Podnosh

It seems:

What have I got against Julie Moult?

Well, looking into some of the hateful and (ahem) inventive crap she’s produced for The Sun and The Daily Mail over the years, quite a lot… but really, I’m here today to deliver to Julie a well-earned lesson on the mysterious inner workings of Google…

Very occasionally I write a post for Thriving (my hat tip for this one), I’m a school governor and also a Fellow of the RSA.  The 250 year old organisation for ideas and social action is just opening its first school in Tipton in the Black Country. As I’ve written before I sometimes find myself astonished/cross by how cautious some of our major institutions are about something as important as education. So I’ve signed up to the RSA’s new educational charter (which you can do here). If you sign it this is what you’ll be supporting:

The Charter

It is the primary purpose of education to awaken a love of learning in young people, and give them the ability and desire to carry on learning throughout life. We need to recognise that education has many aims

Education must nurture creativity and capacity for independent and critical thought.

Young people should leave formal education equipped with the confidence, aptitude and skills they need for life and for work.

Education should help young people to understand how to be happy and to develop and maintain their own emotional, physical and mental well-being.

Every young person has the right to develop to their full potential

Ability comes in many forms and learners need to be supported to enjoy success no matter where their talents lie.

The educational success of learners should not depend on their background. Schools, communities and families must work together to close gaps in attainment.

The curriculum in schools and colleges should balance abstract and practical knowledge so that every learner can access high quality academic and vocational opportunities.

Education should engage the learner with exciting, relevant content and opportunities for learning through experience and by doing.

Education must be a partnership

Learners have a valuable role to play in contributing to the design of their own learning, and in shaping the way their learning environment operates.

The education of young people should be a partnership of schools, parents and the wider community in a local area.

Schools should be inclusive, creative communities which build tolerance, respect and empathy in young people.

We must trust our schools and education professionals

Every teacher should be a creative professional involved in the design of curricula and learning environments, and should be supported and developed to fulfil that role.

Every school should be different, every school innovative and we must find ways of holding them to account for their performance that rewards rather than stifles this creativity.

Publish, then filter; Passion, not scale – these should be stapled onto the walls of anyone interested in creating value – public or commercial – on the internet. And they should be in the DNA of anyone commissioning for 4iP.

Matt Locke of Channel 4’s 4iP on what he took Clay Shirky speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival

If you’re based near Birmingham keep your eyes open, there are more.

technorati tags: thericeshow

Priorities listed here:

Terms of Reference

The Commission will focus on young people aged 11-19 and will:

• Examine what citizenship means to young people
• Consider how to increase young people’s participation in politics; the development of citizenship amongst disadvantaged groups; how active citizenship can be promoted through volunteering and community engagement; and how the political system can reflect the communication preferences of young people.
• Lead a consultation with young people on whether the voting age should be lowered to 16.

The Commission will report to the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Justice, and the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in spring 2009.

Views can be sent to the YCC mailbox – ycc@justice.gsi.gov.uk

It has been many years since I last did any court reporting and I remember the scramble to get out of court and either get to the court press room or recover your mobile from security.  Recording devices like cameras and microphones are banned in UK courts.

Have things changed at all? Would it be OK for a reporter to follow this American example and (from the brilliant Spokesman Review – the paper which practically invented the open newsroom)  tweet progress – presumably using a mobile phone?

Update. the short answer to the question above (Thanks Jon) is that mobile phones are still not allowed. Also found this interesting post on the problems of the web and court reporting:

But in a 24/7 media age, what is contemporaneous? Increasingly, newspapers feel the need to file to only one deadline: now, online.

In fairness to MacNae’s expert editors, this is from the 18th edition published in 2005 and the newer book is better with online matters and the forthcoming edition even better. But the advice it gives on being contemporaneous is from another age: hardly any evening papers publish more than one edition, and most of them are essentially morning papers now anyway, printed over night to save money and time.

So surely “at the earliest opportunity” is now. It’s as soon as the reporter has gathered his or her thoughts, deciphered the notebook scribblings, wrote the story and emailed it or phoned it in to the newsdesk.

Judges are not the most web-savvy people (see here), so for time being the next day’s edition will be enough. But how long before the senior judges and the Ministry of Justice wake up to the fact that the whole issue of “earliest opportunity” has changed?

The Society of Editors is already warning that the Contempt of Court laws need to be shaken up to cope with multi-media realities. So how long before the powers that be take court reporting law into the 21st century?

Thanks to Alison at the Liverpool Daily Post for kicking off the debate on Twitter today. She asked whether newspapers whould break exclusive court reports online, to which I ask another question: why not?

