[nano technology]

I was reading an article on the super conductor/layered oxide NaxCoO2 that, through various "conducting probe-mediated reversible electrochemical sodium intercalation/deintercalation reactions" information can be written and then erased (I'm sure I'm over-simplifying). In awe of the words used (oxidated, intercalated, superconductivity, nitrogen flux, nanolithographic) and wondering what this might mean for us, the end users of technology led me - via a google search - to a whole new world. A world of a thinking so different from my current, humanities-based research. (it's invigorating to be reminded how we can (or is it just me) get very focused one something which is just a tiny part of a bigger everything) In this world where one can measure conductivity (among a myrid of other things so different from my current examination of multi-mimesis and transliteracy in women-authored web fictions), language and story and critique have the privilege of ephemerality, rather this seems to be a world where experiments are necessary and quantifiable results are produced. One such product is the 3D Atomic Holographic Optical Data Storage Nanotechnology. It is a rewritable holographic removable disk.

"An Atomic / Photonic / Molecular / Quantum / Spintronic / Holographic Switch is the method of using a UV laser atom nanoparticle optical switch defined by a non-contact terahertz nano/microwave electric field modulator using attosecond, femtosecond, terahertz UV photons (electromagnetic radiation) simultaneously to alter properties of ferroelectric molecules for data and light expression. Through the use of UV photon induced electric field poling and dynamically changing the internal geometry of individual ferroelectric atoms in a 3 dimensional optical crystal coated on a high / low velocity substrate.
The UV laser diodes and electric field transducers of the Integrated Read/Write Head can be used in any combination or sequence to control the molecules which include UV/blue photon frequencies and quantum energy level as well as Nano/Micro electro static field strength (voltage) and switching field densities (frequency).The only rub is the cost per bit will be cheaper, faster to access, and faster to store for a much longer time uneffected by many environmental conditons." (see here for more)

[if ET had the iphone he wouldn't have made it home]

Two weeks (or there about) after people were seen running to the nearest store only to stand in a queue for hours in order to pay over a week's rent (400 pounds for 4 gig) for a 'phone (albeit a super pretty one), they're seen running right back to return them.

As Cade Metz explains

"Let's be honest here: The iPhone's all-finger, no-stylus interface is a beautiful thing. With the exception of the on-screen keyboard - which isn't
quite up-to-snuff if your hands are any larger than a twelve-year-old's - this
is pretty close to the ultimate UI, an interface you can use without a second
thought. From the get-go. But $541.42 is too much to pay for an interface. UI
aside, the only real reason to buy an iPhone is peer pressure."

He ends his musings with this one-liner:

"More importantly, if you carry an iPhone, what happens to your self-worth? I can assure you: It plummets. Carry an iPhone, and you're just one of the lemmings."

As for technical issues, well, here are 28!


I think I'll stick to my Blackberry. So it doesn't have a 5mp camera but it has a fast web connection (Edge is soooo 2005...), security, loooong battery life, and loads of other businessey-type apps (the iphone doesn't let you edit Word of Excel files?!) that Apple doesn't seem to want to provide (yet).

Plus there's a major security flaw with iphone technology:

"Hackers could take control of an iPhone if its owner visits a doctored Web site or Internet hotspot, security researchers reported Monday.

The vulnerability of the vaunted device, Apple Inc.'s first cell phone, is only theoretical for now. There are no reports of criminals actually taking advantage of the security glitch to remotely access an iPhone. But if it were exploited, hijacked iPhones could be very useful to the same gangs that take over personal computers and use them to disseminate spam, said Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, which discovered the flaw. "You could have a million iPhones dialing the company's main line and overwhelm it that way," Miller said."

For more ranting check out anti-ipod.

[Museum Residency: New Media]

The V&A is inviting applications from experienced and established practitioners for a New Media residency in the Sackler Centre for Arts Education, the first in an exciting new programme of residencies.We are particularly interested in UK based practitioners, who wish to work with the Museum’s spaces and use the facilities in our new Digital Studio with visitors, and who have a track record of development and regular exposure of new work.Purpose of the Residency

The new Sackler Centre at the V&A, opening in Spring 2008, will have two studios for museum residencies which will be occupied by artists/ craftspeople/ designers/ writers/ performers/ architects/ film and video makers etc. There will be 4 residencies of 6 months ( 26 weeks ) each year. This programme is integral to the philosophy of the Sackler Centre, helping to make it a dynamic, creative space. The residency offers practitioners the opportunity to develop new work, re-assess their practice or see work in different contexts by responding to and working with the Museum’s collections and to promote greater understanding of art and design processes for the public.

