Getting to the very end of three years of hard work less than three weeks to go feeling a bit panicked because there is so much more that I wanted to fit in and get done and now it seems over the next three weeks that it will be a case of fairly severely trimming back and trying to concentrate on the essentials I feel that it is an ongoing project I really don't want it to end yet so hopefully the things that I have set up next year will continue and that's where I can be putting my energies now I'm not sure about my early morning blog walking and where that might go but I have found it very interesting and useful to do this as while you were walking up the hill the words and thoughts are coming from quite deep in improvised fashion and I can often make connections through the blog that I wouldn't make if I was attempting to sit down and think it through or even possibly in writing although these early morning sessions are very wordy and need a lot of cutting down I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to putting a search engine so that I could search to find what I wanted the Masters degree website that I have built acts as a sort of aide memoir to lots of the ideas that I have had a lot of examples so I can quickly go back and find things for future reference next I think I'll launch fairly strongly into digital drawing touch sensitivity still the collaboration the playing throwing images back and forth or perhaps moving on a little bit from the photography yesterday when I had Derrick Welsh with me he was doing a session with my students with mobile phones he had a large collection of devices and some of the ones I had as well and they spent the lesson drawing on phones that combination of drawing and animation worked best and most of the session they were pretty well engaged but it's not something that I feel I could do longer term I think the iPhone is too restricting their small size is too restricting I'm very much looking forward to the ipad and the possibilities of working on a large scale I'm quite sad at the moment and they don't have any sort possibility of a stylus because I think a stylus would be hugely improve the possibilities of drawing on devices but I guess there are a lot of technical reasons why they don't I'm guessing that its touch sensitivity that they are really working for and art sort of takes backseat of them that provides a constraint and its good to have constraints and learning to do spectacular drawings with fingers by zooming in and out is perhaps just as good as working with a paintbrush or a pencil it's just that from a drawing point of view we're much more used to drawing with a pencil or a thin brush rather than with our fingers working with fingers might give a more direct way of drawing more the sort of Monkton more hands-on more direct maybe it might just be that I'm not used to touch working with touch

Tags: blogwalking,iphone,MA,drawing

March 16 marching up the hill experimenting again with my walking blog thinking that over that three weeks of the Easter holiday I might do this every morning just the recap on the idea that I should to a recording every morning on a walk up the hill near my house with the dog between two gates one at the bottom of the hill one of the top of the hill and a walk I guess about err 8 minutes maybe the idea is that while I'm walking I should attempt to empty my conscious mind of thoughts and let the flow of speaking bring the ideas up from under the surface from the subconscious so that I can examine them in the light of day I was doing this last year and the year before last year recording my thoughts on life and and then transcribing them later when I got back home which was really quite a time-consuming process now with new software I'm hoping that when I get home I can simply plug the iPhone in and the entire mornings and thoughts will be transcribed for me either software and I don't know how it will cope with my breathlessness as I walk up the hill or with pauses for that matter and I found last Jeff has now I guess an awful lot of what I was saying as I walked up the hill is irrelevant padding and now really the ideas that come out are very few and far between are very small but sometimes quite remarkable I was thinking this yesterday talking to parents about the work I'm doing in school an aside talk the idea seemed to flow in the way that they don't when I'm just trying to think with a conscious mind lots more constant surface when I'm talking to someone I'm not sure what difference it makes if I'm talking to a machine that is not responding that we shall see anyway nearly April nearly 3 weeks when I am planning to work like crazy on this master's degree get the bulk of the writing down and I've been looking a lot at the ideas of flow and aren't what is art yesterday talking to parents err I was talking about working possibly on the edges of acceptability in relation to school working with blogging social networking and to me personally though I didn't say this with the images of young people that I am manipulating and although I don't find it I umm a problem for me at all I do see that it's a bit of a problem for me in relation to school and my job as an art teacher it's not safe but what I said to this parent is along the lines of if it isn't pushing the limit if it isn't on the edge of acceptability and it probably isn't art hand or certainly aren't as we've known it in the last century so much of which is pushing boundaries and pushing barriers as far as I'm concerned although Roy would take issue with this he says the students at each company artists or maybe I'm not an artist but in school if I'm not pushing the boundaries then is it art and if it isn't not what is it is it just skills is it the groundwork of the basics how can I do that thinking about the book the zen of seeing and the quotes there if you are just learning the technique from someone else what are you learning you have to learn that too do and I think maybe you learn it through doing art anyway second gate so I've got to stop here and get myself back home and to the dentist

Tags: blogwalking,school,zen

Okay this is an experimental recording climbing up the hill the plan is to have another go at doing my walking blog maybe a couple of times a week for the rest of the course of three months or so I've got a goodly collection of these recordings the difference this time is that the are recording that I make hopefully can be transcribed directly onto the machine using the new transcription software so I won't have to have a spend a lot of time we were according depending entirely course on how accurate this recording is and the fact that it's being done from my iPhone also hopefully will mean that I can use it in school to do reporting to record my ideas and thoughts on students at the end of lessons it all depends on the speed and ease of the transcription and how much time it takes to do this because if it's longer than typing then there's no point in doing it at all and the one of the difficulties I have I half thoroughly enjoyed inventing new stuff but I'm not very good at keeping it up on a regular basis I'm also thinking at the moment that my degree a lot of what I'm doing with the jury a lot of what new media is to do with is about tagging and little things in little increments rather than big things no longer a big book but lots of little books lots of snippets twitter the quote the sound bites about the ease of finding and collating all these bits and pieces and this lot of information is what it's about maybe one of the problems with this recording is going to be the quality of the sound of the wind particularly if I am on my bicycle I don't think I would work at all maybe that I have to get myself a much better lapel mic and use the Marantz rather than the iPhone so that I get the quality of the recording that I need to make the transcription It will be of interesting and also to see how well this works with me being breathless as I walk up the hill and whether I might need to make a new profile that incorporate the breathlessness okay enough of this switching the machine off recording it

Tags: blogwalking,iphone,tagging

The best ideas seem to rise from the subconscious like bubbles bursting on the surface of a glass of champaign. Often when I cycle or walk, I am not thinking or much, I am conscious of the real world, the passage of time, the effort of the hill. Then time expands, disappears, my consciousness alters, and often at this point ideas will pop into my consciousness. Sometimes these thoughts may have been forming deep for ages. Sometimes they are ideas that make lots of connections between other ideas that I am working with. Sometimes I don't know where these ideas have come from, out of the blue.

Tags: blogwalking,brain