Watch here, or on C-Span2.

11:15 John McCain on the floor. Remember when the right couldn’t unify behind him last election? Bet they regret it now.

11:26 Tom Harkin is up there talking about how bad it is to use scare tactics like his … party … uses.

Tom Harkin wants to be the boss of you

11:31 Harkin mentions Kennedy. Drink!

“In a half-an-hour” let’s make history.” Legislative rape.

11:36 Chris Dodd is up talking about fear or some crap while saying “pass this bill or you all will die penniless and of horrible deaths.”

Dodd argues that the debate is between those who think that having your health care paid for is a right and those who think that having your health care paid for is not a right.

11:42 Why stop at the United States? Why not pay for the health care of all the world? Oh – but wait. They’d call us imperialists.

11:52 Mitch McConnell: “Can all of these Americans be wrong? Do their concerns count?”

11:54 Kudos to Harry Reid for demonstrating irony when accusing the GOP of fear-mongering while giving an emotional appeal for government control at the same time.

If this bill protected patients so much, why the $8b cut from hospice, the millions cut from home health care, the control costs for women?

11:58 FYI, the CBO calculates from the numbers, fuzzy or not, given to them by the administration. No other outside figures are incorporated.

12:00 Affordability and access are important to Reid only if the control of such falls under federal, not individual power.

Reid talks about the evils of the insurance companies. He decided to solve it by giving them even more customers under a federal mandate. FAIL.

12:07 Reid is about to bring Tiny Tim or one of those puppies from the animal abuse commercials to the floor. Just you watch.

12:08 Here we go. Cloture vote.

Kit Bond votes no.

12:11 Party line thus far.

12:13 Claire McCaskill votes yes.

Yeas 60 Nays 40. 58 Democrats, 2 Independents, 40 Republicans.

12:18 The motion passes. Money talks.

Liveblog on Aliens on Film4 (not More4, my bad) from a feminist perspective below – latest updates on top and feel free to leave comments/rants/fanlove! Also I’ll pop a few comments on me Twitterfeed: @sarahbrowngb

FINAL UPDATE: Well, hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, greatly enjoyed watching, blogging and Tweeting a film that never gets old, and cool to stumble across a new thing in it I’d never discovered before. Not sure how much of a feminist perspective I brought but I hope I put across some food for thought.

But enough of my blathering, what did you think?

11.58pm OMG!!! The end has the sound of an Alien egg opening! I’ve seen this film a gazillion times and never heard that!!! I always thought when people mentioned the ’secret’ ending they meant the music … Oh how I wish Cameron had directed Aliens 3 … And let’s just not talk about 4 or the vs Predator travesties …

11.53pm Now THAT, people, is how you kill an Alien queen. I never liked the ‘mommmy’ bit at the end. I DO like the ‘not bad, for a human’ bit from Bishop, tho.

11.50pm “Get away from her you BITCH!’. Ripley FTW!!!! Some say this line makes it sexist, to me it’s almost TOO the other way, males so redundant it’s now just the females battling for supremacy, men emasculated, injured or ‘literally’ torn in two, Alien Queen hissing in primal rage and fury as Ripley knocks ten bells out of her …

11.48pm, Male robot spewing a milky white substance? Freud overload! Now I wonder if that loader we saw in earlier scenes will figure at any point …

11.46pm I wouldn’t get too comfortable with the whole ‘we made it’ just yet …

11.45pm Bishop to the rescue, in your FACE Alien queen …

11.42pm Lifts, eh? Never come when you need them, like for a meeting, or when an Alien queen is after you … And the Alien queen sees the other lift, see – learned behaviour!

11.38pm Truly incredible scene in the queen’s nest. The queen a monstrosity of reproduction, shrieking over her eggs in the stand off withRipley, ordering her minions off. Notice how the Aliens appear to have no eyes? And don’t you just love Ripley’s head cocking before she takes revenge. Also the real bit where she abandons reason, almost a primal rage.

11.36pm In the book of the film (I know, I know) Ripley comes across an Alien embryoed Burke and gives him a grenade to kill himself with. Newt is found, now about to get to the ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN.

11.33pm Awesome scene of Ripley in the lift arming up, nervous, edgy, fearful yet determined. Great shooting, sound and editing to convey the drama, handheld camera to show her perspective … Fearfully yet determinedly negotiating her way through the power plant.

11.32pm And we discover Ripley’s first name – Ellen. The one slightly cheesy bit in the film, but great nonertheless: ‘Don’t be gone long, Ellen’ ….

11.31pm I love this bit, Ripley tools up! What gun DOESN’T she have by the end of it? Considering this is 1986 the effects have held up well.

11.27pm From the primordial swamp, an Alien emerges behind Newt, honestly the Freudian overtones are getting, frankly, very Freudian … and interestingly, the one time Ripley loses her shit is at this point, instinct? Her overarching sense of logic, pointing out that the girl will be alive? Interesting they put Hicks out of action at this point, ensuring Ripley alone can save Newt …

11.22pm I always found the girl a bit annoying. The whole ‘little blonde girl lost’ a la little Red Riding Hood, but with a big Alien standing in for the Wolf …

11.20pm Vasquez is as kick as in death as in life, and Gorman redeems himself. ‘You always were an asshole Gorman’

11.17pm Hudson goes a bit Die Hard. And look what happens. Vasquez blows shit up, is generally awesome. Aaaand Burke meets someone (or something) as venal as he is …

11.15pm They’re abooooooooooove youuuuuuuuu. God this scene had me in bits the first time I watched ….

11.14pm No-one does nervy panic better than Bill Paxton as Hudson. Vasquez meanwhile, prepares for the fight …

11.09pm Oh no, it’s Ripley v facehugger  thanks to evil  Burke. Facehugger as a form of ‘facerape’ was one article I read ages ago re Aliens, which seems farfetched but in keeping with notions of ‘body panic’ that appeared in so many horror films of the 80s.

11.01pm Hicks agrees to off Ripley if need be. Not the most romantic of scenarios, but I suppose he is now showing him his gun. O00h matron! Bonding over phallic objects of death …

10.57pm Bishop begins a slow, tentative forging of relationship with Ripley. And the Aliens retreat. Learned behaviour, I in turn learned that from Life programme w/David Attenborough. Not actually about Aliens tho.

10.53pm Discussion on the possibility of a Queen Alien. Hudson: ”There’s one female who runs the whole show’ – and a quick cut to Ripley. Ooooh yeah…

10.50pm Rather unsubtle analogy of Newt wondering if human babies come out of women like Aliens. Play on fear of women’s sexuality and reproduction … some feminist critics argue the use of phallic guns to destroy female Aliens is sign of misogny.

10.48pm re the locator Hicks gives Ripley: ‘it’s just a precaution, doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything’. Mmm hmm …

10.47pm Talking of leadership – Ripley’s character, independent of gender, is an instinctual and practical leader, who swiftly, calmly nad authoritatively takes charge where others flail.

10.44pm Hicks displays empathy towards child, forging of a new family with Ripleyand Newt as unit … WHY did they kill him off in Alien 3? Ripley meanwhile takes control, Hudson takes orders …

10.38pm Feel bad I haven’t mentioned everyone’s favourite space hick, Hudson. ‘Game over man, just game over!’.

10.37pm Husband says he always liked the woman pilot and wondered why she never really did anything else acting wise …

10.36pm – Hicks echoes Ripley’s assessment to blow shit up, ooh, a frisson of sexual tension over the unleashing of several gigatons of power. It’s like an overloaded metaphor or something.

10.34pm Our first comment! Stevo approves of the music, which I agree is particularly excellent, well done Jerry Goldsmith …

10.32pm EAT THIS! I don’t think Aliens understand English, but that one would be so PWNED if it did …

10.29pm - Ripley to the rescue!

10.28pm – Vasquez alert! ‘Let’s Rock!’ If you’re playing a drinking game, you’ll probably need to drink something right now …

10.26pm Chestbursting scene, eugh that bit makes me puke. The whole unholy birth/infernal mother scenario is grotesque. And Gorman wimps out …

10.23pm Hicks: ‘I like to keep this handy, for close encounters’.  Think out sexy thought think out sexy thoughts …

10.22pm Ripley realises guns not very good things to have under a nuclear fusion reactor. ‘What are we supposed to use man, harsh language?’. I once used that line in a business meeting. No-one got it, alas …

10.2Opm With Ripley, Gorman et al watching the screens, can we class that as a form of gaze, in which case are they passive, helpless or useless?

10.16pm Can I apply the female gaze to Hicks, pretty pls?

1o.09pm: Could the facehuggers be more vagina dentata? HR Giger’s designs perfectly played on that interplay of sexuality, organs, Freudian fears of women’s sexuality. The female aliens are viscous, sticky, but their second teeth protuberances are penis like. I’d have loved to have read Freud’s take on it. Jung’s too in terms  of archetypes … could anyone summarise? Anyone? Bueller?

9.57pm This part, when the marines first land on LV426 and check out the colony, is a masterclass in suspense filmmaking. Remember the ringing sound of the motion sensors? Terrifying …

In this section it  is Ripley who first spots definitive signs of the Aliens’ presence, and she is often the one who finds the solutions or notices the challenges ahead of the others. I once read a review which observed Ripley to be ‘unimaginative’. But it is her pragmatism and levelheadedness that saves her.

9.56pm – From @SciFiHeaven on Twitter – Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon has apparently died, aged only 63. Thankyou for Ripley and for Alien, Dan. RIP.

9.48pm – Aw, Hicks is asleep in the dropship. Michael Biehn, always the B-list actor, never hit the big, big time, which is a shame, because he’s a good actor, has those great rugged yet boyish look, would have been fantastic in the 40s in film noirs as a devious debonair conman romancing someone like Lana Turner then plotting to kill her hubby …

9.40pm I always liked the relationship between Vasquez and Drake. Cameron did a sterling job in creating a multi-ethnic crew with both genders equitably represented. Same with Terminator films, which makes the misogynistic drivel of True Lies with  Schwarzenegger all the more of an abberation in his oeuvre.

9.39pm In this film it’s Hyperdine systems who design the human robots, in Terminator it’s Cyberdine systems. NERD FACT.

9.37pm and a moment of respect for the most awesome line: ‘Hey Vasquez, you ever been mistaken for a man’. ‘No, have you?’ HELL YEAH. All girl geeks can quote this. FACT.

9.35pm. HICKS. The hunky face of Alien ass-kicking.

9.32pm Don’t trust Burke, Ripley! He’s a company man! OK the marines are coming, NOW it gets v cool.

9.29pm Hey, you can buy a whole book of feminist deconstruction of Ellen Ripley’s character!

9.23pm – Lost contact with colonists and they come to Ripley for help. Imagine if Ripley’s character was like John McClane in Die Hard. It would be all ‘yippykayyey Alienf**ker’ and no-one would show fear or any emotion other than mild irration at those goddam Aliens. I like how Cameron and Weaver made Ripley show the fear that all of us would show in such situations. It makes the film all the more frightening.

9.19pm – Aaah story foreshadowing, Cameron’s a master at this. We’re at the Newt’s family discovering Alien ship moment right now. If I shout ‘dont go in there!’ will they hear? Would be short film tho if they didn’t.

9.15pm – Don’t you love how the man who discovered the Alien eggs and started the whole thing was called Kane/Cain?

9.13pm Dig the ‘Company’ meeting with businesswoman in tie. Bad 80s women’s fashion did happen in space!

9.11pm. I always found it interesting that Cameron gave Ripley a daughter, perhaps to humanise her more, as it’s in this film that Ripley  the character most takes shape. Obviously a foreshadowing of her relationship with Newt, but I did wonder if part of it was make her more empathetic with female audience.

9.05pm Ripley’s alive! Although hair got mysteriously shorter in hypersleep. I’ve read in a few film books that Ripley’s character was orginally a man. Credit to Weaver for making the role transcend gender in that respect.

9.03pm IT BEGINS. Aaaaaand cue scary music. Husband moaning already. Great credits and intro music, still sends a shiver down the old spine. Oh this is director cut FYI, good job I ate a big dinner …

9.01pm incidentally, I have probably seen this film more than 50 times and it still scares the shit out of me…

9.00PM Pre Aliens interview – Cameron on Aliens and why everyone tried to talk him out of it.

8.51pm – Sigourney Weaver aka Ellen Ripley of Aliens is also in Avatar. She doesn’t tell people to get away from her, you bitch tho. Boo.

8.49pm: OK, some fanboy/girl interview with Mr Cameron himself advertising Avatar now. I never thought I’d want to see a film involving 12 foot tall blue human lizard. Is there no end to the man’s talent?

Liveblog notes from an IET Technology Coffee Morning, 16 December 2009.

Presenters: Patrick McAndrew, Graham Healing, with input from Elpida Makriyannis and Anne Adams

We have a Tobii eye-tracker in the labs, which isn’t used as heavily as it could be. Aim for today is to show how easy it is to use, and explore some of the ways it could be developed.

