edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: This is the point at which I have to think of something sensible to say in case this doesn't work. Sorry - can't manage it.
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: OK - so that got to me as a direct message - so far so good.
edinburghmsc: via @jar: trying out grouptweet
edinburghmsc: mucking about on twitter
A pug gasps for breath, his face so flat he damages his eyes if he bumps into things; a cavalier King Charles spaniel writhes in agony and must be put to sleep to end its pain; a distraught owner holds his beloved boxer who is fitting uncontrollably...Two years in the making, Pedigree Dogs Exposed lifts the lid on the true extent of health and welfare problems in pedigree dogs in the UK.
HISTORY'S DARK SIDE journey's through the past and present in search of clues for what is really going on behind the closed doors of the groups whose names - but not aims - are known.
The dramatic news events of 1988 seen through the eyes of ABC News America.
As reports confirm that Antarctica is melting more rapidly than thought, the Great White Hope is becoming crowded. But are these nations driven by science or a claim in the area's untapped riches?
The French documentary, called The world according to Monsanto and directed by independent filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, paints a grim picture of a company with a long track record of environmental crimes and health scandals.
This is an incredible documentary that exposes the true criminals in the shadows who stand behind Obama. It's a true non-partisan look at the Obama administration and how they are continuing the status quo by continuing to implement the fascist policies of the new world order.
In Greece and Iran, Jones argues that the ancient Greeks and Persians were far from the Roman view of being effeminate and addicted to luxury. The Greeks valued science and mathematics, while the Persians had initially allowed multiculturalism among the different ethnic groups of its empire (until years of war with Rome).
Documentary aired on ITV about Jesus in Islam With commentary from Hamza Yusuf and Abdur Raheem Green.
Documentary filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney investigates political censorship at colleges and universities in the United States.
This riveting, new three-part series examines three groups of geniuses to answer questions about human intelligence. Do differences in gender, brain size and brain hemisphere dominance enable these remarkable individuals to excel so far beyond their peers? Or, can education and environment help fuel intelligence and enable anyone to become a prodigy, if given the opportunity?
This riveting, new three-part series examines three groups of geniuses to answer questions about human intelligence. Do differences in gender, brain size and brain hemisphere dominance enable these remarkable individuals to excel so far beyond their peers? Or, can education and environment help fuel intelligence and enable anyone to become a prodigy, if given the opportunity?
This riveting, new three-part series examines three groups of geniuses to answer questions about human intelligence. Do differences in gender, brain size and brain hemisphere dominance enable these remarkable individuals to excel so far beyond their peers? Or, can education and environment help fuel intelligence and enable anyone to become a prodigy, if given the opportunity?
The elephant, the Emperor Moth and the Mopane tree form the backbone of life on the African plains. This delicate ecological triangle determines the livelihood of all the other creatures in its system. The Mopane tree is under attack from rampaging elephants, but even more damaging is the Mopane worm, the caterpillar of the beautiful Emperor Moth. They gather in hoards and strip the trees of their leaves in minutes. But the worms are food for a host of animals - even humans - and the trees are home to a number of unpleasant creatures. What holds the delicate balance in check?
The Crucified Soldier, refers to the widespread story of an Allied soldier serving in the Canadian Army who may have been crucified with bayonets on a barn door or a tree, while fighting on the Western Front during World War I. Three witnesses said they saw an unidentified crucified Canadian soldier near the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium on or around April 24, 1915, but there was no conclusive proof such a crucifixion actually occurred. The eyewitness accounts were somewhat contradictory, no crucified body was found, and no knowledge was uncovered at the time about the identity of the supposedly-crucified soldier. Nevertheless, the story made headline news around the world and the Allies repeatedly used the supposed incident in their war propaganda, including an early propaganda film titled The Prussian Cur which included scenes of an Allied soldier's crucifixion. It bears relation to other propaganda of the time like the Rape of Belgium and the Angels of Mons, and the German corpse factory or Kadaververwertungsanstalt. A three-foot bronze sculpture by British artist Francis Derwent Wood of a crucified soldier titled Canada's Golgotha was included in an 1919 exhibition of wartime art in London but the sculpture was withdrawn from the exhibit after protest. The sculpture was also displayed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 2000, again provoking some controversy. Even during World War I the German government protested the falseness of this atrocity story and after the end of the war they formally requested the Canadian government provide proof. With no knowledge of the identity of the soldier and having only a few eyewitness accounts, the crucifixion story was left unproven by a British inquiry after the War. In a 2002 programme for Channel 4's Secret History, British documentary filmmaker Iain Overton claimed to have uncovered new historical evidence which identified the crucified soldier as Sergeant Harry Band of the Central Ontario Regiment of the Canadian Infantry, who was reported missing in action on April 24, 1915 near Ypres.
