Tuesday, 10 June, 2008

Andrew O’Hagan

The Atlantic OceanI’m reading the marvellous The Atlantic Ocean by Andrew O’Hagan at the moment. It’s a collection of essays, mostly taken from The London Review of Books and is a wonderful eclectic collection of writing. Take this little gem, for example, from the opening lines of a piece about celebrity memoirs:

If you want to be a somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.

Thoroughly recommended.

It’s stuff like this that proves, I think, that print has a future. Longer essays like these, don’t really work on the web. It’s hard to concentrate on the screen for too long, and often these pieces need mulling over, book or paper in hand, curled up on the sofa.

links for 2008-06-09

Monday, 9 June, 2008

I got me a MicroTrack!

I’ve been after a decent audio recorder for a while, and on the recommendations of Neville Hobson, who regularly blogs about such matters, I opted for an M-Audio MicroTrack 2. And very nice it is too.

MicroTrack II

I’m still waiting to use it, because my Compact Flash card hasn’t arrived yet. I haven’t ever seen one of these before, always previously having used SD or Sony’s Memory Sticks. I’m guessing CF cards are pretty big – the slot in the MicroTrack is huuuge!

Drip, drip… more ICELE news

David Wilcox pointed me in the direction of the latest E-Government newsletter from Headstar, and their article about ICELE’s slow and rather painful death:

In the medium term, the government is considering an overhaul of e-democracy policy which could bring into being a new cross-government agency to replace ICELE and draw in elements of similar work currently scattered across the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Progress in that direction will be made following the publication by DLG this summer of a white paper on citizen empowerment…

CLG concern over ICELE’s operations is thought to centre on its spending on staff and management and a failure to achieve its initial broad objectives. However, Ellis told E-Government Bulletin that charges of overspending were “plainly not true”.

Interesting! But also rather messy and unpleasant…

I was giving a little thought the other night to th poor councillors who had started blogging using ICELE’s system, ‘Blog in a Box’, and who might now be a little concerned about where, if anywhere, their platform might be going now.

My advice to them would be to move to WordPress, either by using the free hosted option at WordPress.com or by hosting it themselves with their own install from WordPress.org. If any of you come across this blog and need some help, let me know.

Sunday, 8 June, 2008

Free software, or just go online?

Following some of the points made on my post about Kubuntu and Linux yesterday, I’ve been wondering a bit more about free software and how it might help people make the most of their equipment.

After all, software is expensive stuff. One of the great things about Kubuntu is that if I want a piece of software to a job, say editing graphics, all I have to do is call up the application manager, type in ‘graphics’ and it comes  up with a list of applications I can download and use straight away.

Things aren’t quite so easy with the Mac, of course, but at least that comes preloaded with the iLife suite, which means you can pretty much get on with most things out of the box.

Poor old Windows users are of course left behind in this. They don’t have any decent software pre-installed, by and large, and nor do they have access to a great open source application manager like Kubuntu comes with.

Having said that, an awful lot of the best open source apps are available for Windows users as well as Linux. But they are spread about on their own websites – though many are downloadable from sites like SourceForge – and how is the average user supposed to know they are there? If I want to create a podcast on my PC and need an audio editor, how do I know that Audacity is the package I want?

A great way of tackling this would be to create a simple CD, with all the main open source packages that people might want to use on a regular basis. You could burn and print a load to give away, and maybe make the ISO downloadable from a website.

Some of the software I would include on such a CD would be:

All of which are freely available (and more importantly, distributable) for Windows users.

But then… is this really the right way to go? In the age of Web 2.0, cloud computing, Google Docs and Zoho, do we really want to encourage people to be installing loads of desktop software? Or should we just point them to where they can download FireFox, and then giving them a list of bookmarks?

Maybe it depends on things like web connection speeds. Perhaps desktop software works better for some people than others

I’d be interested to hear what others think. Would a CD with preselected, quality open source software really make a difference to the way people use their PCs? Or should we be encouraging folk to use online tools, and to compute in the cloud?