History – a few years ago, Graham and Patrick were trying to improve the OpenLearn website. It was hard to know whether their worries about its effectiveness were real. Used an eye tracker to do a brief study of what actually happens. It was amazingly revealing, and very efficient – just a few minutes of recording and playback showed them the interactions on the site. That then grew in to quite a study, with analysis. At that point, the technology was hard work – took many extra hours. But now have bought more recent kit, with software upgrades, which make it very easy to use.

Some classic research in to how people read pages – like Jakob Nielsen’s classic (2001) work showing an F-shaped reading pattern for web pages. But is it still true?

Has been around since the 1950s! Now more up to date – see e.g. this presentation, which is about the machine we have:

One big win is that the technology is almost invisible – it’s built-in to the monitor, so the effect of the instrument is minimised.

Graham sets of to do a live demo, and Keren Mills volunteers to use it. She’s sitting in front of the eye tracking machine, which looks very nearly just like an ordinary monitor. On the second display, it shows her eye movements – a red circle appears where the eye stops for a moment; it’s bigger the longer the eyes rest in place. It joins these dots up with a red line to track the movements of the eyes (saccades).

The software has three tabs – Design and Record (capturing data), Display (simple replay), Visualisation (analysis tools).

Clicking ‘record’ gets things going. She registers as a new participant, types in her name (or alias!) and clicks continue. then it goes through calibration. It turns out that most people’s eyes are very slightly crooked. The calibration is very straightforward – just tracking large red blobs with your eyes. Oops – the software crashed. Cue a slight pause to fix it, then the final serious IT solution of turning it off and then on again. The joys of live demos!

Jonathan San Diego and others have used this technology quite heavily for looking at learning. It’s hard to tell whether someone’s learning directly from a page using this, but you can tell whether people are engaging or not – whether they’re reading or skimming.

Back to the demo! We also have a video camera, which can be pointed at the user (Keren here) to show their expression, or at the context more broadly.

The calibration worked this time. It’s much more advanced than it used to be – previously, glasses or vision problems would make it impossible. But now the device can cope very easily.

Graham sets Keren a task – to go to the OU’s Platform website and explore it as she would any new site. She does so – but feels a bit self-conscious. The software is overlaying (on the display we but not Keren can see) the red blobs and lines on the website, showing where her eyes are fixating. Keren clicks ‘close’.

One slightly annoying feature of the software is that on startup and on finishing a recording it processes away but without giving any indication that it’s working.

We could see (as the audience) that Keren was skimming a lot, and reading one bit – which she confirmed.

Now we go to the second stage – the playback (‘Display’). On the left it shows the recording sessions, the URLs that have been visited within a recording, and the video from the camera. On the bottom are fairly standard video playback controls, including a hare to speed up and a tortoise to slow down. The timeline shows clearly ‘events’ which are things like moving from one URL to another.

We can see that Keren noticed the ‘Install Google Chrome’ banner on the top-right of the page. And that the eye tracking isn’t affected by head movements, or reasonable ambient illumination – i.e. you can do it in an ordinary room rather than a darkened one.

The third stage is the visualisations. You get a list of URLs, and shows you which of your recordings have looked at that URL. Then for each of those, you can get a view showing them. First is the ‘gaze plot’ which shows where people looked, and in what order – size of the circles shows you the length of fixation, and with each recording shown in a different colour. You can also look at how this elapses over time – so e.g. only show the fixations from the first five seconds, or two minutes, or whatever. You can pick which individuals to look at, and compare.

Top tip: when doing testing, it’s very good to have a fairly stable site. If the content changes a lot, it’s hard to compare – and the eye-tracking software treats large changes as different pages (to some degree – needs checking). And rotating/changing components are hidden in the Gaze Plot: it only shows a still image of the underlying web page. But those are visible in the playback. Another problem – with the web option, the software doesn’t capture video playback within pages (?well). You can capture video, and e.g. SecondLife.

Next view is the Heat Map, which combines the fixations to show ‘hotter’ (more red) for the areas that got more attention. Some classic findings e.g. people fixate on faces.

(There are more expensive analysis facilities which we don’t have – including Cluster and Bee Swarm). There’s an Area Of Interest tool, so you can measure the amount of time that people look at individual areas. It’s quite easy – you draw areas of interest on the screen, then you can see the Statistics for each area. So, e.g., can see how long people spent looking at each area, or how many times they looked at that area.

Testing can show up very annoying problems very quickly – simple things jump out, and you then have evidence to show others in the development team. In this example, Graham used Platform just as a quick example – the testing was three people who spent about five minutes on it, and then Keren live in the session.

You can do more serious, heavyweight analysis – exporting to SPSS, or more serious video analysis tools.

–
This work by Doug Clow is copyright but licenced under a Creative Commons BY Licence.
No further permission needed to reuse or remix (with attribution), but it’s nice to be notified if you do use it.

Post by Dan

Today marks the beginning of committee.  By November 2nd, a whole mess of really interesting folks decided that Tufts is their first choice for college and so they applied Early Decision.  Over the last 30 days, it’s been our job as Admissions Officers to read those applicants and prepare them for the committee process, after which this blog is named.

Personally, I love committee.  LOVE.  The admissions office comes together to present the applicants from my territory and help craft decisions about what the Tufts Class of 2014 looks like.   It’s a big responsibility, one I take extremely seriously, especially in ED, but it’s also a constantly interesting process and one that builds fellowship and collegiality between those of us in the admissions office.  Also, there are a lot of snacks.

See what I mean about Snacks? Those are Committee 1's member initials.

To help with understanding the play-by-play, I offer some introduction to how our committee works. The 20 admissions officers at Tufts split into two groups, which I will call Committee 1 (this is my committee, and in my entirely unbiased opinion, the best committee) and Committee 2.  Not exciting names, I know.  If I had it my way I would rename Committee 1 with a more exciting name, like “The Danger Committee,” but alas.  Each application is presented by the Admissions Officer responsible for the territory – we break that down here – we have a discussion about that applicant, some brief and others long, however much time is necessary, then we vote.  Committee 1 counts Denny, Jen, Danielle, Peter, Isabel, Becky, Lee, myself, and Ben amongst its members.

Without further ado!

9:40am – Lee (our Dean of Admissions) gives us the lay of the land.  Before we even begin looking at the files, we have a thoughtful conversation about what the ED group looks like, our challenges for the year in admissions, and how to stay mindful about schools, territories, and the lives of our applicants.

10:06am – Committee begins!!  Maryland kicks off the fun, which is extra fun, because I read Maryland’s applications.  We read and admit applicants from Baltimore, DC’s suburbs, and the Eastern Shore.   I’m so pleased to go first, I’ll miss the chance to blog our first admit of the year – blogging and presenting are mutually exclusive activities.  But rest assured, our first admit of the year is a Marylander.

10:57am – Done with Maryland.  FUN!  It’s been 8 months since my last committee, yet as a ‘veteran’ (a term I use loosely) this feels totally natural .  Actually, I’m surprised at how comfortable that felt.

10:58am – VERMONT!  Becky picks up the mantle and moves us to central Vermont.  Our first “move” of what I’m sure will be a day with a lot of mileage.

11:15am – We have our first real debate.  People get heated and there’s a lot of disagreement, but it’s productive.  (I wish I could be more specific).

11:17am – I eat a freshly baked cookie Isabel brought in for general consumption.  This oatmeal butterscotch cookie is AWESOME.

11:30am – Danielle eats a cookie and exclaims, out loud, “Oh my god!”

11:37am – Silence as we mull over what to do about a kid with a rough Freshman year.  I voted to admit along with a handful of others, but it isn’t enough.  Frankly, these disagreements are hard, but part of the reality of the process and I’m grateful that even when others vote against me, it’s done with care and thought.

11:41am – Puerto Rico!  Denny presents.  I’m not so secretly jealous of Denny because of the territories he reads: Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Southern California, Southern Florida…  He calls it the “Sun Belt.”   God bless the Sun.

11:42am – Lee sings songs from West Side Story with the lyrics changed.  Jen joins in on the Singing.  I love committee.

11:50am – I air-five Denny as we say adios to Puerto Rico and aloha to Hawaii.

12:01pm – More split votes in New Jersey right before lunch.

1:17pm – Back from lunch (which was spent playing games on Sporcle.com, btw).  Ben, a new admissions officer, presents his very first application(!!!).  Jen gives me her leftover sushi – delicious – and I chow on peppermint brownies as Ben does his thing.  Ben, I learn, is a natural.

1:36pm – We all agree: applying Early Decision if you had some trouble junior year is a bad idea.  Senior grades will help!  Wait for them, please!

1:4pm1 – The committee in the other room is laughing really loudly.  Jealously incites on our side, so we fake-laugh even louder just to show them which committee is best.  TAKE THAT COMMITTEE 2!!

1:46pm – Danielle’s turn to read.  I love Danielle’s reads; they’re hysterical and weird (like Danielle) and laughter is important when one is locked in a room for 8 hours with 9 coworkers.  Sometimes Committee is like survivor, only no one ever gets to leave.

1:53pm – We admit this AWESOME guy from Long Island.  His alumni interviewer says he is “not a one way thinker.”  He’s involved, funky, smart and seems like a really nice guy on top of all that.  Applicants like this one are why I love my job and it’s such a delight to get to know someone like this, even if it’s only on paper, and even if it’s just for a short time.

1:59pm – We’ve stopped to watch a Youtube video (our optional essay #6).  It’s adorable.  Absolutely adorable.  I wonder how many times we’ll do this?  It slows us down when all 9 of us stop to watch a video for 1 minute and 17 seconds, but they are so much fun to watch.  And then, in response to the video, Lee starts to sing again (this time it’s Les Mis).

2:06pm – Lee and I share a high-five as we admit a kid raised by his grandmother and will be the first member of his family to attend a college.  Welcome to Tufts!

2:18pm – We complete a string of 4 admits in a row!  Rare when that happens, but it feels so good to say yes.  Hopefully, our admitted applicants are as excited as we are.  ; )

2:38pm – Jen presents Long Island.   I love when Jen presents Long Island; she explains where each school is on the Island.  It’s like getting a geography lesson.  ”This is close to where I grew up, and close to Roosevelt field. ”  Also, there’s some Billy Joel that gets sung.

2:56pm – Someone (and they shall remain nameless) says, “My lap runneth over.”  Much laughter ensues.

3:14pm – I eat my third cookie.  I can’t help it.  Isabel knows how to bake.

3:15pm – More singing!  This time, it’s the Little Mermaid.  SO MUCH SINGING.  Maybe I’ll bring a boom box (do they still make those?) to committee tomorrow.

3:52pm – I learn things about Malaria.  Thanks, applicants!

4:33pm – We finish.  By my count, I ate 3 cookies, 2 brownies, a dozen munchkins, 9 baby carrots, a handful of chocolate covered cranberries, Jen’s sushi, and veggie chips.  Also, we admitted 22 applicants in our committee.  18 from Committee 2.  SO EXCITING!

4:44pm – As Becky leaves, she yells at me for not writing anything about her for the live blog.  I promise not to make the same mistake if I do this again.

So?  What do you think?  Is this interesting?  Terrifying?  Too much information?  Are there things you want to know more about?  We’re pretty big on transparency at Tufts, or I doubt anyone would let me do this (and as far as I know, this is the first such blog of an admissions process), and I want to have your feedback.  Post in the comments section with your thoughts.

As the semester draws to a close, I’m doing some preliminary planning with some of my English teachers for next semester.  We are interested in working with another teacher and/or librarian who might be willing to help facilitate some co-learning and collaborative discussions via class blogs and/or Skype during the second semester of January 2010.  We are also open to the use of other forms of social media, such as Nings or Twitter, to facilitate conversations and inquiry around texts.  I am also very comfortable with using CoverItLive for liveblogging!

Here are the classes and common readings my teachers are doing:

• Mr. Bradford, 9th Literature/Composition Honors:  Night, January 2010; Romeo and Juliet, February 2010
• Mr. Bradford, 11th Literature/Composition:  Readings from the Realism period in American Literature, January 2010 and The Red Badge of Courage
• Ms. Orfale, 10th Literature/Composition, Honors:  Dante’s Inferno, January 2010; Hamlet, February 2010

While this project has inspired (and also see this terrific additional account!)our call for collaborative partners, we are open to other ideas.  Please email me at buffy.hamilton at cherokee.k12.ga.us if you are interested in collaborating with us across the miles!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Today is the day all domestic geeks look forward to (or dread for some)…a day focused on food, family and more food. I started my preparations at about 3 pm yesterday by making an Apple-Cranberry Sauce, Curry Sweet Potato Mash, baking bread (gluten free) for the stuffing, making the butternut squash for the stuffing and setting the turkey to brine (brining is a surefire way to create a moist and juicy turkey). I cheated a bit and just got a pre-made brine from Whole Foods…it smelled delicious and was almost identical to the one I was going to make so why not save some time? All I have left today is roast the turkey…which I forgot to mention will be bacon wrapped. I bacon wrapped the turkey last year and it was amazing! I waited until the turkey was almost done and applied the bacon for the last half hour and the bacony taste permeated the turkey to the core. Well this year I decided to start wrapping the turkey from the beginning and just remove and reapply the bacon throughout (to keep it from burning. By my calculations, this will either cause the turkey to have a bacony flavor the likes of which the world has never seen….or I will blow up my kitchen. Either way it should be good times!