The aims of the residency are to:

· Enable the selected practitioner to carry out research, develop new skills and explore new ideas towards the creation of new work in the future

· Promote greater understanding of new media production processes for the V&A’s audiences.

· Create links between the V&A’s collections and contemporary art practice.

· Develop practitioners as ‘artist educators’.

· Raise the profile of contemporary art practice with the V&A’s diverse audiences.

The residencies will include a research and developmentphase, enabling practitioners to consider new directions for their own work, work with the collections and plan a project with the public. This could include holding open studios, running workshops or master classes, giving talks and presentations or working with specific groups to produce work for display. This programme of work will be negotiated with the successful candidate and confirmed by the V&A. Any additional activities, such as involvement in the Museum’s public programme will be separately negotiated and an appropriate additional fee agreed.

The resident artist will be supported in their public projects by the V&A’s experienced Education, Access and Diversity staff. This will make a significant contribution to the artist’s own CPD and help to develop a pool of ‘artist educators’ for future museum projects.

Expectations

The focus of the residencies will be on process and on engagement with audiences. We would like to achieve a balance of benefits for the artist, the public and the V&A. Evaluation is a very important component of the residency programme since we will be piloting new approaches and the resident will be asked to contribute to this.

Residents will be expected to:

· be based in the museum for a minimum of 3 days per week

· open their studio to the public for a minimum of one weekday, two late night Fridays per month and one weekend per month (to be arranged in advance)

· display work in progress in their studio (there may also be other opportunities for display elsewhere)

· contribute to the process of dissemination on the V&A website· provide feedback for the purposes of evaluation

Note : work produced during the residency remains the property of the maker, but the residency programme must be acknowledged in any subsequent public or press showing. Any work produced with the public as part of this residency is owned by the V&A.

Selection Criteria

The residency should be dynamic, ambitious and inspiring – pushing forward boundaries of perception about contemporary art and design We are looking for residents who can adopt a range of different roles and who are keen to develop those aspects of their career which include using collections, engaging in public programmes and communicating about their work.

Candidates must demonstrate:

· originality, and evidence of a strong personal style in their work

· dynamic and inspiring ideas about how they would use this opportunity and how they intend to meet the aims of the Museum Residency

· ideas for innovative ways to respond to the V&A’s collections

· an established practice, through a track record of development and regular exposure of new work through exhibitions at a regional, national and international level· an interest in or experience of working in educational / community settings

·an ability to work and communicate with a diverse range of people

Payment

This appointment will be on an Occasional Professional Assistant (OPA) basis and, for the avoidance of doubt, there is no intention to render the Resident an employee of the V&A. The artist will be paid approximately £7000 during their 6 month residency. This will be paid on completion of agreed work stages at the equivalent of £1083 a month (plus 8.3% rolled up holiday pay).

For more information e-mail: hr AT vam.ac.uk

[collaborative book]

I've just been reading the Marketing Profs blog again (I highly recommend it) and one of the top five reads of this week is Christina Kerley's post on "The Age of Conversation--a precedent-setting collaborative book by 103 authors hailing from every U.S. time zone, Canada, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, India and Oman."

"In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page — 400 words — on the topic of “conversation”. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication. And in the spirit of conversation, you can follow-up and extend your interest in the topics covered in the book at the Age of Conversation blog — http://www.ageofconversation.com/."

This collaborative novel is reminscent of DMU's online MA in Creative Writing and New Media's One Million Penguins project. I wonder how it might have evolved if the idea was to produce a printable book rather than a wiki-novel? Perhaps a future project for Penguin and the Master's group...

