[lord judd & creative technologies]

(image from Sue Thomas)


Yesterday a few of the researchers involved with the IOCT were invited to a meeting with Lord Judd. Our brief: to give him an overview of our research and our findings.


Sascha Westendorf and Keno Buss kicked things off with an overview of their DMU Creativity Assistant:

"a tool designed to help develop creative ideas in a transdisciplinary multimedia context, based upon the thesis that "creativity is an emergent property". The intention is to first understand the stages that creative people move through in their journeys of exploration, discovery, innovation, and composition. The well-established path from preparation to incubation to illumination and verification is a good starting point, but more elaborate models are needed to guide software design for individual and social creativity support, and to deal with the controversial question of how such creativity support tools can be evaluated."

Next came Heather Conboy, E-Learning Co-ordinator for Faculty of Humanties at DMU she's also researching her phd on the impact of online environments on creative writers (a bit about a previous talk here). Heather showed us some interesting statistics including this one: 95% of UK higher education institutions have VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments). I wondered what that meant for the other 5%? Are they ahead of the game and using non-institution based systems like open source platforms or do they have class blogs and teach in Second Life? Heather did explain that these stats are from 2006...I wonder what the deal is now?

Also along the lines of creative writers, Anietie Isong shared with us his research on African Writers. Anietie is specifically looking at:

• How the internet is influencing writing from Africa
• The writers' attitudes towards their writing
• Burgeoning styles employed in their writing

Lord Judd asked if all the African fiction was...well, fiction...Anietie says that though it is mainly fictional there are deep political and relgious themes.

I was really interested in Anietie's research and wonder how concepts like "postcolonial" literature will appear (or not?) in African new media writing? What is the play between the marginalised and the privledged - especially when thinking about access to computers, internet, IT learning? I also wonder how the role of "native" might change as Anietie explained that some African writers are writing from the West (UK and USA were some examples).

See some of Anietie's own poetry here and a short story here.


I concluded the presentation segment with an overview of my ph.d research:

After my presentation we opened up into a more general discussion. Lord Judd (I just cannot say "Frank"!) raised some anxieties and concerns with which we agreed. I think this surprised him. In general I'd say that we all agreed that balance is the key to using new media. Though how MPs are to negotiate all the communication they receive and then have to respond to...I don't know. When I suggested just checking e-mail/letters etc...in the morning I was told that is near impossible; something really important might require feedback and can't just be left until the next morning. Sue suggested we have filters like already junk messages go into spam folders...but maybe we need intelligent agents (like PAs!) to sift through messages first? I didn't realise that MPs received so much communication? That's when the discussion turned to literacies...the literacy of navigating all the information available but also the literacy on the side of the people who write to MPs...do they realise (are they literate?) that they need not write for every small thing and are they sure they are writing to the right person?


Quotes of the Day:
When I introduced myself to him as Jess, he responded with: "I'm Frank." (not "Lord Judd")
When told of my recent phd award he said: "So you're a *real* doctor" (!!!)
When beginning the discussion he exclaimed: "I am not a Luddite. I am NOT a Luddite."

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Thanks to Sue Thomas for organising the interesting tête - à - tête and thanks to Lord Judd for sharing his time.

NB If you'd like to keep up with Lord Judd's speaking arrangements, you can sign up to an e-mail alert here or subscribe to the rss feed here (who said MPs aren't digitally literate?!)

Sue has blogged about the day over at PART.