So you might be wondering why Im here now and why Im live blogging. Well why not? People live blog stupid stuff all the time (ie: Live Blogging Martha Stewart) and dammit Im going to liveblog cooking my turkey. So keep checking back for more turkey updates and let me know what youre cooking and how its going.

8:33- Ok Ive hit snooze long enough, time to get up and get this bird going! I removed it from the brine and patted it dry. Next I heated up an apple quartered, a half onion, some cinnamin, some sage, a cup of water and a splash of maple syrup and filled the bird with the mixture (leaving out most of the liquid).

9:06- The Turkey has entered the oven! Its a scorching 500 degrees and Ive opened up all the windows in my apartment to avoid setting off any smoke alarms. It kind of sucks because it lets all the delicious turkey scent out.

9:36- Alright 30 minutes of broiling (and only one burn to my hand) and the heat has been reduced to 350 and the turkey wrapped in its FIRST layer of bacon! Look at this beauty!

Bacon application #1

10:15- OMG my apartment smells like bacon and all kinds of deliciousness. I wish I could transmit scent over the internet because this is what love smells like. Im trying to gauge how long to leave each bacon application on. I want it to cook trough but not burn…but I also need to make sure I dont open the oven too much because that will just add more cook time to the bird and lead to drying it out. Oh and have no fear the bacon from the turkey will not go to waste…what I manage to avoid eating will be diced and added to the stuffing to make a Bacon Butternut Squash Stuffing.

11:01- Alrighty, so the bacon has cooked and is ready to be removed…although some of the bacon decided to graft itself to the turkey and it took some finagling to remove it. But the first layer was shed and the second applied and the turkey is popped back into the oven for the final hour to 2 hours. Sadly I just realized I forgot to get a turkey thermometer so I have to run out and procure that. Lets hope the store isnt too crazy!

12:09- Back from the store and shockingly enough, there were hardly any lines! I was able to walk right up to a register and was out in less than 10 minutes! So now the thermometer is in the turkey and its just under 140 degrees and looking lovely. Check out the all that turkey n bacon juice accumulating at the bottom of the pan…that will make for some tasty gravy! Time to dice up the bacon I removed earlier and make the stuffing! Going to make the executive decision to drop the temperature of the oven a bit so that I dont overdo the bird (chow time is scheduled for around 2pm).

12:47- Success! The turkey has reached peak deliciousness (and something about proper temperature)! Final result was 2 bacon applications (about an hour and 15 minutes for each application). I cooked up some extra bacon and along with the bacon from before, diced it for the stuffing. Ive got to say, I might actually be more excited for the stuffing! Look at it! Homemade bread…butternut squash sauteed with onions, celery and herbs…and now bacon. Just popped that into the oven while the turkey sits wrapped in foil awaiting its transportation.

fun fact- between the turkey and the stuffing there is a total of 3 lbs of bacon!

1:33- Stuffing is almost done and the Curry Sweet Potato Mash is warming up. Just finished the gravy which involved not only the bacon/turkey drippings but a secret ingredient (hint- Aunt Jemima would be proud).

1:46- Huzzah its all done! Now to back it up and pray it survives the 2 mile trek to my friend’s house. Wish me luck!

2:21- Food arrived safely! Got a celebratory glass of wine and am waiting for everyone’s delicious contribution to the feast. Will post final pics later. Thanks for following and happy Thanksgiving everyone!

<3 seanalyn

7:36 am: Damn it. These dogs are like an alarm clock. I was hoping after a bottle of wine last night that they’d be forgiving and let me sleep past 7:30. I guess they gave me 6 minutes. It’s foggy outside. And it looks cold. I’d rather not walk them, but I guarantee no one in this neighborhood is out with their dogs at 7:30 am on a foggy, cold Thanksgiving morning…so it’s time for a walk.

8:12 am: One of my most guilty Thanksgiving traditional indulgences is a peppermint mocha from Starbucks. Since I could drive, I have always gone there first thing in the morning to get one. I’m sure the last thing I need on Thanksgiving Day is a 300-calorie drink for breakfast, but I’m going for a run later that will cancel that out. I also forgot my travel mug in Chapel Hill, damn it. But that’s a pretty red cup.

8:34 am: The turkey is out of its brine, dried off, and sitting in the bottom shelf of Dad’s fridge. The extra time in all this involved cleaning the cooler the turkey was brined in and then trying to figure out a place for the milk, orange juice, soda, and wine I had to take OUT of the fridge in order to fit the turkey. Good thing I cleaned the cooler.

10:18 am: Eight miles and one shower later, and Dad and I are sitting in the kitchen shelling beans*. Is that what’s it’s called when you break the end off of fresh green beans? Whatever it’s called, that’s what we did, for three pounds of green beans.

11:13 am: Not food-related, but Snoopy just made his appearance at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Woohoo!

11:15 am: It’s 11:00, so I decided to go ahead and blanch my beans, which can be done six hours in advance. Get some stuff out of the way before the rest of the fam gets here. Cooking at my dad’s house is always a bit of an adventure…

It’s actually a ton of fun once I get used to the mismatched pans and figure out where everything that I need is located. He has a lot of kitchen stuff…like a million different sized seives and at least a thousand different sized whisks…so I get to use everything I want.

11:29 am: Well, shoot. After all that, I can’t find a 13×9 pan. There’s like a 6×8 pan as evidenced by that last photo, but that’s not big enough for the huge amount of stuffing I’m going to make. I guess no Wilson Thanksgiving is complete without at least one trip to the store….

12:21 pm: After a relatively painless trip to the store, I’m back, and about to start on my stuffing. This stuffing is like, the best dish I’ve ever had. It’s got apple…it’s got apple chicken sausage…it’s got sage and thyme…it’s amazing.

12:34 pm: No sage and rosemary on hand, damn it. I left them in Chapel Hill. Dad’s running back to the store.

12:39: After that run and no breakfast or lunch, I’m starving. I’m cooking some shrimp so I can snack until dinnertime. I hope the guests get here soon so they can actually enjoy some shrimp too! Actually, maybe not….mmm, shrimp.

1:04 pm: Dad’s back with the spices, and I’ve started preheating the oven for the turkey. Hurrah!

1:20 pm: I’ve cooked the stuffing for a little bit, just to get rid of excess moisture…and I’m buttering that bad boy turkey down right now.

Gobble gobble, buddy.

1:34 pm: In he goes! Stuffed with a carrot, onion, and thyme…breast side down for the first 2.5 hours, then right-side up for crispiness. And I’m opening a bottle of wine because I can. And it’s dinner-time somewhere. I don’t really need a reason.

2:01 pm: Chris and Sonja and Lexi are here!

2:35 pm: It’s snack time for Lexi, and for me, too. More shrimp.

2:55 pm: Ouch. I just cut up four shallots for my green bean dish. I’ve never had an onion family member make me cry as much as I am right now. I’m in serious pain!

3:00 pm: Consolation for my messed-up eyes – Sonja’s cranberry pumpkin bread. It’s healthy because it has pumpkins and cranberries in it.

3:46 pm: The rest of our guests are here! Sonja’s parents and brother, Eric. They arrived with pie, sweet potatoes, and a deep-fried turkey. Good god.

4:06 pm: Time to flip the turkey…one and a half hours til eatin’ time!

4:23 pm: I’ve thrown in the garlic for the roasted garlic mashed potatoes…this is the point where everything starts getting down to the wire and it all starts happening at once! I think I have time to take the dogs out one more time and enjoy another glass of wine before it’s really go time. I suspect updates won’t be readily available then, but I’ll try! And happy eating to those of you already at your tables

4:59 pm: Paul and his family just got here, right as the turkey finishes. Perfect!

5:42 pm: All of a sudden, everything is finished. Holy crap. How did 45 minutes pass by!

5:58 pm: OK. No pictures. The food’s on the table and the turkey’s carved. I’ll be back later if I don’t have too much wine.

7:57 pm: Well, that was a successful dinner. Nothing got set on fire…no one tried to kill anyone. However, my dad did spill some wine on my camera, so I’m letting that dry out until tomorrow. So no pictures of the finished meal until then. Suffice to say, it was delicious, and a complete success. I hope everyone had a beautiful, happy, delicious, and delightful Thanksgiving as I did!

*Paul has informed me that this is called “stringing beans.” I apologize for the misnomer.**
**Rosie says this is called “snapping beans.”

So I realized today that during the last 45 minutes of prep, I didn’t get any pictures. Between cooking, helping delegate responsibility, saying hello to my future-in-laws when they met my dad for the first time, and occasionally picking up my niece, I didn’t have an extra hand to use. But here’s the finished table – at the bottom you’ll see my roasted garlic mashed potatoes and my green beans;  next up it’s Julie’s sweet potato casserole; then Kevin’s deep fried turkey (on the left) and my roasted turkey (on the right); then my gravy, Sonja’s cranberry sauce and Kevin and Julie’s deviled eggs; finishing up with my stuffing and Julie’s mac and cheese. And we also had chocolate chip, pumpkin, and apple pies. God.

Anyway, this was a great Thanksgiving. The potluck style is a great way to get the family together, with less work and less money spent for everyone. And I love tasting other people’s favorite dishes. P and I decided the next time I liveblog, he’ll be there to help take pictures if I get caught up in cooking, which I thought was really sweet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A couple of weeks ago I was at Reuters’ and Amplified’s #1pound40 conference on social media, journalism and the future of politics.

The event was billed as a ‘curated unconference’ e.g. some room for mixing up a gently-led agenda with questions for debate solicited from online, offline, inside and outside of the audience present.

One particular tip I picked up really paid off at a conference I covered for Journalism.co.uk a couple of days later.

At #1pound40 were were asked to send one tweet at the end of each session summing up what the most important thing we’d learned from that discussion was.

At the Society of Editors’ annual conference the following Monday, I decided I’d try out this one-tweet rule for live coverage of the event. Our level of tweeting from events has been criticised before – with good reason sometimes – and it can be a tricky thing to get right e.g. enthusiasm to spread a good soundbyte can make you forget that 20 other people in the room will be tweeting the exact same thing.

Instead I tweeted 1-2 times for each speaker – focusing on the most important point(s) of their speech and trying to include background links and strip out any unnecessary, narrative detail.

This left me with more time to take longer notes for news stories and blog posts – and hopefully was a better service to our Twitter followers on @journalism_live. Any other live-tweeting tips, do share.

As some of you might have learned, I’ve liveblogged the Pacquiao-Cotto fight. It was fortunate that we recently subscribed to a cable provider and our issues with our internet connection were resolved prior to the scheduled fight. I was so excited because this was my first time blogging an event live. I was all ready–drinks, laptop, iPhone for the quick photos among others.

Liveblogging set-up at home

I decided to do the liveblogging on Plurk as it will save me time to update my other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. It was very exciting to watch the fight and it was also an exhilirating experience to blog about it live. My fingers were running numb as I plurked/twitted live and typed blindly (My eyes were stuck watching the event as my fingers were very busy doing their work. ). Pacquiao won the fight, which earned him a place in boxing history.

Live blogging about the event reminded me of my days when I was writing for a major daily back home. I used to watch a live game of a defunct basketball association and race against time to submit my story onsite. The challenge back then was to draft your story within 5 minutes and beat the submission of the regular sports writer of the paper. Writing a sports article is no walk in the park as you need to bring your readers to that moment. The article must be lively as possible. The verbs that you use should translate into more than action words, it should create an illusion that the readers are watching the event as it takes place.

With the microblogging platform such as twitter and plurk, liveblogging about any event has become easy but still challenging. Highlighting the most important aspect of the moment is a big task plus the need to adequately describe the moment and bring your readers into the ringside.

After more than 40 plurks about the event, my plurk karma slid so fast that I didn’t realised that I lost more than 0.25 of my hard earned karma (plurk karma that you gain gives user access to a number of exclusive icons on the microblogging network). However, the good news was most of my twitter and facebook friends appreciated my livetweets and realtime status updates.

So, next time you liveblog you might want to consider some of the following:

• Decide on where you will blog. Using a blogging integrator software will be a good idea if you have a number of social networks or blogs to update in realtime (consider using tweetdeck, digsby among others).
• Make sure you have a good internet connection.
• Ensure you have the passion and presence of mind when the liveblogging event comes.
• Practice on your typing skills!

Live notes from IET Technical Coffee Morning – Robin Stenham on accessibility.

Accessibility is one of the things I particularly care about so it’s good to have this session.

Robin is Manager – Curriculum Access in Disabled Student Services. Two main areas of responsibility: single enquiry point for students (or their intermediaries) about the interface between their assistive technology and the OU’s products and services – particularly courses. Has a team, has backup from IET staff, but it’s literally one man plus half another one and half of his dog! The other area of responsibility is policy development, again working with IET and LTS, affect and effect policy. Wants to rebalance and embed accessibility in to the mainstream.

Things are changing quite quickly – announcements on Monday folded in to talk at the last minute.

He talked broadly about the issues around accessibility, and specifically for the OU, and then about the new focus on embedding accessibility across the OU, which promises a step-change in the way we manage making our products and services accessible to all.