This also raises questions for the concept of transliteracy and collaboration. Is transliteracy analogous to collaboration and community? To be transliterate must one also approve of the spirit of community and collaboration? How might the individual feature in transliteracy (or is there an "individual"?) I suppose we'll need a way of negotiating the wisdom of crowds and independent thinking.

[los de abajo]

Los de Abajo were great live! Lots of enthusiasm and excitement and really got the crowd going. The venue, The Borderline in London was perfect. A well-hidden basement/cantina that seemed to add to the reverberation of the bass-heavy merengue and mamba beats. Their name, loosely translated as "those from below" encapsulates their theory that there are no underdogs: "That's all, that's all, we're all just human. We're all just human."

From the Los de Abajo manifesto:

Identity - is knowing who you are. And that's what this is all about - our Mexican identity. We are indefinable as a people. Our blood is restless, because we are the bastard children of a forced marriage between Jesús and Coyolxauqui. We have a demented uncle named Sam, and our brother is Emiliano. On one side of the Rio Grande we are ilegales and on the other we aliens. Aliens in our own country.Equality - is something the West likes to talk about a lot but there are just four words to describe it - We Are All Equal.

[dr. steve's ph.d graduation ceremony]

[happy birthday steve]

Today is Steve's 28th birthday so BUON COMPLEANNO!!





A year on from Steve's viva, tomorrow we celebrate with his graduation ceremony


.

I can't wait until it's my turn to dress up:

great minds: Derrida was born on this day in 1930.

[the semantics of the web]

In an interview published yesterday in IT World, the creator of the web talks about how he envisions the future of the semantic web. Here is a sample of the interview, the full text is here.

Berners-Lee: (Laughs) No, I don't do that. I think about real technology. I didn't invent the term "Web 3.0." The Web is constantly developing. If you want to see what's happening that I am interested in now, there are several technologies laced together. In Web 2.0 there are some technologies like JavaScript and others that are all standards that came out of allowing people to do things. Most standards are coming out now that will have a good push towards the mobile Web initiative, which is the use of the Web on lots of different devices.
In the future we will have the Semantic Web that will allow a whole lot of other things. One of the powerful things about networking technology like the Internet or the Web or the Semantic Web, one of the characteristics of such a technology is that the things we've just done with it far surpass the imagination of the people who invented them. Take for example the inventors of TCP/IP, the original protocols for communication between computers over the Internet, created by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974.
When I invented the Web, I thought of it as an infrastructure; I designed the Web as a foundation for many things. With Web 2.0, social networks and all kinds of things happen on top of it. When the Semantic Web arrives in the next few years, things will be using it in a way we cannot know yet. So, in a way, it's foolish to try to imagine what Web 4.0 will be like when we still don't know what will be done with 3.0.
For Web 3.0 to succeed, the people who are studying it at this moment will have ideas which will enable the new technology. They will design fantastic things just like people with Web 2.0 are designing fantastic things right now. People working with the Semantic Web will make much more powerful things. We can't imagine what they will do. But we have to build the Web to be an infrastructure. It shall never be used for particularized purposes but just to be a foundation for future developments.

[8 ways to grow your blog]

According to Mack Collier at the Marketing Profs site, following these eight easy steps should pretty much ensure you a bigger blog. Although he has in mind corporate blogs, many of his steps apply to personal blogs.

1. Post regularly
2. Develop a comment policy
3. Reply to comments
4. Showcase readers who make special contributions
5. Build your blogroll with your readers' interests in mind
6. Offer unique content aimed at your blog's target audience
7. Make your blog's feed available for RSS subscribers (this is sooo important as many blog readers catch up on their favourite reads only using a feed reader)
8. Offer email subscriptions to your blog's content

"The best way to grow your blog's readership is to shift your focus to satisfying your readers' wants and needs. If you create an environment on your blog that welcomes readers to participate and encourages their feedback, your blog will blossom.
Instead of viewing your blog as a promotional and marketing tool for your company, consider how you can create a community on your blog. Once you shift your blog's focus toward the wants and needs of the readers, you will begin to see your readership grow, as will interaction via comments and links to your blog."

For further details on each step and actionable points see the original blog post here.

