Firefox 1.5.

While Microsoft fool around trying to make sure turn-of-the-decade technologies finally work in the 2006 release of their web browser, the Firefox developers have once again raised the bar for web browsers. The new version not only provides a smoother browsing experience, it also offers up a number of new features that give the web developers amongst us plentiful opportunities to experiment.

If you can upgrade/switch, please do.

After much procrastinating, Kari and I recently invested in iPods. I got one of the new video iPods and, much to her delight, we found a reconditioned pink ipod mini for Kari. And naturally we wanted to be able to listen to them in the car.

Having discovered that Griffin’s original iTrip doesn’t work with the 5th generation (video) iPods (despite the “works with all iPods” sticker still on display) we decided to try out the Monster iCarKit, a combined charger and radio hookup which boasts the ability to plug in a mobile phone charger and iPod simultaneously.

Not only did it not provide the promised power for our iPods and charger, but our attempt to use the kit has left our cigarette lighter socket somehow stretched and entirely useless. The mobile charger which once fitted snugly now flops around uselessly. Needless to say, we got our money back from Target. We now wait to see how easy it will be to get them to repair the car…

For now, this entry is only likely to be of interest to those who will be at Greenbelt (eleven days to go…). This year we’re going to be making use of flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us (shared bookmarks) and technorati (blog search) to try and build an online collage of the festival.

The story went up on the website today, with instructions on how to participate. Please tell your friends and spread the word, while I get to work on the necessary software to bring it all together…

Tags: greenbelt2005 | collage | flickr | del.icio.us | technorati

Written in response to this post on Laurence’s blog, chiefly based on his reference to this Observer article.

I’ve read a number of articles such as the one quoted from the Observer (though not, I confess, that one, yet), and agree that it’s something to keep an eye on, but it often feels like those writers are watching from the sidelines and not getting involved in what’s happening amongst the early adopter community.

The use of digital music (iPods et al) has led to the birth of services like audioscrobbler, which, while providing a personal service, are inherently social in their desire to observe trends, and connect fans. In the world of video gaming the tendency for several years now has been to find ways that players can interact with other human players. Witness the recent involvement of sci-fi author (and digital rights activist) Cory Doctorow in a book party based within an MMORPG as evidence that these are becoming serious communities.

One key thing that all of these creations could lack is true physicality, but as a recent Guardian report about live music indicates, when music fans meet online they usually seem to want to meet in person, and that’s one of the reasons for the bouyant live music scene at present. I suspect that such behaviours will increasingly be transportable to other areas of life.

There can also be a danger of producing communities that are still more self-selecting and insular than those we currently build for ourselves, but I’ve been surprised by the variety of people I’ve seen connected by eg. their love of a single band.

What is needed from the writers of these sorts of reports is not a “woe is me, the old ways are passing away” attitude, but a more constructive engagement with new forms of community and new technologies. We technologists do need more input and more engagement in order to really tailor our strategies to support and enhance community but ill-informed “it’s all about individualism” diatribes aren’t too helpful.

I’ve referred in the past to the wonderful websites They Work For You and Write To Them. Built by a group of volunteers, these sites provide search tools for Hansard (the British parliamentary record) that allow users to keep track of the activities of members of parliament, monitor the occurrence of topics in parliament, share comments on sections of the transcript, and then contact any of their elected representatives (at local, national, or european level) to initiate or continue discussions with them.

For the past few weeks I’ve been beginning to consider the possibility of similar tools for the United States. There are plenty of people working on tools to increase political engagement, and to begin to transform politics into a more participatory process. Particpatory Politics are a prime example, and so is the fantastic GovTrack. There are new tools such as Civic Space that are building tools for organising and managing campaigns (whether electoral or issue-based), and many 527s provide ways for their supporters to contact representatives. But so far as I can find, there isn’t anything that matches the facilities of the UK sites, or that places the tools in the hands of the general populace.

This post should be considered a call for participants. I’m beginning to pull together ideas on what might be involved in developing that US equivalent on this wiki. Ideas, feedback, participants, they’re all welcome…

Tags: participation | govtrack | theyworkforyou | writetothem