Why accessibility?

Students’ ethical and legal rights. Fundamental part of OU mission!

Legal requirement is for ‘reasonable adjustment’, which has raised expectations.It’s a technical, pedagogical and service delivery issue. We need a whole-institution approach.

Also business imperative – exempt from ELQ consideration (any student with disabilities gets full funding), and getting it right helps recruitment and retention. Getting it right for disabled students helps other students too. (Access for all.)

It’s part of our own professional armament – keeping ahead of the game. It can also add value to research proposals (certainly has to mine!).

Changes afoot to put the OU in the lead internationally in terms of how it manages accessibility. Organisational dynamics key.

Disabled students at the OU

11,435 disabled students currently registered – about 6% of the student population. 25% of them get Disabled Student’s Allowance.

Fatigue/Pain 5k, Mobility/Physical and Mental Heath both about 3.5k, Manual Skills and Dyslexia about 2.5k, Other about 2k. Sight, Hearing, Personal care about 1k. Unseen about 1.5k. Autistic spectrum lower. Others and things I didn’t capture about 2k total.

Challenges for disabled students

May have difficulty with one or more of many activities. (Some anyone would expect (reading, writing) and some you might not – e.g. sustaining an activity, interacting with others. ) Need to think about how these activities are supported and make reasonable adjustments.

What counts as a reasonable adjustment needs to be a whole-institution consideration – not a retrofit by Disabled Student Services in responsive mode when students encounter problems.

Who’s responsible?

At the moment scattered – changes to University products and services (e.g. move to Moodle) is senior management. Teaching is course teams. Routes for progression – Programme teams/CAUs.  Technical and media – the producers of the materials (LTS, and other units). Support for individuals is Student Services (ALs, Regional/Central Staff, Disabled Student Services). Examinations is Examinations and Assessments. And so on …

So support for embedding accessibility is scattered across many groups, including Disabled Student Services, Accessibility in Educational Media (AEM) team in IET, LTS, Regions, Equality & Diversity Office, and others.

We spend a lot of resource retrofitting materials – e.g. alternative format production, a small industry sending out PDFs, recording in digital format (and analogue, but that phasing out in February), Digital Talking Books – historically developed ReadOut and DREAM, but that being replaced by an international standard – DAISY – so we are producing many DAISY Digital Talking Books for distribution to students. Other things include transcripts, summer school activities, training and development for staff.

Student expectations, when they’re not met, lead to complaints – and there’s a system and organisation for dealing with those.

How charming to pillory a disabled man – article in the Times on 11 November by Melanie Reid. Issue about Gordon Brown’s handwritten letter to relative of soldier killed,   contained ‘Why if the partially sighted can sue the OU for producing inaccessible material [...] then this constitutes a grave emergency’. Mr M – late 2007 – sued us in the County Court for failure to provide extensions to TMA deadlines and to provide materials in suitable format; we settled out of court.

Enabling Greater Accessibility

Last April, had a consultant in, led to a workshop – ‘Working together to make accessibility a reality’ – good things came out of this process review. Audience senior managers – Associate Deans, Programme Heads, etc. Sponsored by senior managers – Will Swann, Denise Kirkpatrick.

Had seven objectives to improve things for accessibility – doing better, but also documenting better, and being more visible and organised about it. Trying to step outside silos. That took a morning (!). Now translated to an Implementation Plan, with the ear of the senior managers – previous pushes to do this didn’t have that senior ownership and governance.

Objective to provide accurate and comprehensive information about reasonable adjustments – to students, enquirers, advisors, ALs and Disabled Student Allowance Assessors. Would be great improvement on the current long course descriptions, and would require getting things right upstream in the course production processes. Move away from cottage industries and bolt-ons.

Implementation Plan addresses responsibility. Josie Taylor (Director of IET) and Anne Howells (LTS boss) also bought in, via Denise Kirkpatrick, will also include Deans. Learning and Teaching and Quality, Strategy, Curriculum and Awards. Five sections – policy management and responsibility, process, staff skills, technology, review (plans, targets, reprioritisation).

Faculties will specify an Associate Dean to have special responsibility for accessibility, and will also nominate someone to be supported with training and guidance so they have the high-level skills and expertise too. IET will help assess the knowledge shortfall and help people get up to speed and stay that way. Martyn Cooper reckons it’s a minimum of 10% of someone’s time to track this stuff.

New Code of Practice relating to disabled students coming soon from the QAA – has precepts which institutions need to adhere to.

There is a huge amount of information and guidance – some up to date, some not. Routes in via IET Accessibility Primer and general public-facing info on OU website www.open.ac.uk/disability and /diversity

Very much a moving target – technology change very rapid. International standards too.

IET will be producing checklists to help at each stage – what to do, where to get help to do it. Part of IET’s input to Curriculum Management Guide, which is the key document used by Course Teams to make courses.

Also issue with AL-initiated materials, student-generated content (e.g. Elluminate sessions) – accessibility challenges. Some argue that these are additional to producing ‘graduateness’ – but graduate-ness includes encounters with peers, the whole learning experience – so students need to engage with the issues in creating an inclusive society. These should not be barriers for us or our students. If we can harness new technologies in an inclusive and accessible way, it’ll enhance employability for all students. Remote working skills, being inclusive, distributed environment – very transferable skills.

First review in Easter 2010.

What are the benefits?

1. Increased and sustainable recruitment and retention
2. Reduced costs and concomitant increased quality of course production, presentation and support (costs hard to define and quantify, though; may require seedcorn funding – but want cost-neutrality where possible)
3. Reduced costs and concomitant increased quality of complaint management because of an audit trail to be used in the event of DDA challenges (also reputational benefit indirectly)
4. Meeting our mission

Questions

Me: DAISY Digital Talking Books and structured content production.

Robin: Previously, did 1000 flowers bloom approach to technology. Didn’t have understanding of the impact of producing web resources, and implications of multiple stages. Now we have structured content (previously structured authoring) – a single source document (using Word with a fixed stylesheet) delivers a multiplicity of outputs: HTML pages on websites (or complete website), Word-rendition of that material, PDFs to send to printers and go to students. PDFs do help with digitisation and broadly-available content; but PDF still has horrendous accessibility issues. Also outputs MP3 files! And DAISY Digital Talking Books. Disabled Student Services moving on from analogue – we still send out courses on cassettes. 150 cassettes for a 60-point level 1 course! Students spend 20% of time on navigation rather than studying. Also replacing DREAM and ReadOUt with an international standard-based approach: DAISY digital talking books. Will show the advantages of having a digital talking ebook which provides enormous flexibility for non-disabled students to access course texts through the multiplicity of readers.

At the press of a button on Openlearn site – get a Word document, a PDF, a series of MP3s with coherent names, and a digital talking book. Unresolved areas are symbolic fonts and foreign languages, pagination. But we can do a multiplicity of alternative formats at a press of a button – for all students, not just students with declared disabilities.

Project almost finished, but reverberations around for a while.

Q1: Reasonability. To do your job, need to understand what reasonable adjustment means. Is that straight from legislation? Who decides?

Robin: Very interesting question. ‘Reasonable adjustment’ is right from the legislation, and we have to make them, but there’s no case law (yet). We have many best guesses about it. Robin thinks reasonable adjustment is a process, which is influenced by a number of things: the governance and management, international standards, cost, dialogue between student and adviser.

Martyn Cooper: Very pertinent question, highly problematic, has been since it came in. Law sets out the term, Best Practice Guides give some examples of what you have to think about. But everyone settles out of court (as we did) so no case law. And anyway probably wouldn’t transfer very well. General guidelines offered, course teams have prime responsibility. Currently an informal process in the OU. In the new plan, defining the responsibility. Proposal to have a panel in the university so where a course team or a developer decide something isn’t reasonable, they pass it to that panel for review and help. Perhaps your idea about how to meet the situation wasn’t reasonable, but there might be other ideas, so need to check. But some adjustments are in truth unreasonable.

Q1: Only barrier cost?

Martyn: No. If adjustment impairs the study of other students. Or if compromises academic quality. Always say, refer back to learning objectives, or to the assessment adjectives. Is there a reasonable way of achieving those – adjustment might give access to some material but not the learning. Sometimes might say ‘Ok, can’t do that bit, but can reach learning outcomes by going for the other parts’ – so long as the students know. At the moment they don’t get that level of information at course signup.

Q1: There is a legal concept of a reasonable person. Somewhat antiquated. He is a white able-bodied male who gets on the Clapham Omnibus!

Martyn: Disability legislation – back to 1985, 1996 when education came in to scope – so that point probably archaic.

Q1: No legal definition of reasonability, in practice.

Robin: Yes, indeed. We don’t have a coherent process to enable us to have a defendable position about whether our decisions are reasonable. As an institution, the criteria are laid out about academic standards, costs, impact on other students – our processes will enable us to define reasonability, but explicitly and documentation. E.g. from language courses – previously had academic outcomes around about speaking a language, now change to communicating in a language. Change enables e.g. students with hearing or speaking impairments to study.

Martyn: It’s not all doom or gloom! In every case in the last 12 years, usually leads to innovation and better quality for everyone. It’s not a terrible issue of dealing with nasty problems. It’s part of making really good students. So things like virtual microscope or virtual field trips meet the needs of students without disabilities so folded in to mainstream provision to great benefit. Also good news is that this implementation plan exists, with buy-in across the board, rather than being agitated for by the people directly concerned. If it achieves half of its aims it’ll be great.

Robin: Loads of examples where inclusivity improves the content of the course – design, HCI (and mobiles!). New maths & computing course – lots of accessibility review of the new tools, and different ways of assessing work and how groups can work together. Will make the course much richer by considering needs widely.

Jon: Should aim for course team to make a course passable by someone with particular challenge, or to be able to get a Pass 1 (top grade)? E.g. if skip inaccessible part of course, could make it hard to get top marks.

Robin: Raises question of clusters of individual needs. In one sense there’s no such thing as disabled students, there are students with a variety of needs. Structured content allows us to cater to students with a variety of preferences – and requirements – for media to study with. Help students become independent learners. It’s about diversity, and diversity in accessing media. So balance between individualisation and mass personalisation – in course content, learning outcomes, and media.

Martyn: Point raised is valid. Standard illustration: e.g. Arts course talking about development of perspective in Western Art, teaches by asking students to review a series of pictures. Can’t be accessible to students who can’t see – so don’t waste your effort producing endless course descriptions. Course Team then has decision – is there something else we can provide, or can they pass the course without doing that? Is an academic question, tied up with academic objectives.

Robin: Then make it explicit and clear. Students with disabilities not naturally litigious – it’s when they’re led to believe they can do something and then find out they can’t, because the course descriptions don’t help them know whether they can do it or not.

Q2 (visitor from China): In China, have 60m disabled people, but at university level have separate institutions for disabled students. Suggestions for our Chinese universities to be inclusive? Collaborative work?

Robin: Yes, sure! Primary and secondary education in UK has been around special schools for e.g. students who are blind, or who are deaf. But direction of policy here (and societal view), based on cost and inclusivity, is a move to integrate students with learning differences in to the mainstream. At university level, whole thrust of legislation is to create inclusive higher education.

Q2: As developing country, perhaps costs lower for separate institutions.

Martyn: Different perspectives on this globally. In UK, no specialist universities, but some rare specialist colleges. In the US, some universities have special focus on this (incl Rochester). But American model is that the expertise there gets rolled out to other universities as best practice. Different cultures, and huge diversity in this area across Europe. Philosophically in the UK the tendency is towards inclusion. Within the disability community views differ. Many think it’s a good thing, so long as needs are actually met – if not met, it can be a way of avoiding support.

Q3 (MCT course manager): Welcome this. Can be bewildering. Symbol fonts slightly tricky – can we raise that profile of symbolically-rich courses? Will there be particular strand looking at this?

Robin: Working with Science. Did a mystery shopper exercise, keeping a diary, did improvements based on that. Now looking at how we can make science accessible – and where we can’t, and what the difficult areas are. Enormous effort internationally on making symbolic language accessible, but no silver bullet. Tracking that very intently, we don’t know enough about it. Not part of the Implementation Plan but Disabled Student Services working on this. Pathfinder for other faculties too. Timescale – by end of July 2010, project complete, results analysed by Faculty.

Martyn: Every faculty has its own particular challenges – hence need for each Faculty to have a specialist on accessibility in their area.

Robin: Also e.g. deaf students studying music. Similar challenge.

Q4: Where does the increased use of existing, third-party material (online resources, databases, etc) leave us with regards to reasonable adjustments?

Robin: Have done things here. Mary Taylor developed guidelines for referring people to documents and websites – quick and dirty ways to put up flags for further analysis by experts. Having problems with this now. Business school course, co-produced reader – some articles were pictures!, so inaccessible. Had to do fixes. Rights have to be involved here. The simple way of dealing with it is to re-key, but that’s a cost. Or advanced scanning technology for the student themselves. It’s a minefield. Like student-generated content. We have to engage with this. Need to have processes in place, and know the basis on which we’re doing that, and communicate that.

Q4: Embedded in Implementation Plan?

Robin: Yes.

Q5: ELQ exemption – self-declared students?