Saturday, 7 June, 2008

Windowless

KubuntuFor the first time in maybe more than ten years, I don’t have a machine running Windows in my possession. Last week, my Vista-running Acer laptop stopped working. Windows just wouldn’t load. It gave me a load of options to restore things to a previous state of affairs, only, because it couldn’t find the driver for my C: drive, there was no previous state of affairs. And there wasn’t any option to restore the machine back to factory settings, no restore CD, no Vista install CD, nothing.

So I did the only logical thing I could do to make this machine useful again. I put Linux on it. Kubuntu to be precise, and it works very nicely. A sticky start, because I couldn’t find FireFox (it wasn’t installed straight away), and things like Flash player had to be installed too. Also, certain file formats (like MP3!) aren’t supported immediately either. But after an hour or so’s fiddling, I have things working very nicely. It certainly isn’t as eeeasy to get into as a certain Asus machine, but it isn’t half bad. It’s quicker and more stable than Vista ever was.

My Macbook is still my main machine, and I can’t see that changing. The quality of the open source software available on the Linux platform is astonishing, given that it’s mostly free of charge, but for certain applications – like those dealing with media (photos, video etc) – the Mac clearly has the edge. For doing stuff on the web, though, Firefox can be running in anything that doesn’t crash every five minutes or which operates at a reasonable speed. And Linux beats Vista hands down on that score.

Friday, 6 June, 2008

Thursday, 5 June, 2008

A Catalyst for social innovation?

The UK Catalyst Awards are BERR and NESTA sponsored initiative which aims to:

recognise everyday heroes who use technology to make a positive impact on the world around them. What’s more, you could get support to take your idea further and help more people.

Sounds like a good deal to me! They are being organised by Dan McQuillan, an all-round online social change good egg. David Wilcox attended the launch at the beginning of May, and caught up with Phil Hope MP – who is Minister for the Third Sector – as well as Dan, and in his inimitable social reporter style, managed to shoot some video:

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You can still put forward your projects for the awards – and I believe they don’t have to be underway at this stage – good ideas might be enough. It’s a chance to try and drum up some support, get connected with other interested folk and maybe snaffle a bit of funding. And why not?

In other news, Channel 4 have revealed that there will be some funding via their 4IP fund at the 2gether festival in July 2008. It will be interesting to see how these two initiatives work together.

More on 2gether to come, by the way.

Delivering online learning

I’ve had my attention brought to the Thirty Day Challenge, a free month long online course on internet direct marketing. Now, it’s not a subject I am particularly interested in, but I am interested in how the information is disseminated on the course. It seems to be mainly through flat HTML pages for each day of the course which  are chock full of video content, a supporting blog and a forum for participants to have a natter.

This seems a fairly simple way of doing things, I guess people pick up each day’s content through RSS or email, follow the video and text content, then try and put it into action. You might get people coming in halfway through, say, which might mess things up – and how would you present the content after the initial course has finished? Traditional blog reverse-chronological would mean that people hit the last section first.

Maybe one way of using a blog would be to run the course on a regular basis, signing up people to specific start dates and password protecting posts, so those with a password for a section can access it. Maybe this is just complicating things though…

The alternative would be to set something up in a system like Moodle, which is an open source virtual learning environment, which lets you set up proper courses for people to follow. This way you get to properly structure each segment of the courses, and can ensure people properly progress through each stage. I have been having a little play with Moodle recently, and while it clearly has some great features, it seems to be to be rivaling Drupal in the ‘bitch to set up’ stakes, and the end results do look a little, well, dated.

Another way of doing things would be to make the learning synchronous and make everyone be there at the same time for a Webex style session, sharing the screen with those taking part. There are obvious problems here for fixing a time people can make, and it also turns it into a much more formal affair.

Does anyone else have any ideas on how online courses could be presented, split into sections delivered on a daily or weekly basis?