Afro-Punk: The Rock is a 66-minute documentary film directed by James Spooner, exploring race identity within the punk scene across America and abroad. The film focuses the lives of four people dedicated to the punk rock lifestyle, interspersed with interviews from scores of black punk rockers from all over the United States. The interviews cover issues of loneliness, exile, interracial dating, black power, and the dual lives led by people of color in communities that are primarily white.
Closing speeches are an opportunity to look forward to what we do next, and at the EU Commission's conference on media literacy and copyright I, for one, was relieved that our Chairman and film legend Lord Puttnam reiterated, albeit far more eloquently, what I had been proposing yesterday: that copyright in a digital age is worth less than ever before. Content producers had to be prepared to look at fresh ways of getting their stuff to as many people as possible, but finding new ways to pay for it. It was all going so well.
Then the European Newspaper Publishers' Association's Vice-Chairwoman Margaret Boribon took the stage. No wonder Europe's newspaper industry is screwed.
Three points stood out as showing that the European's press's stewards are stuck well behind the digital divide, Boribon neither being prepared to look at fresh models of publishing and content production, nor having any understanding of what opportunity digital media has opened up since the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Firstly she proclaimed that the press only have a window of a few hours a day to maximise monetisation. This reveals that at a systemic level within the European press lobby, "online" is something you add on because you feel you have to, not the core of your news operations. It's worrying if such a lobby is squeezing any cash or time out of taxpayer's money through an entangled and complex EU bureaucracy, as they're quite clearly spending it on the wrong part of the newspaper business: paper. Newspapers now should be about providing wholly free-to-the-user, full feed content on the web, not stuck behind a subscription service (one exception could be the FT and WSJ's financial news subscriptions, paid for out of expense accounts rather than individuals' pockets). More than that, though, they're about providing web-first news - don't make me wait to see your stuff when you finally get around to publishing on paper. It doesn't matter if you don't want to do it that way - your competitor(s) already are and your stubbornness will simply destroy what little chance you have to catch up. When you're producing paper, it's increasingly for those of us who want the colour features, the photography and for those who aren't on the web (yet).
Google News and aggregators are 'thieves'?
She also branded Google News as 'thieves'. Extraordinary. They "steal" her newspapers' content and surround it with their own Google Adsense ads (she made a point of highlighting this evildoing). European newspapers should be thanking Google and sending them an annual Christmas card for the traffic they shove their way. They should also be using Google's unbeatably personalised ads on their own sites, paying a small cut to Google for managing their ad sales department (allowing you to get rid of a few of those employees in the process) and, along with bloggers who cite your stories and link back, you might want to thank them for taking on part of the cost of distributing as well as marketing your content.
The final element of her tirade of falsehoods was that EU structures could and perhaps should be used to reinforce (i.e. give subsidies to support) the trade of journalism and its broken business models, for journalists she represents and who I can only presume agree with her view that the craft they were happily doing last century hasn't changed, and that the public still want their 'expertise' more than some phony blogger or community site. She clearly didn't understand that increasingly we don't trust journalists (or politicians, or bankers) half as much as we trust our friends and long-term relationships with our favourite bloggers. She also hadn't picked up that not only the final product is under threat from regular Joe producers, but the processes of journalism are opening up, too. It's not just Google search that allows us to factcheck the factcheckers. With the Guardian's release last week of the Open Platform we can have access to all the data sources that, traditionally, made up the secretive black book of contacts and information of the old hack.
Until today I had never heard of the ENPA. If its spokespeople and lobbyists continue to peddle such chuff in the future then I will be head of the queue (well, just after Jarvis, McIntosh, Loosemore, Locke, Shirky and most of the people I'm lucky enough to work with) to watch yet another swift redundancy in the newspaper business: the ENPA.
Pic: Newsprint
Tanya Byron reckons we're guilty of Ephebiphobia, the fear of young people, as we incarcerate our young people in their bedroom prisons and replace the dangers of the street corner with risk-taking on unbridled access to the net. Worse still, the challenges raised by the continued lack of interest we take in our children's use of the net are coming back fast to create broader challenges for society.
The reaction to this might be 'teach the kids and teach the parents'. But we're now in an era where it's not so much about signposting where to go on the web, but teaching society how to navigate the net without even a map.
For years now, parents (and by default most educators and decision-makers) underestimate what young people do online. While most adults think youngsters spend somewhere in the region of 18.8 hours per month online, the reality is that UK kids are averaging 43.5 hours a month. Only four of those hours are spent using the net in schools, the rest is mostly unaccounted for on mobile phones and at home in those bedroom prisons. What's going on in those remaining 24.7 hours each month is unknown. The people with the media literacy challenge are not just young people - it's adults, too, who lack the basic alphabet of understanding that's needed to bottom out responsible, creative, enjoyable and engaging use of the web by us all.
