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

Thursday, 24 March thinking this morning about doodles about getting scraps of paper envelopes in meetings Biro scribbling mindlessly letting things grow why do we do it what's the compulsion and what relation is there between doodling and the sort of little flash games that I am playing with on the Internet and where you can get little games on the Internet umm to be more compulsive but I don't think you can ever get them as compulsive as doodles because doodles is not just about the doodling well it's not about the doodling really it is more about the situation of being in a meeting or on the phone it's not something you sit down to do you don't sit down to doodle it happens because you're doing something else it is the situation and that is maybe what destroys just about anything err that you're trying to do with the phone or computer because you're not in the situation except perhaps things on the iPhone apps on the iPhone like ipint where you are sharing little bit of silliness with friends in a pub or in a class it strikes me that the iPhone in a classroom situation is very similar in some ways to the notes used to go around in classes that's similar also to the Facebook social networking and into the iPhone apps I've got dozens of them on my phone and I hardly ever look at them they just sit there I have collected them they're fun individually they are great fun possibly but I don't make time to play with them I don't have time to make time to play with them so they just sit there so how do you make a game that is compulsive but not too time consuming something that people want to do I was looking at a website err this morning and Juan Opie and he has been producing art using Flash particularly one where a camera on the Internet is taking stop frame animations and then the animations are added to the website and other digital artist Ross something or other also I think working for Fabrica err the Benetton establishment producing video cameras that point out of shop windows so all this thing isn't stuff is not very original sadly but I suppose you have to do it and then you become original but the ideas are very clever I'd love to make a camera that is showing what's happening in television downstairs in the art room and I could talk a little bit in my essay about the other networks that I have going the CCTV in the art department and something that I could do with that the flashing on the CCTV and I could possibly also talk about the network whereby I can control people's Facebook and start writing comments into their Facebook as I sit in the art department and the control that gives me a one-way sort of game but it's a similar sort of thing I guess quite harmless from me in this situation but potentially very far from being harmless quite an extraordinary level of control and then finally there's the serendipity of finding Juan firstly online when I was looking for flip-flops because of his flipbook application made for Benetton finding the Benetton site and then in the book that I had ordered from the library at Bower Ashton a book about animation there is a case study on him as well so he comes up twice in a very short amount of time and in fact I had already seen his flip book a couple of years ago when it first came out and I knew it was him but all that serendipity it seems to happen regularly you see what you are looking for our experience is far from objective we know the world as we think we know it there was a little programme on radio four last night which I must re listen to it was actually about religion but it was talking about needing to be in a group so you are needing to know what you think you know I'll have to listen to iplayer and see if I can get hold of it

Tags: drawing,web,apps,iphone,facebook,flipbook,doodles

OK Friday, March 19 and lower gate I'm going to try and talk much more clearly and more slowly one of the problems I seem to have had with the transcription is not recognising some of my faster words he doesn't like me saying err either doesn't like that at all so here is a slower dictate. Talking to my year eight yesterday about sight and perception how we see everything with the brain with our understanding and our memory not objectively with our eye so the sight is all subjective it fitted in quite neatly with the program I was watching on television about high-speed cameras and how the eye and can only process information at a certain speed so it doesn't see things the fast which is of course the basis of flipbook movement animation and move the Cinema the persistence of sight that the image on the retina and all the visual tricks behind the zoetrope and the praxinascope etc and I was also thinking about how the flipbook in your hand is still so magic the kinaesthetic actually holding it and I found some flip books online yesterday that are designed for the iPhone that work with the inclinometer so that as you tip the iPhone runs through the flipbook backwards and forwards so I'm very keen to build that into my iPhone application. I also had a brilliant meeting on Wednesday with the centre for fine print research they are very keen to get these training sessions going so to an extent that does hone what I am doing for my masters degree to look very closely at the flip books to collaboration bit with photoshoppingpong is going while I think that will just tick over I've got my year nine started now on the Photoshop ping-pong site and I can speak quite a lot about the game that Peter and I played and how much fun that was how we got into the flow what else might I talk about this morning and I think leaving the education bit behind and being much more to towards on the idea of games of playing games of collaborative games of games where you raise the energy and maybe this has something to do with expectation and with boundaries when you go and play rugby you expect to get muddy you expect to get involved in the rough-and-tumble which wouldn't be appropriate in other settings so partly the game is about appropriate in this in different settings and I was also talking about this to my year eight yesterday in relation to Facebook and blogging that you have too be even more careful about the appropriateness of the comments you're making because of the contexts in which they are made particularly if anyone can be reading them your mother perhaps or a stranger whoo second gate

Tags: flipbook,pingpong,blogging,brain,iphone,pingpong,facebook

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

Here is another plea - just for a bit of comfort...

I downloaded the voiceband app, and was in the staffroom attempting to show it to our director of music - who didn't seem interested, even though she has an iphone, but she was rushing off somewhere... but another teacher was looking on, and said words to the effect - how much time do you waste on that? I was stung, as she said it in quite a vicious and righteous tone, not at all pleasant. And this teacher is our head of ICT.

I was also a little surprised by one of my art teachers - I gave her a macbook several years ago, and she still has not got the hang. Yesterday, after days of frustration, she said that she was going back to her PC. I had no idea that she was feeling this way, otherwise I would have helped her much sooner. She had spent hours and hours making collections of downloaded images in iphoto - firstly using cut and past to copy images from google onto her desktop - so the were not jpeg files for a start - but then, after creating albums - including many of precious family albums - she was deleting what she thought of as the original photos from the library. And wondering why they then disappeared from her albums.

She was literally in tears of frustration and rage.

In the meantime I have my year 7 logging on to the Voki site, and sending me their comments on their photoshop creations via a speaking avatar.

Just to illustrate two huge gulfs - that between the digital native speaker, and the struggling foreigner, and between the pc left brain spreadsheet mentality, and the wonderfully creative, exciting and extraordinary potential of the iphone for learning.

Here's to the ipad...?!

Tags: computers,iphone,apps,school

The black stone on the moon in 2001, omnipresent, menacing, powerful. I am struck by the similarity between the polished granite stone in 2001, and the current digital gadgets, the phones and MP3 players; the iPhone and iPod especially, and some of the more expensive, perhaps more desirable mobile phones and pda's.

Tags: iphone,touch,objects