[social networking profiles - which one are you]

This is a list compiled by Malene Charlotte Larsen who is researching a ph.d on young people and social networking at Aalborg University, Denmark. The list of 35 perspectives is published in the Social Computing Magazine. I'll copy here just a few:

"The consumer perspective
Social networking sites are money-making machines creating a need for added value among young people causing them to spend all their pocket money on extra features such as VIP profiles, widgets, gifts for friends and so on.
The youth perspective
Social networking sites are places that help young people be young and let them “practice” youth. Therefore, the sites are mainly a reflection of youth culture.
The friendship perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.
The identity perspective
Social networking sites are spaces for identity construction. Here, young people are continuously constructing, re-constructing and displaying their self-image and identity. Also, the network sites make them co-constructors of each other’s identities.
The language perspective
Social networking sites aggravate the written language of young people. They develop bad habits of misspelling on purpose, which makes them unable to write correctly. On the other hand, their online language is really creative and they do know how to tell right from wrong.
The public perspective
Social networking sites are “open diaries” of young people, but they do not think about the fact that the whole world can read their text and see their pictures online.
The social perspective
Social networking sites make young people more social and help them communicate with others. Especially, the sites help youngsters cope with shyness or loneliness.
The technological perspective
Social networking sites are part of the Web 2.0 and social software technology generation in which case focus on the technological possibilities is predominant.

[renewals: other than academic]

Interspersed with the thought-provoking panels, papers, presentations, escapes to the library, and myriad conversations, I had the pleasure of roaming Royal Holloway's beautiful campus, poking my head in the extravagant chapel, and dining in the Picture Gallery.

One night Sue and I embarked on a game of pool prompted much thinking (on my part) as to why I enjoy a game at which I'm so embarrassingly poor. I enjoyed the concentration required to hold the cue and the drive to sink my yellow ball. I found myself mentally tracing the patterns that we created with the balls crashing and then diverging. Then I did some reading and it seems, according to some scientists that we don't actually see the touching/colliding/smashing of balls but rather only the after-effect. It sounds like we only see that which causes collision rather than collision itself.

Kind of like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: you might know the speed of a quantum particle, but you won't know its exact location.

On Friday evening we enjoyed live Jazz while we sipped Pimms within Founder's North Quad. It was (finally) lovely weather and the notes seemed to float along with the breeze and murmuring of voices. Once I figure out how to transfer sound files from my blackberry I'll add some music here.

Update: Catherine, the blogger in residence for the Renewals conference, has added a slew of posts on panels and presentations. Check it out.

[Renewals: Reading in Slow Motion]

Caveat: Blogged Live

Plenary at the Renewals Conference

Professor Richard E. Miller - Rutgers University - Reading in Slow Motion: The Humanities and the Work of the Moment

(He begins by warning us of a technical glitch)

A technological change appeared at Rutgers and the teaching of writing which he fought tooth and claw

Credentials for technology: played games as a kid. His concern about the future of humanities is centrally focussed on the interface between people who are trained to work with words, and images, and the tech interfaces that now define our lives

The National Education Association Report "Reading at Risk" - lit. reading in the U.S. - attempt to study changing reading habits in the U.S: reading habits not cause for celebration, over the past 20 years, young adults (18-34) have declined from being those most likely to read lit. to those least likely.

Our target population are those who do not read

Says every single age group has declined in reading, i.e. not active readers (6 or more fiction "books") BUT does this study look at reading web pages, playing games, reading comics, texting, facebooking, etc...

Why the "precipitous decline"? - tv not at fault, rather the "internet very likely a cause of the decline". The greatest percentage of internet use are those who "formerly were most likely to be literary readers."

The only place that there's been growth in the U.S. is in creative writing - "nearly 30% growth in the number of adult creative writers." (does that include blogging?)

By 2075 no more literary reading.

"We are a nation of writers without a readership": this is a reality that we have to confront as teachers, nature of literacy, expression is being transformed before our eyes. What we know mean by composing is not that you have your own printing press but your own movie software etc...but who's watching it? There's a lot of stuff on youtube that has not viewers.

BUT: how do we understand this disjunction?

"Books remain the foundation of the humanities...its embodied, visceral..." even the most techy people he knows don't settle down with a book (he hasn't met my brother)

Maybe what's important about the humanties and reading is training to focus, how do you focus "in the age of distraction"? How do you get kids to turn off "all that noise" so that they can experience that simple humanizing effect of focusing their mind?