Robin: Not sure. Definitely students on DSA. Don’t know about self-declaration, though.

Martyn: There is a constraint about the amount of study within an annual period.

–
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After mulling around the coffee and muffins in the reception area and feeling awkward because I didn’t know anyone at the conference, I headed into the lecture hall where I eyeballed the walls for electrical outlets.  I would need a power source if I was going to type through several hours of conference proceedings.  I saw another attendee settling in and plugging in her laptop, so I sat down nearby and asked if she would mind sharing the outlet (she didn’t).

So began my day of twittering the “Nowcasting: Design Theory & Digital Humanities” conference held at UCLA last month. My first volley of the day:

@janaremy audience is assembling & positioning themselves around available power outlets (my kind of conference!) #nowcasting

After a few initial tweets I realized, through hashtag searching, that there were several other twitterers in the room.  By following the other tagged tweets I discovered a website that was liveblogging the conference happenings, too.  Within an hour, I found about a dozen people in the audience actively writing about the conference events as they unfolded. We were not only twittering our impressions, but we were in a dynamic conversation about issues raised by the talks.  One person with a digital camera was taking occasional pictures of the presentations & posting the links.  Another was sending links to the various speakers’ publications.  As the conversations evolved they added more depth to the conference presentations than I gleaned from the talks themselves.  In turn, I was getting to know the various personalities chattering about the conference, and by the end of the day after learning the “in-real-life” identities of my fellow twitters, we chatted at the closing reception and have since then become better acquainted via continued interactions on Twitter and Facebook.

Not every conference that I’ve attempted to liveblog or twitter has gone so smoothly.   For example, my intention to post updates on the 2009 American Historical Association conference was thwarted by the high cost of wireless access at the venue (what history grad student can afford a $129 hotel room plus a $15 daily internet access fee?).  A few months after that, when I tweeted the happenings at another history conference, I couldn’t find anyone else who was also doing so (hashtag searches weren’t helpful this time), which made it feel like I was simply having a conversation with myself rather than creating community with fellow attendees.  For example, in one panel about digital humanities my sense of alienation was evident as I sat in a nearly-empty room in what, in my opinion, should have been the session generating the biggest buzz:

@janaremy Only 4 women in audience of Digital Humanities panel. Why? #WHA

@janaremy Wondering why they didn’t find a commenter who knows more about Digital Humanities than just Powerpoint & online syllabi (sigh) #WHA

The positive outcome from tweeting that conference came later, when my twitter feed funneled into my Facebook page status updates.  Colleagues who weren’t at the conference  responded to my tweets, creating an opportunity for follow-up discussion about the digital tools that are useful for scholars.   Later, I also reflected on my experience with a blog posting about the panel.

My latest experiment with using twitter is in my role as the “Online Media Chairperson” for an upcoming Digital Humanities conference at Yale.  Recently I created a twitter account dedicated solely to discussion of the conference, and started tying that presence to other digital humanists on twitter through “following” them, especially those users included in Dan Cohen’s comprehensive Digital Humanities twitter list. Within 30 minutes of my launching the account Dan tweeted an announcement about our event and numerous users began following @PDP2010 or “re-tweeting” Dan’s message. I don’t exactly know yet how the twitter account will augment attendance or ongoing discussion for this conference, but I’m excited to be experimenting with this technology and to see how it might create possibilities for scholarly collaboration that begin before the two-day event and carry on for long afterward.

I’m curious, do any of you have experiences with liveblogging at conferences or advertising academic events via twitter?  Or do you have any advice to offer on how to use social media for academic networking and collaboration?

Live blogging the fight between Pacquiao and Cotto . You can follow me on:

• Twitter
• Plurk

I’ve had good experiences with the Cover It Live live blogging tool, including a  couple of live blogs this week on our football team Peterborough United’s manager Darren Ferguson’s departure from the club, plus Q & A’s which were positive and gained a reasonable viewer numbers and overall audience figures.

Having a clearly defined subject or guest who’s happy interacting online are an advantage as is spreading the word on and offline a week before – having a few questions ‘in the bag’ is the key to a speedy start on the day.

I want to use it for breaking news and events coverage when opportunities arise, just trying to get more of the newsroom team involved.

Stephanie Romanski talks about her experiences with CiL, running a daily chat on her local newspaper site blog. But resource is a big issue, and unless you have a strong subject or keen interactive following; or you’ve hooked a contented advertiser, its just not viable too often.

Stephanie has plans for an ‘ask the independent’ liveblog, potentially full of great content and interaction.

And yes I hate being negative, years of not being able to do or try new ideas or methods have worn me down somewhat, but things need to fall in to place for these ideas to flourish in the current climate of local online newspapers. But thankfully there are plenty of people pushing the boundaries and getting stuck in. The future hopefully looks brighter.

The countdown has begun to the New York Pest Expo: Bed Bug Edition, which will take place on Wednesday. I do love this event, and our participation in it this year has me intensely pleased.

Make sure you check this blog religiously on Wednesday because I will be liveblogging from the show on Wednesday, replete with videos and photos now that Pete Grasso has helped explain to me how to post the videos from my new YouTube account.

Liveblog notes from a presentation by Robin Goodfellow. Part of an ESRC Seminar Series on Literacy in the Digital University, which has its own blog. Of course. Also has an ordinary dull website.

(Robin’s notes and PowerPoint are available – to OU people – on the Knowledge Network)

Update: Andreia Santos also liveblogged the session.

Literacy

There’s an idea that literacy is the ancient idea of being able to read and write – the intuitive concept. A lot of the digital literacy literature takes this approach too, with a deficit model of individual (lack of) competence. But others argue it’s not about skills (new literacies), it’s learning a new set of communication skills.

Robin’s approach is different: starting from a list of reading/writing activities that academics might have to do – PowerPoint presentation to committee, review of a journal article, comment to student forum, etc etc. There are technical skills involved here. More importantly, they are the creation of texts in communities. (Text in the broad sense – something taken beyond a single activity – so lots of things can be texts.) Fundamentally, they are all social practices. Tied up with power relationships.

What is the digital university?

Doesn’t exist yet, and it won’t be called that when it does, it’ll just be a university. Question is what kinds of social practices, and how will they be mandated? Our understanding here is embryonic.

Many ideas: net-gen/digital natives, dumbing down, universities need to step up, OER view of conventional learners vs social learners. Learning 2.0/Seely Brown etc – long way from trad university. Martin Weller ‘is the revolution justified?’. Digital scholarship (Borgman). Unbundled university (Katz).

Exploring established practices and emergent ones

Set as a research question, set out as a seminar series. Four projects drawn from:

• Literacies for Learning in FE (Lancaster and Stirling)
• Digital Literacies in HE (OU)
• Learning Literacies for a Digital Age (Glasgow Caledonian)
• Putting Web 2.0 to work – new pedagogies for new learning spaces (Edinburgh and Strathclyde)

Promoting new research in to practices, four seminars.

OU digital literacies work.

(Mary Lea) Ethnographic, 3 institutions, diverse contexts, 34 students, interviews, field notes, web pages, documents, photos. Learners did lots of diverse activities, mostly what you’d expect, but some ‘hard work’ things like recording CDs and scanning documents. But this doesn’t make their universities into digital universities.

Key points – the importance of reading: vast quantities, different to non-digital. Learners adept at drawing on complex, hybrid, textual genres. Learners discriminate between personal and curricular spheres. What they do is driven by tutor and course guidance – the institutional mandate. Contrast to the view that it’s all coming from the students, or business: it’s not, it’s from the university.

Robin looked at assessed tasks as written genres – generally, when you’re assessed, you have to write. The construction of what is good is still very traditional/conventional – argument, analysis, coherence, critical evaluation, etc.

Literacy in the emerging digital university is about:

• Transformative new digital communication practices
• Institutional mandating of new digital practices
• Persistence of conventional academic values

Need to look at these persistent values, and whether they are going to be changed.

Academic Values and Web cultures

From Helen Beetham’s seminar, the first in this series. Social practices of the academy contrasted with the net.

Academy is about truth, epistemology, dialogue, roles and rules – fundamentally text-based communication/argument & critique. The ‘net’ is about use value (is it useful, rather than is it true), currency, proliferation, virality, just-in-time knowledge, multiple media/bricolage.

(Note to self: there’s some really interesting stuff in Levi-Strauss on the problems facing both bricoleurs and engineers that’s probably worth mining in this context.)

Hard to match the two views. Except Calhoun (2006) has ideas about how they can be connected – Habermas’ notion of the public sphere – reasoned collective choice by informed citizens. Public debate is about ideology, universities do that. Robin thinks we must keep focus on in whose interest ideas are being constructed. Institutional.

(Note to self: Really interesting post/modern idea about expertise/knowledge being simultaneously more important in the knowledge economy – it’s the key currency – and less important – you can find it online/hire it in from wherever.)

Digital scholarship

Themes from OU work – open processes of publishing and reviewing, digital tools for research and teaching, reward for reputations built online.  Focus is on output, not process.

Literacies critique of digital scholarship as literacy: must ask, what kinds of texts are produced digitall in the process of scholarly activity? Which communities are validating these tets as scholarship? How are ‘critique’ and ‘argument’ manifested in textual practices which are validated as digital scholarship?

Summary

Lit meets TEL at LiDU!

Big Twitter debate on the LiDU blog. Instance of putting Twitter stream up on the wall behind presenter – vigorous discussion about whether that should happen or not.

Next seminars – March 1st 2010 Glasgow Caledonian University; October 14th/15th Open University.

Questions

Me: Remark: the sky is not falling in here. Question – What makes it literacies as opposed to other social practices? And why ‘Literacy’ singular now, when it was always plural?

Robin and Mary: Literacies being explored. Focus on texts valuable, pull in ideas from e.g. applied linguistics, universities exist and are constructed by their texts.

Andy Lane: Social practices in communities – Communities of Practice. Is the Academy one community, or a constellation? And academics are not the only members of the community. Parallel with the Polity, and professions.

Robin: Good questions. With Bourdieu hat, Academy as a social field, large constellation of communities in Wenger’s terms. Large social fields which are self-regulating but in struggle. Seeing a threat to HE, breaking down of boundaries between education and commerce and entertainment, and so on. Broader paranoia (!) looking at HE as a social field under threat.

James Aczel: Said very little about what is learned, and treating discipline as unproblematic. Is it there in Physics? Is this practices in Education, rather than across the academy?

Robin: It’s both. Different in History and Physics Depts. But public mission of HE – which is shared – means you can generalise to some degree. Public intellectuals can come from any discipline, engage the public in critical discourse.

Jon Rosewell: Lot of writing driven by assessment – are we just being conservative here? Complaint from student about having to hand-write an OU exam as a completely inauthentic experience. Is it only our assessment that’s keeping things anchored?

Robin: You might be right.

: Often online digital discussion required to be on VLE so it could be assessed. Assessment is paramount. (As ever!)  ‘Critique’ to students means whatever they think it means to the assessers.

Paul Clark: Texts situated in a community with power relationships. What about private diaries and journals? Are they texts?

Robin: Yes, they could be. If nobody ever sees it, then whether it’s a text or not is irrelevant. (For Robin) it has to be social for it to count as a text. Can of course imagine a reader, and that gives it a textual feel.

I’ve missed Biggest Loser for the past 2 weeks, so here I am again.  This is the first time I’ve been liveblogging since minute one. Opening credits: My mom says, “Someone’s gonna get a heart attack there.” Heh.

Alison says, “Obesity is an epidemic. Your mission is to help stop it. You will do everything to help your fellow Americans in the next 7 days – you are going to Washington, DC. Go pack.” They jump on a Jetblue plane (YAY Jetblue!!). Rebecca wants to see Barack Obama. (so do I) Everyone’s excited because they can fasten their airplane seatbelts. Everyone’s very excited. Product placement: JETBLUE.

They’re in their exercise togs and now they’re charging to the Washington monument. Hi, Alison!  Jillian and Bob tell them they’re going to White House. Wooooooooo! They’re at the Jefferson Memorial. They are going back to individual teams now. No more teams. Rudy’s  psyched. They’re all pretty psyched. It’s good news so far. Shay is still the only person in the 400s. She has 2 lbs to go.

Pop challenge: Public workout at the Washington Monument. People need to get other people to get exercising. They need to pass out little stickers with their names on it. This pop challenge starts….. NOW! This looks so freaking fun. People are looking kind of dubious. The people are following people down the sidewalk: “Do you want to want to work out tonight?” It’s frustrating. Daniel can’t find anybody. Amanda is CLEANING UP. People totally recognize her! “You’re the girl from the finale!” She’s got a bunch of girls. Rudy gets a bunch of guys. Hilarious. Allen is seeking out the fire station. He wants to find his brothers. The firefighters are like… um. But they come around.

Liz (the “old lady”) is working on charm and guilt. Tracey is bullying people into taking off their Amanda stickers. People are thinking of changing to the Daniel team. They KNOW him. Ha ha ha ha! Amanda’s group is changing colors and going to Daniel team. They’re all turning into politicians!

