DJALCHEMI

Round-up of talk and interviews

In a brisk (?!) follow-up to my last blog entry, I did a talk to teenagers from three Sheffield schools on the subject "Big Brother is Logging You", sharing the platform with Dave Pattern, Library Systems Manager at University of Huddersfield, who also featured in the TILE libraries event. This was part of the Sheffield 14-19 Diplomas initiative. It was also an experiment in speaking to one physical audience and two 'virtual' ones via videolink, with the occasionally sub-optimal results you might expect with remote teenagers. Both my and Dave's presentations are available online, as Powerpoint, Word supporting materials, and Quicktime video of each section of our talks (unfortunately not embeddable, as far as I can see).

Bringing things almost bang up to date, I was at the Reboot Britain yesterday, and recorded a couple of short interviews with Steve Lawson on AudioBoo. In the first one I revisit and update one of my old, old hobby horses, scepticism in the face of hype about games in learning. Then another old chestnut, mentioning how what Tony Ageh said yesterday about opening up the BBC Archives reminded me of similar proposals made almost five years ago.

Later Steve got me together with Stan Stalnaker of Hub Culture for a discussion. I'd literally only heard of Hub Culture three minutes before the discussion began, so you can hear me trying to work out whether this is an up-market managed workspace or an invitation-only business network, or some combination of the two. Even after hearing Stan speak later in the day, I wasn't entirely clear. Steve was kind enough to tweet my off-the-record explanation for why I didn't answer his second question.

There are plenty more Reboot Britain audio interviews, along with social media of all flavours.

I hesitate before apologising for blogging so infrequently recently. Firstly I've been slowing down for a couple of years now, so it probably comes as no surprise to long-term followers. Secondly, it always seems kind of vain to imagine that people are hanging around waiting for my next bons mots (I know that I personally appreciate those bloggers who discipline themselves to populate my RSS reader only when they have something noteworthy to contribute — which standard you may feel this entry fails to meet!). I've come to the conclusion that it's unwise to create the expectation of being a one-person media channel, because you will find it becomes a rod for your own back — unless your ambition is to build a career with a one-person media channel at its centre.

With that exculpation out of the way, I admit that since I lost the habit of blogging regularly, it has been difficult to get it back. So I probably shouldn't say that I'm planning to blog a bit more in the near future — because I haven't always delivered on such statements in the past — but I am.