Maybe the growth of creative writers is merely the desire to feel creative?

He wants to celebrate "amateur" readers - if his students can only take one thing away with them after class, it's the desire to feel creative (not take Middlemarch away with them though he wishes this were the case)



Miller goes on to talk about requirements of education:
to go into business - no title, not time for degree (says it's not necessary)
to declare oneself a poet, painter, writer, etc... no title and no need for a degree (uses example of Stephen King)
to become a lawyer - 3 years, then bar exam
to become a doctor - 4 years then internship, residency
an English prof - average ages of grad. 37, 11.3 years of study and then? - why does it take that long? Is that "that" hard?

People are stalled. How do we get "passion" back? Why does it matter? It matters to me and I'm going to convey to you why it matters. It's human to "make a connection."

On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry:
"What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird?"


We need to spend time with ideas we don't agree with - this is what the humanities are good for - ambivalence, ambiguity, a state of mind that acknowledges the complexity of the world (I'll remember that one - I'm very complex)

If your only way of joining thoughts is through the word "and" you don't really *think*, you need a conjunction: *BUT* - if you cannot qualify your thought you're not really an academic.

Miller looked at all the references Scarry made in her first three pages, read slowly, make connections. He made a collage of Scarry's references - what a great idea to use in all learning environments.



TIP: Slow down, pay attention, then ideas come.


[Producing "mineable information" - role of universities]

[Renewals: Bloglines 101]

This morning Sue and I ran the bloglines workshop which was a great experience. We enjoyed a mix of blog-abilities and have some really good questions about tagging, searching, and how to create certain parameters for those blog searches.

This workshop was the second of the two-part series of tackling transliteracy. Friday's Thursday's panel presentation by Sue Thomas, Kate Pullinger, and myself began by fleshing out the idea of transliteracy and today's workshop put those ideas into practise.

[Renewals: Are You Transliterate]

For the Renewals conference, Professor Sue Thomas, author Kate Pullinger, and I, presented our panel on transliteracy. Sue began by setting the scene, explaining transliteracy and how the research into transliteracy is very much in process by the PaRT group (www.transliteracy.com). Kate spoke about her role as author and how the notion of "authorship" changes with the platform used. Kate shared with us her experience of (trying to) guide A Million Penguines (the wiki novel experiment) and the diffuse authorship that engendered and then she contrasted that with creating Inanimate Alice with Chris Joseph. I concluded the session with a reading of Inanimate Alice episode 3 and talked about how the different modes interacted with the narrative and how sometimes the modes played against one another (and thank goodness Kate didn't begin shaking her head in disagreement!).

Sadly, but naturally, the technology wasn't as complicit as we would have hoped and thus the audience missed some great videos.

[Renewals: Refiguring University English in the 21st Century

After a myriad of welcomes to the conference (including Elaine Showalter who regaled us with humorous epithets of her time at the MLA), Alan Liu presented his vision of “Knowledge 2.0: The University and Web 2.0."

Here are some bits that I managed to jot down in between being enthralled by Alan's enthusiasm:

1) Technology effects knowledge and dissemination of subject

2) Students become interested in creating because of how it is pitched to them - Alan suggested they write to impress him and their friends

3) Wikipedia is not just the first resource used by students but the last. Thus there is an instability of knowledge base

4) How do you police a "new world" when world is full of multiple authorities? Now there is no "natural" locus for authority.

5) What is a "good" policy for governing knowledge rather than a "best" policy = a satisficing knowledge

6) Pedagogical implications: how to adapt knowledge discourse to accomodate others (think of the different kinds of students who you might have in your classes)

7) Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus as a critique of "new" media corresponds to today's "anxiety." Critique of new media is as old as its romance

"The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves. So it's not a recipe for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered." (68)

[tube grammar]

Waiting at Leicester Square tube station, bracing ourselves for the sardine-like journey, I spied an ad. on the tube wall that creates its own grammar (can you spot the typo?):

[alan liu on transliteracies and reading on the web]

I was very lucky to be able to hear Professor Alan Liu share his thoughts with us. Interestingly, his thinking seemed to pick up (broadly) on what we were discussing last night with regards to critical literacy. Alan notes that we need some kind of framework that can be used to judge the accuracy of a web site (etc...); a tool for students.