From here:

With Drupal version 7, due later this year, Buytaert hopes to include technologies that will make sites running Drupal part of the Semantic Web, Tim ­Berners-­Lee’s vision for making online data understandable to machines as well as people. If Drupal hosts a website containing a company’s Securities and Exchange Commission profile, for example, other sites could access just the third-quarter revenues, without having to retrieve the whole profile. The goal of sharing data in smaller, better-defined chunks is to make Drupal a key part of the growing eco­system of websites that share structured data. If this effort succeeds, it will ensure Drupal’s continued relevance to the still-developing Web. –Clay Shirky

Hat tip Paul Miller of the School of Everything.

This weekend I learned that BMAG is aiming to find a whole bunch of new visitors to its many attractions. Today Jon Bounds asks what new stuff will get people involved?

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have just come into some money, £300,000, and they’re going to use it to create a gallery showing Birmingham’s history from medieval times to the present day. I’m sure we used to have something a bit like this (a local history room anyway).

But anyway — apart from getting some of the industrial history stuff back from Thinktank, digging out the system that did push-button playback of “I can’t find old Brummagem” and providing some of the Library’s Baskerville collection — with a decent home what should it have?

Here’s some suggestions:

Dennis Mortimer’s beard from when villa won the European cup.
Every plan and architects model for a regenerated Brum, all google-earthed up and you can rum simulations of how the city would have looked if they’d come to pass.
An interactive exhibit that allows you to do the voice over for Telly Savalas looks at Birmingham – a bit like Singstar where you have to match the pitch, speed and not laugh when you claim to have “dallied in Dale End”.
Dana International – well she’s not doing anything at the moment.

Jon says we need to “Fill Brum’s new local history museum with proper stuff:” I’m thinking he means less highbrow more pattern shaved eyebrow. Jon has a talent for this, but I’m going to have a crack….:

A blue Goldfish in a toilet bowl.
A multi coloured flying saucer a la ELO.
Any Osbournes who aren’t that busy just at the mo.
A selection of skirts warn on Broad Street from 1308 to 2008.
Carl’s chin.
My mates son Archie – cos he has a perfectly preserved Brummie accent.
Camp Hill Flyover.
BOZOD.

I was tarting around looking for more ratings and favourites in my attempt to push this video from the unveiling of the Big Picture high in the Youtube ratings when I came across another person chasing credit.

Helen Marshall, the artist who worked on The Big Picture, had left a comment here quoting another photographer questioning if Helen was getting sufficient credit:

Comment from Julia Sander
In view of the fact that this is a world record breaking project, I am extremely surprised to find that the name of the artist, Helen Marshall , who was commissioned to lead the final phase and making of the Big Picture. is not mentioned more prominently, and in fact in most press releases, has received no credit at all for her work. I feel that this is a matter which should be rectified at once.
Julia Sander

This bemused me. (Update – Scroll down to see Helen’s response in the comments section. Julia Sander is Helen’s mum who was using her flickr account and (like all proud mums) wanted to be sure her daughter got due credit. The original comment has now been removed).

I contributed some pictures to the big picture and so rather oddly/uncomfortably find myself getting credit for being a joint World Record holder. I’m sure I’m a joint record holder with Helen – who will have also contributed images to the whole mosaic. The final image chosen to be turned into a mosaic was taken in the 1920’s. I would imagine the choice of image would have to fit certain practical constraints. A photo of a poppy was never going to make it because there would not be enough mostly red photos available to make the montage work.

So where does Helen sit in relationship to the community of people who’s technical skills or volunteering of images made the whole project happen?

For example is Helen as an individual artist more or less important than any one of the many people who contributed images? Granted many of those images I would just call snaps (certainly mine), but many of them were very fine photographs and the people who took them were indulging in art.

I suppose the comment just gets me thinking about the relationship between art as a communal endeavour and art as an individual act. The Big Picture is a deliberately communal endeavour, bringing together hundreds (thousands?) of volunteers plus loads of paid professionals who use their technicals skills as photo mosaic makers, designers, software writers, community builders, scaffolders or artists to make the whole thing work.

So who amongst all these should be elevated above the others and why?

There are different ways to tackle climate change. In the last month I’ve written about the focussed and globally ambitious cquestrate. Now recent Birmingham Blogger Jonathan Melhuish (and also here) who’s relocated to London tells me you can also do it by drinking beer.

Carrot Mobs work by finding the local business which is willing to devote the largest portion of an half days takings to green upgrades. When a store commits to divert the dosh into making changes you organise to provide as many customers as possible in that afternoon

CarrotMob is a fun community action which rewards businesses that become more energy efficient. The concept is to take several businesses in a community and start a bidding war find the one prepared to invest the most in improving their energy efficiency. We then all flashmob the winning business at the agreed time and make our purchases there. The business then spends the agreed percentage of revenue it took during the CarrotMob on replacing appliances with more energy-efficient models. Everybody wins! :)

It sounds fun and makes a huge amount of sense for each business. Fan Page.