OK, it’s time. People are lining up. The firetrucks are there! The firefighers have come through! OK, I’m tearing up. Let’s just hope there’s no FIRE in DC tonight!! There are tons of people there. It’s a crowd. It’s pretty cool.  Alison says it came down to ONE VOTE who won: It’s between Liz and Allen! Who knew? The old lady brought it! How the heck did she DO that?? You go girl!

Next, they bring up Bob and Jillian. Crowd goes wild. It’s exciting. Bob is pumped. He thinks he’s a rock star. Jillian walks through the crowd and yells at everyone. They freaking love it.  She’s yelling at a lady in tangerine clothes. They’re kickboxing. Bob is so psyched.  They’re doing mountain climbers! They’re speedbagging. It’s super cool, actually.  They’re doing planks! My favorite! How could would it be to do this every day. I actually love the idea of having daily workouts at the Washington Monument. Bob is standing on a fireman.

Liz gets to take her whole team to Subway and Jillian tells them to get Fresh Fit menu. O boy!

Next, the team goes to their Congresspeople. They talk about obesity among youth and children. Daniel shows off his size 54 pants that he wore in high school. They are impressed. We see him talking about his academics suffering because he’s unhealthy, depressed and having a hard time dealing with school.  He wants better health education. I have to say this is a great episode. Jillian says that Americans have no idea of what’s in their food because if they knew, they’d never eat it. Rebecca cries about being a 245 year old 14 year old.

WOULD IT NOT BE AWESOME if Congress would stop taking money from food corporations? It would be awesome. But unlikely.

Okay, moving on to the Big Challenge. They need to survive four challenges, and the winner gets immunity. They  first have to run a mile. Tracey starts having an out-of-body experience as she remembers her first day on the beach where she almost died. She’s scared. Liz gets to skip one challenge out of the three. But she says she wants to run. Liz says if she doesn’t get in the top six, she’s going to shoot herself for wasting her free pass. Mark, get set, gooooo…! to commercials.

They’re off and running. Allen and Rebecca take off. Daniel says he could run a mile in 12 minutes, but he’s in the dust now. Liz and Danny are fighting out sixth place. Shay and Tracey are duking it out for last place. Shay is trucking. She’s speedwalking at a pretty good pace. Go girl. They’re all flashing back to Day one, when they were dying on the beach. Most of them are just doing great. Rudy is RUNNING. He looks freaking awesome. GO LIZ. I’m getting weepy now. Because I think, I see myself. GO DANNY. Tracey is jogging about the same pace that I do.

Finish line: Rebecca, then Daniel, Allen, Amanda. Liz DOES get sixth. Wahoo.  Here comes Danny, Tracey. Flashback to her near death.  She flashbacks on making out with her husband. It brings her in. YAY. Then  here comes Shay at great clip.

OK, next challenge: They’re at the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. They need to raise funds: billions of PENNIES on the steps.  They need to race down the steps, pick up pennies, up the steps, put them in their bank. Damn. Pennies are hard to carry. Does Liz want to skip this one? YES. GOOD CHOICE I think. Only 3 of them get to participate in the next round. They take off down the steps.  Rudy has nice big paws, so he can hold a lot of pennies. Can they put them in their shirts? Rudy is double-stepping. Daniel: “Rudy has banana hands!” More like shovels.  Rudy fills his bank. Next spot goes to Daniel. Then it’s Allen vs Rebecca. Down to the wire. Alison is shrieking with excitement.

Bob says: when on vacation, run up and down stairs, then do tricep dips and other stuff.

Back to it: Rebecca wins it. Now it’s Liz, Daniel, Rudy and Rebecca competing for immunity. Part 3: US Capitol. Balance on a platform with a Pilates ball on their head.  Hey, they’re all looking pretty cool and Atlas- like. Daniel is wobbling from the get go. Rudy is standing on his brick and having a hard time. Liz and Rebecca are looking pretty zen, but then Liz almost loses her ball. Daniel’s off. Three to go. Rudy struggles, his ball is going. Rebecca is like an absolute statue. LIZ is out. Rudy and Rebecca have the last challenge!

Final challenge: whoever takes 206 steps quicker, wins immunity. Hm. I think my money’s on Rebecca. She’s smaller and has better cardiovascular health. Up and down up and down. Rebecca’s in the lead. Unless she falls down, I think she’s gotta win. This is where you’re at a big advantage the smaller you are. Tracey remarks she’s like a rabbit, she’s like a typewriter. She’s full of metaphors tonight! Rebecca wins!

Next: they visit Michelle Obama’s garden and start picking veggies for the Prez. I am insaaaaaaanely jealous. Next, they take hte produce into the White House. Jillian is wowed. As am I. They start cooking up the just-picked veggies. They meet the top chef of the WH. They’re slicing basil, lettuce, making up a big salad. BOB IS WEARING A TIE!!!!!!!!

They’re eating a beautiful salad which costs $12 for all of them, and there are leftovers. OMG I am in love with this episode, and I repeat, SO JEALOUS.  Hmm, maybe I should gain 300 lbs so I can go on BL and visit the White House? OK, I guess not. But still: I would be so stoked to be in that place. Eating veggies from Michelle’s garden? OMG!

Last chance workout!  Jillian is happy they are not in teams anymore so she can torture everyone. They’re doing monkey walks down the sidewalk. Sprinting up stairs sideways, two at a time, etc, carrying Jillian.

Bob reminds them that weight loss sucks on vacation and they cannot let things slide just because they’re having a great time.

Jillian is training Tracey. She says, “It’s not secret I have not liked Tracey since Day one.” Wow. She says it is not about game play. She is trying to get T to changet her life. MAN, I love Jillian’s arms.  Tracey is sobbing and says, “Jillian is one tough cookie. But she has got the biggest heart. It is HUGE.”  I can see that. I’ve always seen that.  Another shot of the arms. What I would not give for those arms.

Bob and Amanda are thrilled to be reunited.  She’s sobbing about not going to prom. “She needs some extra attention, and I’m prepared to give it to her.” Um. I guess so. “I have faith in you honey.” Errrrrrr. Bob and Manda sittin’ in a tree… here we go. There is some major crushing going on here.

Weigh In: Rebecca goes first because she has immunity. She’s lost 4 lbs. She does a Snoopy dance. She’s excited to be headed to Onederland. Next: Shay is up. She wants to get to Threehundredland.  She loses 9 lbs, down to 393!! Wahoo! She sways back and forth like a five year old. Cute. She’s so psyched to not be 400 lbs anymore. She’s bouncy. Next up: Tracey. She’s down 3 lbs. Not too happy. Daniel’s next. He’s just had two bad weigh ins (+1 and 0). HOLY CRAP. He loses 11! What is that!!!  He says, “150 lbs ago, I didn’t have a NECK. My head just sat on my shoulders like a snowman.” Hee.  Next up: Allen. He needs to lose more than 5. And.. he’s lost 9!! He is looking so good. (my heart is doing a little happy dance right now, seeing Tracey on the bottom!) Danny is up next. He needs to lose more than 7. WOWEE: 12! He does it again!! This is the fourth week in a row for his double digit losses. Woo! Rudy’s turn.  He needs 7, he gets 9.  It’s good! YEAH.  Tracey is sending dagger-eyes at him. Liz’s turn. She’s worried. She needs more than 4. She gets: 3. Ugh. Aw  girl. She takes it with equanimity though. Now Amanda is up. In order to beat Tracey, she needs to lose more than 3. And….. Commercial. Everyone is praying for her. She loses…7!!!!! She’s ecstatic. She and Bob run off to have victory sex. (whoops, sorry, I just lost it there)

So it’s Liz vs Tracey. And all I can say is, if these bozos vote off Liz I’m going to bang my head against the wall. Liz says she is not the person to ask for help. Liz, do NOT pull an Abby.  Shay says she didn’t fight for it. Shay questions if she wants to be there. She’s fulla shit. Tracey gets up and sobs her face off. She sobs and pleads. Amanda thinks she’s apologizing. She doesn’t accept Tracey’s apology but she thinks Liz is a bigger threat. Oh gawd.

People, do NOT SEND LIZ HOME. The voting begins. Amanda votes for Tracey because she’s been betrayed twice. I like her being honest, and not saying “she can do well at home” or some such bull. Shay says she wants people to fight to be here, she wants to see passion. She votes Liz. What does she mean? She wants people to bawl their eyes out?? Danny of COURSE votes for Tracey, because he and Liz are secretly married. Daniel votes for Tracey! (I have to say this was a happy surprise) Rebecca votes for …Tracey. YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Alison as much as says, her game playing has coming back to bite her in the ass.

We see the flashback of Tracey’s beach collapse for the fifty-millionth time tonight. She says the sad person she was is gone. But unfortunately the psycho person isn’t. Oh well.  She goes home wearing a bright purple dress. She resembles a giant grape. (hissssss!) A helicopter is inexplicably taking her home. The last time she did this, she was being medivac’ed out. She reunites with her purple family.

Next: OH MY GOD. ANOTHER freaking flashback to the beach scene. And holy cow, she looks totally amazing. She looks super buff. That is impressive. She’s running that mile and looks great.  She ran it in 11:22, which is way good. Well good! I’m happy. She’s back where she belongs and will not be torturing the other contestants any more.

Next week: looks like Shay is biting the dust.

As well as iSpot, one of my big current projects is OLnet, which aims to research Open Educational Resources (OER) and the OER community, and to support the OER community in developing its research capabilities.

We want to model being open in what we’re doing, so we’ve decided to liveblog our regular team meetings – you can see my notes from our first trial today over on the OLnet site. I probably won’t crosspost everything here and there, so if you’re interested, you’ll need to track the OLnet news as well as my blog!

The contestants join Alison for a giant wheel of silver topped platters. The teams are going to be Blue vs Black. One person will get to pick the teams. Rut-roh. There’s a golden ticket under one of the silver platters, and the person who gets it gets to pick who are on the teams, and who gets to choose the trainers. There are various goodies and baddies under the other platter lids. People who want to participate will step forward. Dina is the first in. Rudy. Liz. Amanda. Shay. Rebecca. Allen. Danny. Coach Mo. Danny. Tracey? Of course. The only person who is not stepping up is Abby.

Rudy spins first. He gets a huge piece of chocolate cake! It is exactly 1,000 calories. AGH. He has to eat it. Num num num. Next is Rebecca: chocolate donut, 280 calories. It gives her witch teeth. Allen: chocolate cupcake! 100 calories. He says, “Sweet.” Enjoys himself immensely. Danny: GIANT cupcake with sprinkles. 780 cals! Yikes. Here comes Tracey. Coach Mo says an evil wind is blowing and he’s not the only one to feel it. HOLY CRAP, SHE GOT THE GOLDEN TICKET! Everyone is just blown away. People are shocked. They think she is a witch for sure. People are gasping and freaking. Coach Mo is sure there is voodoo going on. “It’s not natural. It’s supernatural.” Wooooooooooooooooo…..

Amanda is sobbing. She needs Bob. Dina and Rudy do not want to be separated. Dina feels she can’t count on anybody without Rudy.  Shay says, “people are about to go crazy” as they head toward Tracey and their new fate. Bob and Jillian learn about what’s going on and they are appropriately horrified. Tracey is grinning a psychotic grin.

Tracey wants to train with Bob. Bob looks glazed. Jillian is bummed she will not get to pound Tracey within an inch of her life.  Next: Daniel  goes to Jillian, Mo goes to Bob. Shay goes to Jillian. Tracey gets a few compassion points for putting them together. Allen goes to Blue. Then Abby. Liz is starting to cry. Tracey puts her on the blue team. She’s sobbing that she needs Danny. She puts Danny on the black team. Danny wanted Bob and Liz. He is devastated. Liz: “it kills my soul and makes me mad as all get out.” Amanda is crying because she won’t have Bob. Rebecca goes to the Blue team. She also breaks up Dina and Rudy. Niiiiiiiiice. That’s some very unhappy campers for ya.”

Liz: “She wants to win, she’s gotta do it at home.”

Bob hates the Black vs. Blue. He needs a big guy to beat up, and it will make him feel better. He’s going after Rudy.  Jillian is after Amanda. She wants to beat the crap out of the black team.  They’re puking. Jillian comes out to inspect her puke and make sure it’s wet. ???? Ugh.  Liz: “I have an agenda and my agenda is for her to go home before I do.” Liz freakin keels over on the treadmill. Ack. Lizzie’s down. Red as an apple. She says grimly, “I’ll live.”

She says, “My head’s on straight. Hell yeah. I got an agenda.” She wants immunity.

Dina hates the plyometrics stool. She doesn’t want to jump. I LOVE the stool. I love jumping up on stuff! So funny. Jillian says it makes your butt smaller. Cool. Dina walks out. Rudy asks, “What’s stopping you from doing it?” Dina doesn’t know. She can’t believe in herself. Rudy gives her a personal training session with Coach Mo looking on.  I love the Blue Team training the Black team. Rahooo!

Bob takes blue team to the grocery store. Of course they get some Jennie-O turkey products. We had some Jennie-O turkey chili tonight! Product placement from my very own house. They make wraps with some yummy roast turkey.