Of course this raised questions about who would judge and who would issue those specific standards. Good question. Alan began talking about the "expert vs. folk problem" and shared with us possibilities for social visualisation - statistics that appear in a visual format and let readers know the history of that page (or window, screen, site, blog, etc...). Alan referred to this as the "pathology" of the page. With this visualisation, readers will have a better idea of the page's history, how it was created etc... Think of wikipedia and some of the entries that become protected. Alan explained that with the visualisation technique readers would be able to see who edited the page and who had final call on protecting that entry.

While Alan's talk was firmly focused on the future and what new technology might mean for reading, he reminded us at various junctures, that the history of reading has always dealt with "the new." Ideas like information overload and browsing have been around since the 17th century: "Ancient writers and writers in the Middle Ages produced so much data that there was a permanent threat of overfilled information storages, which led to the development of new information processing techniques."

Some other stimulating points that came out of Alan's presentation:

1) the need to look at the web as an excocentric device rather than endocentric

2) the 'net is text-centric or what Alan calls "text plus," (think of all the source-code behind each page)

3)universities should not compete with corporations (because they don't really have the finances to allow that), rather universities should complement business

4) "media archeologists" who examine what early media might mean for contemporary tools. (Does this mean history is gaining currency?)

5) the "many police" model for information = quality assurance conducted via social networking and social datamining.

Intriguingly, Alan described books as really just mark-up; the look of a book explains a logical relationship between one part of content to another. Wow! Books are just mark-up. That seems to reflect what Cally said lastnight about books just being content holders.

Thanks to Toby for the exciting conversation on machinima and how it fits in with transliteracy...a future paper and presentation in the works...

Tomorrow we'll hear Alan talk on how University English is changing. Also I'll be presenting on a panel alongside Professor Sue Thomas and author Kate Pullinger. Sue and I will also be running a blogging workshop.

[alan liu on online reading]

July 4, 2:00pm, IoCT

"How Can We Improve Online Reading? -- The University of California Transliteracies Project"

Browse, jump, search, filter, aggregate, bookmark, annotate -- these signature reading practices of the Internet are both our history and future. History, because recent research in the history of the book, history of reading, and cognitive science fields shows that "extensive" reading across an amplitude of texts (contrasted with intensive, holy, or close reading) have had a long evolution. They were complaining about information overload as early as the 17th-century. Future, because even amid the flood of multimedia, text is extending in new ways. Much of so-called "Web 2.0" is text-centric: e.g., blogs, wikis, social networking, folksonomical tagging (not to mention ever-present email).

What are the innovations of input (e.g., "reputation" or "social-networking" methods of negotiating between expert and folk markup of text), processing (e.g., data mining), and output (e.g., text visualization) that can improve online reading? What does "improve" actually mean when measured against the long baseline of the history of reading as opposed to the quarterly stock market valuation of the latest dot.com businesses? And who is the "we" ("our") that provides the proper perspective upon the issues, given the fact that in the age of Wikipedia the contest has been reopened between "experts" and the so-called "rule of many"?

The University of California Transliteracies Project was started in 2005 to bring together humanists, social scientists, and computer scientists from across the multi-campus UC system to study these issues from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

In this Distinguished Seminar, Alan Liu, who directs the UC Transliteracies Project, will present the current research and approaches of the project as a lens through which to think about, and consider improving, online reading.

This seminar at the Institute of Creative Technologies is organised by the Production and Research in Transliteracy (PART) group at De Montfort University. The event is free and open to the public. Directions at the bottom of this page.

[the reading revolution seminar]

I'm home now (whew!) after an amazing time at Penguin headquarters on The Strand. I was one of 5 speakers and my brief was to talk about how teens are reading today (i.e. vis-a-vis digital technologies).