Gen-Y doesn't exist
We know from research, anecdote and a cursory glance across Bebo or Facebook profiles (I've probably viewed close to 15,000 in my previous work with Learning and Teaching Scotland) that we are wrong to annoint youngsters with some sort of technological superiority through lables such as the "Google Generation", "Gen Y" or, my pet armageddon, "Digital Natives".
Firstly, we know that while young people are taught how to swim in the safe goldfish bowl of school and private intranets, often by educators who themselves have a filmsy idea of how to operate in that arena, they are completely incapable of operating safely and responsibly in the oceans of the web. If young people are to learn how to upload and download information responsibly then they must be allowed to play with their technologies with the lifeguard of the educator to drag them back to safety when they start to falter. Filtering these technologies serves only to compound the ability of the educator to work with the youngster on media literacy, and harms us all in a wider sense.
Secondly, we romanticise the technological creativity of our youngsters online. While large numbers now upload material online (close to 78% of teens according to most recent research) most of this material is photographic - i.e. mobile snaps from nights out. Creating and publishing original narrative, original code or Facebook apps or even mashed up video or code is not currently a regular pass-time of you average British kid, though we are beginning to see valiant efforts to make this process of creation-publication the norm in our schooling.
However, most don't come close to the kind of creativity illustrated by a young Mark Zuckerberg, pictured, who avoided his near flunk at Harvard art class with some online creativity, a story recounted by Jeff in WWGD. With a few days to go until his final exam, for which he hadn't done any work (well, he was creating his $15b company), he created a site with copies of the artwork that was likely to appear in the final exam, put in some comment boxes under each one, and let his fellow students know that he had created a collaborative study guide. All they had to do was fill in the blanks. Not only did a cheeky Zuckerberg pass with flying colours, but his classmates also did better than normal thanks to their formative assessment that Zuckerberg offered them.
But here's the tough question Jarvis doesn't ask: how many youngsters actually do that, or even think of it as a possibility? Today's literacy benchmark is copy and paste. A media literacy strategy, instead of talking about how we block copying and pasting, and enforce filtering, rating, copyright and IPR restrictions, could begin the hard work of illustrating how copy, paste, open sourcing and creative commons-ing can lead to much better content and information for all.
The challenges of attracting attention to these challenges with a public that's hard to get
The biggest challenge for a 'strategy' like this is that it's incredibly hard to a) attract young audiences b) keep them and c) turn that into some form of value. Channel 4's arguably one of the best broadcasters in the world at doing this, and with 4iP and Channel 4 Education's work online, we're attempting to work out how we replicate television's success at 'reach' to this group online, on mobile and in socially connected games.
Matt Locke and I have been playing around with Dave McClure's Metrics for Pirates in our work with independent companies to push them to think about those questions: how are you going to attract people, how are you going to keep them, and how are you going to turn that into some sort of value? Matt came up with a strong reduction of this, and I made it look less pretty but more utilitarian by insisting on a timescale for each metric. Take those three questions and apply them to what we know about online community uptake (that 90% lurk, 9% will follow regularly and 1% might contribute something) and we end up with a roll-your-own site metrics table:
To help see it in action I made one up for YouTube, had they approached 4iP a few years back for funding. It shows how a site that "gets people to upload videos" has added a lot of small ingredients to the recipe to take people on that more-complex-than-it-looks journey to uploading a vid. It still takes great ideas and a strong awareness of the potential of different technologies and techniques (RSS, Ajax, email, marketing, business development, cloud computing) to be able to fill it in and act on it, and this is where we might just see some problems in our institutions and schools. The knowledge and understanding just isn't there in enough quantities to high enough a level.
Our well-meaning institutions are another obstacle in the process
One could even go as far as saying that it would be counter-intuitive, professionally suicidal even, for institutions to seize this opportunity to engage with young people - any people - in this kind of open, copiable, distributable, redistributable, changeable, alterable way. Jeff Jarvis is right:
As a starting point, therefore, media literacy begins with much more communication between young people and adults when we're taking decisions on how we proceed. There are three main areas that need tackled first:
To take that point of empowerment further, and to conclude, there has to be a realisation that while artists and creators of content used to have value in owning their IPR in a world of atoms, in a world of digits this ownership if IPR comes only with costs. In a digital world if you own the only version of something then, for a while, your IPR has value but, eventually, will be commodotised as me-toos appear - not direct copies, but similar and maybe even better.
If you let people copy and distribute your stuff then you're able, eventually, to reduce your overhead on marketing and distribution - your fans and copiers are doing this for you. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is twofold:
1. Get over the idea that your creation is the last stop of the creative bus:
People will change your message, distort it, make it worse, make it better, create something you hadn't intended - your original will always be your original, their altered version always their altered version. The important thing here is that it's as easy as clicking a link or running a Google search to find the original source and to let the user/participant make their own mind up as to which message they are more engaged with.
2. Find alternative means of being recompensed for your initial efforts
Have your original stuff carry ads or sponsorship, give away poor versions for free but top quality versions for money as eBook fans and TV companies on YouTube and social networks already do, find the George Lucas approach to making your stuff, and make your money on something else.
Pic 1: Smoking and texting
Pic 2: Zuckerberg
I'm in a snowy Prague at the European Union Commission's Media Literacy and Copyright Conference, where the strange but predictable and slightly 20th Century juxtaposition of copyright, piracy and our 'literacy' with media is reflected in the media packs provided by the European Audiovisual Observatory.
It includes gems such as Online Games from the Standpoint of Media and Copyright Law (pdf) which makes a point of comparing video games to film, and applies the 'logic' that their copyright and distribution be controlled in the same way. Unfortunately, it fails to apply the logic in the other direction, that one where openness and free distribution bring success and riches to the likes of Playfish, a London-based social games company whose five games in Facebook's Top 10 have helped the company generate millions of dollars in revenue and funding, or to iMob, the current iPhone social game that turns over around $1m a month from its subscribers.
Other hits in store include Searching for Audiovisual Content with its openner on the "dangers of search". Anyone from social app developers to filmmakers should be hungry for open, wide and free search to their stuff. CBS worked that out halfway through the production of their video on demand website Innertube, realising that the site should probably have been called www.cbs.com/nobodycomeshere. YouTube, not Innertube, is where their audiences hang out, where their public comment on, mashup and make more engaging (for them) the content. Above all, it's where they search for it.
During the conference itself I'll be challenging these more traditional views that there is greater worth in ownership of 'stuff' in an age of digital media rather than making it easier for people to find, alter and republish.
It's in the unhandily titled Media Literacy panel, a phrase that is open to even more (mis)interpretation with 34 more nations in the room than normal. It's also up against panels on Copyright and Piracy, so a lot of the folk that would maybe benefit from a jolt of reality are likely to be having their 1999 preconceptions of media confirmed. Oh well, at least I can send them the link to my blog post of the talk. And, if they're not of the blog persuasion, they can just go and read Jeff's new book for starters, the oeuvre that's currently infecting every bit of dialogue I have on the question of what it means to be media literate.
Pic: CC of Charles Bridge, Prague
A beauty from Jeff's What Would Google Do, currently accompanying my commutes:
With 4iP we're attempting to amplify a few of those distributed gems rather than trying to ensnare them to channel4.com, better traffic and eyeballs or not. We're insisting, much to the distaste of some, on collaboration over ownership of stuff. Jeff thinks it's the right way forward. I think it's the right way forward.
What about you? What about your institutions? A few on which I'd love a discussion: BBC (especially its news), Glow (Scotland's national intranet), Scottish Government services... any more?
A year after the first ever Social Innovation Camp in London, Scotland's bringing the party northwards. From Friday 19th to Sunday 21st June 2009 at the Saltire Centre in Glasgow, SICamp Scotland will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s software developers and designers, together with those at the sharp end of social change. I'm really proud that Channel 4's 4iP has played a central role in bringing one of Europe's top social tech events to Scotland, along with a host of other sponsors.
Until now regulars from the 'down south' tech scene (and those who could make the train/plane/hotel to London) have been able to get together have fun hacking social challenges. This June, developers from across the UK are invited to Glasgow, with just 48 hours to build some web-based solutions to a set of social problems - from back-of-the-envelope idea to working prototype, complete with software.
The Social Innovation Camp takes a set of ideas for web-based tools that will create social change and develops them over one weekend. Working with a diverse range of people, participants organise themselves into teams and help make a back-of-the-envelop idea into a working prototype - complete with working software - in just two days.
Social Innovation Camp is a non-profit company formed in late 2007 run by a small team of people based at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green, London. They ran the first ever Social Innovation Camp weekend in April 2008; the second in December 2008. They also run a series of monthly Meetups for geeks and social innovators to share knowledge and skills. Further information can be found on the ‘About’ section of their main website: http://www.sicamp.org/?page_id=155
And for a chance to join us at the Social Innovation Camp weekend, you can enter your idea for a web-based tool to create social change through the SICamp Scotland website from Monday 30th March - we’re going to be looking for the most exciting ideas for how the web could change stuff that really matters.
Anyone can get involved: you don’t need to be based in Scotland. SICamp Scotland is supported by Nesta, BIG Lottery, Skills Development Scotland and, of course, 4iP. More on our involvement will be revealed in weeks to come. In the meantime, get your socially innovative caps on.