Next: black team heads up a hill. Shay says black team is the underdog, but they have bigger hearts. Alison: “good players help themselves, great players help each other.” It’s a relay race… where they are carrying one of their teammates. On a platform. They are playing for… videos from home. Tracey and Abby have to sit out.

Dina does not want to be on the platform but she does not want to be carried by others. Blue team carries Rebecca. Black team is carrying Dina. Rebecca says it is not like Cleopatra, eating grapes. Instead she is sweating and trying to hold on for dear life. They splash through mud. Amanda loses her mud in the shoe. Dina has to pick it up! She’s psyched. Blue team is starting to lose steam. Second mud pit, o boy. Blue team wins. Liz is happy but is still out for Tracey’s blood.

Holy crap. Rebecca gives her video to Dina. But Dina can’t take it because she has to get on the platform step on her own. She has to do it for herself. Blue team watches their videos. Of course, they cry. Tracey’s husband says he sleeps on the couch because he doesn’t want to be in the bed without her. He says, “Pain is temporary, pride is forever.” Is he going to be proud of her evil backstabbing ways?

Liz goes in to see Danny. She wants Danny to watch her video with her. But it’s HIS VIDEO! She switched her video for him. She is such a freaking peach. His whole family is losing weight: his wife and parents. I’m crying over Liz. He feels like a new man who can run a marathon. (watch what you say dude, they’ll make you do it)

Last chance workout. Jillian wants to build her team to work together. They’re pushing each other on these rolling platforms. Boy do I wish I was on that black team. Partner carries. Daniel’s all “yes ma’am!” Bob doesn’t like the team thing. He takes them to 24 hour fitness.  They do step class with weights, lunges. I want  to take that class too! Jillian is doing trust falls. Big fun!

Time for Dina to face the platform again. The whole team is on her. Jillian is wincing. What is the deal here? Jillian says everyone has their One Thing they can’t conquer. She says, “I have mine.” I am DYING to know. What is Jillian’s one thing that she can’t do? Very curious. I have a lot more than one. Jumping rope. Riding a bike in traffic, or on hills. Anything involving a ball.

Weigh In: Tracey loses 7. Nobody claps. Coach Mo loses 6. Allen loses 7. Rudy loses 8. Rebecca loses 7. Liz: 8. Go girl! Black team goes up. Abby loses 5, which is not shabby, but she is not happy. Dina loses 6. Amanda loses 6. Danny loses 10 and is off all his meds! Daniel loses 11! Go guy. He’s awesome. Shay is the last one up. She needs 8 pounds. She loses… SIXTEEN! Holy crapola!

Blue team has to choose one member of the Blue Team. NO BRAINER. Coach Mo is ready to sacrifice though. I can’t believe Liz voted for Mo!!!!! So did Rudy. And Tracey. And Rebecca. I can’t believe it!!! No way could I do it.

DAMN. Coach Mo goes home. I can’t believe it. He’s doing great. But you know? I do not agree with that vote. At. All.

Cari amici,
domani alle 10.00 ci sarà il congresso nazionale che dovrà sancire, ufficialmente, chi parteciperà alle primarie del 25 ottobre. Il regolamento dice che saranno solo i candidati a intervenire per le mozioni: non ci sarà dibattito ne’ confronto tra i delegati, ma nemmeno tra loro candidati. Con tutta questa sciattezza di principi e la mancata forma di Congresso che doveva essere il modo migliore per distinguere un candidato, una mozione, un delegato da un altro, avevo pensato di fare comunque un liveblogging (presentazione in tempo reale di un evento su internet tramite scrittura su un blog) del congresso sul sito di fgv.scelgomarino.info, guardandolo su uno dei 4 siti che offrono la diretta video: youdem.tv, imille.org, unita.it e redtv.it.
La mia idea è quella di pubblicare le parti più interessanti del congresso in un post sul blog, e lasciare a voi i commenti e i vari argomenti che naturalmente ne scaturiranno dalla diretta. Vi proporrei, quindi, di guardare assieme il congresso, e inserire dei commenti sugli argomenti che vi sembrano più interessanti o meritevoli di un confronto tra i sostenitori.

Vi aspetto in parecchi

Info

Commenti e dibattito su
http://fvg.scelgomarino.info

diretta video su
http://www.youdem.tv
http://www.imille.org
http://www.unita.it
http://www.redtv.it

Liveblog notes from an IET Technology Coffee Morning by Yvonne Rogers, on Tangibles, tabletops or mobiles: which is best for collaborative learning?

(Podcast version will be available at podcast.open.ac.uk)

Review of her work over the last 10 years. Has been looking at new technologies – shareable technologies – and how they support different activities.

15-20 years ago, students working together f2f would huddle round a PC. One would take control of the mouse, the others would be onlookers. Taking control was awkward. Touchpads and laptops allowed people to move outdoors – but interaction much the same.  Then 10 years ago, mobiles came along – designed for one person to use, but children use them in pairs.

Now, new technologies – tabletops, tangibles – designed specifically for multiple users at one time. Reactable for collaborative music-making using tangible things on a tabletop.

These seem to give better support for collaborative learning than 1-person PC. But which works best for what activity? What are the opportunities and constraints of these technologies and contexts?

First: define collaborative learning. Draw from Dillenbourg (1999): small groups performing learning activities together, such as problem-solving. Can be synchronous, frequent; involves joint effort, cooperation, exploration of ideas and perspectives.

1. Tabletops

Fingertip interaction, multiple users, bird’s eye view supports ‘diving in’. (See How to make a multitouch surface for less than £500 for an overview of this sort of thing.)

Claims made: supports sharing, co-creation, more equitable participation, reduced social awkwardness. Her research to see whether it’s true.  Or is it that tabletops are the new whiteboard? (BBC News report on IoE study “Doubts over hi-tech white boards”, Jan 2007).

Jeff Rick talked about ShareIT project earlier, large project, looking at tabletops. How does it work, how does it compare to single-user, do some groups work better? What learning activities work well? Also exploring how to evaluate collaboration – participation level (physical, verbal), kinds of discussion, awareness of others).

One recent study – collaborative learning – compared single-touch and multi-touch for designing and planning seating allocation in a classroom. Icons to represent children. Software – ‘OurSpace’ – shows icons for the children with attributes (e.g. chatty, short-sighted, friendship group). Compared multi-touch and single-touch (enforces one-at-a-time input) – using a Diamond Touch tabletop, 45 children, 7-9 years old, 15 same-gender trials.

No difference for participation – but for younger kids there was less equitable participation in single-touch. Evidence of parallel working in multi-touch; turn-taking talk replaced some task-focused talk in single touch. No gender differences; verbal participation increased with age while physical participation decreased, particularly in single touch.

Why no big differences? Benefit of tabletop may not be multi-touch – may be more subtle ‘collaboration’ mechanisms. Need close analysis of video rather than gross quantitative measures. E.g. increased awareness, use of verbal narratives to keep others informed of actions and intentions; fluid switching between parallel and joint interactions (in multitouch); undoing of other’s work led to more discussion and verbal justification of own position/idea.

Actions speak loudly with words. Verbal and physical blocking can prompt explanations and justifications – e.g. undoing, knocking hands out of the way, holding finger on icon to protect your contribution. What might be considered harmful or undesirable interactions and intrusions can be beneficial for learning, engenders negotiation, enables users to evaluate and consider others’ ideas. Controversial idea!

2. Mobile learning

Claims made similarly – convenience (any time any place), context (any where), motivation (increased engagement).

Can it be more? E.g. used for short bursts of time to support ongoing physical activities, or communicating while exploring. Changing the learning process. So interacting with environment, experiencing, talking to one another, looking up information, taking measurements, comparing with stored data, hypothesizing, reflecting, deciding what to do – not driven by the software. Talking to remote peers/tutors.

Good for measing changing aspects – CO2 emissions, weather, air quality, tracking zoo animals, food consumption. It brings data and visualisations alive, providing external representations in situ – engenders more reasoning and communicating. Helps work through partially-formed ideas.

LillyPad Project – investigated how to restore Indianapolis floodplains (Lilly Arbor Project) – working with environmental scientists, conducting experiments to assess different methods of tree planting. Interaction designers/computing (Yvonne Rogers) to improve scientific inquiry.

Existing practice was one-mile stretch along bank divided in to 6 plots. Teams measure tree growth twice a year. Get measuring devices, map, paper checklist – locate a tree, ID it, measure, record and comment. Good measurements, but limited sense-making took place among students.

So mobile device to go further – enable students t switch between observation, data collection and analysis – reflect, share insights. Simple design – enter new measurements electronically, and access contextually-relevant info to help with ID and explanation.  LillyPad application – data entry, growth history stats, growth history graph. Also contextual info – pictures of leaves, bark, and how to ID what might have nibbled the tree – beaver, deer, rabbit, vole etc.

First trial – one person in group had the app, but was too much to enter data and look stuff up. So second trial, two devices – one for data entry, one for lookup. Not one each, to encourage collaboration – and there are other jobs, including ID. Groups of 5-6 students, 18-60 yo, with a team leader, spent a day on the activity – up to 250 trees to measure.

Findings – engagement – used info and stats pages frequently; team leaders tailored questions that students could answer by looking up. Sharing – over the shoulder showing/looking, lots of reading out. Inquiry – graphs and stats used to reason and make hypotheses about anomalies (e.g. tree appears to have shrunk). Many instances of theorisation and sense-making, about 5-20 per group. Shrinking tree – students and instructor work together through series of inferences, switch between representations.

Visualisation of sense-making activities – what students say, and how they interact. Graphical representation – clearly different interaction.

3. Tangibles

Claimed learning benefits from physical manipulation – combine familiar and known in new and unfamiliar ways, exploratory and reflective, hands-on, makes learning playful. Seems to encourage exploration, but not clear what the learning benefits per se (no diff between tangibles and GUI for balance beam, Paul Marshall, 2009).

Depends how complex the task is – for ’simple’ concrete tasks (story writing, colour mixing) – tangibles can encourage more. For ‘complex’ abstract tasks (e.g. geometry, physics) external representations (graphs, equations) may be more effective than tangibles – better mapping between problem space and solution, and makes problem more cognitively tractable. Debatable though, more speculative.

Summary

Learning benefits are subtle! Focus on process (sense-making, negotiation, exploration), not the outcomes. Shareable technologies can change group dynamics and participation levels, increasing awareness, negotiation and reflection.

Which is best?

• Tabletops can support ‘intense’ collaborative learning.
• Mobiles can support ‘integrated’ learning – indoors/outdoors, within a group, etc, more sense-making.
• Tangibles can support ‘playful’ learning – encouraging exploration of possibilities.

But should look at how to use them together, in classroom and outdoors – an ecology of devices and displays. Tom Mowers’ work – combine tangibles, mobiles, large displays, and other objects (string!) – to encourage children in different activities at different times.

Discussion

Q1: Lots of examples of people experiencing things – a step to show learning. How do you know that learning has taken place?

Y: Doesn’t learning involve experience? It’s a question of what you want students to learn. Different activities; some without technology, some with – encourage different things. Specific activity of risk management – think how you do it currently, and how you want to enhance. Do you want them to work more together, or more on their own? Could encourage. It’s not saying let’s do away with other kinds of learning, or with PCs – they’re not going away. But this is about how to encourage/support collaborative learning. It’s not about learning outcomes in the narrow sense – generally find small differences.

Q2: Tabletops and experiments with children doing the seating allocation task. Might traditionally do it with bits of paper. Is tabletop different?

YR: We did do a paper-based prototype, alarmed at how well engaged and excited the kids were at that. But added functionality to tabletop – could annotate – show e.g. drawing movement routes. Do you really need them? The tabletop did allow you to track which child did what – better for analysis if nothing else. Interesting research question.

Paul Marshall: The kids also fight less with the paper-based version, which we take as being a bad thing. Easier with paper to prevent access by others. Tenuously making argument that tabletops better because more fighting, hence better arguments

Jeff Rick: another difference is that on tabletop, could attach students to desks and then move the desks. Quite difficult to do with paper – discouraged exploration and sense of spatial orientation and physicality.

Q3: Looked at changes in learner practices?

YR: Have compared. With mobile, previous was paper-based. Considerable difference in sense-making activity. Technology intervention will change the practice, interesting question is to look at how. Collaboration not necessarily better, but different. Depends crucially on your goals.

Q4: Kids undoing each other’s work, versus OU students on a wiki where they’re reluctant to change other’s work. How much is it the affordances making it so easy, so it doesn’t look like it costs a lot?

YR: Yes, it’s very easy to do it – just reach and move it. Paper based can take your work away from others. Maybe might be different if you got OU students round a tabletop. Did study with adults – Computing Dept – similar. Increase in physical equity with tabletop vs multiple mice, but not in terms of what people said – which had the greatest effect. Interesting ‘professorial’ effects on fighting/moving.

Q5: How much is collaboration a function of the tech vs control?

YR: From early one-mouse to multiple-mouse stuff, do get different effects. On mobile one deliberately only gave 2 PDAs per group of 5-6; each used it at some time, but encouraged collaboration. The control is very important.

Q6: Person using mouse being the servant rather than the leader of the group?

YR: Yes, seen, but not very often.