I spoke last and I think my presentation worked well as a summary of thoughts and questions that had been raised at the beginning of the session. Sue Horner speaking as Head of Standards and Assessment Policy, QCA noted that for the first time ever the National Curriculum includes the word "multimodal." Sue explained it was one small step but it's certainly in the right direction. Second to speak was Josh Beasley, the voice of a "young person" as the seminar flyer eloquently described him. While he admitted that he doesn't use the 'net as much as some of his friends he certainly IMs and texts (that helped support some of what I said in my presentation). Cally Poplak, Director of Egmont Press, the third speaker, gave an optimistic talk on reading from a publisher's point of view. Unlike the Digitise or Die session in April, here we enjoyed the refreshing optimism about digital reading. While Cally reminded us that she loves books (don't we all) and called herself a luddite (but she did have a powerpoint!) her enthusiasm for the future of digital literature was palpable. She made an interesting point; a book is just a method of production, it's the content that's important. I bet quite a few people would argue that a book is a book is a book because of it's touch, smell, the whole experience but great to hear a publisher look beyond that. Although let me remind readers that I personally don't forsee (not desire) the demise of the book and in it's place the rise of a bland and cold e-book reader. But technology will develop thus making the digital reading an experience of its own. Following on from Cally came Paul Duffield, a Manga Artist interested in making Shakespeare ("The Tempest" in this case) more accessible to young people (grr arg, that was the term for the evening and now it's really starting to bug me). He showed some lovely images, his own drawings, and walked us through a reading of a panel. Fascinating stuff. Then there was me. I began with an audience survey (raising hands) to get an idea of how people in the room (teachers, librarians, policy makers, book lovers, editors, publishers, education consultants, etc...) use social media. I was pleasantly surprised to see almost everyone had watched youtube videos but only one person had a facebook account (at least only one admitted to it). I concluded my presentation by following in Sue Thomas's footsteps and played Michael Wesch's The Machine is Using/Us Video; a good way to sum up in general terms what's happening to reading and writing thanks to certain kinds of technology.

The question period/panel discussion swept past much too quickly but I was very pleased to be able to address questions during the final networking (a.k.a. drinks) session. Quite a lot of people came over with joyous praise for the idea of transliteracy (are you reading Sue?!) and I'm booked in to a few places (already) to share my view of translit. in an online environment and pedagogical sense. How do we teach our students to be transliterate? Good question.

A few issues that seemed to keep cropping up (especially during the networking session):

1) age - there seemed to be a worry that the digital divide was actually an age divide. I was put on the spot about this but voiced my personal opinion that I do *not* think it's an age issue at all. It's about personality and wanting to try new things and wanting to adapt. Not all 18 year olds want a Facebook account, age isn't a guarantor of desire to use new media NOR does it suggest a capacity to understand that media (i.e. critical literacy). In fact, John Dolan, head of library policy at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council brought up the age question and adamantly agreed that age doesn't really figure into the equation in this sense.

2) copyright - creative commons came up but of course with publishing it gets very tricky. Where's the business model that guarantees authors payment for something that is freely available on the 'net (I know Kate, Chris, and Ian are wondering about this too).

3) how might libraries become webby - I was directly posed this question...I don't know. It'll take a lot of effort and time. The main thing, I suppose, is to use social media technology within the library environment, provide access to things kids are doing at school or at home. When the librarian shows students around the library for their first visit (here are the oversized books, here are the paperbacks etc...) why not tour library thing and have a facebook page (like Toronto's Ryerson University) where updates of the latest acquisitions are posted etc...?

My thanks go to Debbie Hicks, Ruth Harrison, and Jenny Warner from the Reading Agency. They were all fabulous and extremely helpful (especially Jenny with all the techy worries at the beginning!). Thanks to Sammy for the use of his laptop which enabled my presentation to run and connect to the internet.

Thanks also to the audience who was extremely receptive and welcoming.

Quite a few people asked for my presentation (including someone from Florida who is visiting England)so here it is via slideshare:

[taking over the {virtual} world]

Created by Michael Wesch for his teaching on Cultural Anthropology; "a massive experiment in education created for (and by) [his] Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class at Kansas State University." He's begun a "world simulation" game where students must create their own "realistic" cultures. Fascinating - a real cross-over between *real* and *virtual* worlds.

Here is a taster:



More:



The conclusion: