For over two millennia, India has been at the centre of world history. But how did India come to be? What is India? These are the big questions behind this intrepid journey around the contemporary subcontinent. In this landmark series, historian and acclaimed writer Michael Wood embarks on a dazzling and exciting expedition through today's India, looking to the present for clues to her past, and to the past for clues to her future.
Ancient Carthage was home to Hannibal; one of the greatest generals in history. He crushed the Roman legions like a force of nature at the battle of Cannae. However, his greatest triumph was also the beginning of the end for the once mighty city state.
This programme delves into the fascinating world of the ancient Maya. More than two thousand years ago, the astronomers and timekeepers of this ancient civilisation predicted that the world would come to an end on December 21, 2012. We explain how and why they arrived at this stunning conclusion.
In this scintillating episode of Decoding the Past, we explore one of the key scriptures of world religion, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This twelve hundred year old document was kept secret in one of the worlds most remote regions for many years. Many religious leaders and historians claim that the mysterious text holds the key to life after death.
The Roman Empire was born almost 3000 years ago in central Italy. 800 years after its founding it encompassed the entire known world & lasted just over 1000 years. However, the empire didn't so much fall, but slowly evolved into a new European culture.
In this programme we discover why alien visitors choose the craft shapes they do (flying saucers are very popular models!), and learn how they overcome the effects of Earths atmosphere and how they defy gravity and cancel inertia.
The Reich Underground (British Discovery Channel) delves deep inside Hitler's vast underground housing, secret tunnels, gold/artwork/weapons/ammo storage and bomb shelters
The king of what later became Romania send two of his sons as a ransom to the Ottoman court where they grew up and were educated. One of them came back to his father and became later Vlad The Impaler.
"The Battle of Midway," directed by John Ford, provides a relatively brief account of the Japanese attack of American ships at Midway atoll. The film is comprised mostly of authentic footage from the battle, with dramatic narration by Henry Fonda.
2,500 years ago Persia was a great empire; regarded as the forerunner of the Roman Empire. However in spite of its size & strength it had an adversary that would seal its doom. Persia's nemesis was a smaller empire - Macedon; ruled by Alexander The Great.
A 2007 BBC documentary television series presented by Andrew Marr that covers the period of British history from the end of the Second World War onwards.
Documentary depicts what happened in Rio de Janeiro on June 12th 2000, when bus 174 was taken by an armed young man, threatening to shoot all the passengers. Transmitted live on all Brazilian TV networks, this shocking and tragic-ending event became one of violence's most shocking portraits, and one of the scariest examples of police incompetence and abuse in recent years.
"Give me a child until he is seven and i will give you the man" 7th episode of a series (and the last for now) which monitors the development of numerous individuals throughout their life. They're now 49 years old.
"Give me a child until he is seven and i will give you the man".The 6th of the series it revisits the members of this social project with all it's participants now 42 years old.
"Give me a child until he is seven and i will give you the man". The fifth in a series which follows the devlopment of 14 individuals from different backgrounds in the UK. In this episode they're revisited at the age of 35.
"Give me a child until he is seven and i will give you the man". The fourth in a series which follows the devlopment of 14 individuals from different backgrounds in the UK.
In a talk not dissimilar to his spiel at the Scottish Learning Festival in 2005, Sir Ken Robinson explains how creativity is at the heart of change. Thanks to Kristian for the tip of the hat.
People sometimes ask why one might 'waste' one's time sitting on Advisory Boards, especially those of conferences. One reason I like it is that you can suggest that you'd like to hear someone like, say, Clay Shirky and, six months later, you've got him. Clay speaks today at Online Information Conference in London.
As well as formal groups around certain types of photography on Flickr (like this HDR group for beginners) there are the more impromptu adhoc communities that form around just one photo. It means that whereas destination sites' half-lives were relatively short, the half-life of a "insta-community" photograph like this becomes very much longer. Flickr, in this case, is an organisation that has created more by doing less - less intervention, less 'management' of community, less structure around debate.
How much does the individual have to give up to get to the action. Sharing is easiest, collaboration is harder and collective action hardest.
Sharing
Bronze Beta is the bulletin board for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's an old skool site/forum based around Buffy. It has one page, and a form in which you put your latest views on Buffy. When the TV co wanted to disband it, or rebrand it the community cried out. "No! Don't give us features. Don't make it different. Above all, don't close it down." The conversations there continue today, well beyond the last episode of Buffy was made.
10 years ago, as Clay helped newspapers move out of Wapping into the new glitz of Canary Wharf, he was concerned with which content management system to get them. Had he told them (had he known) that weblogs being written by geeks in the Valley were going to be harbouring more content than any newspaper could manage, no-one would have believed him.
What makes Bronze Beta work is that it's got a featureless front end, but a very highly developed and complex set of rules of engagement. Fewer features make it easier for the users to share.
Collaboration
The Wikipedia page on Doctor Who has been edited almost 9000 times by over 3000 people. It would be logical (but wrong) to assume that the average is 2.67 edits per person. However, 2200 people only made one edit once, and then moved on. They are not "part of" a community. User Khaosworks, on the other hand, has edited that page nearly 1000 times all on his own. In fact, every article that this user has touched has been on Doctor Who.
This blows up the assumption of an 'average user'. Trying to plan this kind of interaction and collaboration in advance is near impossible to sell to a boss: there's going to be this tiny, unscalable group of users who'll just come to it, unpaid, who you don't know yet, who'll create the product. It really is a case of "in collaboration we trust". We trust it because the long tail type graph of collaboration that Clay refers to is more or less a signature of online collaboration.
Collective action
Getting people to do something is the most difficult thing to do. People tend to do it themselves, of their own accord, when the motivation to do so is more tangible. Cue the HSBC fiasco of last year, when a bank changed its mind on giving students free overdraft and thought instead of charging them £140 for the priviledge. HSBC were banking on the fact that it is tricky to move money from one account to another. They were also banking on the fact that it's hard for students, during a summer holiday, to coordinate action.
Cue Facebook.
When one student set up his Facebook group to campaign against this change, when one student made that effort, it became much easier for people to become activists, just by clicking "Join Group". 4500 members later, with a threat of the whole bunch marching onto the Canary Wharf headquarters, the bank relented.
Thinking is for Doing
Brains are not there to think in abstracts, but to help us do something. Publishing is for acting. Publishing is for doing. It's not just a source of information or a destination site. It's a place where action begins. It's not the Daily Telegraph telling people that HSBC changed the deal. It's Facebook offering a platform to provide that information and then do something about it.
Flashmobs, whose means of collective action I discussed in my recent Cisco paper, are yet another example of technology acting as an enabler to bring people together to act - against dictatorship, for example.
Broadcasters' challenge is technological and economical
The technology that allows us to broadcast has been limited in allowing us to create groups and community. Networks have been limited at doing what broadcasters have done, which is separate out the producer and viewer and participant of content. The internet has given birth to this many-to-many communication, but broadcasters have perhaps been stuck in the mentality of Guttenburg economics: we have to lay out some cash up front before we know if something is going to be successful, therefore the publisher only picks the things that (s)he thinks will make back that upfront. The costs are high and upfront so the risk is mitigated by the filter being placed on the side of the publisher.
When you're not a publisher relying on cash to sell your product or your news, then you can afford to report on what you want, and the readership can simply "put up or shut up". So when a young blogger in Thailand reports on the military coup, before going back to the trivia that she enjoys normally writing about, she receives, as if she were a broadcaster, complaints that her coverage is not in depth enough. She retorts; she's not a pubisher, she doesn't need to please the audience, the audience can come or go and get what they're given. This is a liberation from the shackles of Guttenburg economics that new technologies afford us. It's why blogging is not journalism; a journalist is professionally obliged to stick with the story.
Pro-active protest
Social media has now allowed people to take the initiative in saving their favourite TV shows before the TV show even airs. They have, in fact, created their own crowdsourced marketing department, emailing and advising the TV show on what they have to do to get more people to watch it and make the show such a success it can't be dropped.
The old separations are dead
I got this one quite quickly when I started working for Channel 4 and had to engage with taxi drivers who picked me up on account:
Taxi Driver: So you work for Channel 4?
Me: Yes
TD: What programmes do you make then?
Me: We don't actually make programmes. Other people do that. We just pay them to. But actually, I don't make TV anyway.
TD: What do you do then?
Me: I make websites and cool stuff for mobile phones and games consoles.
TD: Like the ones I see advertised on the TV shows?
Me: No, they're just going to be out there. You'll find them if they're meant for you.
TD: Oh... What's Channel 4 doing that for?
Me: Well, the boundaries matter less nowadays... (at this point, I gain 20 minutes of peace in the taxi.)
All the walls have fallen around the world of information. There are horizons but no barriers. What's the next good thing to do? The answer is likely to be: explore. Try several things at once. If someone has a million pound idea for exploiting the social web, then send them out for a long walk and lock the door behind them. Get them to come up with ten of £100,000 ideas or 100s of £10,000 ideas.
The convening power of traditional media
That, my dears, is a big part of what 4iP is about. 4iP has the potential to be the convener of great ideas, and convene groups that ought to be talking to one another.
With 38minutes we're starting to do just that, having convened a space but given it over entirely to those who want to meet to talk about where they take their design, gaming, coding or new media business in this new(ish) age of t'interweb. Where previously these groups didn't talk, in less than two months we've convened nearly 500 of Scotland and Northern Ireland's top talent from four large sectors who until now rarely spoke about collaborating on projects. But it's happening thanks to the love, sweat, tears and effort of those 500 people, not really 4iP. Just having that shared situational awareness of who's doing what and how you might be able to help make it better is worth its weight in gold.
In the first half of this year I worked with Alas Media, the collective of former students of Marco Torres in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, to produce a year-long podcast series to excite, entertain and educate learners of Spanish. We wanted to explore what it means to be a Latino in modern America, something most textbooks this side of the pond tend to ignore.
Learning and Teaching Scotland have recently started to release the weekly podcast in the iTunes storethrough RSS, as well as on the LTS site. These are some of the best video materials produced for any educational institution or department that I have ever seen, from a point of view of content, context and quality of storytelling.
The result is a series of 17 short movies, beautifully produced by Rosa, Miguel, Eli and Ernesto, which describe the struggles of migrating over two countries on foot to find the American dream, the subsequent problems of trying to integrate while maintaining one's culture, what it means to Hispanic in the States in the first decade of the millennium, what it's like to manage those relationships with your traditionalist family while trying to be an American teen.
The episodes see some progression throughout the year, and are designed for learners with some competence already, from intermediate through to advanced levels.
Have a look at one or two of them, or subscribe so that you never miss an episode. You might be a learner of Spanish or you might be keen to see how these digital stories are being told. Or, like me, you might just be fascinated by these personal stories of joy, sadness, struggle, identity and love