Q7: Teacher mediation with tabletop – looking over shoulder – who’s driving activity. Contrast with mobile devices.

YR: Not looked at yet but study with autistic children starting soon, with teacher more involved in the application. Question of where teacher stands, are they a part, or standing over. In mobile setting, teacher very dominant, directing. After a while, students learned more and could initiate more discussion.

Q8: How to set expectations?

YR: We showed them the device, they appropriated it – they decided who had it and how they used it.

–
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Liveblog notes on a book discussion seminar on The Public Domain, by James Boyle, led by Ray Corrigan. It’s another in the series of senior seminars on the implications of technology for the world that I’ve liveblogged before (last was on The Future Of The Internet).

The audience included notable OU blogger and genius John Naughton, Niall Sclater and a host of other clever technology-informed people from round the OU. Ace senior administrator Tony Walton  introduces things by self-deprecatingly observing that he spends half his time reading boring reports, and the other half writing them, so it’s nice to have a discussion like this.

The book covers ‘the second enclosure movement’, enclosing the ‘commons of the mind’. Ray says the book is the Silent Spring for the information society and should be compulsory reading for all OU senior management.

Book itself is available online for free at the website – in another example of the way in which things being given away for free actually increases the sales of a not-free thing.

Ray also highly recommends James Boyle’s first book – Shamans, Software and Spleens – less accessible but very informative.

Current IP policy is overwhelmingly bad, in ways that matter for everyone. Boyle says so as a fan of intellectual property, not an enemy.

Three primary aims of the book: first is to show that intellectual property policy and horrors matter: they become the default rules of the road. Second, that they are evolving badly. Third, to explore the ‘outside’ of property – the public domain, or commons.

Three trends

First is cultural agoraphobia – an aversion to openness. This picks up the thought experiment of how you’d build an excellent online encyclopedia, in 1991. You wouldn’t go for it being open, rather than with a bunch of carefully-shephered experts. Or of how to set up the global information network.

Second is intellectual property strengtht is the reciprocal of the ease of copying: as copying gets easier, so IP law gets tougher. The ultimate end is total control as copying cost drops to zero.

Third is that IP policy is largely ‘faith-based’, and free of consideration of evidence.

Result is huge opportunity costs, costs from lost sharing.

A monk’s manuscript is ‘rivalrous’ – if he has it, you haven’t got it. And it’s ‘excludable’ – he can keep it locked up in his abbey and you can’t see it. Other things – e.g. MP3 files – are non-rivalrous – I can take a copy of yours and you still have yours, and are hard to exclude people from.

Physical property is inherently rivalrous. Most intellectual property is inherently non-rivalrous. They shouldn’t, therefore, be treated the same unthinkingly.

The way IP law is developed – especially in US – is that content providers get together, thrash out a deal, and pass it to legislators to pass in to law. Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright sets out this process.

Ray Corrigan’s book sets out a case of argument between two monks over a manuscript in the C6th – the closing arguments could’ve come out of the Eldred case in 2003.

Second enclosure movement

IP goods are non-rivalrous, so no over-grazing tragedy. One person’s outputs are another’s inputs. This movement is fencing off outputs, making barriers to future creativity, including things like gene patents and facts – greatly increasing the scope as well as the term of IP law.

85% of the material in the Library of Congress are orphan works – not available commercially, but the owner is not known. So can’t be used for fear of infringement liabilities – which can be and have been huge in real cases, especially in the US – and it’s a strict liability issue.

This results in ‘the C20th black hole’ – because copyright lasts for life of the author plus 50/70/95 years, these cultural resources are locked up and unavailable.

I got a mashup

Story told in the book of how Ray Charles’ I Got a Woman transmuted in to a viral video mashup critique of the response to Hurricane Katrina made by the Legendary K.O., based on Kanye West’s TV observation that ‘George Bush Doesn’t Like Black People’.  Elucidates a trail of works building, stealing and borrowing from each other back to Ray Charles and then back to Soul’s appropriation of Gospel music.

Basically, if current IP law obtained, none of these works would have happened. Possibly stopping Soul music from happening at all.

History of Intellectual Property

Everything you need to know is included in Jefferson’s letter and Macaulay’s speech in House of Commons. Sets out that intellectual property is not the same as physical property, that IP rights are a privilege introduced for the benefit of society not a fundamental right, monopolies are bad, extending rights terms for existing works can’t possibly increase the incentive to produce them, and so on.

History of IP activism is about anti-monopolistic concerns; Boyle argues for a positive compaign that’s pro public domain, or commons.

Jefferson warning, and Sony axiom – limitations are as important as IP rights. (e.g. fair use in US, fair dealing in UK.) Cheaper copying makes limitations more rather than less important. VCRs, Napster, Grokster, iPods, etc.

Now, under DMCA anti-circumvention procedures, breaking a technology designed to stop you copying something is illegal in itself, even if your copying is otherwise entirely legal.

The Farmer’s Tale

Digital fences. Imagine farmers and ranchers – farmers want to fence the land, ranchers want right to roam. Have public roads through the land, free but make the land valuable for everyone. Automobile comes along. Theives steal crops using cars driving away. Deal with it by fencing off the public roads. Ranchers don’t like it, so they cut the fences. Farmers say must protect the fences, and get Congress to pass law making fence-cutters illegal.

Metaphor for DMCA and EU Copyright Directive, and the tale of DeCSS, DVD Jon, and Universal v Corley (2600).

Enclosure of science and biology, and database rights – solid chapters.

Environmentalism for information

The public domain: an articulation of shared values and interests that allow those interests to come into being.  A movement – scholarship and activism – to understand and protect it. People didn’t understand what the environment was, but they do now (to some extent); need to do the same process now.

The movement is underway – e.g. Open Rights Group in UK, Electronic Frontier Foundation in US. Plus also, of course, all the Open Courseware / Open Educational Resources activity too – including the Open University.

Discussion

Me: there’s a point in the book about framing being crucial to whether you win or lose (Grokster), very well made – it’s true for the whole IP debate. Is it ‘fair use is a bit of an exception to the general rule that rights holders own those rights’ or ‘those restrictions are only acceptable to grant in the first place if we include things like fair use as a balance, so removing fair use actually renders the whole IP system illegitimate’?

More fundamentally, if you frame all property rights – (even real and personal property rights) – as social constructions, then of course they can be tweaked and balanced to ensure the best good for the best number. But if they are ultimate moral truths – Seventh Commandment – then the law must uphold them regardless of the effect.

I reckon that the whole book is actually a strong argument that calling it ‘intellectual property’ is yielding the argument it from the start. Despite Boyle disagreeing.

Ray: Yes, agree, but Boyle argues that IP is the terms that are heavily used and widely (mis?)understood.

Gowers Review – unusual in that it commissioned an economic study for copyright extension. Generally no evidence-base in this field.

David Vincent: Continuities from history. Jefferson and Macaulay as the warnings, paths not followed. The C18th/C19th trades protected their interests as ‘Mysteries’ – competitive survival depends on it. Powerful C19th arugment that patents would promote the spread of knowledge. Lack of protection prevents people sharing their discoveries.  Enacted under a heading of greater openness. Copyright similarly. Lots of piracy of printed word in C19th. Dickens sued like mad and lost everywhere. Balance where you protected the book. Need to strike a similar balance. Contemporary point – those who wish to extend IP have the onus to demonstrate why it is in the public good. A lot of it is sewn-together anecdote about what works – partly because the timeframe is so short. It’s all since 1991. Both sides are short of evidence, and taking hold of extreme examples.

Ray: Yes, Boyle argues this in the context of e.g. database right. The hard thing to do is to strike the balance. Reasonable people can disagree about where to put the balance – by doing research.

Geeks are bad at engaging with this stuff politically – geek response is that ‘it can’t be like that, I deny this reality, not going to accept it’ – hence don’t engage, and it doesn’t get changed.

Niall: This political movement – is it there already, what attributes does it need?

Ray: Not yet, but organisations on it. E.g. Open Rights Group, EFF, Creative Commons. (me: and Open Source and Free Software)  And scholars informing the debate.

John: Framing issue is absolutely critical. Better understood by the established order – e.g. religious right frame discussion about abortion by framing it as murder; makes it hard to argue otherwise. Mass media – not a disinterested party – always frame this the way the rights industry want – that any copying is theft. John used to go on Today programme about this, but eventually refused. Most citizens who need to be engaged find this very abstruse. E.M.Forster reckoning that free speech is a concern only of those with plenty to eat. Chances of an environmental response therefore slim. In the end, the system will choke itself. He proposed an image of Gulliver – our economies – shackled to the ground by millions of silver threads woven by IP lawyers. Didn’t go down well with John Humphrys. The people who understand this best are in the computing industry, who know that it’ll kill the golden goose. He hopes it’ll get so bad that the really powerful industries will think again. Really annoyed that the multimedia industries – the ‘creative industries’ – are tiny by comparison to (say) the technology industry, but have disproportionate political clout and profile. We need more incidents like Amazon deleting bought copies of 1984 from people’s Kindles.

Ray: Google book scanning project key here; settlement with rights holders proposed, with lots of problems – but something like this will force a change. It’s still industry regulation, not public interest.

Josie: Irony of Disney being used. Very complex for ordinary folk to get their heads around. Step to one side and see the Disneyfication of children’s literature – Sleeping Beauty, Winne the Pooh – you’d never know their previous existence. Simplify out to that level needed. It’s hard to track who’s taken what from whom and how.

Niall: Translate this book into stories that people could understand.

Ray: Copyright and silence – John Cage 4′33″. Mike Batt music producer’s classical music CD, included a piece called one minute’s silence, on sleeve labels as composed by Batt/Cage. Cage’s estate contact Batt and ask for royalties – used 1/4 of the song, get 1/4 of the royalties. Five-figure out-of-court settlement. Despite difficulty of identifying which quarter he purloined.

Also Wind Done Gone case – Alice Randall’s book, retelling Gone With The Wind from one of the slave’s perspective. Author’s estate got an injunction against it. Took two years and armies of lawyers to clear up.

John: Nothing will happen until large and powerful industries get choked by it, or until the average citizen gets really irked by it. Filesharing is now so widespread, can’t see even the supine Governments of the West going along with a legal regime that criminalises every child in the country. (Ray: but they already have) It’s like Prohibition. In the end, have to decide whether laws that are likely to be widely flouted are worth it. Not there yet. But will think about it then.

Ray: The Three Strikes law here – ignoring the Gowers Review, the Digital Britain review – real risk now.

Direct relevance to the OU: the Blackboard patent. Blackboard got a patent in 2006 on delivering learning. Sued their main competitor, Canadian Desire2Learn. Heard in Texas. Blackboard won the case, lots of movement since then. Patent Office petitioned to review the patent, now looking at it again. Various things back and forth. Blackboard now have a new patent, issued in July – same as the old one, essentially. Desire2Learn have sued Blackboard to have patent overturned … in Maryland.

Josie: We contributed to the look for prior use that came via ALT. Now a backlash – Blackboard seen as villains, lots of people trying to move away from them.

Ray: Blackboard sued students who did a paper on Blackboard systems. Settlement included them promising never trying to understand Blackboard technology again.

John: Moral indignation, very warranted, but doesn’t work. Need to move beyond that. This is a problem of democratic change. We need to try something else. James Boyle is trying things – like a cartoon book. Satire. Educating legislators.

Ray: How this could change.  Catholic church in Ireland, Eamonn Casey Bishop of Galway. Articulate popular TV show comic, widely admired, discovered to have an illegitimate child. Suddenly all the bad things the Church had done came out, almost overnight the Church lost influence. ‘6m people’ effect – Gower review estimate of illegal filesharers. If enough people get affected, that will get notice. Or, finally, technology companies like Google getting their act together. Might not come out the way we like, though.

Tony: The economic arguments are key here. We need to explore them.

Ray: Yes, like economic arguments about externalities and environmentalism.

David: History of Freedom of Information is instructive. Only the rich middle class worried about this, no votes in this. That held it back for decades, but it did eventually go – by good pressure group activity, and European legislation. Also about application of Human Rights law. An area there we can appeal to. Tradition all the way back to the Enlightenment about openness, sustains the Human Rights approach.

Ray: Finally, don’t be too optimistic about Google’s position here – claiming that John Naughton’s A Brief History of the Future was published in 1905.

John: Similar to argument about relationship of individual and State regarding security.

Me: We’re in a better position here in the UK than the US. In US political debate around absolute rights framed in the Constitution. British political history, culture – and  constitution – much more open to pragmatic arguments.

Another observation by me (not made in the seminar):

There is widespread abuse of the law, largely through general ignorance (sometimes wilful). A few know but are contemptible; a handful are punctilious.  Generally most people just rip it off and don’t care and don’t have to, and merrily swap MP3s and watch and make mashups.

Only when large sums of money are at stake (usually on both sides) does the law get involved. This is good de minimis non curat lex stuff – the law doesn’t concern itself with trifles.  Except, of course, when small sums by vast numbers of people are concerned. Then you’re in trouble – the music industry at present and the film and TV industries presently. On the other hand, you can have vast numberss of small losses, and a small, concentrated number of huge gains – which is what the current situation is yielding.